The Power Of Rock / Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Although it's drifted out of focus, the Orks have overtones of this. In Rogue Trader times, there were even fully statted out Goffic Rokk band miniatures.
  • The Noise Marines blast the enemy with deafening noise, a way-beyond-sanity version of this trope. Back in older and funnier editions, they were equipped with electric guitars.
    • There was a vehicle upgrade available to equip their vehicles, and possibly dreadnoughts, with speakers and organ pipes for heavy rock support.
  • The Sisters Of Battle have the Exorcist, a rocket-firing artillery platform in the form of a pipe organ, with a Sister driving the tank and a servitor playing the organ and/or launching the missiles.
• Starchildren: Velvet Generation has glam rock aliens come to the future where the danger of emotions means that Rock has been suppressed by the Culture Police. The titular Starchildren want to free the mass of humanity from their emotional blinders with the power of rock, and their alien magic powers.
• Cyberpunk 2020 has the Rockerboy "class", who's special skill is "charismatic leadership". It allows him to influence ever greater crowds of people.
• Dungeons & Dragons has, for some years, sported a Bard class. Bards do a little bit of everything... and also boast The Power of Rock.
  • Indeed, an epic level bard has at least a 30% chance of secretly being Freddie Mercury.
  • At the highest levels, they can kill you with their music. The concept is that they can rock you so hard that there's nothing left for you to live for. So you don't.
  • Some prestige classes allow a bard to sing down lightning or fire on their enemies, while another can play loud enough to wake the dead.
• Myriad Song has Xenharmonics, the local Expy of the Force, which runs on musical theory. As a result, a lot of the Lost Technology resembles musical instruments, the reason why the setting is Cassette Futurism is because the Neglectful Precursors used analog methods for manipulating Xenharmonics and they (and thus the other civilizations on the galaxy) never bothered to upgrade to digital, and finally a lot of the Newspeak utilized on the rules/setting is musical terminology.
• The Rockalypse third-party sourcebook for the Fate system outright replaces the usual combat skills and conflict rules with ones for musical showdowns, which are of course the only way to settle matters in any of its several suggested more-or-less postapocalyptic setting outlines — guns, fists and the like are simply not even used.
• Gods of Metal: Ragnarock is very similar to Brütal Legend. The characters are transported from their boring lives in Mundania to the Power of Rock fantasy world Ragnarock, as living Avatars of various genres of Heavy Metal.

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