SystemMastery 19 – Furry Pirates
This week, we take hold of a book with a bifurcated design sensibility. Will we actually discover “Swashbuckling Adventures in the Furry Age of Piracy”? Or will we find that the furries appear to have been added to this book late during development? Is this a case of Type 1 or Type 2 Furabetes? What social rank must a male furry be at before he is expected to wear a wig (unless he is a Puritan)? We struggle to answer all these questions in our 19th episode. Special thanks to Ryan for the suggestion. Never suggest anything again, Ryan (keep suggesting things).
System Mastery 
I’ve actually always kind of wondered what the point of Furry RPGs was… I thought it was more like a visual art style than anything else. In stuff like Robin Hood or Usagi Yojimbo or Duck Tales or even Sonic the Hedgehog the characters don’t really have TMNT style animal powers; they just happen to be talking animals.
It’s always seemed to me like you could just take a normal RPG, declare that the characters were anthropomorphic animals, and that would be good enough.
I like the podcast, and I have a bunch of suggestions:
Nobilis, 3rd Edition a game which is very, very good at at filling its niche but not always so good about explaining what that niche actually is.
SLA Industries This was an excellent pitch for a great 2000AD comic that unfortunately became an RPG instead. Actually, from what I’ve read so far it’s a good setting for an RPG too, with lots of interesting things for the characters to potentially do, but it does that 90s thing where there’s a lot of text devoted to a metaplot and high level NPCs that most PCs will never have any reason to meet or interact with ever.
It’s pay what you want on RPGNow, though, so the price is right.
Maid another fetish game, which seems like it has a rule-set that could actually make for some interesting Paranoia/My Life With Master shenanigans. Most of the book is about the author’s anime maid fetish, though.
Khaotic An obscure one I picked up as a kid. Basically, the plot is that the evil science genius Isabella Baine has taken over another dimension, and is using her matter teleporter to send grotesque, genetically engineered cyborg monsters into our reality in an attempt to conquer earth.
Luckily, our government has an older version of her teleporter, so your heroic party of PCs can project their minds into Baine’s dimension, where they psychically take over the mind of one of the inhabitants.
Emphasis on one; your entire party is squished into the brain of a single monster, and they have to work together to control it.
Going through the backlog and i hope to the anime pope that they do MAID, its trash but its amazing hilarious trash with more random encounter tables than you can shake a buster sword at
Also, the optional seduction rules ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I’d like to second the request for Nobilis, just because I’d rather hear your take on it than read through the book myself.
Speaking as a furry, I want to thank you for doing this review. Holy crap I know I have a ridiculous fetish, but what the hell. Embrace your ridiculous bullshit, right? I saw Furry Pirates on the gamestore shelves ages ago and I gave it a miss back then because it seemed so oddly specific. Still, I was glad that something like that had been written because it looked like it at least had decent production values (Atlas Games? Seriously?!). Too bad it failed to deliver on the one big thing that made it unique. What’s the point? Like non-furries are ever going to buy something like that.
I’d love to hear you review Ironclaw and Jadeclaw, furry fantasy games that are actually written like people will play furries in them. Or you could also do Justifiers, which was a lot like TMNT in space but with a system that wasn’t very good.
…
So…like TMNT in space.
Ill have you know its not furrabetes
Its furpes , oh yeah i just made a furry sex joke that also riffs on your joke, im proud of that pun no matter what anyone says
But really they couldnt come up with a better name? Like you just have to throw the furry fandom a bone not pander to it that hard that you just straight up call it furry pirates
What boring fucking name, im internet trash and i like furry trash and even i wouldnt buy this game just because of how bad that name is, and i bloody bought MAID the rpg wich is the most trashy of games