Seeing as how I'm running this game tomorrow...
The Game: Omen
The Publisher: Gila RPGs
Degree of Familiarity: None yet, but the book is literally 16 pages
Books Required: Just the one
Omen is an RPG from the creator of NOVA and the related games, and it has a similarly strategic or tactical vibe to it. Not in a combat sense, but just in the sense of resource management. In Omen, you're playing characters who could, in theory, stop the end of the world. There are two clocks, Doom and Defy, that determine what happens with regards to said apocalypse, depending on which fills first.
I debated whether it was appropriate to include this game on the chargen list; when I exclude games it's generally because they're games like Fiasco where character creation is not only hard-baked into play but actually requires other players. I don't think that's the case in Omen, and there are a few sample scenarios that I can use. There's also not that much to chargen, so this isn't gonna take long in any event.
There are five really brief doomsday scenarios in the book, so let's just roll a d5 and pick one.
Yep, that'll work. In order to make a character, I set aside eight d6s (I'm not actually going to do that because I don't need them for chargen). And then I can take Omens, which are little ways to influence the system. I can take one and then get a ninth d6, or two and stick with eight.
In context: You roll all your d6s at the beginning of the game. When a challenge comes up in play, the GM tells you the difficulty, and you pick a die to apply it. That means that you know if you're going to succeed or fail, but why would you fail? Well, sometimes you don't have a choice. Sometimes you want to save your good rolls for later. Some Omens give you good things if you deliberately fail rolls. Like I said, there's some strategy.
(Coincidentally, curse the darkness had something like this going on because your visible, active card in a given stat meant that you knew what kind of success you could apply at any given them, and I think it worked just fine there.)
Right! So! I think I'm going to finish character creation before I pick Omens. If I have a complaint about this game, it's that Omens don't have any flavor text or names attached, so picking them is a matter of game strategy rather than storytelling.
"Finishing the character" is mostly a matter of pure concept. The game does give me some questions, however:
The aliens sent a scouting party ahead, not to learn about the planet per se (they'd been doing that for years) but to obtain current samples and acclimate their invasion force to the Earth's climate. They did that by taking samples from Teddy, not just tissue, blood, and so forth, but mental ones - engrams, brainscans, CSF. Teddy stumbled out of the park not really knowing what happened, but in the weeks to come as the aliens did a full-on invasion, he figured it out.
But Teddy being the one to make contact also gives him advantages in dealing with the aliens - their technology has a blind spot for him because he's essentially the baseline that their data is derived from. Is that going to make the difference? It might.
Teddy is in his 40s, single (he was engaged once, it didn't work out, and frankly he's not interested in that kind of relationship). He's fit, bearded (usually keeps it neat and trimmed but that's not what's been on his mind lately). Got a bunch of outdoorsy gear in his garage.
OK, so back to Omens. I think I'm just gonna take one, and I'm gonna take this one:
I think that's a good representation of him using his "invisibility" to the aliens' tech to take a big swing (note too that you can get more Omens in play).
And that's it, actually. Let's end the world!
