Fun with Acronyms/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Fun with Acronyms in Tabletop Games include:

Subpages

Board Games

  • BattleTech has a couple fun acronyms, one that has been expicitly explained and one that is merely fun. Myomer Acceleration Signal Circuitry is a movement booster, while the NARC Missile Beacon has never been explained.

Tabletop RPGs

  • The James Bond RPG couln't use the infamous S.P.E.C.T.R.E. for licensing reasons, so used a Suspiciously Similar Substitute; Technological Ascension, Revenge, and Organized Terrorism, or T.A.R.O.T.
  • NPC = Not Particularly Cooperative.
    • Or "Not Particularly Consequential", according to Artax.
  • Dandenong Wargamers And Roleplayers Federation.
  • From Another Time Another Land. Also known as "Fantasy And Tales Of Adult Lechery".
  • Exalted has a very powerful Necromancy spell, typically only used by antagonists, that functions as a One-Winged Angel transformation immediately upon what would ordinarily be their death. Its name? Birth Of Sanity's Sorrow.
  • GURPS Illuminati included a sidebar on an organization that called itself "TRI", which stood for Three Random Initials.
    • Subverted in GURPS IOU, which stands for Illuminati University. People asking what the O stands for are told they're not cleared to know.[1]
      • Not to mention an entire department called C.T.H.U.L.H.U., which stands for College of Temporal Happenstance, Ultimate Lies and Historical Undertakings.
      • And the School for the Performing and Creative Arts.
    • GURPS itself is the Generic Universal RolePlaying System.
      • Prior to release, it was referred to as the "Great Unnamed Role Playing System" in at least one of SJG's publications.
    • On a side note, this editor once was the Game Master of a GURPS Space game and once had the players encounter a race of space monkeys, which had cannons mounted on their ships that fired Projectile-Organized Operational Protoplasm...
    • GURPS International Super Teams has the United Nations Committee on Law Enforcement.[2]
  • Rifts Chaos Earth has the Northern Eagle Military Alliance
    • In the main setting, there's a famous suit of Powered Armor called the Strategic Armored Military Assault Suit.
  • Monsters And Other Childish Things has the Monster Investigation Bureau, which is tasked with capturing and studying what they call Biological Extraterrestrial Merchandise -- if you don't get the second one, that more typically stands for Bug Eyed Monster.
  • The game S.A.V.A.G.E. = Survival And Victory After Global Extinction
  • GORE, or Generic Old-school Role-playing Engine
  • There is an Earthdawn adventure titled Terror In The Skies.
  • Mystara had two elven clans in Glantri - Erewan and Belcadiz. Each has a terrorist group making trouble to the other clan (mostly) - Elven Liberation Front and Free Armed Elven Resistant Youth respectively.
  • The title of the genre-busting/fusing roleplaying game system TORG, originally from West End Games, started as an internal development name, The Other Roleplaying Game.
  1. ↑ The author once said that it does not stand for "Online". Which should be obvious, after all; Illuminati University has the School of Performing and Creative Arts where Illuminati Online University had the School of Creative and Destructive Arts.
  2. ↑ Which is a Shout-Out.
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