The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Takin' It Way Back

Before I get started, I should 'splain a few things. First, this is a review of a product that has been out-of-print for a long damn time. This review will only annoy you if you are looking for info on the latest and greatest RPG product. Second, I made a blithering idiot out of myself by asking last week "What makes for a review that people will actually read?" An Aussie who shall remain anonymous took me (rightly) to task, and then noted that if you want comments then be more entertaining or less pedantic. So this is my shot at an entertaining (information is optional) review, and I'll throw in some biased commentary to stack the deck.

Back in 1993, I was in the Southeast U.S. looking for a place to live. It was raining like hell and 80 degrees, so I ducked into a strip-mall gaming store in a futile effort to avoid jungle rot. Browsing the racks, I attempted to air out my package inconspicuously, because there is nothing worse than running in the rain with wet boxers creeping up on you. I never intended to buy anything, until I stumbled across what looked like a new Frank Miller comic illustrated by Geoff Darrow. Not quite having that stay fresh feeling just yet, I leaned against the wall and flipped through this graphic novel. But it wasn't.

It turned out that the book was Underground, or more properly Ray Winninger's Underground, and it was one of the slickest games I had ever seen. Two thoughts went through my head:

"Who the hell is Ray Winninger?"

followed closely by

"Damn! This book is dense!"

And by dense I mean like lead. It was the heaviest 250-page book I had ever held, and it was softcover no less. The glossy paper, the full color interior, the amazing artwork, the hypertext, the full-page splashes. This was slick stuff for someone raised on GDW games circa 1984. When I saw William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer on p.2, I was sold.

No Sleep 'til Cali

On the flight back to California, I read this glossy paperweight from cover-to-cover, ignoring the worried looks of the middle-aged woman beside me as she caught glimpses of suicide and homicide with my smiling face hovering above it all. As I took a break for honey-roasted peanuts, I was giddy with the prospect of forcing characters to pop anti-psychotics and wear tomato-colored vests while hoping their Punkbuster battery holds out in the time it takes them to walk down Crenshaw. The book started out strong with a "Nods to" section (I guess this was before "Shouts out" became the accepted rap lingo adopted by white suburbanites), which dripped with names that I thought were fly circa 1993. Tarantino (remember him?), Rodriguez (ditto?), 808s, John Woo, Tommy Boy Records (remember House of Pain?), and Oshea Jackson aka Ice Cube. That was before Ice Cube started starring in movies with Marky Mark, Tarantino got on everyone's nerves, and Everlast became politically correct. At the time I thought this was just the shiznit, but in retrospect it seems pretty fly for a white guy. Which is to say, not too fly at all.

While I am discussing the distinct possibility of game designer lameness, just who the hell is this Ray Winninger again? The fact that his name is splashed all over the cover in the possessive makes me think he must be someone I should have heard about. As near as I can figure, he wrote some DC Heroes supplements, has something to do with White Wolf, writes for Dragon infrequently, and posts to newsgroups in defense of AD&D. Which is a helluva lot more writing in the industry than I have done, but it's still a bit weird that the title of the game incorporates his name, as if everyone should know the obvious brilliance of Ray Winninger. After all, it's not Norman Mailer's Underground, or even Michael Crichton's Underground. Which is not to say that Ray isn't a good writer, but it's weird that Mayfair was banking on what amounted to an unknown name.

Back to the game... it is nice to look at, borrows a great deal of ideas from the short-lived comic Marshal Law, and is based on a clumsy-ass system that makes the game all but unplayable. I know. I've tried three times now.

What It's About

The year is 2021 (just like Marshal Law), there have been wars in South America (like the Zone in Marshal Law), these wars were fought by enhanced soldiers (which is familiar to readers of ), and most of these boosted vets are psychotics and sociopaths in the slums of a major West Coast city (pretty much like Marshal Law). The enhanced vets possess powers not unlike those found in the pages of comic books, and even adopt the colorful and ridiculous costumes of these superheroes. The corporations that create these super-soldiers use a virtual reality world called Slumberland to program them, with the theme of the program being the soldiers are heroes in a comic book Universe. The characters are vets who muster out of one of the Conflict Firms and return from the insanity of Paraguay to the insanity that is Los Angeles. There are suggestions for incorporating the characters into the titular Underground, an organization of vets fighting to overthrow the corrupt government and corporations, compelled by their virtual programming in Slumberland to believe they are actually battling villains rather than corrupt politicians. The setting information provided is a bit scant, however, and the world of Underground tends to be light on the details. To run any sort of long-term campaign in this world would require more background or a lot of embellishment.

