Roll for Mutation: Post-Apocalyptic TTRPG History: Ep. 5 Tank Girl & Wizards

0:00Hello, my name is Low, pronouns key him, and this is another episode of Roll Formutation. I have with me Mark Major. Hi there, I'm Mark, and I'm looking forward to talking about some older games today. Yeah, so it's a slightly different format than what we've done before. We're talking about two licensed games. Originally, I just kind of thought about them as licensed games, but I realized that they're very close temporally. And there's a lot of actual overlapping connections that we're going to see between these two. There are more licensed post-pocalyptic games than I would have thought. We've got a lot of conventional ones, stalker, fallout, Jeremiah, war against the Giotoric.

1:08We have a smaller set of zombie ones. We have our new darkness and the walking dead. But by far and away, the vast majority of them are what I'll call sort of dying Earth, fallen Earth, fantasy games. So literally the dying Earth, rolling game, Cadillacs and dinosaurs, World of Aiden, which is another one connected to when we're going to talk about today. Garp's new son, the upcoming fifth season, like there's some really interesting ones. We're talking about marginal ones today. I think is how I want to want to put that. So I'm going to talk about mine. And then Mark's talking about his soap to preview this. You probably saw this in the show title. We're talking about Tank Girl. And remember to talk about Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. Yeah. So, Tank Girl. I'm going to go through a bunch of things in a slightly different order than we usually do.

2:08You need to put a context to Tank Girl herself itself. The original Tank Girl is a comic that comes out in the late 1980s and then moved into a series in the early 1990s. So, very strong look and panchistetic influenced by British comics, lots of 2000 AD. And you can see some of the French stuff from humanoids, Mobius, Metal Harlot. It's created by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. And the first of those is one of the co-creators of the band Gorillas. And if you look at Gorillas and if you look at the original Tank Girl, you will see the same aesthetic. It is a very weird, early 1990s vibe. It's a world that we've got visually and narratively transitioning from real punk, like original punk and indie comics into something a little more polished. We'd go from the 70s and 80s into high irony, meta.

3:11And, of course, this is a time when there's a real transition into grunge and other splits there. So, to quote Wikipedia at length here about the original Tank Girl, quote, the comics' irreverent style is heavily influenced by punk visual art and its strips are frequently deeply disorganized and arctic, absurdist and psychedelic. The strip features various elements with origins in surrealist techniques, co-lage, cut-up technique, dream of consciousness and meta-fiction, with very little regard interest for conventional plot or committed narrative. So, obviously, the perfect thing to film. Director Rachel Telele, I think is how you say it. Apparently, saw this. Saw this as a real opportunity and wanted to do it. Went to a couple of different studios. Finally got, I think, new line on. And they brought Hewlett and Martin on originally.

4:11And they were helping with the art direction and approach. And then Studio Interference. And Hewlett and Martin drop out. The film gets made. If you've seen the film, you know what it ended up being. Not exactly as we might have imagined it. And so, let's put a pin in the movie because now we're going to come to the game. West End Games had several successful game series and licenses. And while they had been strong for a time by the early 1990s, they were on the decline. So this is the time paranoia, as we mentioned before, had stumbled with the third edition. And then that's followed by the disastrous fifth edition. So we're mid-90s right now, 1995. Star Wars continued strong. But again, this is a product that's beholden to the licensee. And let's not understand this. For years, West End Games had been building up the lore and world of Star Wars.

5:14It hadn't been a lot developed. They had been really pushing that. There were new novels coming out. And really creating that excitement that then they would lose license. The new trilogy would arrive and a lot of these things would get washed away. Ghostbusters is another successful game from West End, their license one, but it had never been capitalized on. So their biggest success is torque at this time, the sort of the non-Star Wars success. And this is a weird interdimensional war RPG with many different genres in worlds. It's a completely new system. It doesn't use the D6 system. And instead, it has a strong use of cards and tokens in play. So it's a little bit like GURPS with cards and tokens, but with a metaplot and worlds that are really distinct and specifically.

