- Extremely complicated and math-intensive mechanics and charts governing character stats, in-game actions, gaining experience and leveling, and combat. These can lead to results that are anywhere from questionable to outright self-contradictory.
- Many game mechanics relating to body parts and orifices which are better left un-elaborated.
- Themes of rape-fantasy, racism, misogyny, and LGBT hatred; lots of Toilet Humor; and generalized perversity. Even the cover art for the rulebook is NSFW. The original name is another blatant hint at its content.
- Gratuitous spelling and grammar errors.
The game is best known because of a savage MST-styled review
of the rulebook by Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin on RPGnet. This led to a rebuttal by the creator and one of his contributors. There is also a TV Tropes liveblog.
The game even has an official theme song.
Provides examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: The name list for humans is composed of standard European names, and the name lists for other races are comprised of fantastic names...except for Kobolds, which use common Indonesian names.
- Alliterative Name: Many of the magical items have alliterative "X of Y" names, such as Boots of Beorgan, Chalice of Charm, Dice of Deceit, Goblet of God, Mirror of Many, Oil of Ontendan, Robe of Rudeness, and Well of Wickedness.
- Animal Sweet on Object: This can happen accidentally as a consequence of the rules for magic. When a magical item is used to cast a spell, the item is considered the "caster" for game-mechanical purposes. Thus, a miscast spell result can lead to your weapon and a creature or inanimate object thoroughly enjoying each other's company for a round or few.
- Animorphism: Dwarves and elves have natural shapeshifting abilities, allowing them to transform into certain animals.
- Antidisestablishmentarianism: Invoked in a weird way. Character stats include a chart for intelligence as it applies to languages, including limits on the vocabulary a character is capable of. The highest vocabulary limit is exemplified with "Antidisestablishmentarianism".
- Apocalypse How: Class 6: The titular spell Fatal takes a week to cast (or can be randomly activated by fumbling any spell) and "causes all life to die instantly on the current world of the caster."
- Armor Is Useless: Armor's defense bonus is determined by die rolls. Low rolls can actually subtract from the character's defense, and magical armor comes with a 7% chance of that magical effect killing the character.
- Artistic License – Biology: The rules and character creation process allow for many examples of completely out-of-whack character biology:
- Many bodily features are determined by die rolls, which can lead to outrageously oversized body parts and orifices with negative circumferences.
- It's possible to damage specific internal organs with attacks that have no business being so precise, as one review quotes:"The two stared at each other, then struck simultaneously. Jack's sword cleaved through the cultist's chest, cleaving through the nipple, the xiphoid process — the lowest part of the sternum — and the shoulder blade. The cultist's blade only caused damage to Jack's appendix and his adrenal gland, somehow missing everything else in front of and in back of Jack's adrenal gland and appendix."
- Having your heart torn out kills you in two rounds, which is slower than having your testicles cut off, which with a failed save will kill you instantly.
- A slash to the abdomen that misses all "critical" organs has a 70% chance of causing your small intestine to spill out. This isn't considered a particularly life-threatening wound.
- The cardiac notch is a small dent in the left lung wherein the heart rests. The author took this to mean that "the left lung is smaller than the right", and made it so a lung crit is twice as likely to hit the right lung as to hit the left.
- Childbirth never takes more than fourteen hours.
- Artistic License – Statistics: Some events are "(1d100)% likely" to happen. To determine this, you roll two percentile dicenote , and if the second one is equal to or greater than the first, you succeed. That means that everything has a flat 50.5% chance of happening. And yes, you're supposed to do this for anything that doesn't have a specific rule for it.
- Blessed with Suck: The Anakim have the chance to gain many useful powers randomly at character creation (such as the ability to cast certain spells once per day at will), but the chart these are rolled on also contains disadvantages (mainly physical alterations that lower the physical or facial charisma stats), things that prevent the character from interacting with society (such as emitting odors), or things which make the character downright unplayable (such as traits which force the character to make Drive checks to resist the urge to kill members of a certain race on sight.)
- Brawn Hilda: Enforced. Female characters with high strength stats suffer inversely scaling penalties to their charisma stats—the stronger a female character is, the uglier she is.
- Call A Hitpoint A Smeerp: Characters have two different health systems, Life Points (LP) and Body Part Points (BPP). LP determines how much damage a character can take before they die, while BPP determines how much damage a body part can take before it becomes completely useless.
- Character Alignment: Two axes, "ethical" and "moral", which are exactly the same as Dungeons & Dragons' "lawful/chaotic" and "good/evil" respectively, just with different names. The "ethical" characteristics are described as being taken from Democritus of Abdera, Plato, and Aristotle, while the "moral" characteristics are said to be taken from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.
- Claimed by the Supernatural: This is one possible result of a Magic Misfire, in which the character is branded all over their body with the mark of a (completely randomly-chosen) god.
- Class and Level System: The Professions system, essentially. There's well over 100 professions with possibilities for multi-classing, but the multi-class system is broken. Each level taken doubles the experience point cost of the next level, but only for that one class. At level ten, you can level up a new class to level 5 in less time it takes you to level up your current class to level 11.
