Source for the Cannibal Contagion RPG by N. Phillip Cole
Cannibal Contagion was my first fully-published game, and boyee does it show. I wrote the game with a shitload of enthusiasm and a big heaping load of genuine love in my heart, and as such I got just a bit over-excited during the course of writing it. As I frequently tell people these days, Cannibal Contagion is a 200-something page book that is about 120 pages too long.
That said, I still to this day believe that the core mechanics of this game are rock fucking solid, and I've adapted this rules set to fit a great number of varied gaming purposes. I'm still quite proud of this game's solid-but-lightweight chassis. If you can cut through the overly-long chunks of expository text, there's a tight little system here for zany, fast-paced role-playing action. The basic structures within were strong inspiration for my follow-up game Motobushido, and they have even more recently gone on to inspire my most current project, Gattaibushido:FUSION! - which is something of a mechanical hybrid of the other two. And I've even been tooling away at a revised edition, with the hopes of one day getting it back out there, and in a stronger complete package.
I've published the raw text of the original book here, with only a few very minor formatting tweaks to make it Markdown-compatible. I freely admit that I've had more than one (as in many) cringe moment while skimming through this document, and if nothing else, please believe me when I say that I've developed a lot since writing this, I promise. =)
Today, Cannibal Contagion is no longer physically in print. I still have about three dozen paperbacks in my closet that I truck around to the various conventions I attend, but that's now the only way to get the physical book. And I don't really try to promote the game, either. It's an artifact of my unskilled enthusiasm, and today mostly serves me as a guidepost for how not to write my future games. It's a big flashing neon sign that screams "Always hire an editor and layout artist" at me, and won't let me forget that one time I tried to do it all myself.
But at least I was able to send it back to Mom with a note that said "Look what I made!" and a magnetic metal clip to hang it on the fridge.
Note July 21st 2016: Upload complete. Enjoy!