6:14And the idea that you are moving characters between those worlds. And it came out strong in 1990. Like that was big. And I remember when it hit the shelves, people were very excited about it. But within a few years, the company had released everything they could for it. They were trying some second editions of the things. And again, by 95, they've wrapped up support for it. But during the Haiti of torque, they decided to build a new generic system on that core mechanic. That torque presented. And instead of going with D6, they went with this one. This is one of those decisions that boggles my mind. So first to try it out, they did a game called Shatter Zone, which kind of proves that they could do it. It was again, you know, maybe a two-year line came out. And they said, let's take that and that setting those bits. And we'll do it as Masterbook. Masterbook tweaks the torque mechanics to make them less pulpy. And I'm going to air quotes here, more realistic.

7:17And then I can only describe this as vomiting out a slew of licensed property supplements. Indiana Jones, Necroscope, Aiden Species, Tails from the Crypt, and Tank Girl. So this comes out in 94. Masterbook is in these box sets. It can also be bought separately. And by 97, it was clear that this was a failure. That this had been overproduced. Huge print runs and things were just sitting on the shelves. And look, I seriously cannot remember selling any of these when I worked for years at the store. They just did not move. And so at that point they go, hey, you know what? We've got this other system, D6. And they make that the house system. And they go for more licenses. They redo Indiana Jones. They get met in black in there. Hercules and Zina. And eventually DC Comics.

8:18And none of these hit. DC got a little bit more support. But by 98, West End Games declares bankruptcy and says, it's okay because we've got the Star Wars license. And Lucasfilm says, no, you don't. And West End goes under. So Masterbook. I have to preface this that boy, the 1990s, are a shitty time for role-playing game mechanics. Like we'll see this with what I'm talking about. And what Mark is going to talk about. Masterbook's mechanics actively make me angry. Actively make me angry as I'm reading through them. You have eight attributes. 68 points divide among them. Meaning eight or nine is average. And here's where it begins. And I'm being a little too granular here. But I have to just talk about it. You've got your hit point, which is called toughness.

9:19And it should derive stat from your strength and endurance. And you have to look that up on a table. It's not a formula. It's not, okay, I can see how this divides out. And both are different. So I have to look up on the table for the strength and the table for the endurance. And then add those numbers together. This is a running theme throughout the game. Unnecessary lookups, asymmetrical things, and no table has a formula. There is no table that you can look at and say, okay, I could do this in my head. How this works out. The table is just ramps. No, the table is the point. Like why? Why are you already doing this? Why? You have four different movement rates. They're different calculated differently. It just... So here's the other one. You have... God, I can't even describe. So you've got your skills. We've got some skills that you have. When you make a test, you roll against a difficulty number.

10:20Okay? Eight is a difficulty number. You figure out your attribute and your skills. And then any modifiers, which they don't describe very well. And then you roll 2D10. But you don't directly add the 2D10 to the roll. Instead, you have to go to a non-formula based chart. And you have to look up your total. And that will give you a bonus number, which is then added to the roll and then compared to the difficulty. Hey, and if you roll a 10 on the die, it explodes. But, you know, that's a pretty minimal game once you press 21. Oh, okay. But now we've got, you know, 16 or not. Oh, no. No, you don't know exactly that yet. Because now, you have to take that difficulty number. You have to take this finalized number from a table look up. And you now have to compare that to a success table, which gives you your degrees of success.

