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Conspiracy X RPG
Conspiracy X
On the surface the world looks very much like the one outside your bedroom window. The same people are walking the same dirty streets, the same animals rummage through the same garbage, and the same mindless drivel is shown on the same television stations. Sometimes that world just doesn't seem right. You wake up in the morning and get the feeling that something isn't as it should be. Why do certain figures appear out of nowhere and become famous overnight? Why do the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer? What is the government really paying for when it shells out 75 bucks for a screwdriver? Why is it the more questions you ask the less answers you get? Why is it any answer always leads to another question? Sometimes you cannot see what defines your world. This is the nature of conspiracies. This is the nature of Conspiracy X. Conspiracy X takes place in a world of dark secrets and hidden agendas where the only certainty is nothing is what it seems. The president might not be human... and the sign carrying paranoid on the street corner ranting about CIA mind control satellites may very well be right. In other words, a world just like yours, if you could see beyond the lies... Welcome to the World of Conspiracy X.
- GenresRole Playing Games
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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July 22, 2021For the longest time I had this core rulebook that I remember really enjoying, so I went ahead and filled out my collection, and here's what I found:
Books reviewed:
* Conspiracy X (1996)
* The Aegis Handbook (1997) – Player's Guide to Aegis.
* The Hand Unseen (2002) – Player's Guide to the NDD, or Black Book.
* Nemesis (1999) – Grey sourcebook.
* Atlantis Rising (1998) – Atlantean sourcebook.
* Exodus (1999) – Saurian sourcebook.
* Forsaken Rites (1997) – Supernatural sourcebook.
* Shadows of the Mind (1999) – Psi sourcebook.
* Cryptozoology (1997) – Dossier of the Unexplained.
* Sub Rosa (1999) – Conspiracy Creation sourcebook.
* Gamemaster Screen (1996) – with adventure module included.
* Psi Wars (1998) – Introduces Dreaming, New Credentials, Trait and Resources, Alternate Weapon Ranges, Compilation of Alien Technology Resource Points and Psionics, New Informational Sources, Fear and insanity Rules, Manifestations, Biological, chemical, and radioactive menaces. The majority of the supplement is Psi-Wars, a complete Conspiracy X scenario.
* Mokole (1998)
* Synergy (1999) – Introduces Rules for Toxins and Poisons. The majority of the supplement is Synergy, a complete Conspiracy X scenario.
Conspiracy X is one of the mid-to-late-90s games of, well, let's just say it's the X-Files: Delta Green (first published rulebook in 1997, though earlier works reference it) is X-Files with Call of Cthulhu (you are agents of a secret agency, fighting not only alien invasion, but the humans who are working with those aliens); Dark*Matter (1999) is X-Files but it's an NGO (and you still have to be worried about various human conspiracies as well as the aliens and cultists). Conspiracy X is just that: you belong to a secret ex-government agency (Aegis) dedicated to saving humanity from aliens and weirdness, and have to work against your one-time friends in the Black Book, which is a fully-funded government agency that is working with aliens. Now, since your real calling is secret, you have a cover job, whether that's with the CDC or the Army or etc., so your team may try to "pull strings" to get resources from your actual job. (Funny there's only one or two "gig economy monster hunting games, seems like "your side hustle is defending humanity" could be a fun setup.)
And that sort of is the core of the game, at least as far as the corebook is concerned. Now, I loved the X-Files, and even put up an X in tape on my window, so I was bound to love the core concept of the game (i.e., "trust no one"), but there were a few fillips that probably put this over the top for me, like the cell creation rules (love a system that lets you buy a lair) and the fact that psychic power use was based on the use of Zener cards. (So, if you shoot, you try to roll under your shooting ability, or something. But if you're trying to remote view something, you tell the GM what Zener card you're thinking about and if that's the card that's pulled, you succeed. So dumb, but flavorful.)
Now, this is a book from the 90s, so there's some 90s game design and layout issues, which I will address here: some of the black-and-white art is effective, some is generic X-Files and even just generic generic, and some looks like sketches. (I think White Wolf really set the trend for contemporary b&w art in the 90s); there's also too much playing with fonts -- like a whole supernatural section that to me seems unreadable; there's also a few areas where the background art isn't faded enough, again making it hard to read. Maybe people are still doing this today, but it also strikes me as very 90s in a "wow look at this style" sort of way.
One other general comment for about all these books: they cover some facet of the setting, which means that they have several chapters of player material (so in the Cryptozoology book, there's new options for professions/secret societies) and several chapters of GM-only material. I'm just not sure how to use this book -- do I photocopy pages for the players? Do the players promise not to read on into the GM material?