How It Does It

The system is a nightmare. Everything is rated in Units, from weights to distances to time. This leaves players dependent upon charts to determine the most trivial of calculations, and is just unnecessary. Attributes are rated in Units, so comparing your Strength to a weight in Units allows you to quickly determine if you can lift it. To find out how far you can throw it, however, requires looking up the difference between the weight and Strength on a chart. What happened to the trusty ol' "STR times 5 in feet" sort of mechanic? Worse yet, Units aren't directly additive, so you must convert two Units ratings into real-world values, add them, then look up the real-world value on the chart to determine the new Unit value. This is a bad thing. Gamers don't want to have to throw the I Ching just to determine how far their character can throw a half-full 40 of St. Ides.

Character creation is involved, and requires several goes to get it right. There are four distinct steps, each utilizing some of the virtual funds you receive to design your hero. The funds expended on each step (Recruitment, Genetic Design, Genetic Surgery, and Conditioning) determine how many creation points the character receives, whether the powers they are given are better or worse than the intended level, and if the character suffers from unmanageable levels of stress due to the modifications. If you are not familiar with the system (familiarity gained by several unsuccessful attempts at character creation), then you are doomed to expend too much cash in one area while neglecting another. Don't get me wrong, it's not rocket science, so you will eventually get it. But it is damn complicated compared to better games.

How Much of "It" is There?

The world is sketchy, even with 250+ pages. It's like nouveau cuisine. It looks great, you come away with an aftertaste that is nice, but you still feel hungry. There are plenty of powers to go around, so characters will be diverse. There are plenty of guns, and .50 caliber is considered the ladies gun of the lot. The appearance of boosted criminals has demanded the availability of 20mm handguns and rocket launchers to the unwashed masses. A shotgun just doesn't cut it when a home invader is 14 feet tall, 1200 pounds, and calls himself Mr. 187. (Was there a nod to Chuck Heston on page 1 that I overlooked?) There is some equipment not related to killing described, but not much. In a game that is so dependent upon a unique setting for success, not enough information is provided about that setting. In fact, apart from the intro chapter, the book through page 209 is concerned with what a boosted vet is, how to make a boosted vet, how to kill things with a boosted vet, and how to keep your boosted vet from going postal. Only on page 210 do the few details of the world begin, and that is too little, too late. Don't get me wrong. The details that are here are fine, and I can see hints of what is possible. There just isn't enough.

And some of the details that are here are a bit much. I know the setting is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but in many cases the tongue is poking through the cheek and hanging out the side of the game's face. Simple-minded pre-frontals being designed by McDon...er, McRaney's...to serve as dedicated customers of their burgers and fries is just lame. Likewise, the legalization of cannibalism by the year 2021, and fast food joints that do booming business in human flesh is a bit much to swallow (bu dum bump!). Yeah, yeah...I know I'm not complaining about Mr. 187 being 14 feet tall, but that it is an accepted super-heroic convention. Not even Orwell or Huxley proposed that people in their dystopias would willingly eat that homeless guy who sits on the stoop if his thigh meat was processed enough and slapped on a toasted sesame seed bun. Hell, even Soylent Green being people was enough to make Chuck go batty at the end of that movie (and never did I believe that I would write a review with so many Heston references). I am fine with satire, but the game tries to be too gritty realistic in general to pull off these bits of surreality. I think Swift's A Modest Proposal was brilliant in it's brevity. If I had to run a weekly game set in that world, it would wear thin and fall flat.

Back Up On It

So that's it. A great looking game, strongly based on an uncredited comic book, written well and with humor, wrapped around a system that is too complex and a setting that is too simple. If this review seems heavy on the set-up and light on the substance, then I have summed up Underground pretty well. The funny thing is, I am drawn back to this game every six months like a rat to cheese. It just looks so damn good sitting there on my shelf between Toon and Villains and Vigilantes, but when I start reading it I lose interest. Too many numbers, not enough atmosphere. But that isn't really a negative review. I think the same way about SLA Industries, and I like that game in a masochistic sort of way. Something about the game is done well enough to keep drawing me in. Some of the stuff (fast food cannibalism) could probably be cut, another system used for the dice rolling, and this would be an OK game. I am just too damn lazy to do that much work when I can find other games on the shelf which allow me to sleep in more often. The upside is that if this game is to be found, it will probably cost about 5 bucks. It is definitely worth 5 bucks.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 3 (Average)

