What is Over the Edge?
This is the section of the rules in which I get to explain why my game is so incredibly interesting that your life is incomplete unless you play it regularly, and that all the other games you may have pale in comparison, their game designers obviously suffering from degenerative neural aliments. This I accomplish under the pretext of summarizing the game for you. So what is Over the EdgeTM?
First, lets look at the surface.
This game pits the player characters against all manner of decadent, evil, twisted, mind-boggling, blood-curdling, soul-rending, ego-shattering, world-turning experience. The Game Moderator (GM) is called upon to evoke an atmosphere of surreal danger. The players are called upon to deal with this danger to body and soul, to thrive and accomplish their goals in spite of it. Enjoy.
Over the Edge falls into the same amorphous genre as do the various movies, television series, and novels that take you over the edge of reality and into the dark and surreal world of human fears and delusions, insanity and danger, or sometimes just the inexplicably bizarre. Obviously, to those who have read the book, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs was a major inspiration, but other works that make their mark here include The Outer Limits and Twin Peaks from television, movies such as Repo Man and Liquid Sky, the fiction of Borges and Phillip K. Dick, and the collective unconscious as revealed in supermarket tabloids . Obviously, these sources are very different from each other, and different parts of the island, different game-moderator-characters, and different plots will draw more or less from these various sources.
In terms of rules, Over the Edge emphasizes roleplaying and storytelling over number crunching. The mechanics are exceedingly easy and open to interpretation, so your imagination and common sense will come in handier than will your calculator.
But beneath the surface, what's going on here? What is the game really about? I developed the island of Al Amarja as a playground of the imagination. Why this setting? It is a modern game, so you can easily identify with the characters you create. The game does not need a list of skills or races or backgrounds for the PCs because this is (apparently) the real world. You know very well the kind of people that populate it, and you can easily imagine other kinds of people who you hope don't populate it. The present-day setting allows the GM and players to draw from their vast experiences to make the setting highly detailed and understandable.
And why the simple mechanics? Two reasons: First, complex mechanics invariably channel and limit the imagination; second, my neurons have better things to do than calculate numbers and refer to charts all evening. Complex mechanics, in their effort to tell you what you can do, generally do a fair job of implying what you cannot do. When I look back at the player-characters my friends have invented in my games, and I review the adventures they have had, they stand out as people and events that I had never before seen in role playing games: wild, strange, unique, mysterious, unpredictable, bizarre, personal. The more you rely on rules that someone else has written to define your character or the adventures that this character can undertake, the less of a creator you become. What's more, the rules in any game are a boat that takes you to the shore you want to reach. This book describes the shore in detail, but your boat is a purely functional construction without the elaborate detail and complications. It is my hope that the boat's simplicity will encourage you to concentrate on your goal (enjoying role-playing) without getting caught up in the vehicle (rules).
The rules
are the easiest system I could come up with to let you enjoy the setting.
Like the laws of physics they are imperfect but functional. Let the
setting and your understanding of the universe guide your role as Game
Moderator or player and simply use the rules as far as they work.1