- Conveniently Common Kink: The rules include Debauchery tables for both genders which determine the acts a character is willing to engage in based on a 1d100 roll. Whatever result is rolled, the character is game for all acts in their table up to that number but refuses the rest.
- Disability Superpower:
- A particular strength bonus can be gained with low intelligence.
- The player may re-roll low ability scores, thus making them more capable, at the cost of acquiring deformities and mental issues.
- Doorstopper: The official rulebook is 977 pages.
- Empty Levels: The only benefit to advancing in most professions is additional skill points to spend on class skills, which means (due to the fact that experience required for each successive level doubles every level), one is best off advancing in several closely-related classes, rather than focusing on one and trying to max it out.
- Ethnic Scrappy: The first edition of the rules featured a magical suit of armor that would, to put it gently, cause the wearer to take on physical and mental characteristics embodying the worst stereotypes of black people. The second edition wisely did away with this.
- Experience Points:
- You gain very small amounts of experience for jobs associated with that profession. They're all mostly mundane activities, so gaining experience can be very tedious. For instance, Warriors gain 10-20 EXP per swing of their sword, while basket weavers gain maybe 1 EXP per basket.
- XP is also counted per class, meaning that if you have three classes that gain damage XP, you can be getting 60 XP per swing.
- Fantastic Racism: The rules include a page for Racial Hatred, with two separate tables which lay out how each race views the others and how a character's racial hatred is determined based on the previous table. In either case, the tables heavily favor most races either disliking or completely hating almost everyone.
- Fantastic Slurs: The rules regarding race relations include a list of slurs. For instance:
- Humans are called "poople" (a corruption of "people") by Bugbears, Corruptians by Dwarves and Elves, Slavs (a corruption of "slaves") by Kobolds, and Ribbers by Ogres (since their ribs are very tasty).
- Humans have gendered slurs for Anakim. Male Anakim are called Raptors by men and Skinloaf or Stove-pipers by women, while female Anakim are called Hourglasses by men and Demon-whores by women.
- Fartillery: Anakim Trait for a roll of 72:The anakim may fart as loud as thunder. All creatures within a 10-feet radius of this anakim, except the anakim, automatically take 1d4 sonic damage and are stunned for 1 round, which can be avoided by passing a Drive check at TH 17. This can be utilized only once per week.
- Functional Magic: Ch. 13 of the rulebook is dedicated to magical items, giving a table with extensive options such as armor, weapons, common household items, wands, rods, and staves, and even torture devices that have magical properties and cause magical effects when used.
- Game-Favored Gender: This is part of the more problematic aspects of the game. There is basically no reason to play as a woman (unless you do as the game suggests and roll for your gender)—women have worse stats, cannot access several classes, are discriminated against socially, and multiple spells (including Mind Rape ones) are explicitly meant to work on women.
- Game Master: Referred to as the Aedilenote , although in the original version the title was Maim Master.
- Glamour: Dark elves are repulsively ugly and rely on illusion spells to seduce other races.
- Godiva Hair: The cover for the second edition rules features a man rescuing a woman from her Kobold captors; she is naked but her breasts are covered by her hair.
- Gratuitous Latin: The rulebook has Latin phrases scattered throughout as flavor text. Many are scatological, some are grammatically incorrect, and one seems to be making a reference to Catulli Carmen 16.
- Grotesque Gallery: One of the playable races, the "Anakim", are the children of demons and mortal women. As a result they have a chance of gaining random negative attributes like Black Eyes of Evil, becoming a Walking Wasteland, or smelling of rotten meat.
- Hollywood Tourette's: While the rules do note physical tics, the verbal tic is always to blurt obscenities, and the more likely it is to cause a social faux pas, the more likely the sufferer is to voice them.
- Honest Rolls Character: Stats have to be determined this way. Additionally, the rulebook suggests that everything except gender (ie. race, class, etc) be determined this way, but gives the Aedile the freedom to decide whether or not to enforce this rule. The honest-rolls method does result in possible oddities such as a character being at opposite ends of the spectrum in two stats that you would think would be related. Stats may be rerolled, at the cost of acquiring a random physical or mental disability.
- I Love the Dead: One of the available spells is "Have Her Cadaver", which causes a female corpse to appear to be a living, unconscious woman; the spell's description notes that "the most common reason for casting is copulation." According to Burnout, this was "included purely for comic effect".
- Implausible Fencing Powers: It's possible to get a critical hit on specific internal organs without damaging the surrounding anatomy, or to critical-hit someone's navel, eyelid, or clitoris...with a maul.
- Indecisive Parody: The comments of the game's creators are ambiguous as to whether it's supposed to be a work of "historically and mythologically accurate scholarship" or "controversial humour".
- Insistent Terminology: Loads. Among others:
- The constant euphemisms/dysphemisms for reproductive organs, most of which are very vulgar, including liberal use of Country Matters.
- The GM is referred to as the Aedile, or the MM (Maim Master) in the original version of the rules.
- That isn't the character sheet, it's the character sheets...all 11 pages of them.
