Hey, glad you could make it. Turns out the rest of the crew couldn’t be here, though. Yeah, Jessie’s got a stomach thing, Kareem’s dogsitting, and Dave got grabbed by ICE. It’s cool, though. I picked up this new one-shot game we can play instead of our regular campaign. I know, I really wanted to see how the party dealt with the Sex Gnomes of the Underfuck too. Hopefully we can bust Dave out next week. But for now, let’s try Zolar: The Official Roleplaying Game!
You remember Zolar, right? The made-for-TV movie? Maybe you didn’t see it. I think it only ever aired once on Canadian television in 2004. It might have been one of those tax things you hear about. But don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go. I’ll be the Game Master, and you’ll be Zolar. Here’s your character sheet.
As Zolar, you have three stats: FRIENDS, SKATE, and BLUE. You’ll use these to overcome the various challenges set out before you. For each point, you roll one Official Zolar: The Extreme Sports Movie: The Roleplaying Game die. Each Zolar face represents a success, while other characters are failures. If all three stats are reduced to zero, you fail in your quest. Ready? Let’s get started! Or, as Zolar might say, blueyeah! That’s one of his catchphrases.
Your name is Zolar. For as long as you can remember, you have lived with a laconic man named Skip in his oversized van. Skip discovered you as an infant lying in a crater one night, and like Pa Kent and Son Gohan before him, decided to raise you as his own son. Unfortunately, you don’t blend in with the population quite as well as Superman or Goku — you have blue skin, a large, bulbous nose, a braided topknot, and fins for ears. You grow up in the wilds of British Columbia, drawn to extreme sports from a young age.
You have never known another life, but some nights, laying awake in your adoptive father’s carhome, you wonder. You wonder where you came from. You wonder what it would be like to have friends. You wonder if your alien genitals are compatible with those of earth lifeforms.
And then one day, everything changes. You watch from within the van as your father goes out to greet a group of kids your age. They’ve been sent by pro skateboarder Jason Ellis to seek Skip’s coaching, because they want to be extreme athletes but they fucking suck at skateboarding. Your dad agrees to train them under one condition — that you be allowed to join their team. This is your chance. Roll BLUE to impress your new best friends and teammates.
Damn. You burst out of the van looking like a colloidal silver-poisoned Shrek. Not only are these kids not impressed with you, they’re actually laughing. You don’t have much of a baseline for how human beings might react to seeing a real-life alien, but laughter feels hurtful. They’re not even afraid of you. One of them, this little weasel named Brett, openly says that he doesn’t want to skate with an alien because he thinks it’ll tank the team’s already-dismal cred.
Have these kids seen a lot of aliens before? Has your Skip dad been keeping you away from a society that would in fact have no issue with your existence? You have so many questions. But they’ll have to wait — Brett’s bailed, so there’s a spot on the team open. You immediately dub the group “Team Zolar” despite being the most junior member and everyone just kind of rolls with it. Maybe they really are afraid of you?
But there’s someone who isn’t. While you’re skating and goofing off with your new human pals, a man watches from the distance through high-tech goggles. He— yeah, you don’t know any of this in-character. Just think of it as like, a cutscene. He leers at your antics and informs his superior, Hedion, that you are forming an army. Hedion looks like, uh, imagine C. Thomas Howell with a ton of red shit on his head and a finger for a nose. Kind of like that.
Hedion’s a little smarter than his goon, Prentiss. He says that you’re just making friends. Prentiss makes a crack about how you don’t have any friends. Ouch. Hedion muses that Zolar is one of the most powerful beings “on the universe” but doesn’t know it yet. Remember though, no metagaming. You — Zolar — don’t know about your godlike powers at this point.
You do a lot of training, during which your SKATE increases to 4. We can skip over that, though. It’s two weeks later, and it’s time for the Big Skate Tournament. Your teammates rack up pretty solid scores. Skip’s coaching has paid off. Now you’re up.
You stand on the edge of the halfpipe, nervous energy rushing through you. You can do this. You’ve been training for this your whole life. Roll SKATE to pull off some sick moves.
Jeez. Zero again, huh. I’m not going to mince words: you eat shit. Repeatedly. Nobody seems to notice that you look like an anaphylactic Gillman. All they can see is the dishonor you’re doing to the Skate Gods, and here in their temple, no less. This is bad. Skating is all you’ve got. You’re going to get kicked off the team. You need a distraction.
Lucky you! You get one, in the form of a portal opening above the halfpipe and unleashing magical lightning that stops time for everyone but you and your team. Before you have a chance to wonder what’s going on, grinning Dark Skaters appear and begin to chase you!
Quick, roll SKATE again to evade them!
Not bad! You’re able to stay ahead of your mysterious pursuers. But skating alone isn’t going to get you out of this one. Roll BLUE!
You did it! As you form the image of a wish in your mind, a slumbering power wakes within you! Surrounded by a shield of glowing blue energy, you batter your foes into submission! You gain 1 BLUE from the battle! But it’s not over yet. A hideous-looking alien appears to rally his troops. It’s Prentiss, the guy from earlier, in his true, disgusting form, equipped with Combat Tracksuit, Silver Medal, and Power Glove!
Prentiss and his skate-soldiers open fire on you with deadly alien beams! Roll BLUE again to stop them from killing you and the closest thing you’ve ever had to a friend group.
You halt the lasers with a magic force field and then weaponize it against your attackers to knock them unconscious! But with only one success, you ruin the moment by doing a stupid dance and rambling about how great you are while your teammates look on in baffled disgust.
Later, around a burning barrel down by the docks, Skip tells the kids your big secret: you’re an alien. They seem genuinely surprised, to the point that you wonder if some of them might have incurred traumatic brain injuries from all of their bails. But nonetheless, they decide to stick with you for the sake of possibly winning a skate competition. Congratulations, your FRIENDS stat has increased to 4!
Resolve strengthened, Skip drives you all to the home of professional freestyle motocross rider Mike Metzger, whom he says will have useful information. Mike, it turns out, is an alien.
In fact, he explains, most extreme athletes are aliens, and extreme sports are coded versions of alien rituals. Are your friends then appropriating religiously significant performances whose meaning they could scarcely guess at? Maybe! The important thing is, your meeting with them wasn’t by chance. This was all arranged by aliens to give you, Zolar, friends your own age! But that’s not all. Mike Metzger reveals that you hail from a world named Zorcania, where everyone has a power called “Sirrus.” When you take it offworld, Sirrus becomes the most powerful force in the universe. Hedion found out about this and came after Zorcania, but your planets invested all of their alien chi into you and launched you into space. What? Yeah, I guess that does sound kind of a lot like Superman. The revelation of your origins grants you a deeper understanding of your latent powers. Increase your BLUE to 4!
Still, you’re reeling from the news that you once had biological parents. I guess you never thought about that before. But then you hear something unexpected — two voices calling your name. You step outside and see two blue adults who can only be your parents smiling and beckoning to you! The timing is a little suspicious, given that you literally just heard about how they exploded on their home planet years ago. Unfortunately, you don’t have any stat that might let you detect a possible deception. You immediately decide to give up the only life you’ve ever known for the uncertainty of the stars. Saying your goodbyes, you depart with your parents for New Zorcania.
Your parents lead you to a pavilion in the center of a public park. They seem kind of businesslike, ushering you forward and into a room dominated by two large reclining metal chairs that face one another. Roll BLUE to try and intuit the use of these devices of Zorcanian manufacture.
You’re still too excited about meeting your parents to focus properly. Your Sirrus merely inflates your big, stupid head until your mom tells you to cut it out. There will probably be a lot of these kinds of interactions in your future — you goofing off, your mom telling you “no head inflating at the dinner table.” You relish the thought. For now, though, get those shoes off. Your dad says that the ship is controlled by the union of two bare sets of little piggies.
What? This is not exactly like the time you had to tonguebathe the feet of Garzobol the Sex Gnome to get the secret directions to the Underfuck. I didn’t write this! It’s in the adventure. Look, I’ll prove it. Here’s what it says next:
[As you press your cerulean tootsies against those of the man who spawned you, a curious energy cascades across your body. Suddenly, his feet transform into the grotesque talons of a chicken as he moans in orgasmic pleasure.]
See, dude? I know. It’s fucking weird. Let’s just push through this and move on. And sorry, but it’s more bad news — that machine drained your Sirrus! Your BLUE stat drops to 0 as your power is transferred to your “father,” who is another alien working with Prentiss named Geommer! Things look bad. Roll FRIENDS to see if your pals rescue you even after you immediately abandoned them at the first sign of something better!
Alright, three successes gets you a little girl with Barbie nunchuks and a projectile skateboard! Geommer is bowled over by the attack, but now it’s his turn. Instead of staying to fight, he activates a time bomb and teleports away, leaving you and Prentiss to be consumed by the explosion! With no BLUE left, you’re too drained to do much else but lay there like a half-dead Smurf on human growth hormone. Your friends drag you and Prentiss away just in time.
Hopelessly outmatched by four children, Prentiss spills the beans. Geommer was hired to steal your power for Hedion, just like him. But he’s decided he’s going to keep it for himself instead. And to keep Hedion off his trail, he’s going to kill you, Prentiss, and everyone else in the town by focusing his Sirrus energy to create a massive death ray!
But for that to work, he has to head to the highest point in town, atop a snowy peak. You’ve got to get up there and stop him. Just one problem: you’re all out of BLUE, which is the only thing that can defeat Geommer! But I’ll let you recover some if you succeed on a FRIENDS roll.
