Tonight I explored F.A.T.A.L.: the worst RPG ever.

Like many stories, this one will begin at the end. Jason Sartin, one of the first two humans to review FATAL (the poor bastard read all 900 pages of it), said this: "Personally, I want to believe FATAL was created by an AI that was instructed to 'Create the crappiest possible work that can still technically be considered a RPG' [...] the truth - that FATAL was created by actual human beings who weren't joking - is all the more depressing."

FATAL stands for "From Another Time, Another Land." This mundane title speaks little of the true experience of the game. Its original title does a much better job: "Fantasy and Tales of Adult Lechery." It comes off as hokey or even lightheartedly dark... It is not. This is the thankfully now defunct RPG whose mission was to "realistically" depict a "historical" fantasy environment in which Europe is the only continent that exists (an openly stated decision of the game's authors), women are mentally weaker than men (despite the game's own admittance that the highest recorded IQ was female), and violent rape is not just a possibility, but rather, a heavily emphasized center of game mechanics. All of these features are putrid examples of some of the lower points of human creativity, spawned from a P.h.D. no less, but no single feature of the game is quite as harrowing as the miasma which seems to spew forth from the work as a unified entity.

The sheer violence of FATAL as an experience dwarfs even the violence portrayed in the game. I say this about a game which includes rules for determining A) vaginal circumfrance and B) fist circumfrance as well as rules for when, during interaction, a character's B) exceeds another character's A)... Let's just say that I gave up on exploring the actual rulebook when I came to the section on miscarriage. It seemed that, as I skimmed from page to page, the book became ever more subtly twisted. This is not to say that it is not immediately apparent how disturbing this book is from the first page, but rather, that the pieces in conjunction really begin to work on one's mind. An otherwise random description of rules for pregnancy is much more disturbing after about 300 pages of rules for rape. I cannot begin to believe what reading all 900 pages would be like.

What I find to be most bothersome about the text is the straightfaced comfort of the voice it speaks in. On the first page of the book, the author explains a potential roleplaying choice:

"assume that you are an adventuring knight who has just fought his way to the top of a dark tower where you find a comely young maiden chained to the wall. Some may choose to free the whimpering wench. Others may free her while hoping to win her heart. Instead of seeking affection, some may talk to her to see if they can collect a reward for her safe return. Then again, others may be more interested in negotiating freedom for fellatio. Some may think she has no room to bargain and take their fleshly pleasures by force. Others would rather kill her, dismember her young cadaver, and feast on her warm innards."

At the same time that there is a rising crescendo of lust and depravity, there is the disconnected interest of a statistician. Here's a list; here are its contents. Alone, this passage is blandly gross like a B movie. In concert with the rest of the text it has an effect which, for me, at the moment, is incomprehensible. At this point, my reading of FATAL has really collapsed. It began as a playful romp through the "worst RPG ever," and now it has become something very different.

While I am quite aware of the power of communication, I am not generally of the camp which points its finger at violent media as dangerous or inflammatory. And I am not doing that in this case either. After the slow transformation of my reading of FATAL, I am, however, forced to think about what effect media violence has on us. Censorship and book burning are far more stupid than this book (which says a lot). But, from an anti-censorship point of view, I question what desensitization to violence does to us. While I could easily understand FATAL as the coded notes of a sociopath, it is most likely just the misguided attempt of stupid people (including a stupid PhD) to write a gross-out B movie style game. Either way, as a mass of the desensitized portayal of violence, it has developed the gravity to throw my evening off center. All I am saying is that that is worth note.

My reading of FATAL was heavily assisted by this satyrical review by Darren MacLennin and Jason Sartin as well as its Wikipedia page.