But still causes cancer.
What doesn't, nowadays?
Just breathing causes you cancer nowadays. Like to see someone try and start a campaign to stop people from doing THAT.
Breathing does cause cancer, that has been a commonly known fact among people who are "in the know" for ages now. And no, not in one of those silly "life causes death" kind of ways, but oxygen is (surprise surprise) a strong oxidant. Oxidants cause cancer. Thus breathing causes cancer.
Of course, the alternative is worse...
Back on topic:
Game systems or game settings I really liked include:
Exalted (White Wolf)
Legend of the Five Rings (Alderac Entertainment Group)
CJ Carella's "Witchcraft' game (Eden Studios Inc.)
Mutant Chronicles (Target Games)
SLA Industries (Nightfall Games)
... with Shadowrun having pretty much always been my personal fave.
Mutant Chronicles *eyes twitching* No. NO!
For you who are not in the know, Mutant is an old Swedish RPG, from the early 80's. It was set in a post apocalyptic world (mainly focused around what used to be Sweden), where radiation and stuff caused people and animals to mutate. Many animals became humanoid and sentient, many humans mutated into, well, mutated humans (giving them extra arms, thicker skin and so on), and some were given psychic powers.
The game had a setting that, in some ways, were rather dark, but in some other were more bright and humorous. Think fallout, but with mutated, intelligent animals, and where being a mutated human did not mean that you looked like you had walked through a fire. And you had scenes like
this.
Now Äventyrsspel (later Target games) decided to change things around. First they created a cyberpunk version of Mutant, called Mutant 2089, where they removed all the mutated animals, and made it a bit more generic cyberpunk (but with mutated humans). This was not a bad game, but it was not a great game either. It lacked the charm of the original version of Mutant. You usually don't hear people talk about this game, it was just a bit too generic and forgettable. Then they made Mutant Rymd (Mutant Space) which was the precursor to Mutant Chronicles. I have not played Mutant Rymd, but from what I can tell (from having flipped through the core rulebook) it is basically Mutant Chronicles light (or it might even have been an early version of Mutant Chronicles). This game was obviously trying to capitalize on the success of 40k, and you'll find many similar concepts in both games (even though one, at this point, was just a miniature wargame, and the other an RPG). This game was not very well received in Sweden, it had none of the charm of the original Mutant, it was just grim & dark. Very grim & dark.
Having had some international success with Kult, Äventyrsspel (now Target games (well, actually the name Target Games had been around for a lot longer than this, they just merged their RPG portion into it)) tried to release Mutant Chronicles internationally, and jumping on about every band wagon they could find, they also released a CCG (collectable card game) and a miniatures war game (now directly competing with Games Workshop). And this were when Target Games really started to lose a lot of support in its native Sweden. People were infuriated by the loss of their beloved Mutant. Drakar & Demoner (a fantasy RPG by the same company) also got its new setting, Chronopia, at around this time, and it too was heavily criticized, they dropped a beloved setting (Ereb Altor) in favour of a single big city that was just overloaded with "stuff". Imagine trying to shrink an entire fantasy setting, all the different races, all the different environments, all the different factions, into a single city. It was chaos. It tried to be dark and edgy, and still they released nonsense like
this.
So while both settings kind of flopped in Sweden, they got some international success (leading many swedes to think that people in other countries had no taste. Why the heck would you want Mutant Chronicles when you could have
real mutant?!). Still, these things did not sell well enough abroad. Also on the home front another company called NeoGames started releasing their own games. They started with a game called Viking, a very historically accurate game about vikings (what the heck did you think the game was about?). The rule system was a mess, but it had many good ideas, and from what I can tell, it at least sold somewhat well (actually this was a game made by 101 productions, but lets not confuse things further)). Their following games Eon (fantasy) and NeoTech sold well though, and NeoGames managed to establish itself as one of the giants on the Swedish RPG market. This was not good for Target Games. They gave up on RPGs in 97, due to the lack of success of Mutant Chronicles (which was the game that made a lot of people lose faith in the company) and Chronopia. This was not the end of Target Games, you might know them under another name these days (namely Paradox, the creators of Europa Universalis), but Sweden's first RPG company went under, at least in part, because of the poor product that was Mutant Chronicles.
And that is a not so brief explanation of why most Swedes don't like Mutant Chronicles, and would like to see the game being burnt and erased from history, all of it being incredibly biased. Not that anyone asked for this, but you got this history lesson anyway.
