Weather the Cuckoo Likes
Atlas Games; by Robin D. Laws
"Weather the Cuckooo Likes" is a supplement to the obscure but
exceptional role-playing game "Over the Edge". "Over the Edge" bills
itself as "Psychosurreal Roleplaying", and "Weather the Cuckooo Likes"
goes it one better: it endeavors to be the modern roleplaying
manifestation of Dadaism. It describes the Cut-Ups, a band of psychic,
artistic, and fringe-scientific pranksters who take it upon themselves
to battle the various fascist-leaning factions all vying for control
over the masses, maddening the control-freaks with humor and an
inspired lack of linear thought. It comes off as a sort of Monty
Python meets Naked Lunch in the world of R. A. Wilson's Illuminati
triology, with James Brown singing the sound track in garbled, but
still highly funky, Serbo-Croatian. I won't cover the exact details;
it is the attitude that is important. The Cut-Ups can me many things
to an "Over the Edge" campaign-- a source of astoundingly zany local
color, a deus ex machina for consistency-challenged GMs, or even the
inspiration for the PCs own exploits. Reading this woke up the
trouble-making prankster kid in me who had been sleeping since high
school. For that alone I thank Mr. Laws.
"Weather the Cuckoo Likes" also has a variant rules mechanic inspired
by the cutup method used by Burroughs in the 60s. Instead of rolling
dice, the characters are fed randomly generated words, and are
evaluated for their ability to construct (non)sense appropriate to the
situation out of them. It leads to situations and role-playing that
rapidly spiral off into the surreal, and continues in the "Over the
Edge" tradition of minimal mechanics that still manage to give the
game a unique feel and provoke better role-playing.
I'm not a big fan of the artwork, but given the strength of the other
material, it's hardly a complaint. For shaking up ossifying though
patterns, I cannot recommend it, and the "Over the Edge" game, highly
enough.
-- Kyle
Thornton
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