Pyramid Pick
Questers of the Middle Realms
by Tim Gray
Published by Silver Branch Games
72-page b&w PDF, $8.00; Print-on-demand book, $17.95
"Comedy is hard." Comedy is even harder when the audience takes the subject terribly seriously. Ask about roleplaying games played for laughs and the list will probably be countable on one cartoon character's hand: Ghostbusters. Paranoia. TOON. Other contenders failed because, well, comedy is hard. It's difficult to sustain a humor premise without falling into the traps of repetition, tangency, obscure in-jokes or laziness, a truth relevant to any media. How does Questers of the Middle Realms fare in such a challenging domain?
"This game is written as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reworking of common fantasy elements, poking affectionate fun at the conventions and stylings of fantasy games. Especially That One." That's the first sentence of the book, and writer/designer Tim Gray makes it very plain where he wants this game to go. You don't have to look for internal logic, or depth of detail in character or setting, or even originality. Your mission is to assemble your group of wildly disparate characters with no particular justification in being together (let alone not killing each other) and tear off on quests in search of fortune, fame and more fortune. You will meet dread villains, horrible monsters in ill-reasoned habitats, weird peoples from faroff lands and other species, and triumph! We hope.
The game runs on Chad Underkoffler's PDQ System, . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 20, 2006
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