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Urban Faerie
Modern Tales of Faerie for the Sick & Twisted
Review by C. Demetrius Morgan
Synopsis
Urban Faerie is 44-pages of fey fairy camp, published by Postmortem Studios, and is currently available as a combo PDF set- containing 300 DPI and 72 DPI PDF files of the same eBook- through RPGnow for $6.50. A demo is also available.
Rating: Overall I rate Urban Faerie 7 out of 10 golden apples. What can I say, I liked it. Granted in it’s present state I think this is more a fun read, which is not to say it’s not playable, just that I’d like to see a revision that presents the game material in a easier to access format. And maybe put some crunch into the mechanics! They are too simple.
Initial Impressions
First impressions are everything. So imagine my surprise when the cover (a nice bit of urban style graffiti) loaded on my screen and moving onward I read the following, “Faeries do not exist. If they do that statement just killed one and that is one less of the little buggers to worry about. Feel free to clap your hands if you think it will help.” Ok, thought I, a bit of a irreverent ha-ha this isn’t serious start. Now that was the first thing I read as I tend to jump around documents to see what catches my eye before really sitting down to read. Nothing else really caught my eye and I figured that, well, not sure what I was expecting. But I don’t think it was to see something like this:
Postmortem Studios Patented Faerie Sight Potion
Get a liquidiser and put in the following ingredients.
1 slice of week old delivered pizza, preferably nice and furry.
Fruit or tomatoes, enough to fill half the container.
A hefty dose of acid.
A spliff's worth of nice, resinous, skunk weed.
A Bill Hicks' recommended dose of psychoactive
mushrooms. (Five dried grams).
Five shots of single malt whisky.
A photocopy of a Brian Froud Illustration.
Liquidise until the whole has a smooth, ghastly looking appearance and then remove the container. Set it down upon the floor and dance about it three times, widdershins (that is anticlockwise) chanting the following verse. (You may want to have a couple of shots of the whisky first).
`Hey nonny nonny, I'm a gullible twat.'
`Hey nonny nonny, faeries are phat.'
`Real ale doesn't taste like a badger's scro-tum.'
`Let me see fairies so I can tell me mum.'
If Tom Bombadil can get away with it, so can you.
In all fairness this is immediately followed by a rather lengthy disclaimer expounding upon the obvious, namely that this is a game and fairies don‘t exist. The disclaimer wraps up with, “Postmortem Studios accepts no responsibility for injuries sustained in the making or imbibing of the Postmortem Studios Patented Faerie Sight Potion. Do not be so bloody stupid.” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. (Mostly because a fairy sight potion should contain absinthe, not whiskey. *wink* ) Alas there probably are some few folks out there who might try to actually mix that “potion” up. Sad to say these are probably the exact same types of folks who I used to have to hide my Bard Games “Compleat Alchemist” from for fear they’d write down one of the philters or potions to try to actually mix them up. Stupid is as stupid does.
And that is all in the introduction! It does set the tone for what is to follow, some of which is far more over the top gonzo mad absurd tragically comical than I can begin to explain without embarrassing both you and me with tawdry allusions. So let’s just dive right in, shall we?
Note: Be aware that I have not included any hyperlinks to sections because it is my feeling this review is best served by being read in a straightforward linear fashion. Apologies.
Summary
Where to begin? Let’s see, how should I put this. . . Urban Faerie is like unto a guy dressed as an manic court jester attempting to take a sledgehammer to an elephants scrotum that gets smacked by said elephant with a giant banana moon pie and. . . No, no that’s not it. Urban Faerie is like unto that funny feeling you got when looking at members of the opposite sex when you were fourteen and. . . No, no that’s not it either. Urbane Faerie is gob jaw dropping insanity on a stick, some assembly required, objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear, and please don‘t feed the friggin bears nutters! If you can imagine a role-playing game with a setting that takes the lurid juvenile humor of South Park, adds a jigger of John Waters private label 90 proof dementia flavored gin, a jigger of the best of the worst that genre late night cable adult cinema has to offer, and liberally mixes the resultant cocktail with a punch bowl of fermented milk taken from a rampaging horde of mutant dancing gopher shaped Caddyshack memories spiced with a dash of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the comedy styling of Benny Hill you may get a pallid idea of what Urbane Faerie is like. No, really, I’ve worked on that train wreck of a run on sentence in a effort to capture the frenzied nature of Urban Faerie. That’s what it’s like! What? You had to read that more than once, so it is with Urban Faerie. Hope I captured a bit of its gonzo nutter madhouse escapee feel for you. And the setting?
Setting: Uhm… it’s… well, this is the brown wrapper version of a midsummer night’s wet dream of fairy tales hit full in the face by a virulent strain of demented comedy that would make George Carlin blush. It’s a Grim’s Fairy Tale of modern fairies and how they have been forced to adapt with uninhibited abandon to life in our strange and interesting times. By comparison it makes Andrew Dice Clay seem like an altar boy and Margaret Cho look like a vestal virgin. For instance, “Oberon now lives in Los Angeles with an Anne Summers sprite a scandalous number of centuries younger than him, so much younger that their relationship is more like robbing the uterus than robbing the cradle. Rumour has it he now produces porno movies financed by faerie gold and provides hosting for fantasy based websites.” And that’s a tame bit! In short Urbane Faerie presents an offbeat world setting that would give Dracula nightmares.
The Game: Urban Faerie bills itself as a ‘beer and crisps’ game; that means it’s a beer and pretzels game for those of us who are Yanks. Overall the material is a rather simple and fun read, however for all its semblance of brevity it is a game that must be fully read through. Because without that read through you wont pickup on one simple fact, this entire game is a spooftacular humorfest. There is great potential here for playing up the “Seedy and Unseedy” divide, however goal orientation is rather fuzzy and ill defined, despite the overwhelming amount of background detail provided.
