FATAL

This article or section is about something involving/related to /d/. Expect PROMOTIONS and possible mental scarring. Also rape.

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

The cover of the "sanitized" edition

Were you looking for F.A.T.A.L. the card game? Please tell us you were looking for the card game.

"So basically, FATAL is the date rape RPG."

– Darren MacLennan in his and Jason Sartin's infamous review

"Another faulty conclusion by Darren. Where is dating included?"

– Byron Hall, proving everyone right

A copy of Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery is what would pop out of Slaanesh if she raped Tzeentch while using a bong as a condom. It is, in theory, an RPG that lets neckbeards live out their rape fantasies. The gaming community has more or less unanimously come to the conclusion that FATAL (aka "The Date Rape RPG... without the dating") is simply the worst RPG ever conceived... at least, those that haven't encountered RaHoWa, but then, that game is much less well known, so much the better for us, and in comparison there have been actual documented attempts to actually play FATAL, amazingly enough. Probably never in earnest, though, perhaps even by its bonemongeringly unhinged authors.

The rulebook (written by one Byron Hall and a few of his friends, who go by nicknames such as "Torturon", "Burnout", and "Satan") is as terribly mechanically written as it is obsessed with bizarre sexual perversions that make /d/ seem prudish by comparison. It is filled with enough pointless random charts and oscure rules to deter even a veteran /d/M who has played Rolemaster for years. Quadratic equations are a requirement of most game mechanics. The Anal circumference table meme originates with FATAL. The game was apparently revised and given a new name for the acronym; From Another Time, Another Land makes minor changes to the text (read: removes the racist magical armor) but is still an abortion of gaming.

The FATAL Games website is now thankfully defunct. The current page is your average parked domain crap. However, some fine gentlemen at the Wayback Machine have archived it in all its neon-on-black-plastered-with-animated-gifs glory. Enter at your own risk.

It sparked a "review" by MacLennan & Sartin, which was really more of a profanity-laden rant (admittedly a common reaction to the game), and this "review" in turn provoked a "rebuttal" from the game's creators. Reading the exchange between the two is almost guaranteed to cause brain damage. To sum it up, the "reviewers" spent most of their time talking about the various kinds of torture that would be preferable to playing the game, and the various kinds of torture they'd like to inflict on its creators, and how mentally ill and/or socially awkward they imagine its creators must be, and so on, though legitimate criticisms were also made which anyone could say would justify their invective (see "mechanics" section below. Or don't, if you'd rather preserve your last shriveled speck of faith in humanity).

The game's creators, not to be outdone, turned their ability to totally miss the point on full blast and showed the world a level of detail-obsessed pedantry that had been previously considered impossible. Their counterarguments included: "Facial Charisma is not how good you look. It’s how good your face looks", "I believe what Sartin is looking for is Enunciation, not Rhetorical Charisma", and "Enunciation is better termed a sub-ability than a stat". They also attempted to defend governing something as simple as urination with a formula as complex as d100 + Urination Skill Points + (average of Health and Hand-Eye Coordination skill modifiers) +/- ("Time Since Last Urination vs. Ounces Drunk" modifier), without even attempting to justify why urinating is a skill that exists. They DID attempt to justify why it's possible to have an average speaking speed higher than your maximum speaking speed, but their justification had something to do with conflating "random" distributions with "even" distributions in order to claim that bell curve distributions aren't random, and... look, you were warned about the brain damage, okay?

Mechanics

...Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?

...Okay, you asked for it.

The GM is called the "Aedile", because that's an actual Latin word for 'master of the coliseum games', or 'game-master' for short. What is it with authors of explicitly smutty rpg materials like this and "The Book of Erotic Fantasy" that they have to be pretentious dicks about it? (Answer: Because in the original version he was... wait for it... the MaimMaster. You may now groan.)

