This is the final part of Robin Laws' design notes on the new Firefly Games release, Og.

Last time out I talked about how I felt it necessary, in a crazy caveman game, to give accurate sizes and weights for the various dinosaurs and mammalian megafauna.

This raises a point about the relationship between reality and comedy. By definition, a slapstick caveman game featuring dinosaurs has to stretch the boundaries of reality, both physical and paleontological. Caveman movies and comics, especially those played for laughs, don’t feel any great compunction to portray the creatures in the proper scale. The typical movie dinosaur switches size from scene to scene, as the demands of framing dictate. Of course, the Og GM is empowered to ignore this reality, or any other, to make a scene funnier. Nonetheless, I felt that it was better to supply a baseline of reality to depart from.

Besides, contrasts are amusing, and we tend to underestimate the size of the biggest prehistoric creatures. The immense size of a brachiosaur as compared to a human is so implausible, so evocative of human insignificance, that it’s in my opinion way funnier to use the real sizes.

Another element of reality introduced by the monster section is the food value of each creature. Og is played for laughs but the daily need to acquire food for one’s clan is an essential plot driver that could be, in another game, taken completely seriously.

Now, when I say “element of reality”, I don’t mean reality reality, as in I was moved to go out and do actual research about how much meat subsistence hunters need to survive and the amount of protein the average stegosaur would be hauling around on its massive skeleton. I mean I pulled a bunch of numbers out of the air and squinted at them until they felt right.

If you’re playing Og in a paleontology department (which I guess wouldn’t be so far from playing deck-running cyberpunks in a computer science department) you may want to adjust our doubtless wildly inaccurate numbers. The rest of us, in our relative dinosaur ignorance, will have little trouble with them.

The point, though, is this—all great comedy has an element of reality hidden behind its wacky exaggerations. The brutal reduction of all creatures to their meat value not only provides a reason for the characters to get out and do things in their severely dangerous world. It gives us a comic, vicarious window into an aspect of the human condition we cushy modern Westerners don’t often contemplate. The raw drive for survival has driven the vast majority of humankind for all but a tiny sliver of history. Even today, only a comparatively small fraction of the planet’s population considers itself free of these concerns. We like to imagine ourselves masters of our environment, as opposed to its victims.

Previous Og materials presented me with a choice regarding the new game’s take on prehistoric reality. The original game evokes the comedy of the B.C. comic strip (back when it was good, a geological era ago) or the Ringo Starr movie Caveman. Its 2001 supplement, The Complete Caveman’s Club Book, goes in a more Flinstones-y direction. It describes caveman cities, with crime problems, organized sports, and other elements of modern life dressed up in prehistoric drag. I could see where the authors were going with this; the idea of an Og supplement is a brilliant joke, but a nightmare when you have to figure out what to put in it.

The new Og omits the Flintstones homage. In my opinion, the game works better as an exercise in primitive survival than a loin-clothed parody of contemporary existence. Play in a modernized caveman world requires a grasp of concepts—your lousy boss, the nosy neighbors, lying to your wife about being out with the lodge brothers all night—that are impossible to express with only 18 words. It might be fun to see a version of the Flinstones concept based on the clichés of the early 21st century instead of the 1950s, but that would be a whole other project, and probably not a roleplaying game.

Thus, characters in the updated Og will have to do without their lizard can openers and pterodactyl transit systems. When you become a character in Og, you’re forced to do without. You’re motivated mostly by hunger. Even the words you use to get through the day are taken away from you. Though the rules are less gleefully punitive than before, you’re still pretty much screwed. This is the second indie-like inversion of standard roleplaying practice inherent in the game. You’re no super hero. You get no magic, no super weapons, no mutant powers. Og is not a power fantasy; it’s a comedy of powerlessness. Like Paranoia before it, it puts the screws to its characters, and makes of their haplessness a cosmic joke.

The subsistence theme makes it absurdly easy to create scenarios—so much so that the entire concept of adventures in Og is somewhat of a gag. The book presents three sample adventures in their entirety. They are, respectively, 49, 43, and 52 words long. (That last one is a bit of an epic, I concede.)

The book provides basic guidance on three methods of generating adventures, from the classic “make it up as you go along” to approaches using index cards and maps. Really, though, you’ll find that the storylines essentially write themselves. When in doubt, shovel another terrifying and humiliating complication into an already bad situation.

The new Og was a delightful challenge to design. If you play it more than once, my work is done.