A
role-playing game (the
paper kind) created by master
game designers Jonathan Tweet and
Robin Laws, and published by
Atlas Games. Over the Edge was inspired in part by the fiction of
William Burroughs, particularly the
Tangiers-inspired
milieu of
Interzone. However,
Al Amarja (as the island nation detailed in Over the Edge is named) is both less unhinged than Interzone and more so.
Over the Edge is one of many games that strive to create a world in which all conceivable conspiracy theories are true simultaneously. OtE crosses Burroughs' drug-hazed exotica with, say, an offshore tech haven, and a business hub curiously misplaced in the South Seas. The stories in Over the Edge are driven by factions, like so many RPGs these days: the business types, hacker types, and voodoo pusher-magician types all form tribes and compete for control of the island of Al Amarja, the better to provide default motivations for PCs and NPCs alike and keep the story moving.
The world of Over the Edge is also the basis for the collectible card game On the Edge, which was one of the first major post-Magic offerings in the genre and, according to some, still one of the best. On the Edge was actually released several months before Over the Edge, so whether one was intended as a loss leader for the other is a real question (as is: which for which?).