The intro says you only need to know a little algebra, "and even that is relatively rare." It also says you only need two d10. Both of these are filthy fucking lies. Ability scores are derived from averaging 'sub-abilities' rolled as (10d100/5)-1 and modified by one of three different types of percentages, and conditions during the game may change your sub-abilities which means you need to recalculate your ability scores on-the-fly. Ability score checks are 3d10, so no you need more than two dice.

Apparently you'll need this "little algebra" because you solve quadratic formulas to find out whether or not your rape slave is pregnant. Then you roll d10,000,000 to find out if she's going to have quintuplets. Jesus Christ.

The character sheet is eleven pages long. There are 20 sub-abilities (including "Enunciation" and "Spatial Intelligence"; also note that by this point in chargen you have already rolled your 2d10 eighty times), which determine 5 ability scores. The ethics system is a D&D good-evil/lawful-chaotic using "ethics" which is described vaguely differently from "morals", four different "temperament" scores based on bodily humours (and by the way, the book dedicated 23 PAGES to describing you alignment alone), a primary and secondary temperament in addition to that, and a disposition that is different from that too(which is another 22 pages long). On the second page of the character sheet are the following essential measurements: manhood length, manhood circumference, anal circumference potential, vaginal circumference potential, vaginal depth potential, areola diameter, nipple length, cup size, tongue size, hymen resistance, areola hue, foot size, fist circumference, head circumference, handedness. These measurements are essential, because during combat your roll may cause you to accidentally start raping your opponent, and how many hitpoints they lose depends on the mismatch between the circumference of your appendage and their orifice. In case you missed some of that: it is possible to accidentally rape an opponent to death during normal combat. THEN you have to roll for other things like your height and weight (and then calculate your BMI based on those), most and least attractive features, hair color, skin color, visual acuity, age (which also acts as a modifier for all those abilities and sub-abilities, forcing you to go back and change all those stats again), a check to see if your Intelligence score is low enough to qualify for "Retard Strength" bonuses, birthday, social class, birthplace, number of siblings, and marital status.

In other words, roll randomly for just about everything that any other game system would allow the player to choose for themselves, in the unlikely event that they desperately needed to know the precise size of your foot.

Among the four-hundred and eighteen skills each character must keep track of are "Basketweaving" (Hand-Eye, Common Sense), "Clockmaking" (Spatial), "Delousing" (Hand-Eye), "Glovemaking" (Spatial), "Massage" (Kinetic Charisma, Hand-Eye), "Spitting" (Enunciation), and even "Urinating". Yes, pissing is a skill. Yes, you can fail your rolls to piss, which as you could see in the last section are far more complex than they could possibly need to be.

A character's body has seventeen hit-locations, each with independent hit-point totals, each with their own armour equipment slots, and each of the seventeen pieces of armour have four different types of damage resistance (brawling, hacking, pounding and stabbing).

Magical items range from the mostly useless, to the suicidally dangerous, to the completely insane. Here's a list of notable ones.

