Sport and Games Atlas

How The Game Is Played
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Game

Tales from the Floating Vagabond

Role-Playing Games

Tales from The Floating Vagabond is a comedy science fiction tabletop role-playing game created by Lee Garvin and first published by Avalon Hill in 1991, with a line of support books through 1993. Its tagline promised ludicrous adventure in a universe whose natural laws are out to lunch. The game is a parody full of references to science fiction, fantasy, anime, comics and action films, with comic footnotes in the style of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Discworld. Adventures begin in the Floating Vagabond, a bar built into an asteroid whose front door picks up people from many worlds, so that a party can mix elves, ninjas and carnivorous teddy bears. The rules use ordinary polyhedral dice plus a thirty sided and a hundred sided die, and borrow bar vocabulary: the gamemaster is the Bartender, players are Patrons, and critical successes are called Chugs. A second edition appeared as a PDF in December 2023 and as a book in February 2025, after Garvin's death in 2019.

Facts
Sport
Game Type (category)
Role-Playing Game 1
Origin Year
1991 1
Sources
1. Tales from the Floating Vagabond (Wikipedia)
  • Lead, role-playing game
    is a comedy science-fiction role-playing game created by Lee Garvin, first published by Avalon Hill in 1991
  • Lead, first publication
    is a comedy science-fiction role-playing game created by Lee Garvin, first published by Avalon Hill in 1991
View the Source

Take a Related Quiz

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.