1985 was a pretty good year for roleplaying games. Notable releases included TSR's official Conan rpg, FASA's Doctor Who, as well as first editions of DC Heroes and Fantasy Hero (no relation). The gaming world first saw Mekton, Pendragon, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness back in '85, too. That year also saw its fair share of stinkers. By all reports the official He-Man and the Masters of the Universe turned out to be as infantile as the popular cartoon from which it was derived. World Action & Adventure is now infamous in some circles for its mind-numbingly table-tastic design. And the first Sandman boxed set, subtitled Map of Halaal, became a bit of a fiasco when the promised second and third installments of the series failed to materialize.
Somewhere on the continuum between the successful games of '85 and the true turkeys sits an obscure little item called Excursion in the Bizarre. To this day EitB (as the game often calls itself) remains one of the most obscure games I have ever encountered. I've only seen 2 copies for sale in my entire life and I bought both of them, having misplaced the first copy. Online I've only encountered one other person who claims to own a copy. John Kim's excellent Encyclopedia of Role-Playing Games acknowledges EitB's existence. Other than these instances, I don't think I've ever found another gamer who has even heard of Excursion.
Not that I'm claiming that EitB is one of the great lost treasures of the hobby, mind you. But it does have its virtues, first of which is a healthy sense of humour. The premise of the game is your basic fish-out-of-water story. The PCs are all inhabitants of either Oort, a dimension of treasure-obsessed, dungeoneering elves, orcs, etc., or Chon-Blu, a parallel universe where furries rule the earth. Via the agency of the mysterious Vorpal Winds, our heroes have been plucked from their native digs and deposited into something resembling the real world. The PCs quickly discover that their spells and skills are seriously hampered by the strange pollutions and radiations of Earth, that the locals don't respond well to either trolls or anthopomorphic mooses, and that they can't operate modern technology via command words. Hijinks ensue.
The Game
Character creations starts with generating five traits: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, and Wisdom/Intuition. You roll 5d6 for each trait, dropping the lowest die, for a 4-24 range skewed to the high end. These stats operate much as you'd expect: Strength determines damage in hand-to-hand combat, Intelligence determines how many spells and skills you know, etc. EitB has the distinction of being the only game I've seen with an interesting Wisdom stat. You can make a Wisdom/Intuition check to try to determine the true intentions of an NPC. This will be a very important ability when we reach the section labeled "The People of Earth".
Next you select skills. The number of your starting skills is equal to one-half your Intelligence rounded down, except that all characters have at least five skills. You then divide 250 percentile points among these skills, but due to the strangeness of your new environment you may not assign any skill a number larger than 50%. I found the skill list reminiscent of Call of Cthulhu, as individual weapons, vehicles, and sciences all require separate skills. Once play begins PCs can learn new skills to bring their total up to a number of skills equal to their Intelligence score and an optional rule allows the Excursion Master to merge a starting skill and a similar learned skill. (Example: Anya the She-Skunk starts out play with 50% in the revolver skill. When she learns to use semi-auto pistols to the same level she can merge them into a single revolver/pistol skill. This permits Anya to learn yet another new skill even if she previously reached her maximum skills allowed.) Certain skills are labeled as being available only on Oort, Chon-Blu, or Earth. Some skills can be learned on two different dimensions, such as Hang Gliding being available to both Earthers and Oortians. Six different martial arts skills are given, but there is no rules differentiation between them. Brawling 25% is no different mechanically than Judo 25%, for instance.
Somewhere around here most ordinary rpgs would tell you that in order to use your skill you roll percentile dice and try to get under your skill rating. And most ordinary rpgs would have instructed you in the previous section which dice to roll to make a stat check. Excursion into the Bizarre is sketchier than most rpgs of the era and omits little things like this. It's clear from the text that this game isn't aimed at newcomers to the hobby. The assumption is that you already know how much of this stuff works. A tiny line of errata near the end of the game does solve the stat check mystery: you're supposed to roll under your stat on 4d6. I can't say that I'm fond of this method. I'm a lazy gamer and rolling and adding together more than a couple of dice for a simple stat check annoys me. If I were to run this game I'd probably dust off my d30 and use it instead, but your mileage may vary.
