Customer Reviews

Terra Incognita: The NAGS Society Handbook

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How often have you sat down to an RPG that promised fun, excitement and adventure, only to have everything turn out to be dreary, boring and bland. Too often, right? Here, ladies and germs, we have a game of the old school, where the main objective is to entertain you. Better, it carries it off in the grand fashion.

After wasting tons-o-cash on other gaming companies which shall go unnamed (woof!) with their endless revisions, TI has literilly everything you need to start an exciting game right now. And the Fudge system is so much easier to handle that most of the other gaming systems I've seen, I actully didn't need my pocket calculator to figure out my game stats.

I do hope this game's publisher, Grey Ghost Press lives long and prospers, but you should really get this game now, before it gets surpressed by the Gaming Monoliths!

"Terra Incognita: the NAGS Society Handbook" is a roleplaying game based on the "FUDGE" roleplaying system; it's written by Scott Larson and produced by Grey Ghost Games. It's a game of intrigue and mystery, in which you can sit around a table with your friends and play the part of adventure-scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring the world's ancient mysteries (and sometimes hiding them again from a world that isn't yet ready to understand them).

FUDGE is based on a simple system that uses words instead of numbers to describe characters' abilities and the results of their actions. This can make things more intuitively understandable for new players who aren't used to roleplaying and all the number crunching that many games involve. I'd never played FUDGE before playing "Terra Incognita" and it took me less than a half-hour to create my first character.

Terra Incognita is about researchers and adventurers scouring the world for new discoveries and ancient mysteries. It's very flexible within this scope, allowing for anything from pulp adventure to dashing heroism (think Indiana Jones), from wild gadgeteering to dignified scholars traveling the globe. Plenty of suggestions are provided for customizing your game. You can play it as a very serious game, or you can make it outlandishly silly. It can be a bit quirky or downright bizarre. The mysteries being explored might be natural (ancient Egyptian tombs) or extraordinary (an ancient civilization hidden away beneath the surface of the earth).

While this will undoubtedly make a wonderful ongoing game for people who love the genre, I think it's the ideal one-shot pick-up game (a game that you can put together at a moment's notice and run in the course of a single afternoon or evening). It doesn't take long to learn the rules, and as long as the GM is familiar with the rules he can walk players through them as the game progresses because they're so simple.

Character creation takes hardly any time at all, and you can use the templates if you're really in a hurry. The genre lends itself to simple, episodic adventures. And thanks to the information provided (and the familiarity of the genre), it's easy to put together a simple adventure at a moment's notice. The GM could probably create an adventure in the time it takes his players to create their characters!