• Philter of (race name) Lust: Drink this and every being of the race listed within 100 feet will try to fuck you.
• Cloak of Self-Craving: The wearer will try to perform oral sex on themselves, possibly breaking his/her neck in the process.
• Chastity Belt of Cursed Impregnation: The wearer is knocked up. The difference between this and the uncursed version is that the cursed version always makes the unborn child a girl. Really.
• Jar of Jacking Off: "Whenever a male opens this jar, they must pass a Drive sub-ability check at TH 80 or be compelled to force their fuckstick into the jar. Once inside, the jar will inexplicably grip it firmly and jerk it to completion, even against the will of the opener. Upon completion, the cummer[sic] must roll percentile dice. If the results are 01-10, then the jar becomes pregnant. If the jar is pregnant, it will not allow itself to be opened, but will care for the fetus within, which will be heard screaming by others within 1d100 feet day and night. After 9 months of fetal torture, the child will be born and the jar will break. If the jar is broken during its pregnancy, then the dying and twitching fetus will explode after 1d6 rounds of twitching. The explosion will cause 1d4 Life Points of sonic damage to all within 1d4 miles. Baby parts are inexplicably everywhere. When born, the baby will be Unethical Immoral (translation: Chaotic Evil), will serve the father loyally, will obsessively collect jars, and seem to be male but have no penis, but oversized testicles, which can never ejaculate. Therefore, this child will be forever frustrated. Any child of a jar will insist that others call them “Chucky." What a reference to the Child's Play movies is doing in a "historically/mythically accurate RPG" is anyone's guess. Interestingly, this seems to have partially inspired Death Stranding. In hindsight we should have all known Hideo Kojima would be a /d/M.
• Seed of Hate: Planting this seed in front of a druid's house causes a tree to grow that makes everything hate the druid in question. The only way to kill a tree that resulted from this seed is for the druid to start having anal sex with random animals until he sows a "seed of love". This may cause him to develop a bestiality fetish.
• Mirror of Many: A ripoff of the mirror from Evil Dead.
• Ring of the Lords: It's the fucking One Ring.
• Cursed Dildo of Impregnation: The user is impregnated with another dildo, which is likely to kill her.
• (weapon) of Ravishing: The user will occasionally try to rape random women with the weapon, which will somehow impregnate them with another rapist-weapon (that kills them upon giving "birth" to it).
• Armor of Jewy Jewbacca: "Whosoever dons this armor will acquire a nose twice the size and a manhood half the size. Further, the wearer will become extremely greedy and fight to the death for one silver piece. Finally, the wearer acquires 2 inches of hair all over their body, resulting in halving their Facial Charisma and Bodily Attractiveness. While hairy, the wearer must bathe every 1d6 hours or smell foul." There are three other armors just like this which turn the wearer into an ethnic stereotype with no benefits whatsoever. According to Byron, this was supposed to be "controversial humor". So funny everyone forgot to laugh.
• (weapon) of Torturon: The wielder becomes obsessed with removing his victim's eyes and shoving them into his nose (the victim's nose, not the wielder's) and also takes up sunbathing naked on top of cottages. Okay, that's oddly specific and rather disturbing, especially given that one of Byron Hall's friends is called Torturon...

The magic system is split into ceremonial magic (which is situational at best and often utterly useless for doing anything you might actually need) and chaos magic (which requires you to perform a ritual that requires a roll on a large-ass syllable chart in case it requires a chant to perform, some random ingredients you might not even be able to acquire, and can take days to perform the required ritual). An example of a few spells follows; italicized spell names are ceremonial magic, and everything else is chaos magic:

• Against Every Wild Animal, Aquatic Creature, and Robbers: Keeps wild animals, aquatic creatures, and robbers away from you. Everything else that can kill you can still do so.
• Call God: Summons a god. The rulebook specifically states that whatever god in question will not be happy about being summoned and will probably kill the caster.
• Eternal Spell for Binding a Lover: Smear the listed ingredients on the head of your dick, and when you fuck someone with it they'll beg you to stick it in them at least once a day. (Numerous other "love spells" with similar effects are also present.)
• Fatal: Kills everything on whatever horrid world the game takes place on, including the user. If only every game started with this spell being cast.
• Force Fart: Forces the target to fart, obviously.
• Have Her Cadaver: Cast this on a dead woman and she'll look, sound, smell, taste, and feel just like she was alive but unconscious. The spell description explicitly states that it is meant to aid necrophilia. Draw your own conclusions.
• Oroanal: The victim's mouth now doubles as his anus (or vice versa). Did we mention that the effects of this spell are permanent?
• Perpetual Orgasm:...take a fucking guess. The rulebook mentions that not only does this kill the target, but also that they continue to have an orgasm even after they die.
• Test of Pregnancy: Self-explanatory, and disturbingly likely to be necessary.
• Wish: Like the DnD version, but the GM is encouraged to be as literal as possible, even picking a definition of the word at random if word has multiple definitions. A character wishes for a lot of gold? He gets several thousand pounds of gold bars. Dropped on top of him.

