Review of F.A.T.A.L.

Don't call it a comeback! / We've been here for years...

There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.

If this is the first time that you've ever heard of FATAL, you're in for a fun ride. Well, let me rephrase: You're in for a "fun ride" if you consider a fun ride to be, say, hitting your nutsack with a tack hammer. For about four hours.

Sartin: The nutsack/tack hammer thing wouldn't be a fun ride, but it is preferable to actually playing FATAL. . . . Oh, hi. I'm Jason Sartin. You may remember me from such classic RPGnet moments as "the longest fucking SenZar review ever" and all those humanity-hating and "go kill yourself already" posts I leave on Tangency. I'll be helping Darren a lot with this review, because friends don't let friends review FATAL alone. Also, this is obviously going to be one of those grandstanding "spectacle" reviews that tries to be crowd-pleasing. Those of you who hate that kind of review should do the honorable thing and whine your asses off in the forum below. (This was written, incidentally, back in the days close to the Wild West, so please take it with a grain of salt. A big grain. Like the kind that they strap to the sides of mules so that they can get it out of the salt mine.)

You think I'm joking. You think that I'm exaggerating for comic effect. But you will be nodding your head with agreement, and also holding your swollen, bruised nutsack if you ever happen to open the FATAL .pdf up and give it anything but the most cursory of readthroughs.

Sartin: He's not joking, people, and I wasn't, either. Those of you wondering what the most ass-tastic RPG of all time would look like - the one whose suck factor will forever demolish all challengers and tower over the ages with all the majesty of a homeless, mindless, drooling, shit-obsessed, impotent moron standing on a mountain of used Dragon Ball Z condoms - can finally die in peace. The arguments are over. Anyone who says anything else is the worst RPG ever will...well, I'll inject kerosene into my bladder, piss on them, and then set them on fire. This game sucks THAT much. Godfuckingdammit. We're hardly four words into the review, and already the game has dragged me down to its level.

So, why is it so bad?

'Cause it's the Necronomicon of role-playing games. Not in the cool way, where it's a source of occult knowledge with a terrible, terrible price. It's the Necronomicon in the sense that if you leave a printed copy on your shelf with other RPGs, then the other RPGs will be clustered around the dead, violated body of one of its own in the morning. The copy of FATAL will most likely be down at the station in the Sex Crimes interrogation room, trying its best to put on an innocent face and failing miserably.

Sartin: Another useful comparison is that FATAL is basically anti-thought. As you can already see, it reacts violently with real sentience.

Now we like Synnibarr. Go figure.

See, Synnibarr was bad, but you have to like Synnibarr after you've read FATAL.

Yes, it's a terrible role-playing game in just about every respect, but it's got heart; it's like a punch-drunk, half-blind boxer who hasn't realized that his manager is now "arranging fights" by pushing him in front of a speeding Mack truck and ringing a bell. He's going to get a license plate number embossed into his skull, but he's still out there, still trying. You do the best you can and that's good enough.

Raven c.s. McCracken, although he's made the occasional misstep, also seems like a very decent guy; just a tad misguided when it comes to writing games. There's an innocence to Synnibarr, a lack of subterfuge that makes it fun to think about, if not to read. If nothing else, it's the only game that I've seen so far that has a Midnight Sunstone Bazooka in it. It's a bad game, but it's a bad game based on misguided enthusiasm rather than bitter misogyny.

Sartin: Yeah. I like how World of Synnibarr is uniquely deranged. The first time I read through it, I knew I would never see anything else quite like it, like only McCracken could have made a game that's fucked up the way Synnibarr is fucked up. It's the Plan 9 From Outer Space of RPGs... it almost defies belief in how insane it gets, but the wrongness has this charming quality to it, and I can't help liking it nowadays. I've actually got more entertainment out of it than most of the "good" games I own, and I don't regret buying it, so in a bizarre way, McCracken actually succeeded. That may sound like I'm damning Synnibarr with faint praise, but compared to even that, FATAL doesn't have anything going for it. It's the shitty game to end all shitty games, and it could have been written by any 14 year old with an obsession with rape and defecation, no design skill, a warez copy of Photoshop, and months and months of lifeless weekends to work on it. Seriously, if Byron Hall and McCracken got into a RPG design fight, McCracken would reduce Hall to sucking his wang so fast every streetwalker in Las Vegas would be taking notes. (An image we will all take to our graves.)

FATAL is a product so twisted, so fundamentally broken in its attitude towards sexuality, so unbelievably stupid that you'd think that the authors are trying to make themselves look like they're prime candidates for institutionalization. They're not, which makes it even scarier.

Sartin: By the way, you'll notice lots and lots of these personal attacks on the creator and players of this game as this drags on. While this is bad form in normal reviews, it's hard to avoid here. For one, it's impossible for a game designer we shouldn't insult to create a game this goddamn stupid. For another, Hall and his drooling fanboys went out of their way to honor RPGnet's forums with their personal shot at the world record for "number of flame threads started before one's daily basement Necronomicon (Waldenbooks version) reading". And you know, I think they won it, too. For those who weren't there, the flame wars weren't very interesting. It was all simply another chapter in the long-ass book of moron game designers who have created the "BEST GAEM EVAR!!!" Except that in this chapter, the obligatory AD&D clone featured vagina circumference stats and rape rolls, and the moron game designer's followers had all the class and brain activity of scrotum lint. Oh, they want to be all evil and shocking and crap. God, how pathetically they tried. I mean, imagine opening a door to find your mother and sister raping each other with pink strap-ons. And you then realize that you've never seen their bare asses before, because you're pretty sure you would have remembered the swastikas tattooed there. And upon noticing you, they grin wickedly and give you the finger in unison. It's shocking in a way that instantly blights out all rational thought, but later, you'll have to admit the finger and wicked grinning part was kinda cool. (I...guess.) That's the feeling the FATAL morons so wish they could provoke. Instead, they're more like opening that door to find your weeks-unwashed Otaku brother in his soiled underwear, masturbating furiously to - of all the goddamn things in the world - an Archie comic. And on his bare ass is a tattoo of, inexplicably, someone else's ass, and he's disgustingly fat enough for it to be a good 14 inches across. And as he goes at it, he's quietly moaning to himself about how worthless women, "fags", and "niggers" are and how they should all be raped or murdered. It's still disturbing on all kinds of levels. But it's the kind of stupid disturbing that ends with you having to answer questions to the satisfaction of a prosecuting attorney. Point is, the FATALites have repeatedly proven that treating them with any respect or dignity is pointless, so we're not going to waste your time or ours with the effort. Back in their raving lunatic days, I had thought that Raven c.s. McCracken and the SenZar guys needed to take a big step back and calm down, but Byron Hall and his fellow lobotomy candidates made them look like Rebecca Borgstrom on a prozac bender. But don't worry! None of this will be a problem, because even if you can ignore the misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and all-around idiotic mindset of its core supporters, FATAL blows goats with such panache that it's hard to imagine anyone looking at it and not concluding that Hall should've given up the needle.

By the way, you may notice that I write the "authors" of the game, rather than "author". There's a reason for this: While the game lists only a single author, there are many signs that lead me to believe that Ye Olde Abominatione has more than one author, although uncredited. You'll find an explanation later, but I just wanted to get that out of the way. That being said, what we say about Hall applies equally to each and every person who had a hand in this shitpile.

Sartin: Meanwhile, you'll notice I've simply gone with acting like there's one author. What can I say? It's easier when there's only one legendary-industry-boob-for-the-next-ten-years to blame, and the thought that another human being actually said to him "Hey, FATAL sounds really cool. Let me contribute to it!" is too depressing to contemplate.

Well, let's just see what it looks like underneath this rock

OH MY GOD SWEET JESUS NO

Let's start with the title page.

Yeah, it's that bad.

Sartin: [a la Duff Man] Oh, yeah! [/Duff Man] "FANTASY ADVENTURE TO ADULT LECHERY" in crappy you-can-see-the-asses-of-the-little-engraved-figures font. Right inside a border made up entirely of random "garbage" characters. (Incidentally, at some point after the original version of this review, the name was changed to "FROM ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LAND". Great, huh? Of all FATAL's endless faults, they choose to fix the title.)

While we're on it, if you can queue up "Optimistic", by Radiohead, you'll have a good idea of how the both of us feel right now. For those of you who do not have that song, it is very good and also a song about how everything has gone wrong.

FATAL claims to be "the most difficult, detailed, realistic and historically/mythically accurate role-playing game available."

This is the most damnable lie I have ever seen in my history as an RPG reviewer.

In no sense is that statement true; as a matter of fact, in every sense of the word, that statement is so false as to provide the golden mean for statements of falsehood. FATAL is difficult only in the sense that peeling your face off a strip at a time is difficult; detailed only in the respects that give the creators an erection; realistic - Jesus, I can't even go into it - historically/mythically accurate only in the sense that its creators occupy the same physical world that these myths originated upon, and about as accurate as banging your ass on the keyboard to write the Gettysburg Address.

Sartin: Darren is correct, but it should be noted that this is actually a good title page, as it subtly hints at much (though by no means all) of what sucks about this game. ADULT LECHERY? Perhaps it's nitpicking to point out the redundancy (oooh, oooh! What's next? The fantasy game of "violent combat"? The sci-fi game of "starfaring space travel"? The White Wolf game of "ah fuck it, just gimme the cool powers already"?), but it's a good indicator of the level of thought that went into the whole game. And, of course, it reminds you that this won't be just another Tolkien-clone RPG, but a raping and shitting Tolkien-clone RPG! DIFFICULT? Oh, yeah. Anyone with the force of will to endure reading all 900+ pages of this homesick abortion of a game (without going insane and making sacrifices to sweet Azathoth for a merciful annihilation of the universe) is no one to be fucked with. And anyone who could do that and actually play by its anal-retentive trip to hell of a rules system (without succumbing to Hall's probable compulsion to inhale Draino by the assloads) would have to be some kind of demigod. And yes, it's saying difficult like it's a good thing. But hey, ain't that ALWAYS the eternal struggle of gaming? "Play a difficult game and get massive headaches because it's needlessly complicated and PC-killing-because-I-accidentally-dropped-my-rusty-dagger-and-impaled-my-favorite-intestinal-tract" versus "Go with something that won't make me roll five times on the Random Shit Discoloration Table every time I cast Light My Finger and thus spend more time actually doing things"? REALISTIC AND HISTORICALLY/MYTHICALLY ACCURATE? Oh, I bet. Player 1: R0XX0R! This is the best system for emulating the myths of Heracles I've ever seen! And it's fucking sweet how all the gods, monsters, and heroes can't do anything that wouldn't be possible in real life! Player 2: Hell, yeah. When I was trying to get past Cerberus, he wasn't any tougher than a pit bull with two extra rubber heads! And later, when I was masturbating on the temple altar and I angered the gods, they didn't do anything but just Not Appear. Dude, you can't HANDLE the realism! Player 1: W00T! If this were any more realistic, you'd be able to TASTE the penis length! Player 2: Testify! Lots of people in history had penises, so it's ultra realistic and historically accurate to put in rules about that! Player 1: Man, I could cream myself just thinking about this! I can't WAIT to see if it has rules for hut building, grass growing, nose picking, and the spread of Christianity, since people experienced those during history, too!