- Jesus Taboo: The alleged setting is "like medieval Europenote , only with no Christianity" ...which is the cultural equivalent of "the Atlantic Ocean, only without water".
- Lamarck Was Right: The stats of a child are determined by applying a percentage modification to the average of their parents' stats.
- Lethal Klutz: Rolling a Critical Failure while attempting Slapstick can result in damage to bystanders.
- Loads and Loads of Rules: Along with the 900+ page rulebook, a character "sheet" consists of 11 (single-sided) sheets of paper, all of which are loaded with potential stats.
- Luck-Based Mission: Spellcasters. There's a nontrivial chance they'll kill or grievously wound themselves or a party member with every spell they cast, or even lead to the Fatal spell being cast, and skill has nothing to do with it.
- Magic Misfire: Every spell cast has the potential to go awry, with a pool of 2000 possible resulting effects rolled by the Aedile.
- Mind Rape: Many magical spells, items, and random magical effects cause the wearer, caster, or target to have aspects of their minds or personalities overwritten, usually in negative ways. For instance, armor with the suffix "of Cruelty" causes the wearer to gain sadistic urges, drinking from the Well of Wickedness causes a permanent 1d100 loss of Moral Points, and magical effects on a spellcaster include turning them narcissistic, making them obsessive-compulsive about washing, and causing them to permanently refuse to trim their nails.
- The Napoleon: Kobolds are quite short, averaging around 4.5' for males. Because of this, they force adult human slaves to do all their tasks on their knees and crawl around on their hands and knees, even when hauling heavy loads, so they're always shorter than their captors.
- No Immortal Inertia: Armor of Agelessness slows the wearer's aging by a factor of 10, but if it's removed, the character will immediately change to what their actual age should be.
- No Woman's Land: The setting and rules are horribly misogynistic, to the point that a woman who doesn't keep up with housework well enough can be punished more harshly than male characters who commit actual, monstrous crimes.
- Non-Combat EXP: Each class has a specific action that grants it EXP. All classes have the same EXP requirement to reach new levels, but the actual EXP gained varies tremendously by class: an accountant gains EXP for each month they work, but must work for 80 years to gain a level.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Averted. White Dwarves are pretty much the same, but Black Dwarves have a strong influence of The Fair Folk in them and Brown Dwarves resemble the tamer, post-Fair Folk fairy tales.
- Out with a Bang: Played with by the spell Perpetual Orgasm, which causes the target to start orgasming over and over again. After a short time, the target has to start rolling Health checks with an increasing chance of failure; the inevitable result is that the target dies from a heart attack due to the stress on their body.
- Potty Failure: One random magical effect causes a spellcaster to soil themself every time they cast a spell.
- Rhymes on a Dime: Enforced by a random magical effect.Caster will forever call themselves Curly G. and will always attempt to rhyme whenever they speak.
- Slave Race: Inverted by kobolds, who are a slaver race. They enslave people from every other race whenever they can, using children to dig mines and adults for heavy labor.
- Subsystem Damage: Both types are covered in the rules:
- The Graphic Gore section consists of multiple pages of tables for attacks on the extremities, pubic area, torso, and head with hacking, pounding, and stabbing strikes.
- A lot of spells and wounds from magical weapons have cumulative negative effects on their targets. For instance, a weapon with the suffix "of Festering" causes a festering wound; each time the victim messes with it, it increases in size and causes a 10% LP loss.
- To Serve Man: Ogres and trolls eat other races, with a particular fondness for human flesh. One ogre species specifically eats human children.
- Toilet Humour: The rules are loaded with scatological material. For instance, along with the aforementioned potential to have a urine stream that's as long as most modern cars, there's a spell that causes the target to fart and random magical effects that, among other things, can cause the spellcaster to defecate gems or bricks, believe that their urine is liquid gold (and attempt to sell it) or that their penis has turned to steel (and try to use it as a weapon), or repeatedly carve "My name is George...I eat shit for breakfast!" on a tree. Also, Ogres have "Shit-" as possible parts of their names.
- Total Party Kill: Exaggerated. One of the many, many magical fumbles results in killing off the entire planet via casting Fatal.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: There is a section on warfare in an otherwise character-focused game. Yes, warfare, as in army-on-army, not individual combat.
- Victoria's Secret Compartment: The Dress of Concealment allows a woman to store items in her cleavage regardless of how well she's endowed, provided the item(s) meet a size requirement.
- Viewers Are Morons: The book contains paragraphs describing to the reader what things like salt and cheese are.
- Virgin Sacrifice: A virgin tied to an altar is cited as a possible spell ingredient, with her death being guaranteed upon casting the spell.
- We All Die Someday: "Memento mori"note is one of the Gratuitous Latin phrases peppering the rulebook, and yelling it is a possible spell ingredient.
- Whatevermancy: All of the Divination skills, with one exception, are some form of -mancy, with options including Anthropomancynote , Chiromancynote , Libanomancynote , Ornithomancynote , and Stychomancynote .
- You Have Researched Breathing: There are skills for Sitting, Spitting and Tasting.
- Your Head A-Splode: One random magical effect causes the nearest enemy's head to explode, which is fatal unless they can regenerate.