11:20And that's important because, again, a non-formula based table, the jump-ups are arbitrary. And you have to look at this to determine your damaged number. It's not optional. So, that's the base mechanics. The most unique element of the book, of the masterbook system is the card deck. Players have a hand of cards, which they can use to modify actions. And when you're not in detailed turns, you can play cards from this freely. But in combat, you can take one card action per turn. You can place a card from your hand into your pool making it available later. Or you can play any cards that you already have down in your pool. Or you can trade cards with other players in a one-to-one basis freely. So, some of these cards are enhancements, bonuses to attributes, big benefit if you double-cross a fellow PC, retrying an action,

12:21cancelling it just played card. Okay, mechanical stuff. But there's also subplot cards, like alertness. Hey, we're going to establish common ground. Hey, anemosis appears. Hey, there's aromance. Hey, there's martyrdom in which, to get the benefit, your character has to die. This is one of the cards in the deck that we all have access to. And there are jokers as well. All of these weirdly drastic, but narratively vague effects. Now, don't get me wrong. And we've said this before, when we talked about paranoia. I love cards. I love cards. I love them. I love having cards in games, face to face. We played years and years of a card-based system, but this is so funky and badly done. And when I went to look at the masterbook cards in the copy of Tank Girl that I bought, there are a bunch of abbreviations and weird numbers on them as well. It's not like each card explains itself.

13:23It has more things that you have to figure out. There's more, but generally the game feels like a collection of arbitrary rules. It's especially weird when you get to the universal system force building quote-unquote special effects, like magic. Here we have a three-column landscape worksheet that you have to work through to figure out the costs of any special effects. You'd expect then, okay, that's fine. There would now be a section of finished examples, like a lot of those. Oh, no. There are not. These things are not there. They're just like, okay, here's your calculus that you need to do. It really makes champions look super easy. Wow. So, world of Tank Girl, the mechanical elements that it brings in, it's expanding the mechanics slightly, vehicle combat. I'll come back to that in a moment. Here's the thing. The RPG source book,

14:23when you look at the first page, it has a printing date of February 1995. So, that means that we've got that February 1955. The book is done. It's been to printer. It's already been edited. The film doesn't release until March 31st of 1995. So, they saw this, and we're like, yeah, we're going to do this. This is the game that we want to do. It's not based on the comic, but it's based on the movie. And they committed to it. They committed to this whole thing. And that means, as well, something I'll come back to, that they were working hard in this game, probably from an early draft of the film, because the film got drastically changed over time. I don't know. If they saw Final Cut of the film, I have no idea, but I can't even imagine that kind of gamble. And the thing is that the world of tank girl book,

15:25while it does have some source book stuff to expand the world, again, it really is based on the movie, what the movie implies, that kind of thing. There are some mechanical tweaks. There are new skills. There's a vehicle combat. There's some optional rules for making combat much nastier, like hit location. It was also, as I'm looking to the tank girl, box set, I discovered that I expected that with each of these worlds, there would be a set of unique masterbook cards for each world. This seems like an obvious choice. We've got some wild cards based on NPCs or thematics and things like that. Oh, nope, nope. Don't have that. That is not in there. So there's some other things to say, but Mark, what is your experience slash knowledge of tank girl? I have the tank girl box set on my shelf here in front of me.

16:25I got it maybe a decade or so ago. I have not opened it. It's just an artifact to have. I saw the movie when I came out in theaters. What it is. I love it for a lot of reasons, but it is not for everyone, for sure. I actually saw the movie before I read the comics and I just thought, you know, I'm glad there's an RPG. I opened it up and looked through it. I was like, yeah, I'm probably never going to play this, but I'm not going to get rid of it. It's nice to have. Yeah, it's really interesting. There is an attempt in the text of the world of tank girl, which is technically what it's called, world of tank girl, as they call all of these masterbook things, to kind of have a cheeky and irreverent tone, but at least today it feels very forced. Yeah. You know, there's some meta-interusions by tank girl in there, but it's like they felt they just kind of had

17:27to have that in there. Very, very like a Deadpool-y force. Yeah. Bad Deadpool. Yeah, bad. There are some things definitely in the book, particularly about characters. There's a whole subplot in the book about the founder of big business, the company that is the adversary to tank girl, the founder having found an alien spaceship and having touched an alien spaceship engine and getting messages from an alien world that I don't think that's in the movie. No, it definitely is not. Yeah. And so I have the feeling that is something from the cutting room floor. That was in the original script and of course they wrote and built it. It's like if you've ever read any of those Alan Dean Foster novelizations

