Torg

The Battle for a Reality-Torn Earth
Box cover by Daniel Horne.
Designers	Greg Gorden Bill Slavicsek
Publishers	West End Games Ulisses Spiele
Publication	1990 (original) 1992 (updated rules 1.1) 2005 ("Revised & Expanded" 1.5) 2017 ("Torg: Eternity")
Genres	Cross-genre
Systems	TORG

Torg^[1] is a cinematic cross-genre tabletop role-playing game created by Greg Gorden and Bill Slavicsek, with art by Daniel Horne. It was first published by West End Games (WEG) in 1990. Game resolution uses a single twenty-sided die, drama cards and a logarithmic results table, which later formed the basis for WEG's 1992 sci-fi RPG Shatterzone and 1994 universal RPG Masterbook. WEG produced over fifty supplements, novels and comics for the first edition. A revised and expanded core rule book was produced in 2005,^[2] with a single adventure. After WEG closed in 2010, Torg was sold to Ulisses Spiele, who, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, published a new edition called Torg: Eternity in 2018.

Torg is set on Earth during an alien invasion, and players play archetypal heroes from differing genres. The game's title, Torg, refers to an in-game title that individual leaders of the invasion strive to achieve.

Overview

Torg is set in a near future setting, known officially as "the near now". At the game's starting point, Earth has been subjected to an inter-dimensional invasion by a series of "High Lords", who have changed the natural laws of large swaths of the planet to reflect those of their home dimensions. The players assume the role of "Storm Knights": people from Earth and the various invading realms, who possess limited reality-altering abilities and who oppose the plans of the High Lords.

Game mechanics

Torg billed itself as a "cinematic" game and tried to emphasize game play in a manner similar to adventure films such as Indiana Jones. Terminology used in the game reflects this fact. For example, adventures are divided into sub units known as "acts" and "scenes". Conflict resolution also reflects the cinematic nature of the game. Actions are resolved by a player rolling a twenty-sided die against a difficulty number. The degree by which the roll exceeds the difficulty number of the task influences how successful the player is at the action. Rolls of 10 or 20 allow the player to roll again, adding their new roll to the previous. This can be continued indefinitely as long as the player rolls a 10 or 20, allowing for fantastic feats in a cinematic style. The wound system, which stresses incapacitating damage over lethal kinds, also mimics the style of adventure films, wherein the hero may often be incapacitated, but is rarely killed.

In addition, Torg uses an unusual card-based system to augment gameplay. From Torg's unique "Drama Deck", a hand of cards are dealt to each player at the beginning of the game. The rest are stacked in front of the game master. Cards can be used by both players and game masters to influence play. Whenever a combat encounter begins, the game master flips over a card which dictates certain advantages and disadvantages for the players and the non-player characters (NPCs). Players can also use cards to give themselves advantages, or even plotlines, which could result in extra points.

Players are rewarded with "possibility points", which can be spent to improve the characters abilities, similar to many other role-playing games. However, unlike in most role-playing games, possibility points (or "possibility energy") also exists as an in-game phenomenon, and characters may spend these points to achieve certain effects, such as healing, or warping reality.

Character creation is limited. Both the basic set, as well as subsequent supplements, provide several character templates based on general archetypes such as "Eidenos Hunter", "Vengeful Human" or "Werewolf". These come complete with a general background story and a pre-set roster of attributes and possessions. Player input is limited to distributing points among an array of skills. Eventually, further supplements allowed for more freedom in designing characters.

Characters

Player characters were all "Storm Knights." These were people who were able to alter reality in limited ways. Storm Knights came from all of the different realities in the game, but opposed the invaders for various reasons. Some of the Storm Knights were natives of the invaders' home worlds, and some were natives of Earth who had "flipped" to the invaders' reality. A person became a Storm Knight by experiencing a reality crisis which linked them to a particular reality.

The primary way in which Storm Knights were able to shape reality was the ability to impose the rules of their own reality on a limited area of another reality. Each reality, or "cosm," had a set of four "axioms," which delineated what could be achieved under its rules. The most important of these for gameplay were the technological, magical, and spiritual axioms. For ordinary people, violating the laws of a reality is hard, and becomes increasingly impossible over time. For example, when the Neolithic reality of The Living Land invaded North America, soldiers found that their guns and radios no longer worked because the tech-axiom of the cosm only allowed for a Neolithic level of technology. Storm Knights, however, carried their own reality with them. Normally, they could perform under their own reality wherever they went, sometimes requiring a check against their reality skill, the one skill possessed by all Storm Knights, to accomplish feats which particularly violated the rules of a reality.

