It's a bit of a cult hit and 3e seems quite popular.

I get that its gonzo. I like that.

But it always came across as just the wrong side of gonzo; juvenile and shallow.

What am I missing?

Quote from: Biscuitician;972799It's a bit of a cult hit and 3e seems quite popular.

I get that its gonzo. I like that.

But it always came across as just the wrong side of gonzo; juvenile and shallow.

What am I missing?

Just out of curiosity what makes you think it's juvenile? Which parts?

I've not read the 3rd edition - Just the 2e from the 90s. But I don't remember it being too kiddy. One or two concepts seemed a bit predictable given the cosmology. But I liked the background overall.

Never heard of it. Maybe people enjoy it. Or maybe the people that don't care for it have other things to discuss rather than raging against a game they don't have to play.

Well, there's a lot of potential for social satire.  Mutant Chronicles is more like our world than 40k.  There are nationalist stereotypes shooting each other over scraps of land while the Dark Legion advances.  It's a bit of over the top pulp heroics and a bit of big men and big monsters with big guns (as Paul Bonner once put it).  Honestly I'm a bit mixed on third edition.  It's more thematically unified but it's lost some of the darker elements like the Brotherhood being as bad or worse than the Dark Legion and Cybertronic being less nebulous and more defined.  At one point Cybertronic did all of its recruiting with mind control drugs and brainwashing, now that's just a rumor started by people who hate Cybertronic. The sourcebooks add a lot of depth to the factions that might not quite show in the core book.  Among the human factions there are no bad guys and no good guys, just people rammed into idealized societies that were created when their founders abandoned earth and are imposed on them by the elite upper classes.

Anyhow, I would have preferred the tone of the first edition rpg which was more noir and morally ambiguous.  I always liked the piece of short fiction featuring a young school teacher's life of quiet desperation and the illustration of the mother and child looking for the father's name on the base of a heroic, larger than life statue.

But you may be right, in that the stereotypes and societies are a bit offensive by modern standards.  I think it's mitigated by them all being equally obnoxious in their own ways.  One theme is common among all the corporations, the rich and the powerful reap the benefits and rule from on high while the common scramble to survive.  Nobody ever claims that these societies are right or that one is better than the others.  They're all toxic and loosing a war against a cartoonishly evil force because they can't stop squabbling.  It begs the question of whether we'd do any better today.

Quote from: The Exploited.;972804Just out of curiosity what makes you think it's juvenile? Which parts?

I've not read the 3rd edition - Just the 2e from the 90s. But I don't remember it being too kiddy. One or two concepts seemed a bit predictable given the cosmology. But I liked the background overall.

it comes across as a not very subtle 40k style dystopia, and not in a particularly clever way.

I could be wrong, i've never had the chance to read it and would happily be corrected.

Quote from: Biscuitician;972816it comes across as a not very subtle 40k style dystopia, and not in a particularly clever way.

I could be wrong, i've never had the chance to read it and would happily be corrected.

That's true. It's definitely not a subtle game or intended to be in fairness... It reminds me of Starship Troopers, in the way it's pretty satirical and in your face. But it also takes the piss out of corporations as well at the military. I can't really speak for the third edition to be fair, but original was pretty dark. I'm certainly not bothered by the stereotypes as I think that's it's interwoven into the fabric of the game. But I suppose that could offend some poeple...

While I love WFRP I'm not really a fan of 40k.

I did love the visuals of the original Mutant Chronicles though, as most of it was done by Paul 'the god' Bonner as David has already mentioned. I believe he's not too involved (if at all with the 3rd version). Shame, if it's true...

I never played it or even ever met anyone who ever played it. It was alway one of those games that was just always "Around" shops and cons without anyone actually playing or owning it.

I would give it a chance if someone around here ran it. It looked like goofball fun in the spirit of cheapo 90's big-guns & musclemen dystopias like the Marvel 2099 line or the Stallone Judge Dredd.

