aethereal FORGE was a small independent RPG publisher active during the aughts. While multiple artists, editors, and other contributors were hired by æF, the publisher’s products were largely conceptualized and written by a single person, Michael Fiegel.

A design sensibility became more prominent in the aughts that focused on fast and rules-lite systems that emphasized fiction more so than simulation. Obviously these kinds of games had existed for decades, but aethereal FORGE was one of the many independent publishers of its time that helped popularize this playstyle, amongst other indies like Atomic Sock Monkey Press and Evil Hat. æF wasn’t exactly a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting company, but they certainly made some interesting games worth acknowledging.

I’m going to review and discuss aethereal FORGE’s two big comedy releases: Ninja Burger and Power Grrrl. I think both of these games really capture something about the era in which they were published, for reasons I’ll get into now.

Ninja Burger 2E

Ninja Burger was originally just a comedy website for a non-existent fast-food chain of the same name. The site was created in 1999 by Fiegel, who would adapt it into an RPG a little less than two years later in 2001¹.

The original Ninja Burger RPG used the BEER Engine, originally created for Kobolds Ate My Baby. But I’m only going to talk about the second edition here, which uses the PDQ engine. Something vaguely interesting is that Chad Underkoffler made an unrelated PDQ game called Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot, which sounds like it could be a Ninja Burger spinoff; there really was something in the air in the early aughts that made ninjas very meme-y.

I first heard about Ninja Burger as a youngster looking at the Brikwars website². When I bought my first TTRPG years later, Maid RPG, I also purchased Ninja Burger. I thought Ninja Burger was a highly popular game, since I had heard of it, and was a bit surprised to discover while browsing /r/RPG that its most popular days were firmly behind it. It’s occasionally mentioned in threads relating to comedy games, but that’s about it.

The premise of Ninja Burger is simple; the players work as ninja delivery people for the titular fast food chain. The Game Master is also a character; they act as the Dispatcher for the delivery team and provide description as if they were hacking into security cameras and studying other intel. Ninja Burger’s customers are generally people who want to eat food whilst in dangerous situations and/or inaccessible locations; example customers include the president in Air Force One, astronauts in a space shuttle, and people in hostage situations.

Ninja Burger is a game that I imagine is very easy to write adventures for; if you think of a precarious enough situation for a given customer the complications basically write themselves, and players always have to reach a specific person, which naturally guides things.

Something immediately striking about Ninja Burger is the quality of the presentation; the writing is at a very high level. Fiegel’s writing is funny without being too wacky; jokes feel “diegetic” to the setting, rather than being obnoxiously overt. In the introduction the book lists the other Ninja Burger products and it drops this little gem:

Ninja Burger “My First Shuriken” Action Playset – See product recall info on website.

Of course the joke is butchered here because in the original book it caps off a list and you don’t know you’re about to read a joke, but hopefully you get the idea. Ninja Burger is one of the most enjoyable RPGs I’ve ever read; even if you never play it, the book is worth it for the quality of its writing alone.

The game opens with a page explaining the differences between fictional ninjas and historical ninjas in order to make a point about ninja roleplaying:

The point in mentioning all this is to demonstrate that no matter what ideas about ninja that your players bring to the table – fictional, historical, or somewhere in between – any and all such preconceptions are equally valid (or invalid, as the case may be). There’s plenty of room within the Ninja Burger world for broad interpretation of the ninja concept, and the first thing your group needs to do in order to enjoy this game is to never say “a ninja would NEVER do THAT.”

It’s great that this is codified in the book, because I can only imagine how insufferable it would be to play Ninja Burger with some nerd who polices other players on how everyone should be acting. The game continues by introducing a Violence / Realism scale, before providing the reader with a variety of sample tones with varying Violence / Realism extremes, so that a prospective group of players can choose their desired atmosphere easily.

I won’t summarize the entire book beat-by-beat, but there’s a lot of stuff in the book detailing the setting; the code Ninja Burger employees live by, different kinds of employees, the enemies of the Ninja Burger chain, etc. The game points out that Ninja Burger 1E was very much a one-shot game, but this second edition aims to provide enough material for campaign play, which I think it succeeds at doing. I’m a big fan of the book’s suggestion that a campaign detail a single day of deliveries at Ninja Burger.

Ninja Burger uses the PDQ system, which I won’t discuss in too much detail here; I’m planning on writing a two-parter on Atomic Sock Monkey Press in the future, and the deep dive would be much more appropriate there. To put things succinctly, the PDQ system is kind of like Risus and FATE in that you basically have cliches/skills [qualities], and when you take damage it subtracts from your qualities. Unlike Risus, where cliches are dice pools, Qualities have levels instead that add a modifier to rolls. PDQ Qualities can be negative or positive in nature. Anything a character does that doesn’t involve their Qualities simply is an unmodified 2d6 roll.