Before we get to the next section of character creation the text takes a left turn at Albequerque to explain the phenomenom of the Vorpal Winds. These mysterious interdimensional winds were created when a starship (in a dimension that is neither Earth nor Oort nor Chon-Blu) attempted to use an experimental 'weave' drive. Rather than weaving through the interstices between universes, the drive malfuntioned and the spaceship punched a big ol' hole straight through the multiverse. The result is a dimensional imbalance that occasionally yanks people out of one universe and drops them down into another. Although not explicitly explored as such, this background info looks to me like a shiny dangling plot hook. Can the PCs discover existence of the still-hurtling spaceship, locate it, board it, and somehow reverse the problem?
After this brief diversion, we return to the character creation rules with sections on Oort, Chon-Blu, and their inhabitants. Oort is a delightful little parody of plain vanilla D&D fantasy. In that realm the acquisition of treasure through adventuring is not just part of the local culture, it's also a key component of the main religion of the world. The average Oortian spends their time hunting treasures that, according to their faith, they themselves hid in a previous life. The worldwide Geltian Order of Lawful Divinity regulates these hunts, taking a tidy cut of the profits. The minority religion is the dour Church of Undead Haters, who take the act of turning undead and make it their primary sacrament. Whatever their faith Oortian PCs may come from six available races: elf, dwarf, orc, troll, halfling, and human. Oortian humans are noted as possessing two hearts and troll don't regenerate or any nonsense like that. The text assumes everyone has played D&D or read Tolkien and knows the difference between these races.
The Chon-Blu summary explains how on that world humans didn't evolve, but many animal species have evolved to sentience and now walk upright and possess hands instead of claws or hooves. The dinosaurs never became extinct on Chon-Blu, so they and a ostrich-like species call filperts are the primary wild and domesticated animals. Politically, the Chon-Bluians are much more fractured than on earth. The political landscape consists of almost 750,000 individual nations, all of whom often engage in wars over territorial disputes. The largest nation on Chon-Blu is the size of New Jersey, while smallest is "about the size of your house". Technologically, the Chon-Bluians are near the level of 20's or 30's Earth, excepting that they have recently developed limited portable computers similar to late 1970's Earth models but with crystal displays instead of cathode ray tubes. One of the more interesting facts about Chon-Blu is that the natives never developed any spiritual yearnings. Religion is utterly alien to a Chon-Bluian. The section on Chon-Blu ends with a list of typical PC races: horse, canine, duck, beaver, bear, feline, etc. No ninja turtles on the list.
No stat adjustments are given for any races in either the Oort or Chon-Blu sections. I believe the idea here is that you pick a race that best suits the stats you rolled earlier. Average heights and weights are given, as well as a method for determining actual dimensions and mass of specific PCs. This information is important because taller characters get bonus hit points. Characters 6' or more get d10 extra Damage Points added to their Strength plus Constitution. While PCs 7' or taller (some trolls, bears, cows, and horses) get d20 extra DP. Anyone shorter than 6' only gets plus d6.
The next section details the people of Earth and the chart for determining how they react to your freakish PC group. Humanity is broadly divided into three groups: enemies, allies, and neutrals. Enemies seek to capture, destroy, dissect, enslave, or otherwise harm the PCs for their own gratification and/or profit. Allies enthusaistically seek to aid our dimensional travellers so that at some future point they might capture, destroy, dissect, enslave, or otherwise harm the PCs for their own gratification and/or profit. Neutrals just don't care. Players are advised to stick with neutrals. The book then provides a funny list of possible allies, enemies, and neutrals. The GM is left to their own devices to flesh out exactly why Sylvester Stallone is an enemy and the Contras are allies. One glance at these lists ought to be enough to inspire the Excursion Master to come up with some pretty wild scenarios. Also, I like the fact that gamers are listed as allies but game store owners are neutrals.
After a very simple NPC reaction chart comes the equipment section. Here is where we discover why the anthro-horse on the cover wears an ancient Egyptian headdress and wields a golf club as a weapon while the beer-chugging troll sports a WWII German helmet and an "I *heart* NY" T-shirt. It seems that on their way to the real world circa now the PCs skip along the timestream, stopping for brief intervals in various historic period. The average party skips 5 times before landing in the present, and each PC picks up one artifact from each of the earlier eras. This grab-bag of temporal debris comprises the entirety of your starting equipment. The GM is given complete freedom in assigning this equipment but is admonished to include a weapon, some food, and something that could maybe be sold for cash. "Thus you could end up with a wood-elf from Oort wearing an Incan headdress, decked out in a Confederate Cavalry Officer's uniform holding a transistor radio in one hand, a pack of ding-dongs in the other and an AK-47 strapped on his back. Pretty neat, huh?" Sample lists of possible equipment from twelve different time periods follows this example. The samples are weighted toward the twentieth century, but are still pretty cool. Where else would you find a copy of Lee Iaccoca's biography among the list of starting equipment?