Quote from: Biscuitician;972816it comes across as a not very subtle 40k style dystopia, and not in a particularly clever way.

I could be wrong, i've never had the chance to read it and would happily be corrected.

(emphasis mine)

So... you dislike something you know only by hearsay?  

Okay, I'll play along.

Here's the kicker: Warhammer 40,000 is the more diverse and encompassing setting.  Everything MC does, W40k could do and more.  -But- whereas W40k is broader in setting, MC has more -focus-.  The trick is in knowing how to focus it.  See, both MC and Dark Heresy are about people in a horrible future, dealing with even worse nightmare-fueled cults.  There's a ton of thematic overlap there, and the distinction between the supernatural horrors of one game and the other can seem like window dressing.  So we have to consider where the two differ, and that's where things take off.

W40k is essentially about a giant megalithic united human empire fighting all sorts of foes.  Mutant Chronicles is about a bunch of feuding human factions fighting each other through armies, espionage, and cultural warfare efforts... and then "space demons"* show up.  There's three different time periods you can set your game in, with some different feel to each.  But really, the game falls flat when it tries to be a Warhammer 40,000 heart breaker (and it does!) and rises when it instead embraces a kind of 80's era crime noir low-tech-cyberpunk vibe (which it does as well!).  It really helps to think of it in terms of "Kult in Space" too, drawing more heavily on things like Hellraiser or (the later) Event Horizon or Pandorum, but with a strong Blade Runner or maybe Dredd vibe as well**.

And there's some interesting little side-bits, like how the Dark Apostles are statted up so players can kill them (temporarily at least), the different human factions feel and play differently, and a cosmology I won't spoil but has way more hope than W40k ever offered.  Again, there's nothing here that wouldn't work in 40k, but 40k instead tends to focus on other stuff.

(*there's actually some interesting setting stuff for why the Dark Legions look so... weird.  Turns out they're remnants of races that the Dark Symmetry has already defeated and added to it's forces through corruption and damnation.)
(**I won't mention the Mutant Chronicles movie because, while I enjoyed it... it's a pretty bad movie that's only useful for exploring the idea of Necromutant manufacture perhaps.  Fun cast though!)

Quote from: san dee jota;972833(emphasis mine)

So... you dislike something you know only by hearsay?  

Okay, I'll play along.

Here's the kicker: Warhammer 40,000 is the more diverse and encompassing setting.  Everything MC does, W40k could do and more.  -But- whereas W40k is broader in setting, MC has more -focus-.  The trick is in knowing how to focus it.  See, both MC and Dark Heresy are about people in a horrible future, dealing with even worse nightmare-fueled cults.  There's a ton of thematic overlap there, and the distinction between the supernatural horrors of one game and the other can seem like window dressing.  So we have to consider where the two differ, and that's where things take off.

W40k is essentially about a giant megalithic united human empire fighting all sorts of foes.  Mutant Chronicles is about a bunch of feuding human factions fighting each other through armies, espionage, and cultural warfare efforts... and then "space demons"* show up.  There's three different time periods you can set your game in, with some different feel to each.  But really, the game falls flat when it tries to be a Warhammer 40,000 heart breaker (and it does!) and rises when it instead embraces a kind of 80's era crime noir low-tech-cyberpunk vibe (which it does as well!).  It really helps to think of it in terms of "Kult in Space" too, drawing more heavily on things like Hellraiser or (the later) Event Horizon or Pandorum, but with a strong Blade Runner or maybe Dredd vibe as well**.

And there's some interesting little side-bits, like how the Dark Apostles are statted up so players can kill them (temporarily at least), the different human factions feel and play differently, and a cosmology I won't spoil but has way more hope than W40k ever offered.  Again, there's nothing here that wouldn't work in 40k, but 40k instead tends to focus on other stuff.