If you’re sufficiently good at doing something you don’t need to roll to do it, which is true of most games, but in PDQ that’s codified in a very clear way that makes things unambiguous. Unless you have a dysfunctional group, you’ll never have to debate with your GM about whether or not your character is sufficiently strong enough in the fiction to be able to do something without needing to roll; it’s all there in the action resolution table.

There’s more to PDQ but that’s the gist of it. Ninja Burger doesn’t radically depart from the standard PDQ system, but the game does add a bit of flavor to make it work better for the setting. It’s largely roleplaying stuff, like having a job title and “matter of honor”, but it still can guide things in a meaningful way. It’s kind of like how Ghostbusters uses an extremely simple system, but because you’re doing a certain profession gameplay is guided very effectively.

As Ninja Burger employees, players are supposed to complete all deliveries within 30 minutes [or less, if a delivery starts late]. If they fail, depending on the tone of the game, they may be required to commit seppuku. The game includes some tips on keeping track of time, which basically amount to the GM making note of how long something probably took after it happens, which sounds like too much bookkeeping. If Fiegel had attempted to find a solid real-time alternative that accounted for the time difference between the fiction and actual gameplay, that would’ve been preferable for some people; maybe 40 minutes to complete a full 30 minute delivery? It also would’ve been nice to have a printable sheet a GM can use to cross out blocks of time in 15-second chunks, or something like that.

The book also includes an 8-page adventure, Fill Bill, as well as four short adventures that fit onto two page spreads. It also has a very extensive 30-page section detailing the game’s San Francisco setting, with random encounter tables for each part of the city, as well as a list of 36 films set in San Francisco that players can be inserted into. There’s a ton of stuff here for a GM [or rather, Dispatcher], to utilize, such as the Dispatcher Record Sheet, which is basically four mini-character sheets on a single page. It’s designed to be a quick reference for a GM to use while running the game, and it’s the kind of thing that a GM usually has to make for themselves.

I need to praise the artwork in Ninja Burger; it’s all of a very high quality, and surprisingly good for an independent game from the aughts. This is a period where you saw a lot of digital art drawn using a mouse, and so to see so much high-quality illustration is a real treat.

Ninja Burger is a silly game that’s very divorced from any kind of real-world politics, but there are some elements of the game that haven’t aged very well. The seppuku and honor-related jokes can sometimes come off as being a touch culturally insensitive roughly 20 years later. Ninja Burger is not a game that’s trying to be edgy, offensive, or mean-spirited by any stretch of the imagination; it’s mostly clean fun. But it does reflect the early aughts in some awkward ways.

Ninja Burger is an incredible game, and also an incredible book. In my eyes it’s the gold standard for presenting a rules-lite comedy game; the quality of the prose is not only entertaining in itself, but it also helps a prospective GM get into the mindspace, and there’s so much information that a GM can put to use in here. If the premise of the game doesn’t interest you, you probably will never be converted. But if you think you’ll like Ninja Burger, you probably will.

Power Grrrl

In 2004 aethereal FORGE released the POW! Gaming System, which only ever received a single “worldbook”, Power Grrrl. An RPG.net review by Shanya Almafeta describes the POW! system as being “like a combination of Unisystem and BESM 1e with quirky albeit workable additions”.

The same review also points out that the POW! rules and the worldbook combined total out to being only 96~ pages. Indeed, it’s kind of inexplicable why Power Grrrl wasn’t an entirely self-contained game. It’s easy to imagine an all-in-one version of Power Grrrl being a fondly remembered rules-lite comedy supers game instead of an obscure splatbook [and it would also help if the book’s title wasn’t a homophone of a popular pre-existing superhero’s name].

Power Grrrl takes place in a world where all teenagers have superpowers, but they start to lose their powers as they turn into adults. I have to admit, there’s something a little too melancholy about this premise; if I were GMing a game using this book I’d definitely present it as being a bit more Sky High, where the characters go to a supers school instead of every human being going through their own personal tragedy of disempowerment.

Power Grrrl has an interesting conceit; it’s a fan-made amateur RPG supplement for a fake TV show that never really existed. Or, as the book puts it, “The Power Grrrl cartoon precedes the Power Grrrl RPG Universe by many years. Loved dearly by fans and praised by critics, it was an unfortunate victim of the anime glut which spat out hundreds of cartoons on television.” [pg 2]. The book also includes this note: “Very few details were actually presented within the cartoon, however, so the authors of this game have taken the liberty of building upon the spirit of the Power Grrrl cartoon while giving game players a solid game setting to work within” [pg 34].

I purchased the Power Grrrl PDF because its premise sounded fun and unique. The fake-show fan project conceit feels, if not ahead of its time, certainly like a very early example of 90s anime nostalgia. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired; something you’ll probably notice very quickly is that there isn’t much anime flavor in this game. The literal first villain in the bestiary is a parody of George W. Bush, followed by his sidekick “Dick Chimpy”. It’s very hard to buy into the idea that Power Grrrl was a 90s anime.

