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| Tales from the Floating Vagabond core rulebook |
Avalon Hill's Role Playing Games
In the '80s of the last century Avalon Hill (AH), despite being no more the top company of adventure gaming (because TSR had displaced it courtesy of Dungeons & Dragons), it was still a giant and of course looking to enter the huge role playing market. So, in 1983 and 1984 respectively, AH released two RPGs: Lords of Creation (an interesting game where characters may have adventures in any time and setting) and Powers & Perils (a complex fantasy RPG). They were not exactly a roaring sales and popularity success and SJG's Fantasy Gamer gave both games quite unfavourable reviews in its sixth issue. Anyway, AH launched a magazine too, Heroes, that was to be the RPG equivalent of the venerable General boardgaming magazine and so covered AH RPGs only (including the indeed very successful James Bond RPG from Victory Games, a AH subsidiary): it lasted just ten issues. Then the giant reached an agreement with Chaosium for the release of the third edition of Runequest, deciding this time to license a game that was a sure winner. Albeit there was (and still there is ) a lot of criticism for AH's handling of the game (for example replacing Glorantha with a nebulos 'Fantasy Europe' as the default setting - great and intriguing map however), Runequest Third Edition was published from 1984 till 1994: in 1995 there was a fire sale with the Standard Edition and five sourcebooks for just $ 25. And that was it for AH RPGs? No, because in 1991 AH released Tales from the Floating Vagabond!
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| Fantasy Gamer's last issue covers AH first two RPGs |
An unusual offering
The humour genre in RPGs has always had a significant presence but it's not one of the bestselling themes and the only RPG of this kind really enduring is Paranoia: perhaps this is because, more than many other settings, a humour RPG really depends on the GM skills and players' partecipation, it does not lend itself to 'serious' campaigning and does not reward power and/or rules lawyering players. Anyway, this did not scare AH (perhaps looking at the sales success of Paranoia and, for a time, Toon, two games I love very much) that released in 1991 the core rulebook of Tales from the Floating Vagabond written by Nick Atlas (which is credited as editor and part of the production staff too!), Lee Garvin (which in the following decades will be regarded as the designer) and John Huff, with a cover by James Holloway (of TSR and Paranoia fame) and interior art by Vicky Wyman. Its a softbound, 96 pages book printed in black and... purple! At the end of the book there is a set of fake 'business cards' from people and companies such as Trask Security ("Building a better future. At any cost"), ACME Rent-A-Thug ("Two guaranteed fractures on every call") and Bugshoe - Being Hunter For Hire ("Specializing in humanoid recovery") - a great prop and a nice source of ideas itself. Tales from the Floating Vagabond must have sold well because in the following two years various products were released for the line: Bar Wars, The Reich Stuff, Adventure with No Name, Hypercad 54, Where Are You?, Weirder Tales... A Space Opera, Cosmic Paternity Suit and Where's George?. Alas, the announced (in the "Afterwords" chapter of the core rulebook) and very intriguing sounding Ye Olde West series of supplements (A Fistful of Farthings, For A Few Farthings More and The Good The Bad and The Orcish) and One of Our Dimensions is Missing! never came out (Bar Wars, The Reich Stuff, Adventure with No Name were mentioned by name in the "Afterwords"). Beware: the Tales from the Floating Vagabond core rulebook is not printed very well and it's very easy for the covers to be detached from the book proper. Handle it with care.
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| Back cover of the rulebook: remember "natural laws are out to lunch"! |
The Bar at the Center of the Universe
Tales from the Floating Vagabond is a humour RPG with a very freeform style where characters are patrons (more or less willing) of a an interdimensional bar (the Floating Vagabond of course: "If you kill someone, YOU handle the body!") where, literally anybody (and anything) may be met and where every kind of mission (of course with absurd overtones) may be had. More, players can create any kind of character they can imagine, from disgustingly cute Ewok-like intelligent (well... just the minimum needed) beings to killer robots and sentient plants. You can be anybody, meet anybody and being asked to do anything. Imagine the Star Wars Mos Easley cantina on a lot of steroids and dimensional portals.
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| A sample of the interior pages, very simple layout and graphics in the '80s style |
The Core Book
Tales from the Floating Vagabond is divided in ten chapters, an index, a glossary, an example of play (one page...), afterwords (it's interesting to note that Lee Garvin is credited as the author and Nick Atlas as the editor) and a character sheet. The book covers (thoughtfully) character creation, skills, spells, shticks (to quote the book: "something a character does or causes to happen or has happen (sic!) around him that is designed to add to the comedic content of the game"), equipment (or, more correctly, stuff, things, vehicles, booze - about this, the credits page clearly states that AH "does not endorse the abuse of alcoholic beverages or the consumption of alcoholic beverages by minors or underage adults (...). Do not drink and drive"), background (just five pages with classic enemies such as Space Nazis and newer ones such as the The People's Revolutionary Temperance League, perhaps alcohol is the opium of the people?), game master (here of course called the Bartender) tips and suggestions, rules for antisocial behaviour (also known as Combat), NPCs and a beginning adventure were character discover The Floating Vagabond, meet the Bartender and get their first mission. The book is quite well written and fun to read, albeit not every joke is great - but consider this is a 96 pages manual. I found he Credits page particularly amusing...
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| Reliable companies, professionals and unions ply their trade at The Floating Vagabond |
What is a Shtick?
A shtick is a power/skill/proficiency/curse that characters have and makes them special. For example, our character may enjoy the "Schwarzenegger Effect" (the character seems immune to pain and damage, the keyword here is seems), the "Newton Effect" (if the character sees something which according to his worldview should not happen, he has a chance to cancel it!), the "It'd Take a Miracle! Effect" (for example the group has a truly desperate need to translate something written in ancient Tocharian B or to find a way to escape from an seemingly bottomless pit, well, it would take a miracle indeed...) or the frighteningly powerful "The Bylaw Effect" (Union rules always trump natural laws and that's it - just choose the best Union for the character such as EVIL - an evil maastermind will never be imprisoned or dead for long...). This is most surely a great concept and perfect for the game. It's abuse-prone too, so the book give some suggestions how best handling players being too much eager to use, for exampe the "Rambo Effect"...
The game today
Tales from the Floating Vagabond it's not a hard game to find and its line may be bought at reasonable prices - usually among the $ 10 - $ 30 range, barring strokes of luck in an auction, flea market, thrift shop or used bookstore. The core book may be purchased on Drivethru RPG too for a modest sum and the author had launched a successful Kickstarter project for a second edition the game (more than $ 35,000 of pledges!). Alas, Lee Garvin died suddenly in 2019 and the project has stopped albeit Sandy Antunes wrote in 2019 he was trying to take control of it to bring it at the end. Sad.