Tabletop role-playing game created by Kirby Lee Davis in the early 1980s. Only about a dozen copies were sold, and the game would've vanished into obscurity if not for a review by an April Fool's edition of The Dragon. Thing is, the reviewers couldn't tell if the game was supposed to be serious.
The game's name appeared many times in the classic "Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins" list, as being the favorite game system for The Loonie.
If you actually want to see the rules, an online review is available here.
It's not pretty.
There was also a 40th anniversary edition released.
This game provides examples of:
- Asbestos-Free Cereal: The game has a character sheet at the back of the book, which the book claims is "just for fun!". Oh, those wacky game designers, making it so customers can actually use their product!
- Character Level:it takes 1000 to reach second level, 3500 to reach 3rd level, and progressively more thereafter until by 18th level you have to rack up a monumental 1,200,000 x.p. to gain another level. And, as you might expect, when you gain a level, you gain hit points.
gaining a level [...] gives you a chance to raise your statistics. - Experience Points: You don't have to win fights to get EXP, you can just pick up treasure or go on unexplained missions. As the review says:The number of hit points of damage you inflict, times the experience level of a human target or the "lair type" listed for the creature you attacked, plus the Detect Level of the target creature, equals your experience point award.
- Game-Favored Gender: A woman's physical traits are halved.
- Fictional Currency: The basic currency unit in Fashan isn't the gold piece, or the silver piece, or the penny — it's the "Bank Note".
- Inherently Funny Words: Several, some intentional, some not:
- The example setting included in the game is "Boosboodle, a land just south of where Melvin is standing now."
- Among the fearsome animals roaming Boosboodle are the Worlong, the Bartaln, the Macanda Cur, the Lantal, the Tractorn, the Melark, the Filcornect, the Mantax, the Baero, and the Bull Makl.
- No Woman's Land: The basic rules assume that your character is male. If you want to play a female, you have to divide your die rolls for strength, constitution, and Hit Points by 2, and multiply your die rolls for charisma by 1.5. Since the rules are already obscure and hard-to-follow enough as it is, most players (if there were any) would choose to play a male just because it would simplify their lives. (But don't worry, the game isn't sexist, because the authors say in the introduction that they're not sexist so it must be true.)
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: One of the monsters is a snake like creature called a concor which is listed as weighing 1/10 of its length (in feet) in pounds, meaning a 10 foot long one would weigh 1 pound. As the review says, such a snake would have to be pretty damn scrawny.