Storm Knights could also spend possibility energy in order to influence reality. One way they could do this was to impose their own reality temporarily on a limited area around them. The most common use of possibility energy was to effect rapid healing.

Notable features

Torg is designed to allow players to derive enjoyment from how characters, equipment, and environments of the various realities interact, such as having Terminator-style futuristic cyborgs adventure alongside Dungeons & Dragons-style mages in an Indiana Jones-style pulp setting. It also allows playing a game with an explicitly epic or 'cinematic' overtone (as in Star Wars or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as opposed to RPGs like Vampire: The Masquerade or Dungeons & Dragons).

Torg provides a unified mechanics system suitable for any setting; character attributes and game mechanics use a single sliding scale ('18' can equally mean an hour of time, a truckload of weight, an expert marksman's skill, or $4,000) and a unified method of task resolution involving a 20 sided die. At the same time it provides an open-ended die mechanic: one twenty-sided die roll, read through a bonus chart, gives the bonus to a character's skill for that attempt. Barring special circumstances, the die may be rolled again (and the subsequent total added to the first roll) each time a 10 or a 20 is rolled. Along with re-rolls gained through spent possibilities, card play, and other possible influences, this allows truly spectacular feats to be accomplished by player characters.

The game's backstory involves 'possibility energy', which can be used by Storm Knights to achieve heroic feats. In the game mechanics a spent possibility gives a player a chance to make an additional die roll, potentially leading to greater success. Similarly, an included deck of cards provides bonus rolls or skill points and contains ideas for additional character interaction. Some of these cards can be used instead of Possibility energy. It places an emphasis on groupwork and character interaction by exchange and giving of cards, coordination rules, and the use of "group powers."

At the time of its release Torg's 'Infiniverse' campaign was an ambitious attempt at creating an interactive campaign setting. Subscribers to West End's Infiniverse magazine received response forms, through which they could inform WEG of the progress of their campaigns. Player input actually influenced the campaign setting through a 'rumor' system ('rumors' were introduced in Infiniverse magazines and published adventures, and the majority of responses would determine whether that rumor was 'true' or not). While innovative, the Infiniverse campaign ultimately foundered after the first year or so.

Setting

The game setting describes a number of different realities, each a different genre, self-contained but with two elements common to all: a Darkness Device and its linked ruler, the High Lord. Together each is an individual cosm with its own four axioms and three World Laws. Each cosm survives by invading other realms and converting them to its reality. The inhabitants of most invaded realms transform into those of the invading cosm, while a few become Storm Knights. Storm Knights are the player characters of Torg. The conversion drains possibility energy which feeds the Darkness Device and High Lord. Earth is an unusual 'realm rich in possibility energy and the only way to access all of it was to have a number of cosms invade at once. This was organized by The Gaunt Man, High Lord of Orrorsh, the most successful and powerful of the High Lords. Initially six cosms invaded, all are detailed in the Worldbook, then in their own sourcebook.

Game history

TORG Revised & Expanded, 2005. Cover by Talon Dunning

The title was originally an acronym for the in-house development name: The Other Roleplaying Game. Unable to find a better name, the name was adopted as the official name and applied to the game. Names that were considered but rejected include Shadow Wars, Shadow Spawn, Twilight Shadows, and Endless Earth.

Torg initially achieved some success in a saturated market. Reviews (both contemporary to the release of Torg and since then) generally cited the uniqueness of the cinematic elements (e.g., the drama deck), the flexibility of rules system, and the expansiveness of the setting.^[7] However, various factors such as poor quality control in new products, a large amount of required game material to purchase, and unwillingness to use the Internet as a medium, meant that by 1994 only a few hardcore fans remained. Various attempted sales of the property and failed attempts at revising and resurrecting the game ensued. In 1995, Omni Gaming Products released the first issue of a new Infiniverse magazine, ignoring many of the series-ending events of WEG's final published adventure War's End in the interest of continuing the game under their own management. This quickly fell through.

By 2004, Torg was again under ownership of West End Games (although WEG itself was under new ownership) and a new version was under development. An announcement by WEG's then-current owner on the official Torg forums explained further:

"To that end, we are beginning our "countdown to the new Torg" event at GenCon 2005; at this event we will have at least two products designed for established Torg fans, but which will hopefully be approachable enough for new people who would want to get started in the grandeur of the Torg universe early.

