Over the Edge (game)

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Over the Edge is a tabletop roleplaying game by Jonathan Tweet, made in collaboration (to a certain extent) with Robin Laws and Mark Rein·Hagen. (That's a large part of the team responsible for Vampire: The Masqerade and Ars Magica, if those names mean nothing to you).

The game is set on the mysterious Mediterranian island of Al Amarja, which is ruled by Monique D'Aubainne and various members of her extended family. The D'Aubainnes have most of the standard U.S. laws on the statute-books but basically only enforce them if you attempt to mess with the status quo, making Al Amarja effectively a Libertarian despotism. As a result, Al Amarja is home to every conspiracy imaginable (no, seriously, one splat-book has a table to determine whether any given housecat is an alien and part of the huge Conspiracy of Cats) as well as a haven to all sorts of freaks and malcontents.

The native Al Amarjians ("'Marjians" or "Martians" in local slang) are a mongrel and polyglot population, much given to self-expression largely (but not exclusively) in the form of drinking, drugs, public weirdness and violence. And they wear nooses instead of neckties.


Tropes used in Over the Edge (game) include:
  • Alien Geometries - The Terminal, Al Amarja's major airport. It's shaped like a step pyramid. An upside-down step pyramid. Try not to get lost.
  • All Myths Are True - at least, a good portion of them. And there's kitset rules for making up the rest of them.
  • Ancient Conspiracy - several.
  • City of Adventure - The Edge, so much...
  • City of Spies - pretty much every secret service has a branch on Al Amarja.
  • Conspiracy Kitchen Sink - see above.
  • Doomsday Device
  • Elvis Lives
  • Even Evil Has Standards - Even other drug dealers think the Sandmen are freaks.
  • Everything's Worse With Baboons - The Dog Faces are a gang comprised of one old lady, her freaky radio technology and a horde of intelligent baboons. They're dangerous, to say the least.
  • Fantastic Drug - Lots of them. And then subverted with Wings, which is sold as if it has the same weird psychic effects as the fringe-tech drugs, but is actually just LSD.
  • Granola Girl - The girls in Alpha Rho Tau.
  • Mad Scientists - they're called "Oppenheimers".
  • Milkman Conspiracy - these are also numerous.
  • Omnicidal Maniac - Mr. LeThuy, an unassuming Vietnamese man. He's also a dangerous nihilist who wants to destroy the universe.
  • Reality Warper - The Cut-Ups Machine, and by extension the people in the Cut-Ups Project, will change reality if any organisation gets too close to running the world.
  • Serious Business - The Sommerites are a religion worshipping the rock vocalist Karla Sommers. They throw good parties.
  • Shout-Out - Al Amarja is basically Interzone on even more drugs.
  • Tomato in the Mirror - The glugs are the real humans. The rest of the human race are mutants bred to destroy them.