18:27of movies where clearly he was going from a script and not the final film. About tank girl as a apocalyptic thing. It is not a nuclear apocalypse. So one of the things is of course by the 90s we have the Berlin Wall fall. We've got a kind of twist away from nuclear. Instead we have a comet and a comet strikes the earth and creates the devastation and we get a fallen desert australia which I think is deliberate for a couple of reasons. It gives them the mutant kangaroos that are running around. But it also of course apes the aesthetic of the rogue warrior. So it's borrowing a lot from that. And there are a bunch of other movies that have this vibe to it

19:28that are happening in this time like there are a couple of comet movies. There's hardware. I'm thinking of another movie that has a real vibe and look of that same thing. Screamers is another one even though that's kind of set on an alien world. It definitely does that. And I think that's really interesting. Like we have this shift in terms of what the anxieties are and how we're going to approach them. Again, a certain amount of irony that I think is interesting. But what I also think is critical is this game doesn't interrogate the apocalypse at all. There has all the vehicle combat rules and stuff. All of the trappings but there are no rules for survival.

20:28Anything like that. Now mind you of course it's a comedic film but the game doesn't provide the tools for comedy in a light way. It's still a crunchy granular semi-realistic game and it can't find its tone. I don't know if you've had experiences like that in other games where the tone doesn't quite match up. Yeah, it feels like in games like that it was either one person working under a lot of pressure with little context or a team that has been brought in and everyone is throwing stuff together and there's a mishmash of tone, both in writing and definitely in mechanics. We can see here. There's a lot of things put together and they make a lot of sense. It's such a strange license. If they had, it's not even like Tank Girl the comic was a huge, huge hit.

21:29Yeah, it was definitely underground favorite. Yeah. That they thought this was their market just absolutely baffles me. Yeah. I imagine the license is not expensive. Okay, but that was probably a thing. The thing that baffles me is that it was a box set that instead of a book. I have the Ghost Dog RBG and stuff like that is people got a cheap license and put it out a soft cover and forgot about it. But to make this part of a small-ish line and make a box set, which is much more expensive than just putting a book together. That's a strong choice. Yeah, but on the other hand, card form factor. I take that back. If you're not doing individual cards that fit with the world, you only need to do a master book box set.

22:29It has the cards. And then you do the simple booklets but they didn't do that. If I remember correctly, at some point they did put out some of the world books separately. And that might have also been a problem as you had two different form factors. At this point, I can't quite remember. It is a really interesting time capsule for two things. That meeting point of punk and grunge where in the 1990s and Chuck Klosserman has talked about that in his book about the 1990s, there is this weird move to kind of irony and ironic detachment from everything and inability to take things seriously. Everything kind of has to have a jokey tone, even if it is serious. And that, I think, we're so kind of away from that particular form of it

23:31that maybe we can't see it. And there are other games that are of the time. And I can't remember the exact year, but, and I may have mentioned this game before, White Wolf's human occupied landfill is another game that I think does kind of dark apocalyptic, but it really leans into it as trashy as that game is. It is consistent in its vibe. I think this one is radically inconsistent. But, you know, if you like Tank Girl, it's got lovely pictures from the movie. It's got some illustrations taken from the comic. It's got some original artwork. I think it's not a bad thing to pick up if you're a Tank Girl fan. Yeah. Or if you're interested in seeing

24:32another vision of the apocalypse from the 90s. Yeah, or just having an artifact of that era of design. Yeah. So, let's talk about our other game here. Yeah. So, the other game is Ralph Bakshi's Wizards RPG. This is a very, very post apocalyptic setting. It's from 1992. This was WIT publications. They, I think the designer was. I did not put them in my notes by having right here. Boom. Boom. Yes. There we are. LME. Yeah. They did. I think they did WIT did Mewdesoids first. And they also, I believe right after Wizards did a WF game. Oh, yeah. I didn't know about that until I was looking this stuff up. There was a WWF venture game. What's it not? Amazing. They.