So, yeah.

Okay, I gave the subtitle more attention than it deserved. Let's just say that if Hall set out to write ONE FUCKING LINE that instantly screams that the ensuing RPG will be very nearly as cool as getting diagnosed with cancer and Necrotizing Fasciitis bacteria on the same day, he succeeded brilliantly.

And for the fun part, the FATAL Games logo is "Where the dice never lie." I would suggest that the owners of FATAL Games must have dice that come up "THIS GAME SUCKS, BEAVIS" no matter how they are thrown, or we must chalk this up as yet another falsehood.

Sartin: Yeah, I really like that logo, too. It was nice of the FATALites to point out that when you play games from other companies, your dice may lie to you. Ha, I knew it! All those times I was playing D&D or SenZar, and that d20 would show a 3 or some shit when I knew I rolled a 20. Thanks, FATAL, for showing me the way! No, wait. This game still proves once and for all that Darwin was an ass-grabbing fool.

Yeah, we just ripped off Mr. Cranky. We're hardcore like that.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that this fucking thing is nine hundred pages long? This is why I summoned help from Jason Sartin, people.

Sartin: Yeah, thanks. Now watch, by the end, I'll probably have to summon someone else to help me. We'll have Justin Bacon or Scott Lynch or Elissa Carey or some other poor bastard down here to write the closing paragraph and talk me out of climbing a tower and shooting random basement-dwelling losers. Mmmmmm... killing potential FATALites... (Oh, and another thing that has changed since our first go around is that I probably wouldn't request Scott Lynch's assistance. See, he has since become a published fantasy author, and while that doesn't necessarily raise him above the rest of us mere mortals, I'm happy for him. Back on point, it wouldn't be right to interrupt his efforts to inject some desperately-needed non-suckage into the fantasy genre just to deal with all this stupidity!) But yeah. It's nine hundred pages long, and you can hardly turn one page without seeing something that's desperately stupid or sucking or screaming "Look how COOL and HISTORICALLY ACCURATE and HUGE DICKED I am, because I'm terrified you won't notice!". You can see the bind we're in.

This is from the second page:

"For instance, assume you are an adventuring knight who has just fought his way to the top of a dark tower where you find a comely young maiden chained to the wall. Some may choose to free the whimpering wench. Others may free her while hoping to win her heart. Instead of seeking affection, some may talk to her to see if they can collect a reward for her safe return. Then again, others may be more interested in negotiating freedom for fellatio. Some may think she has no room to bargain and take their fleshly pleasures by force. Others would rather kill her, dismember her young cadaver, and feast on her warm innards."

So, basically, FATAL is the date rape RPG.

Sartin: It's also the cock fruit, attacking turd, and (of course) gay buttfucking ogre RPG, but one thing at a time! (It's like an express train full of things designed to hurt your mind. Just when you think that it's finished running you over, and the last train car of stupid starts receding into the distance, another hits you, grinding another chunk of brain cells beneath its wheels.)

(And no, rules for dating are not included. Rape? Yes.)

There's not really a whole lot of ways that I can get around this: FATAL, as a whole, is your chance to stop being the good guy and start being the soulless rapist that you and your tiny clique of brain-dead morons knew they could be. You can come home from a long day of being shunned by anybody with a soul, wipe the pepper spray from your eyes, scuttle down into the cold concrete of the basement and engage in what amounts to a verbal circle-jerk with a clique of people just as terribly broken as you are.

Sartin: I'll cut in here to say that while being a brain-dead rapist is an important part of the FATAL experience, there are two further aspects that make it the visible-from-space pile of festering associty that it is. 1) Juvenile ideas that even the SenZar guys would've been too embarrassed to touch. You know, like magical fumbles that cause clones to spawn from your cock, or make you shit constantly, or make you start anal-fisting your target while trying to bite your ear, or make you recite stupid lines that were probably ripped off from metal songs every time you cast a spell. Or magical ingredients like vaginal yeast or the "cunt-pipe" of an elderly virgin. 2) Rules so mind-bogglingly stupid and complicated that you'd beg for a no holds barred Rifts/Synnibarr crossover instead. Note that this can overlap with the juvenile ideas, like with how likely you are to critical hit someone's clitoris, or the magical fumble that makes your nutsack swell to 10d1000 (inches, we can only presume, it's not labeled) for the next 3d3 days. But like I said, one thing at a time. While we're still on the second page, by the way, check out that first sentence: "Welcome to a fantasy medieval role-playing game that focuses on realism and detail whenever possible without sacrificing fun." (Emphasis mine.) Later, when you've seen Hall's idea of "realism and detail without sacrificing fun", you'll be invited to laugh bitterly with me.

You know, it occurs to me that most games of FATAL are probably played with only the one hand, since -

Ow. Ow. OW. FUCK. MY BRAIN. OW.

Remind me not to go down that path again.

Sartin: Not so fast! You forgot to picture them being the only gamers who have to wipe off their dice when they're done! I'd bet nothing but nothing will jinx your dice faster than leaving someone's semen on them. Hell, when it happens, the FATALites probably laugh and shout (a la Saruman) "You will taste MAN JUICE!" Ugh. (STOP PUTTING IMAGES IN MY HEAD THAT I CAN'T GET OUT LATER EXCEPT WITH A BULLET.)

See, here's the thing: Vampire is a game that can also be classified as a date-rape game. You're a vampire, a mythic creature who's been sexualized by about three hundred years worth of literature into a romantic creature; and yet, as a vampire, you're stealing a part of people's bodies without their permission, every single night. You're eventually going to kill one of them when you get a little too hungry one night. You don't necessarily want to. But you need to eat.

And do you know why Vampire is the superior game by far? Because the game forces you to find out what you'll do to survive. If you have to drink somebody else's blood in order to live another night, will you do it? Will you drain some bum on the street, or stalk somebody for three hours and take only enough to survive.? Or will you subsist on dogs and cats? Every time you stab somebody in the throat with your fangs, drink the blood - even if you're not thinking about it in the game - you're essentially risking somebody else's life for your own. You can say that you're a vampire, you have to do that, but nothing's stopping you from seeing the next sunrise except your own sense of self-preservation, even when you're already dead. Yes, you are playing a vampire in an RPG, but you can still kill yourself in the game and make it a valid, in-character choice.

Sartin: Hate to cut into Darren's pathos, but the thing I remember most from Vampire: The Masquerade was how you can chainsaw whack someone with 8 successes and still barely hurt them. Fucking dice pools. (Oh, hush.) [Oh, But yes, sadly, even in this area, Vampire is way superior to FATAL.

It's in the background, but it's there. You have to make a decision. In Vampire, it's an adult decision: Do I kill to live? In FATAL, it's "Date rape and killing and cadavers are all cool! YEEEEEEAH! THANK YOU FOR SHOWING ME THE WAY, SPRAY PAINT HUFFING AND SOCIAL RETARDATION!"

Also, misogyny. We forgot to thank misogyny.

Maybe there's some subculture that's into this; judging from the FATAL theme song, which sounds like the Cookie Monster chasing a drum kit being pushed down a flight of stairs, I'd guess thrash metal or speed metal or metal metal or whatever the fuck they call it nowadays.

Sartin: Incidentally, the FATAL theme sucked enough to make Darren beg me to kill him. If for some reason you aren't interested in suicide, I would recommend not listening to it. Hell, I would recommend not paying attention to FATAL at all, but here you still are. You've got problems, people.

See, even the most extreme of this stuff - say, Cannibal Corpse - is designed to take a stage persona, say "Screw you, world!" for a few hours, then being regular people again; it's born out of showmanship, like an extreme form of professional wrestling sans the body slams. FATAL isn't a piece of showmanship; it's one of the diaries from Se7en, a document pretending that it's perfectly normal and healthy and winds up painting its authors as terribly, terribly maladjusted.

Sartin: During the FATAL flame wars, Hall really did have that psychotically calm John Doe demeanor in his posts. It might actually have been impressive, but any chance for that went out the window when he never defended any of his bullshit arguments or claims when MacLennan, Patrick Chipman, and everyone else started questioning him. Well, and when I couldn't help picturing him in a lavender bunny suit as he typed. (Okay, no, that's not originally what I was picturing him doing, but it's a sanity-preserving substitute.)

And I am now on the second page.

If you want another good example of how the game's authors seem desperate to lie to themselves, and by extension the reader, you can check out their claims that they're not really sexually deviant; they're just including it for the purpose of completeness.

For example:

The information in this game does not represent the world-views of Fatal Games, nor is extreme violence or extreme sex condoned by Fatal Games. Instead, the information is included for completeness.

And this weak bullshit might fly, if it weren't for the fact that they were openly drooling over the possibility of people extorting sexual favors and/or raping a helpless woman not one page before. This is declaring that you did not kill that man one minute after killing that man.

Sartin: That, and it's a trick statement anyway. Remember that FATALites lack the necessary balls to even approach women in real life. Their supposed non-endorsement of rape/violence stems from cowardice, not "Hey, it's just a game." But hey. If you don't want to play dirty by personally attacking the FATALites, just consider this: "Okay, they don't condone rape, misogyny, and five hundred foot nutsacks...they're just really proud that the overwhelming focus FATAL puts on rape, misogyny, and five hundred foot nutsacks makes it SO much more 'realistic' and 'historically/mythically accurate' than every other RPG available!" Doesn't really work, does it?