Goddamn! Your BLUE hits an all-time high of 5, generating an enormous shockwave of Surrus energy. You only ruin it a little by saying “I got my blue on,” and “blue-yeah!”
This is it. The final conflict. Geommer’s set up with another alien dentist chair attached to his death ray. But before you go out there, your friends have one last trick up their sleeves. They sent Prentiss out to try and trick Geommer by shapeshifting into Hedion. I’ll roll using Prentiss’s DECEIVE stat.
Oof. Geommer sees right through the obvious ruse and blasts Prentiss with the death ray, launching him off the mountain to his demise.
Your friends respond with light laughter, as if they’d just seen a man sit on a whoopee cushion rather than witness a sentient life erased in the blink of an eye with godlike power from beyond the stars.
You’re up, Zolar. Roll BLUE one last time.
Blue-yeah! Let me just check on the Surrus power table… it looks like you emit a devastating explosion that annihilates Geommer! Or… do you? The day is saved for now, and you return to your friends. But elsewhere, a heavily burned-up Geommer communicates with Hedion. He has a new plan, he says, as he morphs into Brett, the kid who left the skate team at the beginning of the movie!
Was he Brett the whole time? Did he kill this child and assume his identity? I don’t know. I think they were going to answer that in the next release, but it never came out.
Well, that didn’t take as long as I thought it would. There’s a little epilogue to the adventure if you’re interested? Yeah? Ok, let’s do it. For this one, you’re going to be playing as Nicki Clyne, the 21-year-old actress who portrayed the girl Keiko.
Nicki has three stats: GASLIGHT, GATEKEEP, and GIRLBOSS.
You are Nicki Clyne, Canadian actress. Things were going pretty well for you for the last few years. You moved up from roles like “Girl Student #2” to making named guest appearances on shows like The L Word, and you even landed a regular gig on the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which looks like it might get picked up as a series.
But last year, something went terribly wrong. Your agent got you a role in this dogshit Canadian made-for-TV movie called Zolar that was directed by a guy who worked on Vampire Academy and Big Wolf on Campus. Bizarre CanCon stuff that gets zero distribution in America. As an up-and-coming actress, you shouldn’t be doing Canadian TV — you’re trying to get to Hollywood! It just seems so impossible to break through. There are so many other women with the same goal who are better connected, prettier, who went to acting school. And just when things were taking off for you: Zolar.
It’s November, and the foul weather isn’t helping your depression. You’re willing to try anything to take your career to the next level. So you decide to go to an intensive workshop put on by a company called Executive Success Programs. It’s a lot of people talking about maximizing your potential and achieving your goals. Roll GIRLBOSS to see if this is just bullshit.
It seems legit! Everyone’s so friendly and they all seem to have their shit together. You start going to more and more ESP events. One day, you meet the owner of the company, a handsome American in his late 40s. He’s charming and magnetic, and you become involved sexually. You feel like things are finally starting to go your way. Battlestar came through and you’re spending more and more time with your lover, helping him build his organization and getting other young women involved, helping them just like the group has helped you. But some people end up leaving and making some pretty gross accusations. Roll GASLIGHT to convince everyone else that they’re full of shit.
Obviously these girls are just jealous of you! I mean, the Dalai Lama presented your lover with a scarf onstage! The Dalai Lama! It’s not like he’d be a part of any organization that turned a blind eye to abuse!
But things manage to take a turn for the worse. In 2019, your lover is convicted on charges of human trafficking and sexual abuse. What do you do? Surely, now you want to step b— you want to double down on your support for him? Well, alright… roll GATEKEEP to try and pull it off.
You go on CBS News This Morning to defend your lover, claim that the FBI framed him, and stage a weird dance performance outside the Brooklyn prison where he’s detained. It mostly just makes you look really sad — except for the parts that make you look evil, like when you threaten to publicly identify the women your lover abused. This isn’t going great. The last acting gig you had was voicing a character in a motion comic in 2010, and you’re a defendant in a civil suit. You’re going to have to GASLIGHT yourself if you want to get out of this one.
Congratulations! You, Nicki Clyne, somehow didn’t slink away in shame after years of defending sex criminal Keith Raniere and his NXIVM cult, in which you played a major role. Instead, you’ve reinvented yourself as a brave truth-teller slash woo-woo influencer who rails against woke culture, hangs out with James Lindsay, and brutally abuses MLK Jr. quotes.
Yet there are days when a bitter truth worms its way to the surface of your psyche. Not that you enabled and assisted the mass abuse of women — you’re fine with that — but the fact that no matter what you do, what you accomplish, you will always have played a girl named Keiko in a movie called Zolar about a blue space monster who can sort of skateboard.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John McCammon, who never learned to skateboard and now has zero interest in rectifying that. Another childhood dream ruined thanks to Canadian TV.