Anyway, those are all, in a way, minor issues, because my big issue with an omnibus conspiracy game is the same as my issue with the X-Files: does it have to be everything? Gray aliens who come to investigate humanity because our psychic residue is interfering with their reproduction (which leads to them creating both human-alien hybrids and dolphin-alien hybrids)? Sure, that's cool. Secret lizardmen masters who once ruled the earth (and who almost wiped themselves out in a religious war, so that the remaining Saurians don't have the same agenda)? Oh, we need that. Prehuman immortals with magical nanotech and also here's another chapter all about their secret history and culture? Well, I'm not sure how I'd bring that into my game. Sasquatch? Maybe. Secret magical sasquatch who helped humanity overthrew their alien overlords? Uh, what? Oh, and what about demons, supernatural seepage, human failing to become the incarnate forms of monsters but becoming something else? No, what, no?
Maybe this smorgasbord approach is good because it lets people tailor their games so that you could play a romp of a monster-hunt game and then play a "is it an alien or a vampire?" game and then play a "secret lizardmen pacifism cult" game, but I'm having trouble holding it all together. (In a way, this is what makes Delta Green really work: everything weird from the 90s can be included, but it all goes back to something Lovecraftian. Aliens? Magic? Cults? Monsters? Yes, yes, yes, yes -- and also no, because it's all Hastur and the Mi-Go and everything else.)
There's several interesting ideas here in the weeds (I really am amused by the idea of the Grey-dolphin hybrids, especially since they call themselves the Blue; and the idea that the Saurians don't all have the same agenda is a good reminder), but I'm really not sure I would ever play this game so much as steal some of the ideas here. Also, I think the "shades of gray" aspect might be very hard to play in a conspiracy game: when you already don't know who you can trust to support you in your agenda, it's nice to have a clear idea of what that agenda is. Like, the last book in the series takes the standard bad guys -- humans working with aliens -- and offers a different take, which is interesting, but again, what the heck are players supposed to do with this information? (Honestly, maybe there's a good premise there for a game: you are part of the good conspiracy and your job isn't to stop the bad conspiracy, but to convert as many of them as possible.)
Another reason to use these books as choppable for parts is that there's so much that's just not playable. Like, yes, one of the joys of conspiracy fiction is to uproot the secret history of "what's really going on" but there's so much background here that the players won't ever be able to uproot outside of a "hey, we found this Atlantean diary" -- and even if they did, it wouldn't really change the game.
One final note before I run out of words: The last three books in the list above are from the digest-sized book series that was supposed to come out regularly with new rules and adventures. This series was badly titled "Bodyguard of Lies," and you can tell it's a bad title because they always prominently included the Churchill quote that the phrase comes from. As a resource, eh, maybe you need an exhaustive list of different poisons or yet another subsystem (on dreams), but for me what was most interesting was what a time capsule it was, with all the aol addresses, calls for freelance writers, and hope about what else they have planned for this series. Also apparently there was a tie-in watch? That isn't the weirdest thing in these books, but it's up there.
Books reviewed:
* Conspiracy X (1996)
* The Aegis Handbook (1997) – Player's Guide to Aegis.
* The Hand Unseen (2002) – Player's Guide to the NDD, or Black Book.
* Nemesis (1999) – Grey sourcebook.
* Atlantis Rising (1998) – Atlantean sourcebook.
* Exodus (1999) – Saurian sourcebook.
* Forsaken Rites (1997) – Supernatural sourcebook.
* Shadows of the Mind (1999) – Psi sourcebook.
* Cryptozoology (1997) – Dossier of the Unexplained.
* Sub Rosa (1999) – Conspiracy Creation sourcebook.
* Gamemaster Screen (1996) – with adventure module included.
* Psi Wars (1998) – Introduces Dreaming, New Credentials, Trait and Resources, Alternate Weapon Ranges, Compilation of Alien Technology Resource Points and Psionics, New Informational Sources, Fear and insanity Rules, Manifestations, Biological, chemical, and radioactive menaces. The majority of the supplement is Psi-Wars, a complete Conspiracy X scenario.
* Mokole (1998)
* Synergy (1999) – Introduces Rules for Toxins and Poisons. The majority of the supplement is Synergy, a complete Conspiracy X scenario.
Conspiracy X is one of the mid-to-late-90s games of, well, let's just say it's the X-Files: Delta Green (first published rulebook in 1997, though earlier works reference it) is X-Files with Call of Cthulhu (you are agents of a secret agency, fighting not only alien invasion, but the humans who are working with those aliens); Dark*Matter (1999) is X-Files but it's an NGO (and you still have to be worried about various human conspiracies as well as the aliens and cultists). Conspiracy X is just that: you belong to a secret ex-government agency (Aegis) dedicated to saving humanity from aliens and weirdness, and have to work against your one-time friends in the Black Book, which is a fully-funded government agency that is working with aliens. Now, since your real calling is secret, you have a cover job, whether that's with the CDC or the Army or etc., so your team may try to "pull strings" to get resources from your actual job. (Funny there's only one or two "gig economy monster hunting games, seems like "your side hustle is defending humanity" could be a fun setup.)