Following no particular logic I can discern, the next section of the book details the magic system. Those of you who are salivating over the prospect of crunchy new spell mechanics or access to unbridled power can go read a review for an Exalted product or something. First level D&D wizards pretty much kick ass compared to EitB magicians. The main problem is that most spells don't work on plain old vanilla Earth and the ones that do are unreliable. Due to the influence of differing gravities and background radiations and unknown pollutants in Earth's atmosphere, newly arrived spellcasters have only a 5% chance of successfully activating a spell, unless they are a trained Oortian mage, which adds a measly 10% to the possibility. The longer you stay on Earth the more you can adjust to the strange environment and the better your chances get, but tyou'll never reach above a 50% chance. Obviously, the magic system is meant to be played for laughs but I know a lot of players who will balk at these cruddy percentages. Maybe if the game included some sort of crazy misfire rules the situation would be more palatable. But alas, such a chart is left as an excercise for the reader.
The spells themselves are nothing to write home about, either. Most have a casting time of 15 seconds (3 combat turns) to an hour and the durations are generally an hour or less. The Oortian spell effects are all standard stuff: invisibility, wizard eyes, setting people on fire, etc. The combat spells are few and do little damage (like 1d10) or an unspecified amount ("EM to determine any damage to targets"). All Oortians above Intelligence 5 know a minor spell or two that they can cast once per day, while trained mages carry around a scroll with fire-&-forget Major spells on it. I can't find anything to tell me how many spells a mage knows or can cast per day. It may be intend for them to be limited to one or two as well, but can choose from amongst the Major spells.
The furries of Chon-Blu have their own variety of "natural" magic. These spells are similar to minor Oortian magic in terms of power and reliability, but the possible effects are totally different. Chon-Bluian spells are animal-based powers such as Play Dead or Farsee or Track. The text forbids Chon-Bluians from knowing spells that don't fit their animal type, so molemen can't learn Farsee, for instance. The spells in this section are cute. I think they would be a lot of fun in actual play, if any PC could ever make the absymally low casting rolls.
After several pages of sidetracks and meanderings, the character creation section finally comes to an abrupt end. Next up are the unnecessarily crunchy movement and encumbrance rules. If you know anyone crazy enough to play this game but obsessive enough to want to calculate their PCs "slow walk" and "brisk walk" speeds, please make a point of never intorducing me to them. I consider this section to be either a parody of some other game designer's obsession with movement rates or else a waste of a page and a half. As far as I'm concerned the only useful tidbit here is mention of the fact that a combat turn is 5 seconds long.
Finally, we've reached the combat system. Yay! Time to break stuff and kill people! Excursion has three combat subsystems: hand-to-hand (i.e. unarmed), melee, and firearms. Players are advised to stick to hand-to-hand whenever possible in order to avoid unnecessary entanglements with law enforcement. Combat is handled using the classic sequence of determine initiative, roll to-hit, and roll damage. In hand-to-hand combat participants with martial arts skill always win initiative against non-skilled opponents. If two martial artist face off against each other, the one with the higher skill ranking will always win initiative if their skill exceeds their opponent's rating by 20% or more. Any opponent with 5 points of Agility above their foe always wins initiative as well. If none of these cases apply then everyone rolls a d6 and resolves actions in order from highest to lowest. While this system is more complicated than many initiative methods I have seen, I can't say I hate it. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that I would come to loathe it in actual play either.
To-hits in hand-to-hand combat are resolved by comparing Agility versus Agility on a chart, which yields the target number. Roll the target or higher on a d20 and you hit. If two opponents have the same Agility, the target is a ten or higher. Martial arts skill provides a bonus to the die roll of +1 for every 20% skill or fraction thereof. Characters with an Agility of 18 to 23 may make an extra attack each round and anyone lucky enough to have an Agility of 24 or higher gets a third attack as well.
Punches and other hand-to-hand attacks do 1d6 damage for every 10 points of the attacker's Strength or fraction thereof. Additionally, anyone hit in combat must make a Consitution roll or be knocked out. Damage from fisticuffs comes off of Constitution, so this roll will get harder the more someone is pummeled. When your Constitution is reduced to zero you are unconscious and officially "beaten to a bloody pulp". Hand-to-hand damage heals at a rate of one point per hour, unless the Excursion Master rules the damage was more severe. One may attempt to short-circuit the two knock-out methods above by attempting a "debilitating blow", but the GM may modify the attack as he or she sees fit. The example given is a player declaring they want to rip the lungs out of an opponent and the GM assigns a -10 to-hit. Should a debilitating blow hit, the opponent is, well, debilitated. Should the attempt fail the attacker is rendered defenseless for d3 rounds. The page following the hand-to-hand chart gives an useful example of a brawl between a troll and a pro wrestler.
To-hits and damage work differently when using melee weapons. Divide your weapon score by 5 and drop any fractions. Subtract this number from 20 and that becomes your target number. Opponent Agility doesn't enter in to the equation, but defenders may opt to parry by using their attack to negate the hit instead of making an attack of their own. All melee weapons do d6 times d6 damage, making a dagger as deadly as a chainsaw. And since Joe Average ought to have around 28 Damage Points, any single knife wound might kill him.
But battle-axes and baseball bats can't hold a candle to guns in terms of lethality. A 9mm pistol does 1d6 times 10 points of damage, enough to outright kill all but the absolutely beefiest fighters on a high roll. 12 gauge shotguns do a whopping 1d6 x 25 points of damage. The only thing standing in the way of firefights being ultra-deadly is the inherent inaccuracy of gunplay in EitB. You need to roll a 17 through 20 to-hit in order to do full damage. An 11 through 16 is an extremity hit and only does one-quarter damage, which still ought to hurt like hell. Shotguns loaded with shot do half damage with extremity hits, but at medium range or longer all shotgun hits are quartered. Following the firearms section are the rules for death and healing and suchlike, with a broad outline suggesting that the Excursion Master may wish to inflict lingering effects such as broken bones.
After the combat rules follows my favorite section of the book. Entitled "How to Win", the next page or so lays out an explicit victory condition as the default mode of Excursion play: get back to your home dimension and you win the game. A few ideas as to how the PC's might accomplish this task are sketched out, as well as suggesting one might continue play on Oort, Chon-Blu, or other various dimensions. I am completely charmed with centering the campaign on finding your way home. It's a plot reverberates through the ages, whether we're talking about the Odyssey of Homer or Gilligan's Island. And I'm a sucker for a role-playing game with an explicit victory condition. But you can count me among the guys who tend to think of a character's xp total or killcount as our score in the game. Folks with personal game kinks that don't lean the same way shouldn't worry, as no structure or mechanic enforces the victory conditions. It's just a nifty idea that a game group can adopt or waive as best suits their style of play.
Next up we get a couple of useful pages of hints for the GM, followed by a mini-adventure in which the PCs will probably end up kidnapping Steven Spielberg, or rather movie mogul "Stephen Steelburg". It seems Mr. Steelburg's latest blockbuster, The Winds of Time, may be based upon actual information about the Vorpal Winds. Can the players figure out a way to get this information out of the studio chief while at the same time avoiding a confrontation with his army of security goons? Probably not, but it ought to be fun to watch the poor saps try.
The text ends with a call to action from the authors for fans to send them Excursion material for inclusion in future supplements. Alas, such things were not meant to be. The only supplementary material I am aware of is a small line of EitB figures from Dark Horse miniatures. I've seen with my own eyes at least one blisterpack of orc girls on roller skates for sale at a local con. It's amazing the things this hobby will produce, isn't it? Following the author sign-off is a table of random places where the Vorpal Winds might manifest. The list spans from Duluth, Minnesota to Mackay, Queensland, Australia to Bridgetown, Grenada and many strange points in between.
Conclusion
Overall, Excursion's game mechanics are somewhat unsophisticated and lean greatly upon the fact that anyone interested in the game already knows how a role-playing game is "supposed" to work. But for 58 digest-sized pages Excursion into the Bizarre packs in a whole lot of fun. What other game lists Greenpeace as an ally and then makes being an ally a bad thing? How many other games include a crate of Ceylon tea as possible starting equipment? And I dare someone to show me another spell list that includes Farsmell or Lick Wounds. Even if you hate the mechanics, the setting (such as it is) could be easily adapted to your preferred generic system. I think someone could have a blast running a Vorpal Winds based campaign using a combination of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Palladium Fantasy. Or you could tone down the deadly violence with a comedy system like Toon. Someone who lived through the eighties ought to get a lot of fun out of Excursion just by flipping through the text and soaking up the huge quantity of old pop culture references sprinkled throughout. Excursion into the Bizarre may not be the best or most complete role-playing game on my shelf, but I'm glad I own a copy.
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