(*there's actually some interesting setting stuff for why the Dark Legions look so... weird.  Turns out they're remnants of races that the Dark Symmetry has already defeated and added to it's forces through corruption and damnation.)
(**I won't mention the Mutant Chronicles movie because, while I enjoyed it... it's a pretty bad movie that's only useful for exploring the idea of Necromutant manufacture perhaps.  Fun cast though!)

I don't hate it. I just don't think it looks very good.

People form opinions and make judgements, welcome to life!

One thing to keep in mind about Mutant Chronicles and 40k is that MC was largely created by ex-GW employees like Paul Bonner and Mark Copplestone who sculpted the original space marine miniatures.  It's not so much a rip-off as a response.  Back in the day there was a lot of bitterness lurking beneath the surface.  It's not a coincidence that it's a setting of horrible corporations and doomed warriors fighting their way into citadels full of mindless zombies.  Their magazines certainly weren't above the occasional cheap shot back in the day.

I often describe the setting as Buck Rogers verses Hell Raiser.  The inner planets of the setting are pure pulp.  Jungles and dinosaurs on Venus.  Red deserts on Mars.  Jungle tunnels on Mercury.  Oh, some attempt has been made to rationalize it.  Before the Dark Legion came, the corporations were pretty good at gravity manipulation.  Really, the legion is the weakest part of the setting.  If it didn't give PCs from different corporations a common enemy to shoot at I'd probably just ignore it.

It's certainly a rule of cool / drive the tank closer I want to hit them with my sword, kind of setting.  The current version of the rpg certainly makes epic stuff possible.  I had an Ashigaru pc who was unstoppable with a sword and even cut an attack helicopter out of the sky at one point.  I have mixed feelings about the rpg.  It has some pretty good legacy features from the original and actually works okay in play if you don't look at the resource rules too closely.  It really ties the characters into the setting but making 4 career characters takes quite a while.  It's good that there's an inexpensive player's book that covers character creation.  You need multiple books for this game.

I'd have done a lot of things differently but many of my favorite games do that.  I can write a game that does what I'd do just fine.   The discussion of range bands is the best I've ever found and pretty much redeemed the concept in my eyes.

But I think part of the appeal is that Mutant Chronicles has been around since the early nineties and it gets some credit for doing things early on, if not first.  While the 40k universe and MC universe would probably integrate into each other quite easily.  Each corporation could exist as a world government on an industrial world in 40k with pretty much no conflict.  Put them on the same world and they'd be shooting at each other so much that the Inquisition would eventually destroy the planet just to shut them up.  But it's the human level of the setting and the easily recognizable societies and tropes that make MC great for roleplaying.  People who don't know 40k generally have trouble playing to the setting and don't really get Space Marines and Eldar.  Elitist Germans and corrupt Americans and popculture obsessed samurai and belligerent Brits and inscrutable cyberpunks are, on the other hand very easy to pick up and play.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;972829I never played it or even ever met anyone who ever played it. It was alway one of those games that was just always "Around" shops and cons without anyone actually playing or owning it.

I would give it a chance if someone around here ran it. It looked like goofball fun in the spirit of cheapo 90's big-guns & musclemen dystopias like the Marvel 2099 line or the Stallone Judge Dredd.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1114[/ATTACH]

If it helps, I dislike the 3rd edition very much?
Google "mutantpedia" and look the original if you haven't already. It is flawed in more ways than one, but gloriously so.

Quote from: baragei;972868If it helps, I dislike the 3rd edition very much?
Google "mutantpedia" and look the original if you haven't already. It is flawed in more ways than one, but gloriously so.

what's wrong with 3e?

Quote from: Biscuitician;972799It's a bit of a cult hit and 3e seems quite popular.

I get that its gonzo. I like that.

But it always came across as just the wrong side of gonzo; juvenile and shallow.

What am I missing?

You say "juvenile" and "shallow" as if they were bad things.

I love the gonzo corporations, the Imperial Trencher miniatures looked fantastic, and the recent-but-widely-despised RPG hits the fun button for me hugely.