Ray Winninger's Underground
Author: Ray Winninger wrote Ray Winninger's Underground Category: game Company/Publisher: Mayfair Games Inc. Line: Underground Cost: $24.95 Page count: 256 ISBN: 0-923763-87-2 SKU: 350 Capsule Review by Guy Incognito on 10/18/99. Genre tags: Science_fiction Comedy Superhero	Takin' It Way Back Before I get started, I should 'splain a few things. First, this is a review of a product that has been out-of-print for a long damn time. This review will only annoy you if you are looking for info on the latest and greatest RPG product. Second, I made a blithering idiot out of myself by asking last week "What makes for a review that people will actually read?" An Aussie who shall remain anonymous took me (rightly) to task, and then noted that if you want comments then be more entertaining or less pedantic. So this is my shot at an entertaining (information is optional) review, and I'll throw in some biased commentary to stack the deck. Back in 1993, I was in the Southeast U.S. looking for a place to live. It was raining like hell and 80 degrees, so I ducked into a strip-mall gaming store in a futile effort to avoid jungle rot. Browsing the racks, I attempted to air out my package inconspicuously, because there is nothing worse than running in the rain with wet boxers creeping up on you. I never intended to buy anything, until I stumbled across what looked like a new Frank Miller comic illustrated by Geoff Darrow. Not quite having that stay fresh feeling just yet, I leaned against the wall and flipped through this graphic novel. But it wasn't. It turned out that the book was Underground, or more properly Ray Winninger's Underground, and it was one of the slickest games I had ever seen. Two thoughts went through my head: "Who the hell is Ray Winninger?" followed closely by "Damn! This book is dense!" And by dense I mean like lead. It was the heaviest 250-page book I had ever held, and it was softcover no less. The glossy paper, the full color interior, the amazing artwork, the hypertext, the full-page splashes. This was slick stuff for someone raised on GDW games circa 1984. When I saw William Burroughs' Thanksgiving Prayer on p.2, I was sold. No Sleep 'til Cali On the flight back to California, I read this glossy paperweight from cover-to-cover, ignoring the worried looks of the middle-aged woman beside me as she caught glimpses of suicide and homicide with my smiling face hovering above it all. As I took a break for honey-roasted peanuts, I was giddy with the prospect of forcing characters to pop anti-psychotics and wear tomato-colored vests while hoping their Punkbuster battery holds out in the time it takes them to walk down Crenshaw. The book started out strong with a "Nods to" section (I guess this was before "Shouts out" became the accepted rap lingo adopted by white suburbanites), which dripped with names that I thought were fly circa 1993. Tarantino (remember him?), Rodriguez (ditto?), 808s, John Woo, Tommy Boy Records (remember House of Pain?), and Oshea Jackson aka Ice Cube. That was before Ice Cube started starring in movies with Marky Mark, Tarantino got on everyone's nerves, and Everlast became politically correct. At the time I thought this was just the shiznit, but in retrospect it seems pretty fly for a white guy. Which is to say, not too fly at all. While I am discussing the distinct possibility of game designer lameness, just who the hell is this Ray Winninger again? The fact that his name is splashed all over the cover in the possessive makes me think he must be someone I should have heard about. As near as I can figure, he wrote some DC Heroes supplements, has something to do with White Wolf, writes for Dragon infrequently, and posts to newsgroups in defense of AD&D. Which is a helluva lot more writing in the industry than I have done, but it's still a bit weird that the title of the game incorporates his name, as if everyone should know the obvious brilliance of Ray Winninger. After all, it's not Norman Mailer's Underground, or even Michael Crichton's Underground. Which is not to say that Ray isn't a good writer, but it's weird that Mayfair was banking on what amounted to an unknown name. Back to the game... it is nice to look at, borrows a great deal of ideas from the short-lived comic Marshal Law, and is based on a clumsy-ass system that makes the game all but unplayable. I know. I've tried three times now. What It's About The year is 2021 (just like Marshal Law), there have been wars in South America (like the Zone in Marshal Law), these wars were fought by enhanced soldiers (which is familiar to readers of ), and most of these boosted vets are psychotics and sociopaths in the slums of a major West Coast city (pretty much like Marshal Law). The enhanced vets possess powers not unlike those found in the pages of comic books, and even adopt the colorful and ridiculous costumes of these superheroes. The corporations that create these super-soldiers use a virtual reality world called Slumberland to program them, with the theme of the program being the soldiers are heroes in a comic book Universe. The characters are vets who muster out of one of the Conflict Firms and return from the insanity of Paraguay to the insanity that is Los Angeles. There are suggestions for incorporating the characters into the titular Underground, an organization of vets fighting to overthrow the corrupt government and corporations, compelled by their virtual programming in Slumberland to believe they are actually battling villains rather than corrupt politicians. The setting information provided is a bit scant, however, and the world of Underground tends to