Or, even better:

For instance, the detail of violence may exceed that of other role-playing games, as crucial damage may explicitly explore the destruction of many body parts and internal organs.

Except that what the guys at FATAL know about medical science and/or the human body is so small as to actually suck away from the collected body of medical knowledge. There are entire anatomy texts that are now blank because the knowledge has been drained away to fill the terrible wound that FATAL made.

Sartin: Those of you who are upset that Hall took a giant piss on anatomical science can take heart in knowing that he also soaked everything that's ever been written about art, medieval history, and RPG design while he was at it. Meanwhile, Testosticles forbid that just fucking describing an injury isn't any better than FATAL's lame ass "Crucial Damage" charts. I mean, really:

02% Belly Button Opponent’s belly is hacked, though no critical organs behind it. The small intestine may (70%) spill forth. If it does, the sight of this causes the opponent to need to pass a Health check at TH 50 or be stunned for 2d4 rounds.

Yeah, having your small intestine spill forth sure can be distracting! (And yes, any "It's just a flesh wound!" jokes you want to make here are entirely appropriate. It's not a life-threatening critical.)

Further, role-playing situations that accurately represent mythology are likely at some point to include rape, molestation, encounters in brothels or possibly situations that deviate more from social norms.

Enjoy this first mention of "Well, because it's historical, we're not in trouble." As much in life, the authors of FATAL use history and mythology as they use any other source: Go through it for the dirty parts, ignore everything else, then claim that you're entirely accurate. (And while there are myths that deal with rape - most of them Greek - molestation, brothel visits, or giving birth to a clone through your cock didn't appear in any of them. Nice try, though.)

A way too thorough breakdown of the creative process Sartin: This would be a good place to rag on the "one thousand hours of research" the FATALites are ever so quick to bleat that Hall did when he shat out FATAL. While many of you have been understandably skeptical of this figure, I can easily see it. In fact, going from FATAL's end product, Hall's research probably went something like: 20 hours: Playing AD&D and thinking "I could so do better than this." 0.4 hours: Hitting head on a toilet and becoming absolutely sure of that. (That's 24 minutes of hitting your head on the toilet. This is not a mathematical error.) 2 hours: Being rejected by fuckable women. (If you're willing to expand the definition of "fuckable" to include the words "within four drinks", then the final research total can be considered well over 1,000 hours.) 25 hours: Huffing paint and listening to death metal. 0.2 hours: Composing the FATAL theme while still disoriented from the paint huffing. 20 hours: Thumbing through every medieval history book that has the word "prostitute". 5 hours: Accidentally flipping through Roman or Biblical history books and either a) mistaking them for medieval history books, or b) failing to realize that, as human society varied drastically over the course of history, writing FATAL in a way that portrays society being pretty much the same EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME and calling it "historically accurate" is a bad move. 0.4 hours: Mistaking a policewoman for a prostitute. 10 hours: Flipping through anatomy and medical texts while drunk. "Yeah, I think you could make a Health check to survive if your sternum was driven into your heart. Way cool." 2 hours: Repairing punctures in "Sexpot Annie". 5 hours: Flipping through kids' mythology books and watching Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and realizing (with the help of a large, skull-shaped bong) that Zeus and Odin must have been total ass-bandits and they just left that part out, and "mythological" just means whatever the fuck you want to make up. 10 hours: Reading up on non-cognitivism, ether theory, and physiognomy without realizing that they're not exactly respected ideas anymore. 900 hours: Circle jerking with Torturon, Burnout, and Psychotic Messanger [sic] of Death. I did not personally witness any of this, of course, but it's the combination of events that would most plausibly result in FATAL.

By the way, did I mention that this book is 900 pages long?

'Cause I'm going to be bringing it up as this review progresses.

A lot.

Because you bastards owe me. (And you still do!)

Sartin: Yeah, what he said. I never thought I'd see actually wanting to play Imagine or Palladium, but now that I've gone through FATAL, damned if I can even remember what sucked so much about them. Ugh. Fuck "owing", gentle readers. I'm coming for your young.

What makes FATAL especially fun is the droning, obsessive tone of its rules sections - for example:

Finally, observe that when these sub-abilities and abilities are determined initially for a character, the abilities are determined for young adults. After the sub-abilities are described and the tables presented, aging effects are illustrated which must be referenced throughout the character's life. The last chapter details how two abilities, Physical Fitness and Strength, may be increased through persistent exercise, and also, an alternate rolling method is presented.

And there's that not-English again; where, when you rewrite it for a review, you find yourself restructuring the way that you speak English. Sure, you may have been able to write and/or speak it before; but then you read something like this, and you find yourself taking sentences out into the shed at midnight, butchering them, burying parts of them in the backyard and then redistributing what's left over the original document as a warning to any other proper use of the language in the book.

Sartin: On the "bright" side, FATAL is arguably not as mind-numbingly written as Aria or Multiverser. On the "you haven't been huffing butane" side, that's much like saying "Okay, so I slid naked down a giant greased razor blade, but at least I'm not the guy who was thrown into a vat of fire ants." In both cases, either outcome is totally stupid and painful, and the party responsible should be gang-beaten with cattle prods until the God of Bitch-Slapping finally comes down and says "Alright, I think he's had enough..." Except that in the most obnoxious case of all these, the God would suddenly add "Oh, wait, this was for writing FATAL, wasn't it? Here, let me recharge those for you." Yes, I'm actually saying that writing FATAL is more worthy of a cattle prod beating than throwing someone into a vat of fire ants.

See, try this:

These abilities only represent your character at the start of his life, so they will change as he ages; charts for this are elsewhere. Later on, we'll detail how you can increase your Strength and Physical Fitness, as well as an alternate method of rolling dice. Also, since you're reading FATAL, you should probably be aware that this game sucks.

See? English. Is that so hard?

Sartin: Needless to say, there aren't any editors, copyeditors, proofreaders, or non-retards in FATAL's credits. I'm not convinced there are any human beings, either, but we won't get into that. Instead, I'd rather take this moment to rant that this is a great example of why editors are really damned important if you're writing a RPG. They're not just good for correcting typos, but making sure your writing technique does not end up sucking all that is ass. If you're not the best writer in the history of the universe, don't end up like FATAL! Get those editors!

So check this out: There's five primary stats, right? But, in a nod towards the residents of insane asylums who smear the walls with their own feces, each stat has four sub-stats which determine vital, important information like, say, enunciation, or kinetic beauty. So, you actually have a stat that determines how well you can speak, or how pretty it looks when you move.

Sartin: Would this be a bad place to mention that you have to randomly roll all 20 sub-abilities? And the roll is 4d100, halve it, and subtract 1? Then you go back and calculate each primary ability by averaging all four of its sub-abilities. Which is really cool when you consider that primary abilities are rarely if ever used by the rules. (Which, in a revision, he upped to 10d100/5 -1. So he fixed that up real nice.) (Blinks.) What? ARGH. The best line of the review So, basically, saying that this game should be burned is an insult to fire.

You can go now, if you want. You have just read

the best line of the review.

The worst part of reviewing this shit is that I actually have to think about it. I actually have to read this shit, then comprehend it - and this is the hardest part - then try to explain it to you, then I have to spend half an hour with a pencil up my nose trying to fish out the piece of brain that died the minute that I tried to use it to understand FATAL. And God almighty, that's not a fun job. I'm genuinely worried that this is going to start interfering with my life, so that I start wind up adding on pointless, redundant statistics to everything that I do, like the guy who writes Hybrid.

Also, for x=(c)(number of words in review)*ycc+kill me you fucks kill me.

Sartin: It's hard to believe, but even Hybrid is less of a waste of atoms than FATAL. You can catch my review of it here. (Here I stop to note that Sartin's website is unfortunately down, and it's almost certain that Hybrid wasn't meant as an actualy role-playing game, but as an unfortunate artifact of mental illness. The author deserves sympathy and some professional help.)

Just for example: Charisma includes Facial Charisma (how good you look), Vocal Charisma (how you sound,) Kinetic Charisma (how pretty you look when you move), and Rhetorical Charisma (how fast you CAN FUCKING SPEAK.) That's right, everybody: You can determine how fast your character can speak, in words per minute. This is an important and critical thing to have in a game.

Sartin: Yeah, where to begin? I mean, I can't count the number of campaigns I've seen where it matters whether your face can be THAT much prettier than your body. But don't worry. Even if you blow that 4d100/2-1 roll for it, you can beat it by wearing a bag over your head, like most FATALites probably do in real life. And while we're on the subject, it's cool that Kinetic Charisma is entirely separate from Hand-Eye Coordination and Agility. That's right! You can be the clumsiest, most spastic sack of shit who ever lived, and yet still inspire boners because the way you pick up that bottle of Jack Daniels to help you get through this game is just so Kinetically Charismatic. Meanwhile, you fans of the controversial pastime of hot, sweaty man-love will enjoy how, with Vocal Charisma, the lowest possible rating will get you a description of "gay". (Good for them, because I was just thinking "Wow, this game is complete shit and its authors are complete shit, but I wanted a soupçon of homophobia to go along with it.) And Rhetorical Charisma...yeah. I mean, this happens all the time in the dungeon: Player: Okay, the dark priest HAS to be down to his last few hit points. As I take my next strike, I'm gonna shout "This is for my brother! Eat testicle pubes and die, scrotum breath!" Gamemaster: Now, hold on! I'm not sure you could get that entire sentence out before you hit. Oh, if only there was SOMETHING we could roll to see!

I spent some time trying to scream, but nothing came out but blood.

Sartin: Okay, people. Remember that Darren's a professional, and we're reviewing on a closed course. Don't projectile vomit blood at home!

I should also spend some time describing the artwork for this game. Most of it is obviously photographs run through the Graphic Pen filter in Adobe Photoshop; and most of the photographs depict two beer-swollen morons pretending to fight about as smoothly and realistically as any fight on Star Trek - which is to say that it's stiff and really, really staged. There's also startling depictions of the ARTWORK HERE monster, and crudely drawn pornographic sketches here and there. As a matter of fact, the ARTWORK HERE monster must be the most common wandering monster in FATAL, given its frequency of appearance.

Sartin: Wait, he was trying to be intimidating? I thought he was going for a "Hi! I'm a silhouette of a bearded jackass who couldn't pass muster in the SCA!" look. Really, take a white marker and scribble on some black construction paper, and you won't be too far off from what little artwork HAS been filled in here. If Hall used Photoshop to create these images, he sucks at it. (The Graphic Pen filter hath its uses; this isn't one of them.) Here, check it out:

Really. It's from the combat section. Actually, that one isn't so bad...the guy on the right may be Hall, and no illustration that depicts Hall in a state of imminent fustigation can be all bad. Hmmm...

Oh, yeah. I'm either drunk or half-blind, or someone needs to try harder.

Or check this description of an ability check:

For example, a slovenly trollop offers herself to a strapping young adventurer if and only if he can expediently say a tongue-twister of her choice. Driven by hormones, the young male agrees, and asks what is the tongue twister. The courtesan challenges "Huge hung hero hunks hastily hump horny heaving hot whores. How 'bout it, huh?"

So: Not only do we have a splendid example of the level that FATAL operates at, we also have an example of the game's utter misogyny. You will never, ever find a female character in this game who isn't a prostitute and/or proclaimed slut, because that's the only kind of women that exist in these dipshits' imagination. There's also not-English ("what is the tongue twister" instead of "what the tongue twister is"), and, for the final kick in the balls to my leathery psyche, you have to check against your Enunciation stat in order to say it.

Sartin: Appropriately enough, that example ends with the adventurer blowing it and losing the girl. How unintentionally autobiographical! But while we're on the subject of whores and sluts, there are also few occupations in this game that get more wordage from Hall than whoring and all things related to it (and even those only exceed the whoring volume through huge charts or long, boring ass skill lists). And all the whore and whore-related profession descriptions, of course, instantly footnote you to "information on whores has been obtained from Medieval Prostitution , by Jacques Rossiaud". Which, as it turns out, is a book on prostitution...in southern France...in the time period spanning the 1400s. And yet Hall is basing an entire world on it. Yes, people, this is what passes for "research" and "historical accuracy" in FATAL. Actually, I tell a lie. One aspect of whoring you won't see FATAL spend time on is sexually transmitted disease. Yep, with the loving attention Hall pays to sex, genitalia, whoremongering, and rape, there isn't one damn word in the entire book about STDs. So Hall's either careless beyond imagination, or didn't feel "the most difficult, detailed, and realistic game available" needed to present anything that might be a possible consequence to raping and fucking your brains out. Your call!

Then there's the charts - pages and pages and pages of charts. I should mention that the Bodily Attractiveness stat affects your breast cup size, although, of course, only for women. Oh, and you can get "retard strength". Check the formula out for determining this:

(71 - retard Intelligence) x 3 = (% chance of Retard Strength).

I hate the author. I really fucking do.

Damn, Sartin, leave something for me to work with Sartin: As bad as Darren's making this sound, he hasn't been telling you the tenth of it. These abilities - and the charts for them - could deep-throat a sperm whale. Not counting the 4d100/2-1 roll (may it burn in hell), there are three central, massive idiocies at work here. In order: Lame ass references and quotes I love how when every sub-ability mentions skills or bodily features or combat stats, we get a big " (SEE CHAPTER [insert lame ass chapter number here]) ", as though we're too stupid to catch the chapter references in any of the other 19 sub-abilities that are right next to it. But then again, FATAL was written for FATALites, not you or me or anyone else whose IQ doesn't begin with a decimal point, so I guess it's necessary. And I have to love that "Brute force bereft of wisdom falls to ruin by its own weight" quote - yeah, it's utterly hypocritical, but it's also half-assedly ironic, given that nearly every FATALite to date has presented themselves as a total death- and rape-monger while having no clue how much their belovedly rape-enabling game sucks. General idiocy/pointlessness Like Intelligence: Spacial. With a way cool "Unfamiliar Object Assembly (# of pieces)" column. This would be the most complex machine a character can understand or some shit. Those with 100 Spacial can only understand machines with 200 parts, but with above-average Spacial, that will quickly grow to thousands of parts. Of course, where you're going to find something with that many parts in the most realistic fantasy setting available is a mystery to us both. Or the Math sub-ability, with a "Highest math possible" column. Huh. I had no idea Geometry is the highest math any character can understand. Or the Common Sense sub-ability, with a "likely to" column to explain what low Common Sense characters are likely to get caught doing. The lowest possible rating is "Get caught for greater scheme: attempt to kill a god", but "Appear at emergency room after getting dick caught in zipper" and "Write FATAL" are just as likely. The Vocal sub-ability has that "gay" note, of course, but if you're around 88-114, your description is "ordinary". Now check out the descriptions above and below it: 84-87: "Always says 'uh' or 'uhm'" 88-114: "Ordinary" 115-120: "Avoids 'uh' or 'uhm'" So where does this leave "ordinary" speakers? Do they avoid "uh" and "uhm" half the time, and always use them the other half? It's a mystery for the ages, or for whoever's got Hall's bong. And it's cool to know that Health will help out with that Urinating skill. And it helps with your hearing, too, for some reason. Also, did you know that only people with below-average Health can have allergies? So if you have even one allergy, congratulations: you're a FATAL weenie and will have a penalty on Urinating. Disgraced, you will be hopeless until you realize that all you have to do is fucking drink a two liter already and wait a day, which will give you a high enough mod to automatically score a "flood" on the chart and (if you're average height) get it as far as 16 feet with total accuracy (naturally, being "the most realistic game available", FATAL makes no distinction between power and accuracy. Or, for that matter, the ever-increasing difficulty in "holding it"). But speaking of realism and Urination, what's really cool is that you can't piss unless you roll over 5... and the roll is d100 + Urination Skill Points + (average of Health and Hand-Eye Coordination skill modifiers) +/- ("Time Since Last Urination vs. Ounces Drunk" modifier). Of course, you'll have to drink at least 16 ounces if you want to urinate without a penalty or having to wait more than half an hour, but that isn't very hard. FATAL characters can practically urinate at will! I have this stupid image in my mind of them beating down their opponents, chugging down those drinks, and standing around holding their dicks (and diddling every open hole in sight) for that half an hour just waiting for that Urination roll. Hell, they probably carry huge funnels so they can be extra quick with getting in the 256 ounces (and +80 mod) that will all but guarantee a "flood". Fucking shit, they probably have greasy T-shirts over their armor that say "PENIS! CUNT! ANAL CIRCUMFERENCE! Put a condom on my head, I'm a FATALITE!" God with a flying orgasm, SenZar has never looked so mature and deep as it does this fucking moment. But hey. If you can get that Urination skill up to 100, that will cancel out the worst possible penalty for drinking 0 ounces. Spell your name with the realism! Oh, and about that Retard Strength? It's only +2d10 for humans. And with abilities running from 1-199 (and occasionally beyond), that's not exactly worth bothering with. But that's what makes it so 100% FATALish - it reveals Hall's total wankerness, but adds more or less nothing to the game.

The fact that there are fucking *20* increasingly pointless and redundant stats, and the way they interconnect or fail to is stupid

Let's go right to Bodily Attractiveness. Oh, look: "Males with high Bodily Attractiveness tend to have high Physical Fitness, Strength, and Height" - yeah, maybe if all four stats weren't totally random. Sure, high Bodily Attractiveness will boost those a little, but even if yours is the mind-blowingly maximum roll of 199, you'll only get a +18 bonus. You'll forgive me for going "Woooooo!" in the most intensely sarcastic voice I can muster. It's not enough of a "tendency" to matter much of a shit against the random element. But fuck it. For FATAL guys, pretty = stronger. I'd add some crude speculation here about what team Hall is batting for, but I can't think of one homosexual on this forum who even remotely deserves the degradation of being lumped in with him. (It's just too damn bad my team doesn't want him, either.) Meanwhile, the inverse is also presented - low manly Bodily Attractiveness penalizes your Physical Fitness, Strength, and Height. Guess there aren't historical or realistic "tendencies" towards ugly bruisers. But guess what! All that shit's only for males. Like Darren already mentioned, female Bodily Attractiveness increases your Cup Size. It also decreases your Strength and Weight. Again, total bullshit. But what the hell. It's nice to know the ideal FATAL girl is a death camp survivor with a basketball under each nipple. (I don't know if you've ever read the adult webcomic Moon over June, but the author's style tends towards this. More a matter of artistic choice, like the horrifically skinny people in Aeon Flux.) Somehow, I don't think that shit flew during history, either. Naturally, most games just give you stats and let you picture how they fit together. (It's a fun process I call "getting to visualize the character you actually created".) But then, those games weren't designed by misogynistic human accidents who would lose a battle of wits with an plus-sized assplug dressed up as a crack pipe. FATAL, sadly lacking that distinction, insists on drunkenly interconnecting these stats in ways that have a flung piece of shit's chance in heaven of being "historically/mythically accurate" because, gee, it's not like standards of attractiveness have been TOTALLY DIFFERENT in different eras, places, and myths or anything. But noooooo. In FATAL, sexiness has one standard, everywhere, all the time, all over the world, because Hall apparently forgot the exact meaning of the words "realistic" and "historically" after he hit his head on that toilet I mentioned when I deciphered his research. Oh, well. Of course, FATAL hardly gets its head any farther out of its ass with the stats it doesn't stupidly try to interconnect. Can you predict what can happen when character facets like speech or beauty or intelligence are governed by three or four totally random stats each? Just keep reading. Facial Charisma at 175+ gives you a description of "causes wetness". And with all the total randomness, it's so cute that you can blow that Bodily Attractiveness roll badly enough to get a head start on being the strongest, fattest woman alive, but still roll enough Facial Charisma to catch boners anyway. Fucking FATAL. Wow, look! Enunciation! Naturally, this is a sub-ability of Dexterity. You'd think it would be under Charisma or Intelligence, but I guess you see something stupid every day. Anyfuck, I really like how Enunciation determines your "Maximum Speech Rate", but Rhetorical Charisma determines your "Average Speech Rate". Ugh. NO ONE FUCKING CARES. Of course, since both sub-abilities are (say it with me) totally random, we don't really know what happens when your Maximum Speech Rate ends up being lower than your Average Speech Rate, but it's just on this side of "totally possible". Tying into these two nicely, of course, is Language (an Intelligence sub-ability). Especially that "possible # of languages learned" column. Naturally, with FATAL being the "detailed" and "realistic" game that it is, it's possible to get a high Enunciation and Rhetorical Charisma without rolling high enough in Language to actually be able to speak a language. Am I amazed that Hall came up with all those bullshit interconnections for Bodily Attractiveness, but didn't bother to imagine how any of his other attributes might fit together? If FATAL were a movie, it would make Battlefield Earth look like an utterly convincing, well-considered masterpiece. Of course, we can't let all this shit go without looking at the age modifiers. Infant modifiers are presented, in case you wanted to play Baby Geniuses against a backdrop of anus fisting and 16 foot urination. And it's not as crippling as you'd think, either. The total Strength modifier is -90, so if you were lucky enough to roll 180 Strength or so, your infant adventurer will be about as strong as an average adult human. Bodily Attractiveness is also -90, so again, an excellent roll will still leave you with average adult fuckability and little or no BA penalty to those Seduction and Sexual Adeptness rolls. (To recap: That's a baby that's as strong as a normal human and apparently eminently fuckable in the bargain.) I've flushed RPGs that were better thought out this. Language is also a blast when you toss it through the age modifier bullshit. With the Child-category penalty, you'll have to roll at least 95 for that, or you won't be capable of learning a language until you hit puberty. (Roll less than 65, and you'll have to wait until adulthood. Below 55, of course, is that magical threshold where you'll either jump off a cliff or face a lifetime of being unable to say "Look, shithead! I can't learn any languages!") Of course, if your race happens to be most varieties of Ogre (-50 to Language) or Troll (-90)... I also like how Reflection (which determines your earliest memory) increases at Middle Age and Old Age. I had no idea getting older makes you remember more of your childhood (Actually, imagine a game in which your memories had a connection, through magic, to your life as a whole - so, for instance, if you were in need of an escape, you would remember when you rode in a horse race and somehow channel that memory as a spell. Or, to get slightly artier with it, you could have the GM tie together a memory and a current event and somehow use the two things to comment on each other - seeing a sword break in front of you sends you back to the ordeal that you had to go through in order to get it. None of this occurs in FATAL, though.) After all this crap, though, I have to admit to one bright point. I liked how some of the sub-abilities provided real life-kinda examples or descriptions for each score. Like Strength listing how much you can lift, or the Vocal Charisma and Math columns I mentioned (okay, those ended up being dumb anyway, but the basic idea wasn't so bad). Examples like these can give solid ideas on how good a score really is, something many RPG systems have had trouble with. Of course, this hardly makes up for how the stat rolls are so completely fucking tedious, or how my bitching troll berserker probably won't know any languages, or how there are 20 attributes for things a sane game could have covered with 8-10, but whatever. Anyway, I hope this entire section was mind-numbing for you. Because you can barely imagine what it's like to read and dissect this shit-hauling train wreck. And on that note, let's let Darren have the review back. Yay!