And then there are the miscast tables, which have a variety of notably bizarre effects, including but certainly not limited to:

• The next shit you take coming to life and trying to kill you.
• Fruit growing out of the caster's penis/vagina, which can be consumed for stat bonuses.
• Gay ogres popping out of nowhere and trying to have buttsex with everyone nearby.
• A "scratch and sniff" vagina appears on the caster's head.
• An eyeball appears on the caster's penis, and can somehow act as a lie detector.
• The target's skin turns black. "Aedile may decide appropriate penalties."
• A gerbil falls out of the target's asshole. Congrats, you are now Richard Gere.
• The nearest woman is convinced that her name is "Cuntrina", and insists that everyone nearby refers to her as such.
• A disembodied penis with wings appears and tries to rape everything nearby.
• Accidentally consuming the enemy while being raped.
• Accidentally cast FATAL (see above). Everybody hopes to get this one.

And many, many more.

Classes are no less peculiar- they range from the standard fare of Warriors, Mages, and the like to things which no sane person would play (such as Delousers, Inkmakers, and of course Whores, who get a longer write-up than most other classes combined save for the ones with giant tables). Every class earns AP (the equivalent of experience points) in different ways, and in some cases it is earned so slowly that a character (or even their player) can die of old age before they even reach level 2.

TL;DR: It takes all the overcomplexity of World of Synnibar - which, I shit you not, had an equation to show how hard you could breathe - took out the lore, classes and just about everything else that made Synnibar worth a damn, added so many sexual perversions (that the introduction has the balls to claim all of it is only present just cause of its "historic/mythical relevance") that it would make Slaanesh look twice, and shat out one of the worst RPG systems ever concieved.

External Links

Files

• 2003's "Fantasy Adventure to Adult Lechery" the 1st Edition of FATAL
  • (DO NOT EXPOSE GAME TO FACE. FIRE IS BETTER ALTERNATIVE. BURNING IT IS A GRAVE HERESY TO FIRE. FIRE ON FACE IS BETTER ALTERNATIVE TO GAME.)
• 2004's "From Another Time, Another Land" the 2nd edition
  • Sanitized, removes some of the nigger jokes and child-anus-tearing rape. What a truly depressing display of The Man's censorship.
• URL for random character generator needed Random Character Generator And the link is broken... New link for the sick and curious. You have been warned. Broken too, unfortunately.

Reviews

• The (in)famous Review of FATAL, courtesy of the Wayback Machine (Updated, non-Geocities version).
• The "rebuttal" to said review in which the author and one of his friends dig their own graves. It's comedy gold, in a disgusting and shameful sort of way, but you'll probably laugh your ass off regardless.
• A group of Irish roleplayers taking a crack at doing character creation. It goes as well as you'd expect. [2]
• The official theme song (no, really) of FATAL
• Thorough review in three parts with numbers and sophisticated insults towards the game: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• Famous TV tropes discussion thread with numerous tries to get through FATAL.
• "System mastery" podcast review
• Reasons not to review FATAL
• Playreport by samtravis on reddit
• Playreport by Dust on giantitp.com

Gallery

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  A completely original and not at all derivative set of alignments. Though admittedly, this is much better named than the D&D alignment system.

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  Yes, this actually happened. [1]

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See Also

• Afreemanornot's cursory review of FATAL
• Black Tokyo, a game that, according to at least one anon is even worse, though at least it's D20, so it's engine is solid. [[3]]
• GURPS Sex
• Racial Holy War, another game that is widely considered to be way worse. You can not actually play this game. Yes, it's pretty much what the name makes it sound like.
• The Aristocrats, FATAL-style
• VTNL, a Russian game which is a serious contender to being even worse than FATAL. It was designed for 14 years, by a complete autistic who ignored everything RPG related during that time, to keep his original vision. It has rules for how to properly roll dice, and the GM is encouraged to punch the players in the face, if they fail to roll according to them.