be light on the details. To run any sort of long-term campaign in this world would require more background or a lot of embellishment. How It Does It The system is a nightmare. Everything is rated in Units, from weights to distances to time. This leaves players dependent upon charts to determine the most trivial of calculations, and is just unnecessary. Attributes are rated in Units, so comparing your Strength to a weight in Units allows you to quickly determine if you can lift it. To find out how far you can throw it, however, requires looking up the difference between the weight and Strength on a chart. What happened to the trusty ol' "STR times 5 in feet" sort of mechanic? Worse yet, Units aren't directly additive, so you must convert two Units ratings into real-world values, add them, then look up the real-world value on the chart to determine the new Unit value. This is a bad thing. Gamers don't want to have to throw the I Ching just to determine how far their character can throw a half-full 40 of St. Ides. Character creation is involved, and requires several goes to get it right. There are four distinct steps, each utilizing some of the virtual funds you receive to design your hero. The funds expended on each step (Recruitment, Genetic Design, Genetic Surgery, and Conditioning) determine how many creation points the character receives, whether the powers they are given are better or worse than the intended level, and if the character suffers from unmanageable levels of stress due to the modifications. If you are not familiar with the system (familiarity gained by several unsuccessful attempts at character creation), then you are doomed to expend too much cash in one area while neglecting another. Don't get me wrong, it's not rocket science, so you will eventually get it. But it is damn complicated compared to better games. How Much of "It" is There? The world is sketchy, even with 250+ pages. It's like nouveau cuisine. It looks great, you come away with an aftertaste that is nice, but you still feel hungry. There are plenty of powers to go around, so characters will be diverse. There are plenty of guns, and .50 caliber is considered the ladies gun of the lot. The appearance of boosted criminals has demanded the availability of 20mm handguns and rocket launchers to the unwashed masses. A shotgun just doesn't cut it when a home invader is 14 feet tall, 1200 pounds, and calls himself Mr. 187. (Was there a nod to Chuck Heston on page 1 that I overlooked?) There is some equipment not related to killing described, but not much. In a game that is so dependent upon a unique setting for success, not enough information is provided about that setting. In fact, apart from the intro chapter, the book through page 209 is concerned with what a boosted vet is, how to make a boosted vet, how to kill things with a boosted vet, and how to keep your boosted vet from going postal. Only on page 210 do the few details of the world begin, and that is too little, too late. Don't get me wrong. The details that are here are fine, and I can see hints of what is possible. There just isn't enough. And some of the details that are here are a bit much. I know the setting is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but in many cases the tongue is poking through the cheek and hanging out the side of the game's face. Simple-minded pre-frontals being designed by McDon...er, McRaney's...to serve as dedicated customers of their burgers and fries is just lame. Likewise, the legalization of cannibalism by the year 2021, and fast food joints that do booming business in human flesh is a bit much to swallow (bu dum bump!). Yeah, yeah...I know I'm not complaining about Mr. 187 being 14 feet tall, but that it is an accepted super-heroic convention. Not even Orwell or Huxley proposed that people in their dystopias would willingly eat that homeless guy who sits on the stoop if his thigh meat was processed enough and slapped on a toasted sesame seed bun. Hell, even Soylent Green being people was enough to make Chuck go batty at the end of that movie (and never did I believe that I would write a review with so many Heston references). I am fine with satire, but the game tries to be too gritty realistic in general to pull off these bits of surreality. I think Swift's A Modest Proposal was brilliant in it's brevity. If I had to run a weekly game set in that world, it would wear thin and fall flat. Back Up On It So that's it. A great looking game, strongly based on an uncredited comic book, written well and with humor, wrapped around a system that is too complex and a setting that is too simple. If this review seems heavy on the set-up and light on the substance, then I have summed up Underground pretty well. The funny thing is, I am drawn back to this game every six months like a rat to cheese. It just looks so damn good sitting there on my shelf between Toon and Villains and Vigilantes, but when I start reading it I lose interest. Too many numbers, not enough atmosphere. But that isn't really a negative review. I think the same way about SLA Industries, and I like that game in a masochistic sort of way. Something about the game is done well enough to keep drawing me in. Some of the stuff (fast food cannibalism) could probably be cut, another system used for the dice rolling, and this would be an OK game. I am just too damn lazy to do that much work when I can find other games on the shelf which allow me to sleep in more often. The upside is that if this game is to be found, it will probably cost about 5 bucks. It is definitely worth 5 bucks. Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 3 (Average)