Midnight at the Well of Ludicrous Player Races

I found this box set for a non-insignificant price in a game store's used section; it'd been resealed so I could only go on the cover illustration and title (the back is blank white). Both are fantastic. I had hopes, I guess, for a Fantasy Games Unlimited-style trove of esoteric formulas and pinpoint-detailed character sheets, de rigueur for small-press RPGs at the time, but I got something both better and worse in different ways.

Midnight at the Well of Souls is the first novel (1977) in an SF series by a guy named Jack L Chalker. I'm not familiar, but then I'm not much of a reader in that genre. Based solely on the cover art (the exact same as the novel's) I expected the game to be a swords & sorcery romp with centaurs and pyromancy but it's not that at all. Almost all of the system, released in 1986, was written by a fan of the series named Timothy A. Green - hence TAG Industries, the publisher - and he provides the most honest introduction I've seen in the hobby:

Sorry, bud. The skeleton of the game is very close to Basic Role-Playing: a series of characteristics (called Statistics here) determined by a random 4d6 roll, a few characteristics derived from these by cross-referencing a table, then a whole lot of skills.

Though the Statistics generation comes first, we'll start with the skills. As usual, I choose the most absurd skills available, and so I'm a dog-riding synthicist in camo who has rudimentary talent in Hand Rock (:horns emoji:) and Thrown Rock. The x'ed skills are a couple I got to choose to be especially decent at. There's nothing too outstanding though, just your basic Basic skill options. Some are influenced by Statistics, but most are purely player's choice. Initial skill points are determined by a table that cross-references Age+Intelligence, both of which are purely random. There's about a 200 point difference between low and high scores, and with skill rolls already pretty weak, I'd be irritated as a player if my two low rolls also made the rest of my character's abilities so limited.

The Statistics are way more interesting, if only by proxy. There's a whole lot of info I wrote in the margins that should have fields on the character sheet, like Poison Resist and Fatigue/Endurance Recovery (the two methods for tracking damage), but more importantly, notice the crossed out numbers? That's because Sarah Mitchell is Czill, a bipedal plantlike alien with jack-o-lantern for a head and one brain in each foot.

The #1 no question best thing about Midnight at the Well of Souls is that there are over a hundred playable aliens - the table above is a selection of the most humanish - and almost all are ridiculous. Below are three examples from a single page in the A section:

On a single page we have giant high-tech beavers, Cthulhoid tentacled slugs, and 9ft-long venomous millipedes who live for almost 200 years. And each of these can be rolled up as player characters; see the numbers above the descriptions? That's the number by which you multiply your rolled Statistics, which is why I had to cross out a few above. It's extremely cool that the game gives you very broad mechanical changes to go with a very thin layer of species description upon which to base your character. My favorite is the mass-less brains that live as a collective beneath a distant ocean floor. Sign me the fuck up.

What's truly weird is that the box dedicates some 47 pages to these playable alien races while trying really hard to dissuade the GM from allowing them:

In a attempt to make the game more like the inspiration, I believe, Green tries to encourage players to take races based on location on a hex-based space map provided in the box set. (There are other callbacks to the source material that make no sense if one's not familiar, like dedicated sections to a drug called Sponge that deals with one kind of destructive alien lifeform and a particular police-only pistol that PCs will likely never get hold of.) And even further making this single rad-as-hell feature of his game less fun, Green, it seems, gives the GM sole power to roll and assign races for the players. I understand it's a remnant from first-wave RPG tradition but, jeez, way to turn the single most exciting roll of the game into something the player's won't even see.  It's a strange enough decision that I feel like Green might've written this passage at a different time than when he wrote the neat alien descriptions and a lack of playtesting let it stay as is.

As far as I can tell, which is limited to this obituary, Green never published any further RPG material. Based on his exhausted introduction, I'm not surprised. Though the BRP system here isn't exactly innovative, the breadth of player character options is impressive and each species is detailed enough without much crunch. Totally worth tracking down.