Weather the Cuckoo Likes

by Robin D. Laws

This is the weather the cukoo likes, armored division submissive to vernacular the world into a gambling birdhouse velocity. The Cut-Ups Project is the Al Amarjan wing of the Chaos Boys, an international (and interdimensional) group devoted to thwarting the plans of Control Addicts everywhere. If you know Al Amarja, you know it's full of control addicts! The Cut-Ups don't attack the various conspiracies they oppose, but instead strike out at the very fabric of reality on which all of their insidious plans depend. As a sourcebook, Weather the Cuckoo Likes will bring you along on the Cut-Ups' outrageous exploits. It * Descriptions of individual Cut-Ups, from the Andalusia Dog to noted game designer Robert "Doc" Cross;
* Foes of the Cut-Ups, including the unfathomable Koanhead;
* The Coatless Code, which guides the Chaos Boys (and also fits very nicely on a placemat);
* Optional Cut-Up a completely new approach to game mechanics, for OTE or any other game, based on little scraps of paper with words on them;
* Cut-Up fringe devices, from the Cut-Ups Machine itself to the Collective Unconscious Swizzle Stick;
* Two Complete Adventures, to throw your PCs right into the zany fringes of Reality that the Cut-Ups call home!

Genres: Role Playing Games, Horror

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws brought you such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, The Dying Earth, Heroquest and Feng Shui. He is the author of seven novels, most recently The Worldwound Gambit from Paizo. For Robin's much-praised works of gaming history and analysis, see Hamlet's Hit Points, Robin's Laws of Game Mastering and 40 Years of Gen Con.

Reviews

[Benjamin]

Part 4 of my 4 part review of everything Over the Edge related, probably to be followed up by a part 5 when I read Robin D. Laws's short novel, and then maybe part 6 when I get around to the newest edition (3rd).

This time, I'm reading just five books, three adventures and two sourcebooks. The adventures:
* It waits — an overstuffed adventure with psychic rats and attacking trees and mice hives, new races and power groups — and too many "!", which kind of represents the problem I have with this adventure (it's just too much, but maybe that's the thrill of Over the Edge)
* Sylvan Pines — there's a mental institution, your PCs are there, and there's a murder. A classic set-up with not a lot of twists. If you were to write this today, you'd have to play a bit more with the tropes. Also I'm not thrilled with some of the very 90s set of NPCs (including a sexually repressed therapist and a nymphomaniac)
* With a long spoon — racists (Black and white, and at least one Jewish supremacist) end up in a fight while trying to unlock psychic potential. Maybe this feels like the most 90s thing of all, the idea that all racism is bad (yes), so that all racists are equivalent (no....). I feel like there's also an edginess here that bums me out. I understand a bit of what they're going for here: presenting a situation with clear villains and then asking the PCs which villains they'll help or if they can bring them all down. But still, it would require a big change to make playable these days.

The sourcebooks:
* Wildest Dreams — all about the drug Nightmare, the thought-forms-brought to life that are tulpas, and the psychopaths that prey on them. Again, this is a book about bad people, and it's clear that the PCs role is probably to stop the powerful from oppressing the weak, but the focus on the bad makes this book a little sad. The included adventure notes that it has no humor, which is definitely how it reads.
* Weather the cuckoo likes — and here's the humor and also the bite: the sourcebook for the Cut-Ups, those Burroughsian chaos agents who fight control addiction in all its forms. Like most of the OTE books, this has info on NPCs, weird tech, some locations. (It also includes some special rules for cut-ups, which is basically: can you make a sentence out of some set of random words?) And here we are back on OTE's prime ground, for me: a serious issue (Laws's short essay on what control addiction is, what it feels like to be powerless and also to have some, even minor sense of power over something) mixed in with the weird and the farcical (talking dogs, animate cartoons giving you warnings, etc.).