25:32Yeah. So, it's an adaptation, the official adaptation of the 1977 Ralph Bakshi film. The film is wild. I just rewatched it again last night, but I've seen it many, many times. It is a post nuclear apocalypse, but it is a pure fantasy movie. It is millions of years after a nuclear war was kicked off by some terrorists sitting off of bomb in the UN and destroy the earth. Some mutants survived. Humans eventually were wiped out. And the, what do they call the true ancestors of man, elves and berries and dwarves and gnomes returned as the earth's primary inhabitants. The movie is amazing. It is animated in a style. If you've seen any Ralph Bakshi stuff, you know exactly what the style is. He also did the older lord of the rings movies.

26:32He did Fritz the cat cool world later on and some things. But there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of rotoscoping. There's a lot of kind of like animation on top of stock footage, like crudely colored in. And it is definitely of the time pacing wise. The music is kind of like slow and psychedelic. It is the story is very simple, but is it is mostly vibes is pretty good. It holds up really well, I think. In this fantasy world, the apocalypse has changed the laws of physics. Technology doesn't really work anymore for the most part because magic has taken over. At the top of the story, there's the birth of these two wizards Avatar and Black Wolf. Avatar is the pretty good one. Black Wolf is the ugly bad one. And basically Black Wolf went off and tried to bring technology back. Avatar stayed and made things nice with the elves and fairies.

27:35And the, the big point comes when Black Wolf uncovers Nazi propaganda and is able to embolden his armies and scatter the elves until evil is eventually defeated. It is not a subtle film. In any way, lots, lots of swastikas, lots of cartoonish, gory, but like really like... I don't want to say gritty because that has a weird connotation of it, but like the visceral, I think, the violence is in it. Both like visually and tonally. There are mass executions. There are things that very strongly mirror the actual things that happen and are still happening in some places. But yeah, not subtle at all. So that is an interesting setting to put a fantasy world in. And in that world, your players are...

28:35It's nice because it gives you a strong direction. It's not just your fantasy adventurers doing fantasy adventure stuff. And specifically, you're not going on adventures looking for glory and treasure. You are basically resistance fighters. You are doing griller raids. You are escorting people. You are hiding a lot of the time. You're disrupting supply lines, except your elves and fairies. There's a lot of espionage and all that sort of stuff. So that's an interesting focus for the gameplay. And the tone again, not subtle, but both the movie and the book, I think, have this really interesting mix of very earnest idealism. There's narration that is very earnest, I think, is the work. Yeah, it's very meaningful. It's describing how nature is encouraged as beauty and growth and technology.

29:35It always works to destroy. It is wild. This is, for me, I think about... I'll say this, I saw this in the theater when I was eight years old multiple times. And it dramatically shaped my perception of the world. Yeah. But it is a thing that this is Tolkien, but the subtext is text. It's that Gareth Merendi, you know, people use subtext or cowards. Yeah. It is World War II animation, fantasy animation, to the Lord of the Rings World War I. Yeah. 100%. But it does have that same tone. The RPG was 1992, but the movie was 77. And they both still have that really dark, sardonic tone to them. Iconic scenes from the movie that are darkly humorous. All that comes through in the book as well.

30:35In the intro, there's kind of like a proto-Olivia Hill rule. You know, there's a lot of Nazis in the game, but they're like explicitly, you know, we do not support or condone. Nazis in any way shape or form, and then it continues. We also do not advocate illegal activities, witchcraft, drug use, robot assassins, racism, torture, murder, escapism, appeasement, genocide, demon summoning, or the detonation of tactical nuclear devices without adult supervision. And so that sort of dark bleak, sarcastic humor is a constant throughout baked into that earnest worldview of nature, good technology, bad. So the core book came out in 1992. There were two other source books that came out afterwards. There's the Montegar source book, which is the Goodlands and the Scorch with a T Scorpsch source book, where it's black wolf. It's the bad waste lands. And then there's also another adventure desert wind and a GM screen, a few little things,

31:39but that's pretty much it. They not allow support past those initial things. The system itself probably not as bad as tanker. It is definitely a product of its time. Character generation is, I mean, it is straightforward, but similar. You pick your race. You spend 40 points on attributes based off of the racial averages of your eight stats, strength of intelligence, dexterity, charisma, constitution, perception, size, and willpower. So you distribute points between those to move them up and down from your base. And then you do calculations, a lot of calculations for your secondary attributes, your might, which is different than strength, your damage bonus, your spirit, which is different than willpower, movement rates, reaction speeds, recovery. You have shock points and hit points, which are interesting. And everyone starts off with luck points, which is a neat kind of nod towards future,

32:43more narrative-y stuff, and you just spend your luck points to automatically win a thing or not get killed or come across something interesting. So that's neat. There is on top of the attributes. There is a skill system. It is Westend-ish in that. It does have a paranoia. I think paranoia is the closest system I can think of to it. For Centile-based, there are each set of skills is tied to an attribute. You have a base score for each of those. And then as you get skills, those add pluses to that. And they have basically background or career packages that you can pick and mix and match to give those sets. Now, I want to walk through, you have your attributes. And you buy your attributes. And by the way, eight different attributes, but they all cost different. If you don't buy them, they all cost different points. Like strength of six points, wisdoms, eight points each.

33:45But then you take that, and for each of the skills, you look at the attribute, and that gives you a number, which is usually something like two, three, four, five, or six. But this is a formula. There is a table you look up. One, two, I think is one to four is one, five to eight is two, and so on. So it's basically like mod divided by five roundup. Yeah. And when we look at the example character, the example character, most of their skills that they have on their sheet are three, four, or five. There's one that's an eight. Now, there are some modifiers for difficulty. But you're not rolling that D20 against the attribute. You are rolling it against that skill. You're rolling a D20 against most of the time, a three, four, or five. Yeah. Yeah. It is bleak. It is the wildest thing I've ever seen. I've never seen a game go, hey, guess what?

34:49You're going to miss 75% of the time. Yeah. There are a lot of, you know, you said there's a lot of modifiers for difficulties and advantages and disadvantages and stuff. And I don't know how much of this is intentional and how much is a happy accident. But it feels like, I mean, you are definitely underdogs in the face of this technological army that's coming out to you. And it does definitely get that sort of hopeless feeling. But it does encourage you to instead of just running out of an attacking tank with a sword. It does encourage you to use more guerrilla tactics and set things up and give yourself every advantage so that when it comes to making your role. You have a better than one in four chance. So that's that's kind of neat. I don't know if that was on purpose or not. I don't know if anyone actually ever played this. It does have a lot of like little crunchy things. It has difficulty bands. It has post rolls. You can get crits and blunders and there are tables for melee and range weapons and everything for that.

35:51You know, there's falling and drowning rules. There's not like hit locations. It's not that crunchy, but it is on the crunchy side. It's about, yeah, it's about where it should be, I think, for the time. One of the other things that is a little crunch, but also unique is the magic system. No one is playing a wizard, but people can do magic. And with like the other things, it is difficult to succeed at, but there's not really a set spell list. You can either build a spell, invent a spell and you build it from determining the area, the damage, the duration, what the components might be. There's a dozen things range or whatnot and assign points to those to create the spell that increases the difficulty. The cost to cast it and whatnot. So you can have a bandalier of common spells and they do have some written out.

36:55But the other half of that is what is called evocation. And that's basically just like make a magic roll and something might happen, which is cool because you're probably not going to make that roll and bad things are probably going to happen. And so there's that. So in the book, there is a solitary venture, which is, I think there's again, like in paranoia, there's one that you can walk through yourself. There's a sample adventure called tunnel of hate. There's advice for making adventures that are all very again of the time. They're very kind of like beat plot driven semi scripted and go go point A point B point C. They have a list of basic plots like assassination, diplomacy, recon, escorting sabotage, and then they have like that kind of like the twist card. They have a list of like here are some plot devices you can use like betrayal or a time limit awesome or you discover something new to drop in there and you know it's standard for the time I think.

