Friend or Foe?

by Jonathan Tweet (Editor)

Who Can You Trust? The chain-smoking man can show you around the Edge for cheap. The pale-skinned Englishwoman can get you in touch with the magician you're looking for. The officer from the Center for Paranormal Control assures you she won't bust you for having an unregistered psychic power, provided you fill out a few forms. A charity caseworker is asking lots of questions about your neighbors' personal lives. A sharply dressed Japanese woman wants to know the name of the bully who used to beat you up on the schoolyard. Dr. Hamati is once again giving his infamous lecture on "Caste, Class, Status, and Mediocrity." It all seems innocent enough, but this is the Edge, and you know better. Friend or Foe? is a collection of thirty-four Game Moderator Characters for Over the Edge GMs. Now, whenever you need to add more plots or personalities to your game, they are here at your fingertips. Whether you need heroes or villains, local color or a plot device, romance or suspense, a nightmare or slapstick, you'll find what you need right here.

Genres: Role Playing Games

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Tabletop game designer, children's science communicator. Grandmother Fish was a labor of love for 15 years.

Reviews

[Benjamin]

Part 3 of my 4 part review of Over the Edge, a roleplaying game I have various versions of, this entry covering a bunch of digital books I have, including

* At Your Service, a collection of locations and NPCs
* Cloaks, notes on fleshing out spies in Al Amarja (locations, NPCs, weird spy-tech)
* Friend or Foe?, a collection of NPCs
* Over the Edge 2e rulebook, which has a chart about which conspiracy likes which other conspiracy, but otherwise seems like the 1st edition, except with a 3-column layout that makes it a little harder to read
* Warped Adventures: Invasion, a little scenario that can be used with the OTE system where you play aliens trying to invade the White House

These digital copies are from a Bundle of Holding purchase that also included some books I have physical copies of and have already reviewed:

* Forgotten Lives
* Players' Survival Guide
* Unauthorized Broadcast

And a few physical books that I have on order:

* Weather the Cuckoo Likes
* Wildest Dreams

And a novel:

* Pierced Heart, the OTE novel by Robin D. Laws

(Oh, this post is a lot of logistics and background, I could call this "Oops! All about the process" and that would tell you that I am also listening to the Blank Check podcast Patreon episode where they are doing all box office games.)

So, what did I think about these books that are mostly more NPCs, more mysterious locations, more problems for the PCs? I loved them (except for the 2e rulebook), with Cloaks being the least interesting to me.

Also a note: one of the long-running possible themes in OTE as published is a meta commentary, where your characters may realize that they are characters in a game being controlled by other people. I... don't really like that, it seems like that angle would devalue all the other weirdness: "What does it mean? Oh, the universe is more complex than we could ever understand" is a strong open-ended question about the nature of the universe; "Oh, someone is writing this fiction that I thought was real life" is a fun destabilization but also a final answer that makes sense of everything being nonsense. (This comment brought to you by the fact that At Your Service includes a LARP-centered house and a comic book store.)

What I really enjoyed about At Your Service and Friend or Foe?:

* range of characters/locations, from the sinister and conspiratorial to the absolutely mundane -- from the devil who may be the villain behind a big campaign to the unhelpful but ordinary bureaucrat, from the living plants that feed on psychic energy to the corner bodega
* some of the characters have multiple versions so that you can decide whether they are charlatans or real magicians or people who misunderstand their own power -- is this the first time that was used?
* the fact that each character/location includes notes on story seeds (some pretty banal, like "here's a weird therapist, maybe you go see a therapist for therapy?")
* a lot of the stark line art, really emphasizing the sketched and hollowed out faces