Those of you who don't know who John Tynes is, you should immediately go out and buy Delta Green, Unknown Armies, or Puppetland and find out just how amazingly brilliant the man is. John Tynes is in the same league as Ken Hite and other masters of amazingly great ideas and execution of them. Few people are able to weave together so many good ideas, or even salvage bad or cliched ideas.

John Tynes maintains a personal webpage, Revland, where he posts fiction, poetry, photos, an ezine, and even some gaming materials. One of these little samples is The Zone, a strange little setting for a modern "weirdness" game.

Containing no mention of systems of any sort, The Zone is nearly nine pages of history, setting information and notes on where to take the game. It is a short little story that could easily grow into a wonderful campaign for a variety of games. It could be an off-beat Unknown Armies chronicle, a slightly modified Delta Green game, an alternate WitchCraft game, inspiration for a Conspiracy X (or any X-Files-esque game) chronicle. It fits best into some form of modern-day game, although some sort of dark-conspiracy might work the best, while modern occult would significantly change the feel of the story.

The setting itself is thus: The Tunguska blast in Siberia during 1908 was something more than just a comet exploding a ravaging a huge area, it was a dissolving of the barriers of time and space, with catastrophic effects. At first, Russia keeps the location secret, but then things come through - and then a woman comes through - and then the plague. In 1996, some creature comes through bearing a disease that turns out to be remarkably deadly to humans. Desperate to find a cure, Russia turns to the rest of the world, and a team is assembled to go through the portal into whatever lies beyond. Heavily armed and trained, they cross over - into what seems to be the future, a post-apocalyptic world of violence and superstition, where the temporal and spatial anomalies that typified the Zone have spread across the entire world, and people are forced to live with the knowledge that they may disappear at any time, only to pop back into the world some time later.

This is typical Tynes work. A surreal idea is conceived of and then executed, and Tynes manages to craft a compelling world with a great deal of startling details, like the mention of just how the fact that you can disappear at any time has affected society, giving rise to shamans who conduct rituals to bring loved ones back as fast as possible. Or how everyone carries chalk with them to mark a circle around where someone disappeared, so that no one steps in it when they return. It is ideas like this that I wish got printed and developed and writ large in nice hard-cover books with excellent artists. Until then, I guess I'll have to settle for just the text that Tynes wants to put up on Revland, but hey, it's free and it's good, so there really isn't much to complain about.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)