Or, check this shit out:

According to a prominent philosopher, males tend to be more spirited, savage, simple, and less cunning. Females, on the other hand, tend to be more compassionate than males, more easily moved to tears, at the same time are more jealous, more querulous, and are more apt to scold and strike. Females are, furthermore, more false of speech, and more deceptive. Females are also more wakeful, shrinking and difficult to rouse to action.

And later:

The philosopher's observations presented above are generalizations and do not hold true for all characters. Certainly, it is possible to find a surpassingly shameless male, or a female who is less susceptible to depression than males, but these instances are the exception to the rule, assuming that the above observations are correct.

This is what the authors are talking about when they say that the game is "historically accurate"; they've taken Aristotle's thoughts on gender, then used them to justify their own sexist stupidity. They make assertions, then try to weasel out of them later on in the same paragraph - "This is all true unless what the philosopher says isn't true, in which case it isn't true."

Aristotle may have been a brilliant philosopher, but when it came to women, he partook of traditional Greek sexism at its most asinine; Aristotle didn't believe that women could be fully human, although I'm guessing that it was more from ignorance than from actual hatred. But including it in your game and treating it like it's gospel is equally asinine.

Sartin: Of course philosophers are who you turn to when you're creating something with a basis in reality. (And yes, especially when your beliefs are so limp-dicked that you're only "assuming" the philosophers are correct.) That's much better than basing your shit on the findings of, oh, researchers or historians or scientists or anyone else whose ponderings and conclusions actually have to be based in reality. Then again, Hall also tries to wank "scholarly literature" by us to justify heavier female attribute penalties. Here's the official rationalization: According to the adjustments above, it may seem as though males are superior, though it is important to understand that there are other instances, such as nurturing, that are not apparent in the adjustments and may become evident and valuable during role-playing. The function of altering gender according to the table above is to shift the averages of the sexes to more closely resemble reality. The shift in range represents masses of characters better than extreme instances. For instance, the highest measured Intelligence is that of a female, though by large numbers females tend to score slightly lower than males in Intelligence. In this case, shifting the range lower for females also prevents the possibility of a female possessing the highest Intelligence. This is an unfortunate limitation. Fucking god, where to begin? "For instance, the highest measured Intelligence is that of a female, though by large numbers females tend to score slightly lower than males in Intelligence"? Yeah, I'm sure that when he wasn't attending to Sexpot Annie, Hall had a lot of fun rounding up women from medieval Europe and testing them. Of course it's perfectly valid and "historically accurate" to assume they would have the same Intelligence-reducing (and Bodily Attractiveness-raising) "nurturing" and "background" as modern day women, right? And on that note, even if Hall were claiming this shit as modern gender modifiers, he only selected the parts of his "scholarly literature" that went along with his retarded views. Even the first work listed, "The Smarter Sex: A Critical Review of Sex Differences in Intelligence" (by D. Halpern and M. LaMay) claims that males more frequently have certain types of mental retardation, but you're sure as fuck not going to find that in these rules. "In this case, shifting the range lower for females also prevents the possibility of a female possessing the highest Intelligence. This is an unfortunate limitation"? Translation: "Yeah, this is an unfortunate limitation...which I just admitted creates a result that isn't true in reality (because I forgot I'm designing the most realistic RPG available)...but guess what? I haven't taken it out, because I would rather claim that the female masses are stupider than men than make my rules accept that at least one woman has scored a higher IQ than any man to date!" It's an ugly game.

There's also the issue that the average human being will have had experience with women, as opposed to the Dunwich-dwelling inbred shack cavemen that wrote FATAL. They borrow stupid generalizations about women from ancient philosophers because they don't have the stones to say what they want to say about women; namely, that they are good because they have penises and women are just there to be slaves to them. This is just pathetic on a Biblical scale. And again, like I pointed out in the Wraeththu review, RPG's have gotten miles better at integrating women into settings where the roles haven't been filled by women. Even in the earliest versions of D&D - well, maybe not Chainmail - any gender could be any character class, with the minor sexism of having women's strength only go up to 18/50 instead of 18/00. FATAL literally turns back the clock to to the age before D&D.

The races: Don't particularly care about them; all of the mythology that they're shitting on has already been done, and done better, by D&D. (I don't mean that D&D shat on the mythology.) Worse yet, the game has monstrous PCs - this in a game that claims historical accuracy, but can have monstrous PCs in the same game as human PCs. As a matter of fact, the game isn't so much historically accurate - y'see, that would actually require work - as it is historically related, in the same way that humans are distantly related to microbes. Actually, let me rephrase that: FATAL is to historical research as human beings are to dwarf stars. They're entirely different things.

Sartin: Yeah, the races also sucked a hot one. Oh, look, you can be an "anakim" half-demon-kinda-character. That was so cool when SenZar did it. SEVEN. YEARS. AGO. Except that even SenZar Demonians were never this lame. "Most anakim are the result of an incubus or succubus mating with a human. These anakim are more commonly called cambion. Oftentimes, cambion children show no signs of life until they are seven years in age"? Right. Would-Be Mortal Mother: Oh no, a stillborn! Oh, wait, I died during childbirth. Lord Asmodean, Master of the Seven Phalluses: Huh. We should keep it around for seven years, just in case! For some reason, anakim are also the only monstrous race to not have Bodily Attractiveness or Facial penalties. Despite that they also have to roll d10 weird physical traits on a d100 table. Hmmm... 09: The anakim has cat-like eyes. The character loses d8 Facial Charisma since the eyes are so large and round.. Huh. Okay: 18: The anakim has the legs of a goat. 24: The anakim has the odor of rotting flesh extend one foot away from their body. 25: The anakim has eyes that are permanently bloodshot. 54: The anakim has gils on the side of their neck, allowing them to breathe underwater. 64: The anakim has a third eye in the middle of their forehead. Having three eyes improves Vision by 1d20 points. Since 50 Vision points is perfect Vision, these bonus points are applied in this direction. 66: The anakim is accompanied by an odor of feces which extends 1d6 feet from their body. I wonder why those and many other disgusting or deforming results aren't worth an attractiveness penalty. "Historically/mythically accurate" standards of beauty sure are a bitch to figure out, aren't they? More good ones: 40: The anakim causes humans within one foot to desire anal sex according to their sexuality. As usual, in case you forgot someone was holding a gun to your head and making you read FATAL. Or that sexuality can be argued to include "Does not desire anal sex from either gender". 45: The anakim is cannibalistic. Eating vegetables will make this anakim nauseated. Uh, I think "carnivorous" is the word you're looking for there. (Maybe the guys at the grocery store have convinced the authors that all of the meat sold is actually human flesh, and not pork or beef or chicken like it says on the package. And are probably charging them double for REAL AUTHENTIC HUMAN FLESH.) 95: The anakim has abnormal hatred for females. Whenever within 1d100 feet of one, the anakim must make a Drive check at TH 30 or attack with the intent to kill. That's nice. Given the contempt FATAL in general already shows females, I'd hate to imagine what it would consider an "abnormal hatred" of them. And that 1d100 thing. What the fuck? Every time a female might get within 100 feet, does he have to roll to see just how many feet she can come before he has to make the Drive check? Or does he just roll once, when the character is created? But why make it so totally random? (Why doesn't somebody just kill the anakim before he kills a woman? Oh, wait, right - according to the creators, women just have to die for daring to dump Torturon's ass for being an ultracreep.) Oh, right. "Historical/mythical accuracy". Cause, you know, there's lots of myths where one half-demon hacked apart women when they got within 90 feet, but another half-demon could stand them as close as 15 feet. But whatever. There are races other than anakim, but Darren's right. None of it is worth caring about. Still, it's cool to see that even in a "historically/mythically accurate" game, humans still have a lifespan of 73 years. And that on the Racial Hatred table, "hatred" is by far the most common attitude between races, especially for humans (despite their status as the most "neutral" race). In fact, the only races FATAL humans have anything less than total hatred for are themselves and all three races of non-dark dwarves and elves. Oh, wait, they only dislike anakim, despite that race's legendary, mythically accurate, deadEarth-like abilities to smell like shit, have triple-size penises, or be walking anal sex aphrodisiacs. Naturally, humans have not just a lack of hatred, but a preference for each other. I guess there's either just one human race in FATAL (white, of course), or that all the interracial tensions that sadly exist even today weren't historically accurate enough to bother mentioning. (Not to mention that white people back then used their nation as a race - so if you were a proud Spaniard, you would dismiss those awful Italians as a lesser race of man, and if you were Italian, you dismissed the Spaniards as dogs that walked on two legs. Medeival Europe was pretty stupid.)

In addition, there's huge areas of white space reserved for artwork, which I guarantee you will never be filled. You can find personality traits matched up with physical traits, in a bit of quackery that used to be called physiognomy. The guys who wrote FATAL never left a discredited science's leg unhumped.

Oh, and here's the cream of the crop: You can actually roll to determine randomly determined sexual characteristics, including vaginal circumference - how much a particular vagina can accept. The fun part is, as these morons would know if they'd even been in contact with a vagina, is that a vagina can expand to any size - like, say, in childbirth, another facet of life which these chimpanzees in short pants forgot about.

It's dangerous to go alone; take this stupid and ignorant idea. Sartin: Their knowledge of nipples is sadly lacking, too: "A nipple that is not erect may have no length whatsoever." Come on. Even recluses who wank to porn know better than that! And it's nice to see that both "nymphomaniacs" and "sluts" have separate modifiers to the Vaginal Circumference roll. That might keep them from rolling too low a circumference for even an average infant to pass through. And I love that Vaginal Depth Potential: "A female’s Vaginal Depth Potential equals her height in feet converted to inches (such as a female of 5’ 6” becoming equivalent to 5 1/2”), and then (2d20)% is added." It doesn't amaze me that Hall felt this was so important that such a detailed rule was needed for it. If he's ever fucked, it was missionary and in total darkness. And there's your Anal Circumference roll, in case someone needs to figure out if they can fit their penis or blade or fist (yes, there's a Fist Circumference roll, too) in there. Try to get out of rolling it, though, because you don't wanna read sentences like "Should any anus be stretched beyond the limit as determined by the table below, which differs from anus to anus, the orifice will rip to accommodate the incoming object. First, consider all relevant modifiers, then roll percentile dice and proceed to the following table" without the assistance of alcohol. Of course, no true discussion of FATAL would be complete without Hymen Resistance, too. This is a 5d20 roll for female virgins, the result of which is the percent chance per intercourse that the hymen will resist breaking. They must grow membranes pretty tough in FATALworld...the average roll for that is around 52%, and I'm pretty damn sure they break way more often than that. While we're on the subject, the length of the intercourse or the size of the man's manhood don't figure into the breakage roll at all. God fucking almighty. You can't even stick your dick in the realism here. You can also roll your Facial Features, Hair Thickness, Most Attractive and Most Repulsive Features, and quadrillions of other things that a sane game would be content to just let you choose, in the unlikely event you even cared. Meanwhile, the Skin Color roll runs the gamut from deathly pale to merely tan. No brown or dark or anything, though. Further evidence that FATAL is a white boy's club.

Oops, wait: Vaginal stretching is covered a few pages later, with more nonsense gleaned from scanning a medical text. (A 15% chance of miscarriage? Uh-uh. Labor takes "up to" fourteen hours? Uh-uh.) And the real head kicker is that being pregnant reduces Bodily Attractiveness by 1d20: "Although in some sense a pregnant female is 'beautiful', her Bodily Attractiveness is negatively affected." Hall loves you as long as you look like a Barbie doll; any sign that you're not a blow-up doll is met with revulsion.

Sartin: Okay, rules analysis time again. Even a -20 (the worst roll for the pregnancy penalty) isn't that bad (granted, none of the female attribute penalties were that high, but it's the reasoning behind them that's the most ass-ramming). If you have an average 100 Bodily Attractiveness, pregnancy will reduce you to 80 at worst - not enough to seriously hurt your chances in the sack. Sure, it'll reduce your Bodily Attractiveness skill modifier from 0 to -20. But a skill's final modifier is the average of the modifiers from all applying sub-abilities. Sexual Adeptness has three that apply, and Seduction has two, so your BA penalty for those would only be a respective -6 and -10 AT WORST. As skill rolls work on a d100 + modifiers roll, you can see that being knocked up definitely won't curtail your ability to seduce and sleep around. Nice and realistic, like you'd expect.

The last place you want to go for information about morality

See, I was quitting about this time in Synnibarr, because I made the mistake of actually trying to read through it straight. I quit feeling frustrated for wasted potential and a terrible execution. (Actually, the charts in Synnibarr are actually relatively well-placed; I've seen worse, looking at you Mechwarrior 3rd edition.) Here, I'm tempted to quit because this is just so embarrassingly stupid as to make me wonder if I've been somehow tainted by reading it; as if somehow I'm going to wind up treating women as alien creatures made out of stats rather than, as, you know, people.

Extensive charts exist for getting drunk - you actually have to cross-reference your weight against how many drinks you've had and what kind of drinks they were in order to figure out whether you're buzzed, intoxicated or vomiting. Unknown Armies just gave you a 5% penalty every time you took a shot, because the people who wrote Unknown Armies descended from creatures who were vertebrate, and also apparently damned good at making role-playing games.

Sartin: The marijuana (and it's so hard not to believe they pronounce it "mara-jah-wanna") chart is a blast, too. Following the model for pissing, the total "inhalations per hour" versus the "time since last euphoria" are considered to give you a Euphoria Factor. And then, in a move only a sociopathic accountant could love, you have a long list of traits that get reduced by 1/4 or 1/2 or once or twice the EF. Blah. But hey. Bet you didn't know that being high actually raises your Intuition.

Disease rules are found as well. Instead of actually using anything closely resembling a rational system for disease, FATAL simply creates a percentage chance of fatality, so that the bubonic plague has an equal chance of killing a starving beggar as much as it does of killing a bugbear. You know, historically accurate and everything.

There's a chapter on morality - what the book calls "disposition" - which attempts to distill morality and ethics down into nine separate categories, including a cross-referencing chart for what disposition hates what and what a primary and secondary disposition work like in conjunction. If you ever have a pressing need to hurt yourself - the kind of deep-down hurt that lasts for days - go ahead and read through the chapter, 'cause it'll give you that feeling. Most of it is philosophical wank that probably got recycled from one of the Greeks, or summarized; not being a fan of philosophy, I didn't recognize anything in specific.

Sartin: I would like to remark here that if you're going to make a "population count per alignment" pie chart, you should NOT: a) Use only black and gray for colors. b) Use SHADES of those two colors for each section. c) Have NINE possible alignments to shade in. Hell, this chart looks so bad, I'll just show you now:

(So 60% of the population is...apparently some shade of gray.)

Seriously, people. Meanwhile, it's cool that FATAL says "individuality" and "randomness" are "unethical", while "conformity" and "patterned" are "ethical". (Yeah, let's get those "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" cracks out of the way, too.) Just the phrase "Neutral Moral" makes me giggle, too, while we're on the subject. Darren's assessment of half-assed recycling from Greek philosophy isn't bad, but the Disposition/Morality chapter is basically about Hall spending 25 pages bending "ethical/unethical" to mean "lawful/chaotic" while babbling about the deficiencies and excesses that can turn "morality" into immorality or evil. Gee, how innovative.

As much as he's the father of role-playing, Gary Gygax still has much to answer for when it comes to the original D&D morality system.

I've figured out one thing in relation to FATAL and its claims to historical accuracy. When they say that they're historically accurate, they mean that they've gone through...maybe fifteen books at the absolute most, and that's being awfully generous. So, as a result, whenever you come to the conclusion that it's incredibly sexist, you can entertain yourself with a confusing, obscurantist bit of pseudoscholarship that basically suggests that it's your problem that there isn't a single spot in FATAL that refers to women as anything but whores. For a bit of fun, you could go through and counterpoint every single lame point he makes with about a hundred examples from FATAL that utterly disprove his point.

Not me, of course, but somebody. (Oops - spoke too soon. Later on in the review, I'll be dicing that up as well. Silly me. Fucking FATAL.)

You get an F on history, Mr. Hall.

(Or You Fail History Forever, as the kids say these days.)

So, we get to the chapter entitled "Mind", in which personalities are divided according to the four medieval humors - sanguine, choleric, melancholy and phlegmatic, and how to determine which one you character is. In other words, instead of coming up with a character and using the system to help define him, you get to roll dice in order to determine which humors are dominant; which in turn are based on medical concepts incredibly laughably outdated.

Sartin: Incidentally, the four humors also inspired the names of the four Z'bri houses in Tribe 8: Sangis, Koleris, Melanis, and Flemis. Oh, and Tribe 8 is much better and more mature "dark" game than FATAL. It's probably more historically accurate, too. Herein lies a useful lesson for game designers: if you're making a really shitty game, don't put in things that will remind people of much better games. (Although you have to admit it does let us recommend much better games, ones that make FATAL look like the shitwork that it is, ones that will reward your money with hours and hours of reading fun, as opposed to hours and hours of vomiting and trying desperately to forget.)

I believe that what Shithead was thinking was something along the lines of "Okay, people in the Middle Ages tried to define people along these lines, so should I." But the problem with defining people's behavior according to their humors - I mean, avoiding the fact that it's yet another discredited pseudoscience - is that people don't fit into four categories. Neither do they fit into four categories with four subcategories each. Alchemy was essentially an intellectual dead end for science, and yet, in this day and age, we've got a man trying to use them with a completely straight face - not as a disguise for a better game mechanic, like the Nine Spheres from Mage, but as a method for defining people.