And that sort of is the core of the game, at least as far as the corebook is concerned. Now, I loved the X-Files, and even put up an X in tape on my window, so I was bound to love the core concept of the game (i.e., "trust no one"), but there were a few fillips that probably put this over the top for me, like the cell creation rules (love a system that lets you buy a lair) and the fact that psychic power use was based on the use of Zener cards. (So, if you shoot, you try to roll under your shooting ability, or something. But if you're trying to remote view something, you tell the GM what Zener card you're thinking about and if that's the card that's pulled, you succeed. So dumb, but flavorful.)
Now, this is a book from the 90s, so there's some 90s game design and layout issues, which I will address here: some of the black-and-white art is effective, some is generic X-Files and even just generic generic, and some looks like sketches. (I think White Wolf really set the trend for contemporary b&w art in the 90s); there's also too much playing with fonts -- like a whole supernatural section that to me seems unreadable; there's also a few areas where the background art isn't faded enough, again making it hard to read. Maybe people are still doing this today, but it also strikes me as very 90s in a "wow look at this style" sort of way.
One other general comment for about all these books: they cover some facet of the setting, which means that they have several chapters of player material (so in the Cryptozoology book, there's new options for professions/secret societies) and several chapters of GM-only material. I'm just not sure how to use this book -- do I photocopy pages for the players? Do the players promise not to read on into the GM material?
Anyway, those are all, in a way, minor issues, because my big issue with an omnibus conspiracy game is the same as my issue with the X-Files: does it have to be everything? Gray aliens who come to investigate humanity because our psychic residue is interfering with their reproduction (which leads to them creating both human-alien hybrids and dolphin-alien hybrids)? Sure, that's cool. Secret lizardmen masters who once ruled the earth (and who almost wiped themselves out in a religious war, so that the remaining Saurians don't have the same agenda)? Oh, we need that. Prehuman immortals with magical nanotech and also here's another chapter all about their secret history and culture? Well, I'm not sure how I'd bring that into my game. Sasquatch? Maybe. Secret magical sasquatch who helped humanity overthrew their alien overlords? Uh, what? Oh, and what about demons, supernatural seepage, human failing to become the incarnate forms of monsters but becoming something else? No, what, no?
Maybe this smorgasbord approach is good because it lets people tailor their games so that you could play a romp of a monster-hunt game and then play a "is it an alien or a vampire?" game and then play a "secret lizardmen pacifism cult" game, but I'm having trouble holding it all together. (In a way, this is what makes Delta Green really work: everything weird from the 90s can be included, but it all goes back to something Lovecraftian. Aliens? Magic? Cults? Monsters? Yes, yes, yes, yes -- and also no, because it's all Hastur and the Mi-Go and everything else.)
There's several interesting ideas here in the weeds (I really am amused by the idea of the Grey-dolphin hybrids, especially since they call themselves the Blue; and the idea that the Saurians don't all have the same agenda is a good reminder), but I'm really not sure I would ever play this game so much as steal some of the ideas here. Also, I think the "shades of gray" aspect might be very hard to play in a conspiracy game: when you already don't know who you can trust to support you in your agenda, it's nice to have a clear idea of what that agenda is. Like, the last book in the series takes the standard bad guys -- humans working with aliens -- and offers a different take, which is interesting, but again, what the heck are players supposed to do with this information? (Honestly, maybe there's a good premise there for a game: you are part of the good conspiracy and your job isn't to stop the bad conspiracy, but to convert as many of them as possible.)
Another reason to use these books as choppable for parts is that there's so much that's just not playable. Like, yes, one of the joys of conspiracy fiction is to uproot the secret history of "what's really going on" but there's so much background here that the players won't ever be able to uproot outside of a "hey, we found this Atlantean diary" -- and even if they did, it wouldn't really change the game.
One final note before I run out of words: The last three books in the list above are from the digest-sized book series that was supposed to come out regularly with new rules and adventures. This series was badly titled "Bodyguard of Lies," and you can tell it's a bad title because they always prominently included the Churchill quote that the phrase comes from. As a resource, eh, maybe you need an exhaustive list of different poisons or yet another subsystem (on dreams), but for me what was most interesting was what a time capsule it was, with all the aol addresses, calls for freelance writers, and hope about what else they have planned for this series. Also apparently there was a tie-in watch? That isn't the weirdest thing in these books, but it's up there.
December 26, 2022
On one level, you've got to admire the brazenness of Conspiracy X's bid to do an X-Files RPG without actually having the X-Files licence. On the other hand, its mythology isn't that compelling and when Delta Green exists and does this better and more artfully, what's the point? Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews