Pyramid Review: Furry Pirates

Pyramid Review

Furry Pirates

Published by Atlas Games

Written by Lise Breakey and Bruce Thomas

$22.95

My first exposure to the sub-sub-sub-genre of animation featuring cute anthropomorphic creatures known as Furries came at a comics and games convention in Atlanta, around 1990. I'm sure they'd been around before, but I'd never seen them. But there, at some artist's table, was a huge binder of fantasy and science fiction art -- standard stuff, heavily-muscled swordsmen rescuing scantily-clad ladies, dashing space rogues firing their blaster pistols, that sort of thing -- except all the characters were animals. Lions, foxes, dogs, housecats, wolves, you name it. It was kind of cute, in a weird sort of way.

Then the artist offered to show me his "special collection," and I naively said yes. And thus came my first (and only) exposure to Furry Porn, art in which the self-same animals from the first collection of art were now engaged in all sorts of, uh, X-rated activities. It was an eye-opener, to say the least.

And I hadn't seen much from the Furry camp since, until Furry Pirates. I'm not sure how Atlas Games came to publish this game -- if you read the note from developer Jeff Tidball, I'm not the only one -- but Atlas Games has done a lot of very different things, and refuses to be nailed down as a predictable game company. Bully for them.

And while the premise is decidedly strange, Furry Pirates is a complete, well-designed, coherent roleplaying game. The selection . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.



Article publication date: June 4, 1999

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