37:59But it does have a GM section that has not principles necessarily, but GM advice that has very principle read like be prepared, keep on top of things, show and tell, be dynamic, go with the feel, be flexible, be tough, be fair, you will be wrong. And of course, go see the movie for the vibes. I don't think it is necessarily good GM advice, but it is definitely in the direction of GM's have rules to. And the book of course has a bestiary of creatures and mutants. It has extensive skill system systems and equipment and whatnot. Yeah, that's pretty much it. It comes from, you know, it is an early 90s RPG. I kind of did a lot of comparison to see like what it reminds me of the most. It is a book system. It's not building off of one. I will say I think groups has a lot to answer for.

39:01Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think I do think paranoia does have a lot of both there's a lot of DNA in there, both like mechanically and totally, which is interesting because it's not the same at all fictionally. And it does feel like that's strictly a transitional game, but it is like in that era where things are starting to become like more, hey, let's make it more like a movie than like a war game. And there are some design nods to that. There's a heavy emphasis on lore, very, very deep and again, not subtle. There are, you know, the sort of like it has advantages and disadvantages, which have their problems. Yes. Across the board, it doesn't encourage you to use those as role play hooks, which is nice. It does have the luck points, which let you, you know, the metacurrency that let you do that. Importantly, I think the action in the game is set during the movie. It's after Black Wolf starts his initial attacks and genocide of the elves, but before he discovers that they called the dream machine, which is a film projection that shows the Nazi propaganda films.

40:17So there's a, it's in an interesting place and you could not necessarily play the movie, but there's a lot of possibility in that short slice of the film story that is intriguing to me. Tone wise, the movie is way more psychedelic than the game could ever be a visual and oral artifacts. Definitely if I were to play her on this game, I would require everyone to watch it because there's just no way to mimic that tone without that. It's extremely anti-war. It's extremely anti-fascist. It's very anti, I don't know if it's necessarily anti-technology, but it is anti-technocratic, like very, very fantasy hippy 70s stuff. There's, you know, the society as it is has been there for literally millions of years and progress is seen as a bad thing.

41:19And yeah, the tone is very earnest with these like almost jarring shifts to irony and like little cutout scenes with the soldiers and whatnot. Both in the book and in the movie, I think the apocalypse itself, you know, it is way in the past, but it is described in detail. Like very is not abstract. It is kind of like factual and also kind of casual, just like, here's what technology did. And this is, you know, pre Berlin wall falling. So there are still nuclear tensions in the air. And this is just a, you know, this is what might happen. A few other details, again, skills are difficult to use, but especially combat is rough, partly because of that, but partly because like you're a serious dwarves, known with swords and bows and whatnot. And your enemies have machine guns and those rules from machine guns, like they remind me of old cyberpunk rules, like you, like, you can do bursts or full auto and you, you know, roll for every group of like 50 bullets.

42:29And see how many of them hit your guys and do damage and it is, yeah, I mean, it doesn't say, hey, don't fight someone who has a machine gun, but it mechanically says do not fight someone with a machine gun, like find a way to get around that. Also interestingly characters can't be human humans aren't around anymore. This is a purely fantasy race apocalypse. Yeah, I think it just assumes that you're going to fail a lot and fight from a from an underdog position, which again is not explicitly spelled out in the text, but definitely is like if you know how to read mechanics tells you that strongly. It is interesting that our apocalypse here, it's again a dying earth far future. Yeah, which often doesn't spell out the apocalypse, but here the apocalypse is fascism and the apocalypse is technology like those two things to play. There's almost two apocalypse is the nuclear holocaust that happened millions of years ago, and then there was the impending technological holocaust that is coming.

