Take That / Tabletop Games

• Warhammer:
  • In both versions, the entire Ork race are a Take That! at football hooligans even though fans tend to think of Orks as really funny but it's kind of obvious it's a take that when you realize they are to bricks what dumb as a brick is to normal people.
  • Among 40K's many planets with such names as Armageddon, Murder, Fenris, and Baal, one stands out as being differently horrible.
    Birmingham is also known as the Black Planet, as it receives almost no visible light from its system's sun. As a result, the planet receives few visitors, and its inhabitants have become linguistically and culturally isolated. Its technology is primitive compared to the rest of the Imperium, as the musket is still in use among the natives.
• The expanded Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies, and Munchkins list is littered with Take Thats directed at the likes of Star Trek, comic books, Gary Gygax, and whatever else the contributor wasn't personally fond of by attributing them to Munchkins — which, by extension, is probably an indicator of fan-hating.
• WoTC released a few animated shorts before the release of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, they focused on very specific monsters and races in terms of how 4th Edition would affect them. One of the shorts was about the red dragon and contained a very amusing reference to the "Edition Wars" in which traditionally whiny fanboys ranted about the suckiness and evil of 4th Edition. Said reference showed a forum being trolled by an actual troll that was promptly buried under a large pile of dragon excrement by the red dragon as it flew overhead.
• Old World of Darkness:
  • From a supplement to White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension: "This same century also sees the birth of many of the modern 'gypsy' stereotypes, which... lead to the fanciful romanticization of 'True Romany' as singing, dancing, scarf-wearing vagabonds. This stereotyping is perpetuated throughout the 20th century through works of popular fiction, cheap horror movies, 'medieval' or 'Renaissance' re-enactment societies, and badly researched role-playing game supplements." The same company had earlier released World of Darkness: Gypsies, a supplement playing on exactly those stereotypes.
  • A whole chapter of a Vampire sourcebook was a giant Take That! to the infamous Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand.
  • The Brujah clanbook features a "Fake Rapper" archetype, depicted as a white poser who claims to be from the streets but has no streetwise or combat abilities. It's obviously mocking Vanilla Ice, whose record label infamously tried to pass him off as a former gang member in a phony autobiography. The archetype is contrasted on the next page by a "Real Rapper" who looks more like Dr. Dre and has the stats you'd expect from a life on the streets.
• After the Secret Service raid on their premises was deemed to have been unlawful, Steve Jackson Games printed a card for their Illuminati: New World Order CCG depicting a Secret Service agent wearing the insignia of the Nazi SS. (Its special ability also helped KILL government employees by getting there "just a second too late", not save them, so even the game mechanism was a Take That.) A justification for the raid given was that the book whose manuscript they seized, GURPS Cyberpunk, was a handbook on computer crime, especially hacking. The result? They made Hacker shortly afterward, a board/card game focusing on computer hacking.
  • Also within the INWO universe, there is a card for Al Amarja, the setting for rival CCG On The Edge. This was in "retaliation" for On The Edge including a Bavarian Illuminati card. Both designers were, of course, in on it.
• Another, less malicious, Steve Jackson Games example, Car Wars featured an America that was mildly post-apocalyptic, having survived a limited nuclear engagement with Communists. The worst hit spot in Central United States? Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where main rival game designer TSR games had their headquarters.
• The Shadowrun Sourcebook Runner Havens has the following gem during a discussion of Hong Kong pirates:
  Runner: I heard that if they catch a ship, they rape everyone aboard to death, eat their flesh, and sew their skins into their clothing -- and if you're lucky, they do it in that order.
  Second Runner: What the hell have you been smoking?
• The bizarre Egg of Coot, a ruler in the Dungeons & Dragons Blackmoor setting, was a jab at Gregg Scott, an individual who'd previously given Dave Arneson some flak.
• Palladium Books include a description of an alignment system which includes a statement against neutral alignments, a feature of the Dungeons and Dragons based games. One sentence reads: No neutrals is one of the very few definitive, unbending rules of the game.
• A good-aligned drow? In Golarion? He wouldn't last long—no matter how badass of a ranger he was.
• In the Paranoia XP rulebook there constant jokey references to a certain other fantasy RPG being overly complicated, constantly calling it the Unfun RPG.
• The welcome page to Nobilis third edition refers to Guardians of Order having distributed the second edition until "they decided to stop sending out money and books and stuff and just lurk like a serpent, coiled around the dark heart of the world". Given what Guardians of Order were up to at the end, Dr Moran was probably due a shot or two.
• Fate of Cthulhu manages to throw in a dig at, of all people, Jonathan Franzen:
  Reading the Necronomicon is not in itself a problem. Much like, say, a Jonathan Franzen novel, it is confusing, nonsensical, but ultimately harmless. The trouble comes from — again, much like a Franzen novel — taking it seriously.
• Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed is a darkly humorous satire of hack-n-slash RPGs. When the rulebook isn't covering actual game mechanics, then the author is either taking potshots at the players or at tabletop RPGs and video games.
• Fabula Ultima: The empire of Elonia in the Press Start adventure is a subtle dig at Elon Musk, with its main characteristics being unstable constructs prone to malfunction, and stealing tech and materials from other countries to use them as their own.