Teenagers From Outer Space

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Teenagers from Outer Space is an RPG based on the a harem/magical girlfriend cliche riddled anime genre made by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games, famous for Cyberpunk 2020 and Mekton. It is not to be confused with the terrible 1959 movie "Teenagers from Outer Space" which was given a sound drubbing on MST3K.

The setting is this: unlike the rest of the galaxy humans have stages to their mental development. They don't just go from baby (egg or maggot or even chest burster) to functional adult over night. Humans of course have a gradient to their development. That middle ground between adult and child, teenager, was like a cultural lighting bolt to the alien races. The idea that you could have near adult resources but not the responsibility was one hell of an idea. Over night Earth became a cultural hotspot, THE place to be in the galactic cultural scene. Now Earth is some kind of a kind of tourist destination, THE place to send your children (or maggots or something) for an education, if only to shut them up about it.

Unfortunately for the Earthlings they are both technologically and biologically behind. Aliens can have a vast assortment of superpowers while humans don't. So you have human children going to school alongside people who can bench press a truck. Fortunately for humanity, because we are the cultural center of the galaxy, all humans are thought to be the coolest thing on two legs. Because of this they have a rule for "the Human Fake Out" where you can convince any alien of anything, repeat, ANYTHING, without a roll. This can backfire when your new friend with a zap gun figures out that your "traditional" human greeting dance is just making him look stupid and in that case you will get what you deserve. As per the conventions of the genre, with enough time humanity will be able to hybridize itself with all the alien races, meaning that the human race will end up having the powers of all the other aliens in the galaxy combined.

That's no so bad if you think about it, like a PG-13 version of Humanity Fuck Yeah. The problem is that the game is wrapped up in a tortilla that smells like weeaboo. The thing is explicitly inspired by comedy anime, the light mechanics favor frantic silly role play for engagement. It supports and recommend a kind of "go with the flow" ad libbed comedy vibe, consequences for failure are low and death is impossible. It's few mechanics lay emphasis on roleplaying and it could work to play settings that are more appealing to people who don't like anime, but are still inherently very random settings. Adventure Time comes to mind and the similarities to Haiyore! Nyaruko-san are almost too obvious not to mention but that's about it.