JAGS Wonderland

JAGS — the acronym standing, not inaccurately, for Just Another Gaming System — is a relatively unpretentious generic RPG system in the traditional style: anyone who has any experience with, say, GURPS or BESM 2nd/3rd will not find anything terribly surprising here.

JAGS Wonderland, on the other hand — available at the same link as JAGS itself — is the star of the JAGS setting and sourcebook lineup. It is (as the perspicacious reader may have surmised from the title) an infusion of horror into the works of Lewis Carroll, and anyone who has any experience with such works as the AD&D modules EX1-2 or American McGee's Alice... well, is still going to be awed and amazed, because Wonderland is several separate sinister and spicy-sour strata of screwed and screwed up, each delicious and flaky like so much player-character sanity.

I categorically refuse to go into spoilery details; the .pdfs are there for the reading, although if you think you'll ever potentially play in this setting, keep in mind that the Book of Knots is GM-only material — and you might not want to read even Wonderland.pdf. If you think you might want to run it, on the other hand, please do go read it, Knots included! (Alas, there are numerous typographical errors, and a fair amount of the artwork is "we can't afford real art" 3D renders; this is perhaps forgivable since, well, they can't, but it does occasionally grate.)

(Note: Although the word "JAGS" does appear in the book title, JAGS is reasonably generic, and so there are few hooks where a setting could be tightly coupled to the JAGS ruleset; Wonderland does not even make the attempt. If you have strong preferences about what kind of cup you drink your tea from, JAGS could be dissevered from Wonderland and another system grafted on in its place without the result appearing too much like the sort of twisted chimera one might expect to find too far down the rabbit hole.)