It probably would’ve been better if Power Grrrl had pretended to be based off of an American syndicated cartoon instead, like Street Sharks, because the entire book is so lacking in verisimilitude. You might think I’m being a little too fixated on this one particular aspect of Power Grrrl, but there’s such a thing as “committing to the bit”, which this game basically hand-waves away by saying little is understood about the cartoon, even by its fans. It’s a real step-down from Ninja Burger, which succeeded in these areas so well³.

Let’s circle back around to the POW! System. For the most part it’s a very simple system; roll 2d6 + stat modifier. Something neat about the system is that Specials, defined as “actions, powers, and abilities . . . which give your character an advantage over ordinary people”, can only be chosen if your relevant base stat is good enough. There are some elements of POW! that seem needlessly fiddly, given the complexity of the larger system [e.g. armor has a short term “Frame Rating”, but also can be permanently destroyed if its “Damage Rating” is depleted]. But, on the whole, it seems like a perfectly acceptable rules-lite system.

The POW! System is the kind of simple and unobtrusive system that’s perfect for being modified for specific applications, like D6, FATE, or PDQ. And so once again I don’t know why Power Grrrl didn’t just include a tailored version of the POW! rules. There are 10 worldbooks advertised towards the end of the system PDF, of which only Power Grrrl ever saw release. There are posts in the RPG.net forum searching for artists to draw the other worldbooks, but clearly something happened. [1, 2, 3]

I have some other minor quibbles about Power Grrrl. Every page of the PDF has the sheet of notebook paper facing the same way instead of alternating them, a serif font is awkwardly shoved between the lines of the notebook paper, and almost none of the artwork has an anime vibe. Granted this is because the artwork in the book is mostly drawn by the fan writing the supplement, but my response is that it would’ve been better to simply alter the conceit a little and include more fake screenshots. There are also a lot of 2d6 tables in this book that should’ve been d66 tables in order to avoid probability curves⁴.

Like Ninja Burger, Power Grrrl includes an introductory adventure and a list of Plots To Steal [fifty for Power Grrrl instead of the d66 table in Ninja Burger]. Many of the plots here are incredible premises for an adventure, and I think this is the best resource in the entire book. Here’s an example:

Invader Zim – Earth has been invaded! The problem is that this alien has taken on the guise of a human teen, and only our super group is aware of his existence. Can they thwart his plans and convince the world that he exists?

I don’t necessarily think Power Grrrl is bad; almost everything I’ve had issue with is stuff that only the GM will ever see. These GM-facing issues aren’t organizational problems where it’s difficult for a GM to parse important information; it’s just stuff related to the fake-anime premise, which probably wouldn’t have much direct effect on gameplay to begin with.

The meta on making stuff about fake TV shows has gotten a lot better since 2004; it’s easy to imagine a modern attempt at making a Power Grrrl-type book having much better fake anime screenshots, and writing that reflects how much more knowledgeable the average animation fan is now about various production and localization related things.

There’s a lot of stuff in Power Grrrl for a GM to think about. It’s the kind of book to pick and choose ideas from, rather than use in its entirety without changes; this is true of most splatbooks, but maybe not to this extent. It’s a good resource for running a cartoonish game about teen supers, but it’s not quite the home-run that Ninja Burger was. [If you want to read more stuff about supers games, I recommend looking at my series on rules-lite supers games.]

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After releasing two final games in 2008 and 2009, Hellas and Vox respectively, Michael Fiegel stepped away from the RPG space. He said the following in a 2012 post on the RPG.net forums:

I spent about a decade writing, editing, designing, printing and publishing role-playing games, and recently I decided to pursue other ventures. As such I’m no longer in the RPG business.

Since then he’s worked on some fiction books and videogames. He did start making posts about a potential third edition of Ninja Burger in 2017, but at this point I think it’s safe to assume the project has been abandoned.

I think the ethos of aethereal FORGE’s games represents something about their time period. Not only their specific comedic stylings, but also how they were released. If one looks at the history of the TTRPG medium, I think it’s fair to say that online PDF distribution allowed a lot of smaller, quirkier, rules-lite games to get published that larger companies probably wouldn’t have even considered, and everything æF released feels like a niche game.

I highly recommend Ninja Burger to anyone looking for a comedy game; I love its use of the PDQ system, and there’s a ton of stuff in there for a GM. Power Grrrl is an interesting splatbook, but sometimes more so interesting in concept rather than in practice.

aethereal FORGE’s games can be found at DriveThruRPG.

1. Ninja Burger has also been turned into a card game and board game. ↩︎
2. I wrote a full piece about Brikwars here. ↩︎
3. Ninja Burger 2E was released in 2006, roughly two years after Power Grrrl, but the general Ninja Burger concept predates Power Grrrl by five years . . . ↩︎
4. Ninja Burger has a single 2d6 table that is also ill conceived; if you roll for random competition, you only have a 2.78% and 5.56% chance of encountering Pirate Pizza and Samurai Burger employees respectively, the major rivals of Ninja Burger, and a 16.67% chance of encountering HunBurger, much less significant opponents in Ninja Burger lore. ↩︎