Toon
Speak its name softly.
Toon is an RPG in which you are playing as cartoon character. Not in a “Roger Rabbit” way with the characters in the real world (although that does seem kind of like a nice idea for an RPG) but in a “I’m taking part in a looney toons episode. You know, the Chuck Jones ones that make you laugh so hard milk comes out of your nose. Those ones.” way.
Written and published in 1984 by Steve Jackson games I bought this when I was young and naive as a group of us worked through things like Warhammer FRP and Shadowrun. I picked it up as something different but we never really played it much being a group of teens with more interest in fantasy violence than cartoon violence (must remember to tell the story of the Dwarf troll slayer and the small dogs he strangled). So it was abandoned to its fate until I found it and the little un took a shine to the pictures. I explained what it was and suggested a game sometime. So several nights later the three of us sat down to our very first family RPG session.
I’m not going to dwell too much on Toons game mechanics as they work along the lines of pretty much every RPG under the sun mixed with cartoons. You can do impossible things, pull items out of tiny bags, get shot, have pianos dropped on you, eat something and have an xray done to see it inside you… If i needed ideas for a story I could just watch Cartoon Network for a few hours and have a legitimate reason for once (No dear, its called research). You don’t die in it, you just fall over and come back in five minutes, failed dice rolls become more fun as they add chaos to the situation and a stupid imagination works wonders. Which is why we had such a good time playing it.
There is an introductory story which is based around a toon Olympic games and has a bunch of precreated characters. Now come on, admit it. How many people really play with pre-generated characters in RPGs? Theres no fun in it normally but as neither of my subjects had played a Pen & Paper RPG it was the best way to kick it off. One was a large Russian Hippo and the other was a vain Cat and both of them found great fun in picking on my poor old mole ref who was supervising the games. At one point poor old mole had a javelin stuck out of his chest, one through his ears (couldn’t hear them fighting too well at this point) and we all ended up trying to not laugh too much. The game ended up running over two nights due to most events (boxing, running etc…) becoming nothing more than shoe throwing and mole harassing. Poor mole ended up handing over the prize for first place (a sports car) to one of these shocking bullies.
A few nights later we started a longer campaign thats a riff on Ghostbusters called Witchdusters and started with the creation of the characters then a brief bit of playing. After spending a large amount of time ignoring my NPC banging on the door they finally answered and then didn’t even make me a cup of tea. I think Peter Venkman has some serious competition going on here. Sadly the witchdusters never made it to their first job at the haunted museum but we live in hope of one day getting the story back on track.
Whats interesting about Toon is that the mighty Warren Spector edited and created much of the content and its interesting to see how far he has come but is still working with similar patterns of play and interaction.
And now for the inevitable links… Toon is available via Steve Jackson games as a download here and rpggeek has a load of info about the game as well.