43:3515 years, one film RPG based on one film 15 years ago, and one of the things it really does show is the impact of cable television. Yes. And video rentals like that that kept wizards alive in a way that you would not have expected it to survive. Yeah, I definitely saw wizards more times than necessary on HBO in the 80s. I bet it was super cheap for them. Yeah, absolutely. It's also worth noting the gender politics of the original movie are really questionable and problematic. Yeah, that's across the board with bachy stuff. Yeah, there's there's a lot of political subtext gender subtext that they're questionable there. Yeah. One of the interesting things about the game itself, you know, comes out from Ken Whitman with publications who ends up doing just a few things.

44:39You mentioned WWF, immunoshoes, but also gets tied up with traveler after this and there's some some issues with that. The author Edward Bohm to connect up to tank girl, he worked on for West End games, the world of necroscope, the licensed RPG. Yeah, he also once they went over to the D6 system worked on men in black. And he did a ton of paranoia, a ton of cyberpunk as you alluded to cyber generation. Also L5R and Castle Falkenstein, but then looks like he drops off by the end of the 90s. Yeah, but an interesting like tie over of these things. Would you play this? I would run it. Yeah, I would have to definitely have a lot of trust in the person who was who was running it to play.

45:42And definitely like have as of like cats, tone setting, like we are underdogs. This is not heroic fantasy. We are gorilla freedom fighters and we're probably knocking at you, right? And just kind of like you have that sort of night, which is a band of blades. Don't do it. The other thing is there is a ton of world building in here. Like as you as you talked about there, there's a long descriptor at the beginning. There's lots of sections on the different peoples and then we've got two different source books. And Bulma is involved with one of them, but not the other. Did they just make this up whole cloth? Because this a lot of this stuff is not, I mean, most of this stuff is not present in the movie. Yeah, this is completely interesting because this is so actually originally pitched this. You know, he wrote it in like two days based on doodles from, you know, his high school notebooks basically.

46:42This is the war of the wizards. I had these cool drawings and I was going to paint it on the side of a van, but then I decided to do a movie. It is 100% a van painting game. So I don't know this is actually true, but I imagine that he has a lot of lore that didn't make it into the movie that was possibly referenced. I would love to know just how much because it is wow. There is a little bit of, there's a blurb from him at the back. Oh, yeah, the important part. The blurb in the back teases wizards to which never happened. It's like, it's coming out next year. Everybody had never came out and never happened. Instead, as you say, we got cool world. Which, yeah. These are wild like the 1990s. Again, both Masterbook and this are attempts to like build new systems that I think echo and ape other games, but maybe don't ask the why.

47:43Like what are those games doing? Why do you need to bring them? Because it just, it feels very weird. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting that they all are their own things and so similar to adjacent things without like explicitly being. And I know there's like a lot of fragmentation and movement around in the industry. From a modern perspective, it feels like it would have been worthwhile to like take a season and say, you know, we have these projects coming up. Maybe we should try to make at least a base system that we can customize off of. I personally love book games. So I'm glad that it happened. But is this perspective that feels like that would have been a stronger move. But I'm not in the business. So that's fine. Anything else you want to say about tanker or wizards? You know, for all their flaws and there are many, you know, I own tank girl, I own all the wizards books.

48:44I'm never getting rid of them. I may wind up playing at least wizards at some point. But yeah, they're just like really neat artifacts of the time based on properties that have like a small but passionate following. I have to wonder if an apocalypse world hack for wizards. My some thoughts there. Interesting. Give everybody the ability to reach into the psychic mailstrom in their own way. Thank you for listening to the show. This has been a role for mutation. This is a production of the open heart gaming community. You can find out more about that at openheartgaming.com. We have a Patreon that supports all of these podcasts. We have a discord that you can join. You can give us feedback. We'd love to hear that. As always with podcasts, if you give us a little rate, review, reshare. If you're watching this on YouTube, thumbs up, and subscribing.

49:47All of those things help us out a lot. Thank you, Mark, for going on this weird journey today. Thank you for taking me along. And listeners, that is our show.