Ultimately, 2005 came and went without the arrival of the new Torg game. Due to expending resources and time to developing and publishing the new D6 games also by WEG (D6 Fantasy, D6 Adventure, & D6 Space), it became necessary to push Torg into 2006. The new release date was to be in the Fall of 2006.

"Without giving too much away, this will be the beginning of a grassroots effort to get people excited and thinking about Torg again. Those waiting for next year's second edition will get a well-tested system and a universe ready for multi-genre action, and fans who want to come along for the ride through the coming year will learn more about the secrets and mysteries of the Torg universe than they've ever known before."

In addition to an upcoming second edition ("Torg 2.0"), WEG released Torg Revised & Expanded (dubbed Torg 1.5), in order to invigorate interest among longtime fans and to generate interest in backstock of first edition Torg merchandise. This book was released in May 2005 as a PDF file, and was slated to be released as a limited-edition hardback in June 2005, though the release date was subsequently pushed back to July and finally released in August. A limited run of leftover softcover editions, printed for distribution at the 2005 Origins RPG convention, were also made available on WEG's website. The announced Torg 2.0 was never produced.

Torg: Eternity

When West End Games ceased operations in July 2010, Torg was sold to a German game company, Ulisses Spiele.^[8] The July 31, 2014, email newsletter from DriveThruRPG announced that Ulisses Spiele were planning new Torg titles for 2015. Meanwhile, the company had made most of the back catalog available for purchase as PDF downloads in their webstore, aside from the original boxed set.

In 2016 Ulisses Spiele announced that new edition would be released in 2017 under the title, Torg: Eternity.^[9]

Ulisses Spiele started a Kickstarter on May 31, 2017, for the new edition of Torg, named "Torg Eternity".^[10] The Kickstarter succeeded, generating $355,992 against a goal of $8,000.

Early setting changes included the renaming of Nippon Tech to Pan-Pacifica, and Tharkold's permanent arrival in Russia as part of the original invasion of the cosm.

Drawbacks

While the breadth of Torg was one of its most exciting features, it could also cause significant problems. Because the scope of the game was so broad, and it incorporated such a wide variety of skills, the game became unwieldy to some players. Further, in some cases simple rules given in the basic set were thrown out or expanded in sourcebooks, so that players moving between campaigns sometimes found the rules were not what they were used to; even some of the character templates from the boxed set were not completely compatible with the rules in the sourcebook for their home cosm. This breadth of scope also served to ratchet up the game's expense: each of the game's realms was detailed in its own sourcebook, and those sourcebooks included rules that weren't covered in the main rulebook. For instance, if a character wanted to build his own magic spells, the player needed to own (or at least have access to) the Aysle sourcebook. Likewise, psionics were covered in the Space Gods sourcebook, martial arts in the Nippon Tech book, pulp powers and gizmos in The Nile Empire and Terra sourcebooks, and cyberware/bionics in the Cyberpapacy's. Note, however, that if a Cyberpapacy character wanted to hack the GodNet, they needed yet another supplement for those rules. While this allowed a group to take their game in any direction they wished, it made it difficult to keep up with all the rules. This is especially true because long-term campaigns tend to lead to cross-genre characters, such as mages with cybernetics, or espionage agents who learned the Occult. It reached a point where even published adventures would forget, ignore, or skim over previously established rules.^[17][18]

Successive materials suffered from power creep: as more books were released, the rules and equipment tended to escalate the relative level of power available to player characters and NPCs alike. The Living Lands Sourcebook, while initially formidable, was soon superseded by advanced alien weaponry, more powerful miracles, cybernetics, occult magic, and psionics published in subsequent books.^[19]

The later material displayed a penchant for humor, often at the cost of breaking the mood. The edeinos of the Living Lands proved a popular target, transforming to other realities and becoming among other things "Skippy the Edeinos" (who in the campaign setting came complete with an action figure), a Nile Empire "Rocket Ranger" named Captain Verdigris, and an Elvis impersonator. Supplements such as The High Lords Guide to the Possibility Wars went so far as to address this issue and advise readers to read the original material on edeinos to make them more dangerous/serious and ignore the trend WEG had itself established.^[20] The Nile Empire also often slipped from the genre of pulp heroes into outright self-referential parody. For example, Nile Empire ninja engaged in elaborate martial art moves and high-pitched battle cries, compared to their stealthy Nippon Tech counterparts who would mock them. Scene titles in the published adventures were often elaborate puns, and there was a Five Realms role-playing game-within-the-game where the author Jeff Mills was a parody of game designer Greg Gorden, and who eventually went on to help save the world in the final published adventure, War's End.^[21]

