Refuge in Audacity/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Warhammer 40,000 lives off this trope. It includes, among other things, supersoldiers in ridiculously oversized powered armor with chainsaw swords and fully automatic armor-piercing rocket propelled grenade launchers as their standard sidearm, who are led around by hammer-wielding skull-helmeted priests and supported by giant walking sarcophagi with flamethrowers, missile launchers, and chainguns mounted on them, and that's not counting the hundreds of meters tall walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks with the firepower of entire armored divisions, undead robots awakening from before the dinosaurs evolved, flamethrower-equipped battle nuns, vehicles that go faster because they are painted red, and aliens with guns that shoot ninja stars.
    • Monomolecular ninja stars, thank you very much. You also forgot the psychics who run the risk of having their heads randomly explode due to the DEMONS THAT GIVE THEM THEIR PSYCHIC POWERS trying to escape and wreak havoc, as well as the fact that the gods of those demons will either turn you into a raving psychopath who needs to drink blood to survive, a sex-crazed nymphomaniac murderer who even views death as the sexiest thing possible, a plague-ridden pusbag who loves the immortality he's gifted with that allows him to live through the excruciating disease, or someone capable of hearing every thought in the universe all the time, forever.
    • Those monomolecular-ninja-star-gun aliens also have tanks the size of city blocks, but which can FLY; sacrifice themselves to become the giant, fiery living incarnation of their not-quite-dead god of war; and live almost exclusively in giant continent-sized space ships, having destroyed their own worlds earlier in their history orgied so hard that they CREATED the aforementioned sex-crazed nymphomaniac "death is the sexiest thing ever" god and a thousand lightyear wide Negative Space Wedgie. Oh, and their most elite and feared close-combat fighters are performing troupes of storytelling acrobats and mimes.
    • Orks. Warhammer 40k is audacious by our standards. Orks are audacious by 40k standards. And let's not get started on the weirdboyz and Mad Dokz, who are considered to have a few hundred screws loose by other Orks. Remember, these are the guys who can make their vehicles go faster because they're painted red. And they're the Comic Relief!
    • Warhammer Fantasy is less audacious, but it remains one of the few tabletop games to have ever created an army of mad scientist ratmen with lightning guns and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
    • The factions of 40K may be insane, but the BACKGROUND is Up to Eleven: Humanity's population is in the countless trillions (Terra's population: 100 trillion). A Million Is Not A Statistic. It's not even a blip; it's Human Resources. Yet they're still barely holding on against Everything Else. For the past 10,000 years of endless war. The wars before that turned the effective Afterlife into extra-dimensional Hell and sentient life's worst enemy. There are other gods that eat stars, worshipped by the above absurdly old-yet-functional robots. Several races were made by beings older than that. The only extra-dimensional races we've seen are planet-eating Hive Fleets The lightest things to come out of this place are probably the Ciaphas Cain novels. This list is by no means complete. Yeek.
  • The GURPS 4th edition rulebook says this on the skill "Holdout" (concealing objects on your person): "A Las Vegas show girl in costume (-5 penalty to skill) would have trouble hiding even a dagger. Of course, the show girl might escape search entirely (unless the guards were bored) because 'She obviously couldn't hide anything in that outfit!' Full nudity is -7 to skill."
  • Vampire: The Requiem has an extreme example in the form of the Crassus ghoul family. Though mortal, they have some vampiric powers, which they use to build their huge American empire. Powers such as reduced rate of aging, Mind Control, and a concentrated psychic manifestation of Evil Is Sexy. They also every now and then get beaten and raped by their vampire patrons for the lulz. They don't acknowledge any of their powers or rapes, and those that do, continue to let it happen.
  • Paranoia has a skill dedicated to this, Chutzpah. The example used to explain the skill is standing before a judge to be sentenced for murdering your parents -- and pleading for clemency because you're an orphan.
  • This is the entire point of the majority of joke games (as opposed to comedy games).
    • Macho Women with Guns.
    • Human Occupied Landfill.
    • Good grief, Kobolds Ate My Baby. This game has you create a laughably underpowered Kobold for the sake of bringing back the tasty, tasty baby for King Torg's feast. Fail, and you go into the pot. Babies may explode spontaneously. There really is a Baby Horrible Death Chart. You may wind up eating a baby to regain health points. Bringing a baby back to the caves for your friends to eat wins you points. It's played for laughs.
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