That creates a second disjunct in the game: There appear to be two different authors writing the game. One of them is somebody who's read a lot of medieval and Greek philosophy and mythology without a historical or cultural context to put them in, and appears to be sane, if not profoundly ignorant about history. The other is a drooling metalhead wannabe-rapist who's forced to get his jollies by masturbating over stat blocks involving sexual characteristics. I don't know who is who, or even if there are two people involved with this. Either way, it's scary, like Dr. Jekyll and Captain Jerkoff.

Sartin: Personally, I want to believe FATAL was created by an AI that was instructed to "Create the crappiest possible work that can still technically be considered a RPG", and the AI not only succeeded brilliantly, but even went as far as to start massive flame wars on RPGnet, as it studied the examples set by World of Synnibarr, SenZar, and most especially Rifts and realized that no RPG can achieve ultimate crappiness without overzealous creators and fanboys to piss everyone off. Naturally, the truth - that FATAL was created by actual human beings who weren't joking - is all the more depressing.

The mental illness section basically transcribes the DSM-IV's section on various mental disorders, but offers no particular rules other than "occurs over the next 5 + 1d100 months"; and, of course, there's tons of sexual dysfunction listed alongside megalomania and kleptomania, just in case we forgot that we were reading FATAL.

The section on medieval life is about as deep as a skillet; if you check the references that they cite for the section, for example, you'll find Life in a Medieval Castle / City / Village and Reign of the Phallus - but Reign of the Phallus is about ancient Rome and Greece, rather than medieval Europe. None of them are scholarly texts, to boot, and Reign of the Phallus is sharply critiqued even in its Amazon review for its sloppy work.

Just in case you were in the mood for some more pain, there's a Debauchery chart, so you can roll dice - thank fucking God, 'cause I was worried that I wouldn't be able to suggest that FATAL's authors apparently use Rolemaster as wank material - to find out how far a particular character will go. To make things worse, it's a sliding scale, so that we find out that somebody who will entertain multiple partners won't engage in anal sex.

Don't ask why, it's on a chart. It must be true if it's on a chart.

Sartin: Naturally, you can also roll to see if characters are heterosexual or homosexual. Even better, being a male with low Strength or a female with high Strength (or low Cup Size) will bend your modifier towards the gay end of the scale. It's nice to see these lame stereotypes being paraded in such a realistic, historically accurate game. Meanwhile, anakim get such a big Debauchery modifier that they'll always roll at least "Give oral sex". Nice to be a member of a race that's guaranteed to suck, huh?

You can also roll a d10,000,000 in order to find out how many babies a particular woman will have, even though there are only five potential outcomes. Fucking FATAL.

Sartin: You have to wonder if Hall, exploding syphilis canker that he is, has ever actually played his own game. You know when you roll d100, you have to say "Okay, the red one is the tens" or whatever. What's up here? "Okay, red is the tens, green is the hundreds, translucent red is the thousands, blue is the ten thousands, green speckled is - ah fuck, which one did I make the red one again?" (For those of you at home, it's the tens.) And, of course, this is yet another of those situations that comes up ALL the time in fantasy. I mean, shit. Seeing if there's that one in ten million chance you'll bear quintuplets happens even more often than starting the campaign in a tavern.

And even when you do read something that apparently came out of a more scholarly text, you know that what you're reading has been essentially pared down to the fundamentals - in other words, whatever will paint medieval society as a gigantic orgy and women as whores. For example, we're informed that even respectable inns will include whores among services offered; and that the doorman, bellboys, porters, waiters, barmaids and cleaning girls - and the cleaning girls also double as whores - will all be slaves.

But there were very few slaves in Medieval Europe; serfs, yes, but they had some legal rights. Plus, medeival lords relied on their serfs for their money, through the sale of crops; dicking with them was a good way to get poor. If you go by FATAL, Medieval Europe's economy was entirely based on whores and whore-related activities; whoreconomics, if you will. Especially funny is the section on justice, where we see punishments for slaves in a society in which slavery, by and large, didn't even exist. If you commit slander against a married woman or priestess - and there were pretty much no priestesses in Medieval Europe - you wind up getting branded with an SL. Did this ever happen? No.

The nimrod who wrote the section gets Roman law - which I doubt was this harsh - confused with the law of Medieval Europe. Even worse, the punishments come from the History of Punishment and Torture, which is basically designed to showcase the most sensationalist punishments without the appropriate historical context. (Incidentally, some of the game's creators had a description of which medieval punishments they would inflict on ex-girlfriends on their websites, which - I think - got them kicked out of college.)

For that matter, in a game that claims to be the most historically accurate game out there, where the fuck is the Catholic Church? Where's the Inquisition? Where's the Hundred Years War? Where's Italy? Where's the Muslims? Where's the Crusades? Where's the New World? Where's the Black Plague? WHERE'S EVERYTHING? It's like walking outside and everything you know was there yesterday is missing, replaced with the little blank spaces on the ground where things used to be.

Sartin: While we're at it, where's the Flat Earth, the Four Elements, and the universe revolving around the Earth? Don't forget that Hall is also unquestioningly accepting the conclusions of ancient Greeks on women. Why isn't he taking the Greeks at face value on everything else, too? Poor genetic material, I would guess.

In FATAL? Nowhere.

Like I said, if the authors of this thing had even the minimal shame that you see in a dog dragging its ass along the carpet, they would remove any boasting about FATAL being accurate immediately. I'm not holding my breath.

I think that I'm going to be sick...

The section on criminal punishments for rape: it's mostly enough to make you sick, especially since the motherfucker who wrote it describes rape as "taking his pleasure" - rather than as the act of vicious violence that it is.

Sartin: Hell, I'm still noxious from how the motherfucker refers to FATAL as a RPG, rather than the miles-long monument to human worthlessness that it is.

Well, here: look:

Rape

In an average community, an average of twenty rapes occur annually. In 80% of cases, rapes are committed by between two and fifteen characters.

Now, keep in mind: 80% of cases, two to fifteen rapes apiece - yeah, Byron's apparently let the glue sniffing burn out the part of his brain that's able to do mathematics.

Sartin: It's nice to know that FATALworld apparently has Rape Clubs ("The first rule is we don't talk about Rape Club..."). Really.

They force the female's door at night, do not disguise themselves, and either rape the victim in her home and in the presence of terrorized witnesses, or drag the victim through the streets into one of their houses, where they have their pleasure all night long. In 80% of cases, the neighbors do not intervene. Almost all rapes involve extreme brutality, though they never attempt to wound or kill her.

Sartin: It's also nice to know that the average communities in FATALworld apparently have no guards, night watchmen, or law enforcement. Really.

The rapists come from all levels of society, but the majority are artisans and laborers. Less than 10% of rapes occur by thugs. In 50% of cases, human rapists are between 18 and 24 years old. The group is composed, on average, of 6 characters. Only 20% of the rapes are committed by 10 or more characters. Half the male youth participate at least once in gang rape. Sexual violence is an everyday dimension of community life. There tends to be less in smaller communities such as hamlets and more in larger communities such as cities.

Sartin: It's yet nicer to know that half the males in FATALworld are rapists or former rapists. Really.

If identified, rapists are imprisoned for weeks, though no more than a month. If the victim withdraws the complaint, the rapist is freed immediately. Imprisonment for rape consists of flogging, unless the rapist is an outsider, in which case the rapist is banished. When freed from imprisonment, a rapist is not considered criminal nor considered to be bad.

Sartin: It's even more nice to know that rape apparently doesn't constitute a "serious" offense in FATALworld (given that the first paragraph of the Justice section suggests "hanging for serious offenses" for those who want to keep things simple, and the same section lists rape as the least severe of 45 crimes). Really.

The social reaction to rape is rarely favorable to the victim. The human victims of gang rape are between the ages of 15 and 33. Child rape is rare. The rape of a child under the age of 14 or 15 is considered a serious crime. The victim loses her good name in almost all cases, and encounters difficulty in regaining her place in society and family. If the victim of rape is single, then fewer males desire her as a wife. If she is married, her husband may abandon her. Priests comprise 20% of the clientele at private brothels and public baths. Some priests are even members of nightly gang rapes. The victim of gang rape almost never accuses them of committing sodomy.

I soiled my review to put that in there. I thought that you should see the kind of people that you're dealing with. Sartin: It's nicest of all that - ah, hell with it. FATALworld is a piece of shit with as much connection to reality (historical or otherwise) as urinal cakes have to real food. Really.

I share Darren's annoyance, and then some. I'd love to hear a reputable expert explain how all this could possibly be historically accurate. I wasn't kidding when I said rape is listed as the least severe of 45 crimes. Gambling, failing to pay your rent, vagrancy, and being a wife who keeps a fucking disorderly house are all listed as more severe.

It might be possible to be more of a waste of skin than Hall is, but it'd take more work than climbing a mountain. I mean, really. Hall and his idiot fanboys aren't even wannabe rapists. They're rapists' cheerleaders. Think about how pathetic that is.

Medieval enlightenment on the women's rights was pretty weak, but Jesus - it was never this bad, ever. I'm sick to my stomach from having to read this shit; it's transparently poor scholarship and an even shittier attitude. They express absolutely no qualms about the victim, or what the aftermath of rape is; no, instead there's more statistics, so that they can further dehumanize what they hate. As a matter of fact, it's fairly obvious that the author just grabbed the sentences that supported his warped little views and pasted them into his .pdf.

Oh, but you'll be glad to know the victim of a gang rape almost never accuses her attackers of sodomy. I don't know why it's useful information, but it's in there for some reason. You'd have to think hard, and also be under the influence of a great many drugs, to figure out why Hall chose to throw that in there. The motherfucker.

Sartin: It's his idea of subtlety. He can't exactly come out and say "Huh huh. Rape is cool!" in as many words, but he can present settings where the worst consequence for it is for pussies. (Forgive the horrible, horrible pun.)

And what's worse about this is that the author doesn't see his own bias; he'll go on and on about how well it's been researched, but all that he's done is read a few books and declared himself an expert. He confuses Rome and medieval Europe, he compresses some five hundred years worth of legal argument into a series of gory, cruel punishments, he ignores legal developments like the Star Chamber or the Magna Carta - and the result is a bitter stew of repressed misogyny and hatred. We're always kept up to date on the status of how women can be raped and degraded, but there's never mention of justice for women - and if the law didn't do anything to fix it, I can guarantee that the old justice of clan vengeance would have applied at some point. Shit, even in Biblical times the punishment for rape was death, and that carried on throughout the years. The reason why it doesn't look familiar to students of history is because it never happened.