System Mechanics: Gah? Gorble. .er. . Flibble, flop, floop? **koff** Let’s see Health seems easy enough. Characters are either Fine, Disabled, or Squished. That makes for three levels of damage, any damage inflicted requires the player to tick off a level. Pretty simple and straightforward. Should make for quick games for those who can‘t avoid combat situations. However, unless I am incredibly dense, I could not find any section dedicated to discussing methods of conflict resolution. And, for once, the search function appears to be fully functional. I’ve just read through all this gonzo mad insane utterly madcap frenzy of offbeat world background, now where’s conflict resolution d*mn-it! Ah, it’s on page 30, and it’s not referred to anywhere as anything a veteran grognard of a role-player would expect to use in a Boolean search to find it. (Note to author: You, sir, are a construct of dire diabolical evil in multi-spangled tights.) Yeah, sure, I get it. It’s meant to be a funny, next time include a TOC or Bookmarks so I can find it without having to make like Diogenes. Now then, conflict resolution. . . It’s boring. Roll a die six, take modifiers, compare to opponents roll. Silver lining: it’s so simple even a opium smoking monkey can understand it. Good job.
Character Creation: Characters have 5 attributes as follows: Muscle, Skill, Wits, Magick, and Luck. These attributes are normally rated from 1-6. My main problem here is, with the text trying to be funny with the explanation of character generation, when read at first glance, I was left totally baffled how I am supposed to generate base numerical attributes. There are a number of Fae races provided, with stat blocks, but are these base stats? I am guessing they probably are. Alas, this is one section where the presence of mondo gonzo humor just distracts. I’d suggest this section be reedited for clarity even though veteran gamers should not have too great a problem figuring out how to make it work.
Note: Remember, as a game author we need to literally take our readers by the hand and explain to them in terms a six year old could understand what is supposed to be going on. Yes it’s a pain in the arse, but look on the bright side, Game Master’s will love us for going out of our way to provide as stress free a gaming experience as possible.
Appraisal
A great gonzo humor supplement. Too, in some regards Urbane Faeries is amazingly similar to an game idea I once outlined on The Forge a coon’s age ago. Both essentially have the same number and types of attributes but the focus of play, style, and goals are somewhat different. Also I tentatively titled my fairy game Pixies: The Gleaning and didn’t give it quite the same level of frenzied over the top Benny Hill on acid humor. Besides which I decided my game would be bettered developed as an RPG board game, and there it stalled. Even so I still have the notes for the plain RPG version laying around on a disc somewhere. Thus you can imagine that going into Urban Faerie I knew a thing or two about the basic genre tropes. From what I have read thus far I can say, without reservation, that most of the genre tropes have been met by the author. Granted they seem to have come away from that meeting twisted in knots and turned around, but they are definitely there. The main problem I have with this material, as presented, is that the sections are poorly labeled. More to the point there is nothing approaching chapter breaks. This makes finding things very difficult as there is nary a bookmark provided and the index present just doesn‘t cut it. For instance how are you supposed to know that conflict resolution is on page 30 as it is not referred to as such, but is instead found in a section titled “Doing Things”? I didn’t. In fact the difficulties I encountered in locating information makes me wonder if maybe this beer and pretzels game wasn’t written when someone had drunk a few too many at the pub late one night. (And they say nothing good comes from dinking!) However, while I am of the opinion this document really needs a revision in order to make it easier to find things, the basic premise is sound. In fact if this game were more fully developed it would probably rocket to the moon. Overall tis game has the potential to generate some gonzo mad fun, but in it‘s present state you have to work at it, and that is an oxymoron for something labeled a “beer and pretzels” game.
PDF Issues: Looks great on screen but when you go to print out pages about 99.998% of the lines are blackened out. My test pages, all of which are chosen at random, look like Freedom of Information Act documents made all the more bizarre by the fact the illustrations seem to print without incident. In fact they display no pixellation and are crisp and clear. Wish I could say the same for the rest of the document.
Negatives: Contains nothing resembling chapter breaks. Organization of contents, despite flowing well, is piss poor. I’d call this an accessibility issue as, were this a print product, it would be akin to taking a book and just printing every chapter back to back without so much as a indication of when one section begins and another ends. In fact I’d go so far as to say this document feels like a first effort. Which makes me sad because I really liked this.
Positives: I foresee this game being gonzo mad fun, if it is ever revised so those of us who are banal and like organization can find things in an orderly fashion. **wink** Too, the PDFs have few “issues”. Search works. Loading the PDF didn’t cause my computer to reboot, nor does it have any perceptible load lag. I don’t know what Postmortem did between this early PDF offering and its later documents but I humbly suggest they go back to creating PDFs via this method. Whatever it was. As for the game itself, even for a “beer and pretzels” game it lacks crunch. Second after better organization, and more clearly delineated sections, what I’d really like to see in a second edition are some expansions to the underlying game mechanics. Seriously, I like the premise presented, and the game mechanics are functional, but by the same token I would like to see this game more fully developed. Urban Faerie could become a strong, independent, RPG system fit to give the current charnel house stench of mass produced assembly line OGL/D20 products a fit. But don’t just take my word for it buy a copy and decide for yourself. Then e-mail the author and Postmortem Studios with hundreds of revision suggestions and ideas! If that doesn’t get the ball rolling nothing will.
Try not to step on any D4s!
Copyright © 2004 C. Demetrius Morgan
