Pandemonium

A little-known RPG from the early 1993, Pandemonium! took us outside our nice comfortable world...

All those things you read about supermarket tabloids? Backwoods lake monsters, alien abductions, Elvis sightings, they're all true. The players control Paranormal Investigators, or rather reporters for one such rag, The Weekly Weird News, after attaining Enlightenment. Besides simply being able to accept all the bizarre events most people write off as hooey, becoming Enlightened allows people access to unusual abilities like walking through walls and clairvoyance, as well as being able to call up the abilities of who they were in past lives. With these abilities the players are sent to investigate everything from bigfoot sightings to secret conspiracies.

Sadly the game found little support from the gaming public and was shuttered after the release of the rulebook and a single booklet containing premade adventures. Not to be confused with the 1982 Movie of the same name, nor the PlayStation 1 series of games of the same title.

Pandemonium! provides examples of:

 * All Tabloid Stories Are True
 * Backup Twin: An offered explanation for a quick and simple bout of reincarnation.
 * Brought Down to Normal: Players can temporarily lose their Englightenment, and with it goes all their special abilities.
 * Canada, Eh?:
 * Elvis Lives: The pack-in adventure has the players investigating why there haven't been any Elvis sightings for an entire month.
 * The Masquerade: Although it's achieved by most people having a particular state of mind which prevents them from believing in paranormal phenomena, which can be alleviated through alien technology or psychic occurrences. If a player loses their Englightenment, they stop believing in all the weird stuff.
 * The Men in Black
 * Not-So-Imaginary Friend: One of the available powers.
 * Reincarnation: Everyone has a past life and can try to summon it up to make use of its special abilities (such as making rousing speeches as Abraham Lincoln or advanced mathematics as Albert Einstein). If a character dies, they're reincarnated and can do this with the abilities of the character they'd previously had. Villains have past lives too, but ones like Hitler, Ted Bundy and Richard Nixon.
 * Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Every character has a phobia of something. A few of the pregenerated characters are scared spitless of role-playing games.