This started out as a funny review, but FATAL's starting to make me wish that the entire human race would just spontaneously combust and die.

Sartin: And since I already started the review at that point, I'm pretty much to where you're looking for things that look like FATAL players and setting them on fire. I'll end up incinerating a lot of dildos and basement-dwelling greaseshits on accident, but it'll have to do.

In case you're sick of hating the author for his misogyny, you can start hating him for his obsession with crappy rules. If you want to create a druidic circle, then you have to use the following formula:

Result = (Ae) + Ae(N1/2-1)

That quiet chomping noise you're hearing is the noise that my backbrain makes while it's eating my forebrain, out of rebellion at having to do this.

What the formula there suggests is something like number of druids versus time of season or something or other; I don't really care. If you have to do binomial equations in order to figure out how large a circle is, rather than abstracting it, I'm not interested.

OM NOM NOM NOM TEXT OM NOM NOM

There's an exhaustive list of occupations, most of which I can't be bothered to go over; you can probably get the same list by getting a better system, like D&D 3rd Edition or Rolemaster or WFRP, which does dark medieval fantasy a thousand yards better than FATAL - and checking the net for medieval occupations, rather than using FATAL's. (Like you have to be told.) You'll be pleased to know that whores gain experience for bringing their clients off, just in case you weren't feeling dirty already.

Sartin: The "occupations" are basically FATAL's character classes. So along with mages, warriors, and druids, you could be a 5th level dicemaker or delouser or whore or whatever. Interestingly (never let it be said that I absolutely refuse to give credit where it's due), characters actually have to do things related to their occupation to get Advancement Points towards their next level, rather than the generic XP for adventuring in most games. It's not very compellingly done, though. I'm not sure what the point is of being, oh, a bailiff (10 AP for winning a case! 10 more each month your lord's manor is stocked!) or grocer (1/20 of 1 AP per unit of staple food sold!) when most of the combat professions get AP for inflicting damage (10 or 20 AP or more for hitting someone once with a big sword!). As such, all the mundane occupations did not need to be presented as 50,000 or so extra choices - D&D3's ubiquitous "expert" class was an elegant solution for such throwaway characters and jobs. And you fans of AD&D1's old "1 gold piece found = 1 XP" rule will love the Bandit, who gets far more AP for stealing/looting money than many occupations could ever score earning it (that bandits also get damage AP is just icing on an ass-shaped cake). (Hypothetically, you could just have two bandit characters steal from each other until they're the best thieves in the world. Good looking out, Hall.) Plus, the AP total for each level doubles each time. Which gets really annoying after a while. Even warriors who hack and slash all day or bandits who steal millions of silver per victim will take a long ass time to get the 524,288,000 AP needed for 20th level (but hey. If you can only make it to 262,000,000, that's almost good enough for 19th level). The Maim Master (FATAL gamemaster, alcohol help us) can speed things up a lot by opting to award bonus points for things like accomplishing goals and "group cohesiveness", but if you're interested in playing this game, those probably aren't your high points. Then again, if you're running this game, giving a shit probably isn't your high point, either. More problematic is that FATAL is very generous when you change occupations. All you have to do is get to at least 2nd level with the one you have, and you can start over at 1st level with another one. Which means that when the AP requirement gets too stupid with your combat occupation, you can just switch to another, similar one and gain 5-10 levels (and all the attendant benefits) with the same AP it would have taken you to gain 1 level before. Also, you only gain more Skill Points when you go up a level. This was annoying enough in D&D3, Rolemaster, and countless other games, but at least those were usually sane in what you get (and how you can spend it). FATAL, by contrast, gives most races like 75+1d100 Skill Points per level. That would allow you to probably get that Urination up to +100 right at 2nd level, but in another money shot for you sociopathic accountants, each skill can only have d10 points dumped into it per level (because "skills grow both at different rates for different characters"). And yes, you have to re-roll it each time. Worse, you can only spend points on skills you've been using or training. Let's face it, you probably haven't been working on the 8-175 or so different skills it might take to dump all your points. This is naturally another of those "Did he even PLAY this before he flung it our way?" moments. The entire thing is way too random to really be considered sane. (On the upside, at least everyone of the same race gets the same treatment, SP-wise. In D&D3, it's always been annoying how, no matter how intelligent they are or how well-educated a background they might come from, a fighter or wizard can never have more skills than, say, a rogue. Yeah, I know, it's a game balance thing, but in-game, this has never made sense. I guess FATAL isn't any better - every human gets the same SP roll, regardless of background or education - but whatever.)

The skill list isn't too bad, although there's about twenty more skills for divination than there should be - the author decided that it'd be a good idea to split up each individual method of divination, from horse entrails to candle wax to whatever the hell they came up with. I'm reminded of Rolemaster for some reason, although I've never seen that product in full.

Sartin: The skills are too narrow for my tastes (did "Weapon, General Type", "Weapon, Specific", and "Weapon, Mastery" all have to be separate skills?), but by this point, the problems with this game run far beyond such a matter of preference. Naturally, since this is FATAL, Hall doesn't miss too many opportunities to explain how skills like Intimidation, Wrestling, and Logic can be applied to rape and sucking.

Detail-wise, skills work by rolling d100 + (skill's Skill Points) + (average of listed sub-ability modifiers), and hoping the result is high enough. It's not the worst way to do it (if you can forget that whole ugly process of how skills increase), but Darren is right to be reminded of Rolemaster.

As a matter of fact, the batshit craziness gets turned down a little for the section on weapons, which goes into encyclopedic detail on various weapons and items and so forth. And it's perfectly normal, although you can buy a chastity belt if you happen to want to remind yourself that you're reading FATAL. (I did find out that you can use aged urine to put out fires, which sounds just crazy enough to be historically accurate.)

Sartin: And I learned condoms can be made out of goat bladders and animal intestines, medieval dildos are made of stone, and the "rhythm method" can really work! (Condoms can be made out of animal bladders and intestines- you've probably seen lambskin condoms at the drugstore - but everything else, probably not so much. I fear to research the origins and history of the dildo, for instance.) No, we're not back to the bullshit craziness, we've been there the whole time.

Combat. Ah, back to the bullshit craziness.

Okay, check this shit: This is your initiative roll:

(1d100) +/- (Reaction Speed Skill Modifier) - (Delivery Penalty).

In other words, you roll d100, then add on your speed modifier, then subtract your delivery penalty. Basically, the weapon that you're wielding determines when you move - so if you're carrying a broadsword, and all you want to do is run away, you're going to have to sit there while they peg on you until it's your turn to act. Doesn't matter that you're not using the broadsword; this is FATAL, not your nancy-pancy system that makes sense. The instant after we get a description of initiative, we immediately into rules for coma and death - including a lengthy discussion of the stages of putrefaction, invaluable for Call of Cthulhu but utterly irrelevant to the chapter at hand. If you want to role-play a decaying corpse, try All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

I want to go into detail about the combat system. I'd like to, but I keep finding myself idly gouging chunks of flesh out of my arm whenever I try to summarize it. It's not entirely bad; just overcomplicated and mechanical.

Sartin: FATAL combat didn't suck as absolutely as I was expecting. For the most part, it's a poor man's D&D3 stapled to that homebrew system everyone makes when they get drunk and realize Rolemaster doesn't go far enough. Sure, that's bad, even really bad, but it's not as sanity-wrackingly horrible as, say, Imagine combat. I guess that would be another one of those "on the bright side" vs. "you haven't been huffing butane" observations, though. Anyway, everyone has a basic "Current Armor" number you have to roll over to hit them, and the number can be increased by agility and wearing armor. Current Armor is insanely low unless the target's armor's got serious nuts - two unarmored, evenly-matched 1st level humans will hit each other 90% of the time in this game (more, if they're using an actual Weapon Skill). So unless you just suck beyond all comprehension, you'll probably get to roll your weapon's damage. But don't worry too much about getting hit all the time. Unlike the D&D3 approach so far that this very much should not resemble, you can learn the Parry skill, which gives you an opposed roll against any attack, all round long, without costing you any penalties or actions. Just the thing for when you don't have Ceremonial Plate Mail or are facing some bastard who kept rolling a 10 for his Weapon Skill every level up! Meanwhile, every armor also has different percentages that it can add or deduct from incoming Pounding, Hacking, Stabbing, Wind, Burning, Cold, Brawling, or ah fuck it I stopped caring damage. Yeah, that shouldn't be too annoying after my calculator gets thrown out the window (eh, I'd just use Stabbing weapons. Almost every armor is all but worthless against them). And if you have multiple attacks, you have to roll separate initiatives for each one. And Darren already mentioned the delivery penalty thing (but don't worry about that, either. If your weapon has more reach than your foe's, you automatically win initiative if you can keep backing up!). And the time listed for bandaging wounds is "not in active combat", but casting a 10th level spell is "one week". (Was there EVER a campaign anywhere that had a week-long swordfight?) Christ with a shitstick! Can't Hall at least pretend to think these things out? There are other things - "smiting" (or, as most English-speakers would say it, "knocking down") a target when you damage it enough, called shots (hey! I can target someone's needle if it's "non-living and immobile"!), morale checks, breathing, falling, charging - but I'm tired now, and it's nothing you haven't seen 10,000 times in other fantasy games. Oh, well, at least your Life Points don't go up each level. And they're not so high it would be impossible to cleave an average human in half with one swipe from a two-handed sword. That may be the first glimpse of realism we've seen all game, and it only took 400 pages to find. Actually, the falling chart also reveals that Hall has at least peeked inside a physics book. The acceleration formula was done correctly (at least for meters; Hall used 3 instead of the more accurate 3.28 when converting to feet), and the figure given for human terminal velocity (114.95 feet per second) is perilously close to the most commonly accepted figure (120 feet per second). So, wow. Two blatant nods towards realism! Enjoy it while it lasts. Pitch hitting for criticals in FATAL are natural attack rolls of 90+, which give you a percent chance of scoring a roll on the relevant Crucial Damage table. But we'll get to that in a minute. Let's just say that Hall is about to put on his +5 Cockrin