One advantage of the game was that with a virtual army of "Storm Knights," player characters could be fit in to anywhere on the planet. However, this led to a huge "supporting cast" of characters. The initial characters featured in the first trilogy of novels were implied to have great destinies but for the most part slid into obscurity. Individual writers and artists had their own preferred cast of characters they featured in the published supplements, novels, and adventures they worked on. One supplement, the Character Collection, featured a contest of reader submissions for best characters. The five winners were then incorporated into a subsequent published adventure. The result was an overly large cast of characters where no one individual or group made an impression or could be identified as the primary identifiable characters of the game.^[22]

Another problem stemmed from the fact that visiting other realms meant travelling to geographic locations and cultures with which many players and gamemasters were not familiar. For example, there is a specific reference to 1930s gangsters "with an Arab slant," though most players simply did not know how to give such a "slant." Similarly, a lot of references were made to the culture clash between the Victorians and Indonesians, without specific information. In practice, this tended to be ignored in the game's own adventure modules, despite the vague references to culture in the rules books. Also, as not surprising for a U.S. game aimed at U.S. customers, Torg was highly U.S.-centric. At one time or another every invading cosm except one occupied part of the United States, and most of the real-world political focus was on the U.S. government, which was taken over in a political coup by a fascist Senator. Four of the ten book-length adventure modules were set in the United States, with three of those (City of Demons, Operation Hard Sell, Central Valley Gate) set in California. The final major act of the concluding adventure, War's End, was also set in California.^[23][24]

Finally, in some quarters the game was criticized for its alleged anti-Japanese sentiment, as the Nippon Tech realm played into many of the fears and concerns of Japanese business dominating the U.S. industries in the late 80s/early 90s. The portrayal of the Cyberpapacy provoked claims of anti-Catholicism as well with its papacy that among other things spread an artificial AIDS virus. It has to be said that within the game it was actually the Core Earth Japanese and Catholics who were "good guys" fighting evil invaders who embodied these stereotypes. However, that distinction was often lost upon many, and WEG did heavily promote these stereotypical elements in their gaming products even while attributing them to fictional invaders.^[25][26][27]

Reception

In the July 1990 edition of Games International (Issue 16), Paul Mason found the combat mechanics fairly pedestrian, saying, "All that can be said of this is that it is serviceable and not overly complex." He also found that "the artwork is weak for a product of this prestige." He concluded, "the game reminds me just a little too much of Pacesetter's doomed introductory product Sandman, which featured a similar heady, eclectic blend."^[28]

In the February 1991 edition of Dragon (Issue 166), Jim Bambra liked the multi-genre aspect of the game, in which players could be immersed in a medieval fantasy London one session and in a cyberpunk Paris the next. He also liked the quick resolution for skill checks and combat; although it did require some table checking, it was fast and adaptable. He noted that magic and healing were "neatly handled and fit into the system with a minimum of fuss." Bambra criticized the varying quality of the rules, saying, "some places are very clear, but re-readings are needed to grasp to what is being said in other areas." He also found the quality of artwork varied greatly. Overall, Bambra thought Torg was "a major addition to the role-playing games currently available."^[29]

In the July 1992 edition of Dragon (Issue 183), Martin Wixted called Torg "one of the most gripping role-playing games I have ever encountered." However, he cautioned that it was "not for the rule-dependent gamer."^[30]

In the August 1992 edition of Dragon (Issue 184), Rick Swan reviewed Tharkold, a supplement describing the demons invading Los Angeles. Of Tharkold, Swan said that West End designers "have hit their stride." He noted that "absent in previous TORG products but delightfully present here is an undercurrent of black humor."^[31]

In a retrospective review of Torg in Black Gate, Matthew David Surridge said "The possibility energy that made the player characters heroes was, in essence, imagination. Torg, as a game, was literally driven by imagination on numerous different levels."^[32]

Reviews

• Challenge #44 (1990)
• White Wolf #21 (June/July, 1990)
• Review in Shadis #8

References

External links

• The Storm Has A Name... - Extensive site by Kansas Jim, author of the Torg Revised & Expanded (AKA Torg 1.5) rulebook.
• Herbert, Jamie (2006-10-09). "Review of Torg 1.5 Revised Rulebook". RPGnet.
• Grady, Robert J. (2002-04-08). "Torg: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars Playtest Review". RPGnet.
• Torg at the Pen and Pencil database