There's some really odd games I got backing charity bundles on DriveThruRPG, but since I haven't read them, I not sure that counts. And since that's not interesting to talk about, I'm going to talk about TORG: Roleplaying the Possibility Wars.
TORG had a lot of things going for it. First off, the setting had just about everything built in. The premise is that there's these other-dimensional super-evil guys who invade other dimensions, looking to drain the "Possibility Energy" from them. The process turns the reality they conquer into their own reality. So when the great lizardman shaman of the "Living Land" (a land full of dinosaurs) takes over chunks of America, it transforms to match the Living Land. Cars stop working. People sometimes transform into cavemen. And so on. In addition of Dinosaur Land, there was "Pulp Adventure Land", "Evil Japanese Businessmen & Ninjas Land" (it was the 90s and that was a thing back then), "Fantasy Land", "Cyberpunk Land ruled by the evil Cyberpope" and "Gothic Horror Land." (Plus some that invaded later.) PCs were "Storm Knights" - people able to go into foreign realities without transforming and able to use their native tools. (So the Elf Mage can go to regular Earth and cast spells, and his pal the Special Forces Ranger can take his machine gun to Fantasy Land.) The mix-and-match nature of the game let you do just about anything and play just about any character without having to jump campaigns. It also had some great innovations in play - most notably the Drama Deck, a deck of cards that gave PCs (and the GM) little boosts here and there, and also encouraged PCs doing more than just shooting the bad guys. Lastly, the campaign evolved month to month. There was a newsletter you could subscribe to (this was pre-Web, though they had some presence on usenet as alt.games.torg), and each month it had little updates and adventure seeds and the like. The back page was a form you could send back in to WEG, saying what your heroes had done and where they'd done it. And allegedly, they threw that data into something that determined how well the war was going. These days, there'd be some sort of living campaign and wow, OMG, I'd be all over that.
I ran it for a few years and it was a ball. However, the game had some flaws. First off, the effect rules were semi-exponential, and as the game progressed, higher results meant crazier things. At high levels, a Haste Spell cast by our Sorceress let a Pulp Cowboy's horse break the sound barrier. The Core Earth psychic who got nosebleeds bending spoons at the start of the game was eventually using loaded 747s as weapons and could pull satellites out of orbit. Also, trying to make a new spell using the make-a-new-spell from the magic rulebook was a sanity-busting affair. Lastly, the base roll was Stat+Skill+1d20. The problem was stats were 6-13 and skills were 1+. There was no cap to skills, except that it got ridiculously expensive to do raise them after a certain point. That meant that everyone made sure to boost their power stat (dex for shooty types, willpower for holy types, intelligence for magic types, etc) as high as possible and ignore everything else.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the recent news that the German RPG company that had bought TORG ages ago was going to start making new material in the next year or so. I hope they fix some of the broken stuff in the rules.
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