It's Tuesday night, a dozen people are in a Jersey City living room. There is dice on the table. A lot of dice on the table, there's also the possibility of a few old kenner Star Wars toys, or a Gen One transformer or two. These mostly aren't retro reissues, mind you, these are the real deals. The GM stands from behind his custom GM screen, with photos of every cool thing from the '80's on it. He doesn't make a speech, not until the video plays.
He turns on his TV, and a clip plays. It's the late 80's opening of HBO feature presentations. If you were a kid around then, you'd know the one. It's the one that opens up over a miniature set of a city and then turns in to a space-opera anthem that makes you want to kick some ass. Then it changes over to a title crawl that the GM and some of the other players editted from scratch to give the impression that the players are cast members of some Early Era HBO drama. Golden Earring's 'Twilight Zone' plays in the background, reminding you that it's 2am and the fear is gone.
This is the opening ritual (and a really good crash summation) for 'ReMemorex', a tabletop game developed by Sean Jaffe of Nerdy City productions. It is an RPG about 'suburban 80's terror' as they would put it. They site the creation of the game on the hit show, Stranger Things, and it shows in that you can play adults, teenagers, or middle schoolers. But it also takes its cues from ET, the Last Starfighter and many others cinematic gems of the 1980's. You are a normal person in a seemingly normal town. And then weird shit happens and now some or all of you have to deal.
As of the writing of this post (June 1st), Nerdy City has launched the Kickstarter for ReMemorex.
I've been part of the playtest for ReMemorex since February of this year. It helps that most of your house also plays and the developer is a fifteen minute walk from you. So reader beware, I admit to bias. I also think that the game is good without the need to blow smoke at my friends.
As said before, you play a middle schoolar, high school, and/or (our playtest allowed one in each range bracket) adult. Each one of these characters follows the highest form of personality archetypes of the 1980's: John Hughes Breakfast Club. You play a Brain, a Jock, a Princess, A Basket Case or a Burnout
The game's system is in a stripped down style focusing primarily on Roleplay and Narrative over statting it out. Your stats denote who you are, what you do, and a line or phrase attached to them. For example, my character Tommy Johnson is a fourteen year old High School Freshman and one of the earliest computer hackers. His three stats are:
Computer Science Brain
Fledgling Hacker
'I'm In'
Each trait has an active and a passive rating behind it. So the difference between reprogramming an arcade machine (Tommy is a major gamer and actually helps run The Centauri Arcade fun complex, more on that in a second) and knowing that the machine has been tampered with will be different. While this may seem limited, the fun is to justify how to use your skills. For example, Tommy's "I'm In" is a line many hackers have used (or been portrayed using) while cracking a system. I can also use that trait when Tommy needs to sneak in to a place. If you can justify it, chances are good it will fly.
The major mechanic that sets the tone of the entire game are the Tracking Errors. Tracking errors are things you can do when your PC isn't in the scene. These skills are highly Meta in terms of use. The tracking errors I've encountered (though subject to change in the book) are as follows:
- Helping Hand: Adding an element to the scene to directly help the characters present. An example used in a game was a character was being chased by a nasty video tape demon thing (Yeah, it's kinda like that). I, who was not in the scene, rolled a tracking error to add a shovel to the scene to give her a leg up.
- Monkey Wrench: Adding an element that hinders the characters present. This one is to make a game challenging, but I don't recommend spamming this one. RPGs are about collaborative storytelling, and I will keep repeating that throughout my career until the overall morale improves. Rolling for Monkey Wrenches enough times-especially since you're not in the scene-is a good way to take an RPG to Monopoly levels of anger and frustration.
- Guest Star: I may be making up the title on that one, mea culpa Sean. But the gist is the same. You roll a tracking error that inserts yourself in to the scene. Not your character, but you. You take on the role of an NPC in the room. If a scene is happening in the local dive bar, you can roll a tracking error to play the bartender, so long as the GM doesn't need to use it.
- Jump Cut: This adds a single detail in to the scene. It doesn't necessarily add anything to the scene, but it's something that adds to the flavor. John Woo throws tracking errors all the time to get those damn doves to appear in his movie. No one mentions them, they are just there for effect...or some times they aren't. When you're being harangued by a paranoid agent of a vague, yet menacing government agency in the video arcade (Such is my character's life) and someone rolls to have the arcade cabinets flicker, it doesn't go well.
I say "roll for a tracking error", this is a euphemism. It does not mean that there is a stat being rolled or anything. But there is a ritual to the tracking error, of staking your claim by rolling the dice on the table. It signifies the intent, because damn near every gamer will pause at the sound of dice rolls. It's nearly pavlovian.
I want to point out these tracking errors for a simple reason. While everyone is going to be focused on the Stranger Things bent of the game, the tracking errors give you an understand of how to view this game, at least in my opinion. ReMemorex gives you permission to be Meta about the things that go on in this game. You can do things in reference to movies, shows, books and other pieces of trivia. Hell, you may end up interacting with them. Which, thinking about it, makes it almost a Creepypasta game when you consider it. Think Candle Cove....then maybe stop before too long.
All of this can be best spelled out in the setting designed by Sean Jaffe. Clearfield, Delaware (and it's equally fictional surrounding towns) is a fully fleshed out area with locations ripped straight from the 80's. My character all but lives out of the Centauri arcade complex, where one of his rivals got picked up in a eldritch horror version of The Last Starfighter. He can then go outside to the Wing Cong Chinese Restaurant for a plate of crap spare ribs (the egg rolls are okay, though). There are a million other references laid out.
And my god, has Jaffe laid them out. During one scene, someone asked the distance between two characters houses. He knew them by the cross streets. While I have not read the book yet, I know that most of Clearfield will be laid out for any and all who wish to play in it. Also, several other locations will be supplied by other writers (as yet unannounced) focusing on different areas such as New Mexico, Florida, and more. I'd be interested in doing a Pennsylvania themed game, as I have family in the small towns in the hills that could easily have been Centralia if they weren't careful.
Having played the game, I find it a refreshing take on storytelling. While it isn't a GMless game, there is a higher degree of collaboration involved. And while it does some times split up the party (a usually no-no in most RPGs) it doesn't remove player agency. If anything, and to paraphrase the developers, you almost have more agency when you aren't in the scene.
Some people may shy away from the game because it swivels so strongly to 80's nostalgia. I was one of them. I was born in '86, and only barely remember the tail end of the decade. It's a little daunting when the year of the setting is several months after you were born! But honestly a little research and a cursory binge of some classic movies and TV shows will clear you up. Seriously, for my gamer/hacker I watched WarGames, Last Starfighter, Tron and even that Nintendo shill movie, The Wizard.
Also, you're not as married to the era. I know of at least one Memorex game being run in the mid 90's, a full decade later. I'll be interested to see campaigns of potential "Modern Era" games being played. Although I somehow imagine them to run like an episode of the new Twin Peaks. You recognize a lot of the faces, but things have changes and have gotten even weirder.
To close, ReMemorex is a game for those who want to feel nostalgic while also dealing with the Eldritch Forces beyond your ken, of taking the mundanity of suburbia and give it a good old shake up in a way that would make Lovecraft and Cronenberg proud. It's high on roleplay and storytelling, without the mess or fuss of heavy stats.
You may check out their Kickstarter project HERE
