I Shot My RPG Folder

I haven't done any blind reviews in a while. Owing to my lack of focus, let's do this random ass shit. As always, I often do not know who the fuck makes these games so if you dislike any of the creators that's just on you, man.

I really have never heard of A.C. : After Collapse by Justin Oldham published by Shadow Fusion. I'm honestly not sure how I got this. Maybe a bundle? No shade to Shadow Fusion, but I would never buy a game like this. Even though I loved The Road Warrior and made my own post-apoc RPG called "Surivors" based on it when I was 15, I am just not into the militant post-apoc jam.

So this game says it is a d20-based system, classless, with detailed combat rules and rules about radiation, etc. Interesting thing: it says that there are three classes of RPGs in the Collapse timeline. There's B.C. (Before), D.C. (During), and of course A.C. (After). So you can play games I suppose in modern times while the world is still humming along and during the tumultuous collapse and then after it.

Shit, this is from 2019? That's pretty recent.

So my first impression is that this is too big and not my bag. It's 286 pages... about 200 pages more than I need or want, generally. But that's just me.

Oh no... there's Upper Body Strength and Lower Body Strength and there's an Attractiveness stat. And damn, the section on batteries takes up half a page of the table of contents! Batteries must be a big fuckin' deal.

The Collapse seems to be brought about by AI, perhaps inspired by Terminator? There's a bit about homeowners gating their communities and trying to ignore what was happening in the world around them. Seems familiar.

Ultimately, a game with an "Upper Body Damage Modifier" is just not going to be my taste. If you like crunchy systems and if you're into something like Twilight 2000 maybe this is your jam.

Way back in the old days, Palladium had the license to do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG stuff. The original After the Bomb was a supplement for TMNT and Other Strangeness. I suppose since that license has probably lapsed, Palladium just made a whole separate After the Bomb RPG.

I picked up this book recently because I kinda dig funny animal RPG shit and I already owned several of the related supplements.

There's a weird disclaimer right at the front where Palladium says they do not condone the practice of magic, among other things. As if this game was gonna find it's way into the hands of little kids whose parents are Bible thumpers. This is 2021... Tik Tok exists. After the Bomb is really no threat, guys.

Looks like Erick Wujcik based this entirely on the house system. Cool. I don't have much to say here... I like that this exists.

Ok, I picked another monster of a book. This sumbich is 350 pages! Ehdrigohr, a game with precisely the right number of hs in its title, is by Allen Turner, published by Council of Fools, and is powered by Fate. Now, I'm not the biggest Fate guy. Which is weird because I mail ordered a copy of FUDGE back in the 90s and loved it. But I guess if I'm gonna do a FUDGE then I'll just do a FUDGE. No shade on Fate, I know a lot of folks who dig it.

Oh shit is that Papyrus font? Bold.

So the premise is that nine tribes of people dwell in a broken world of darkness where they struggle to maintain the light. There are chaos monsters or something roaming the land. You play someone who probably wants to keep the monsters at bay and protect reality. Cool.

I am not a big fan of the graphic design. It smacks too much of the high desktop publishing era. There's a border around each page and a lot of use of watermarks. We don't see any spot art until page 27. But I do like that that aesthetic is kind of Native American or Mesoamerican... I know next to nothing about this, so I'm not even sure what terms to use. But clearly from the art and some of the language of the book it is in this vein.

Though the art is kind of scant, it is pretty cool. Not all of it is my vibe but I dig it. I just wish they hadn't let the watermarks bleed through the art. Again... smacks of "I CAN do this so I WILL do this" desktop publishing. Just a pet peeve.

Ok. This looks like a true labor of love and I'm not gonna poo-poo it. There's a lot of worldbuilding in this thing. It's BIG. For me, it's just too damn much and I'm just not into Fate. But if you like Fate and you like the aesthetic then by all means dig in and see what's here.

Fate Condensed

I have never played Fate, but I know something about it's DNA (here's a post about FUDGE). This post is mostly about Fate Condensed.

If Fate Core was too damn crunchy...

FUDGE was a toolkit RPG. You really couldn't just open the book and start playing. You first had to understand its structure and then make some key decisions about what kind of game you were going to play. Because FUDGE was a freeform, universal, do-it-yourself gaming engine. It was a tool you used to build your own RPG.

A lot of minds went into the development of this game. Fate has a rabid following. I really had no idea other than hearing it mentioned on podcasts here-and-there, especially when I started listening to gaming podcasts not laser-focused on the OSR (hey... people play other games!).

(As an aside, I see that Leonard Balsera was a co-creator of the game. In my many investigations of ways to handle initiative, I have heard the term "Balsera initiative" or "popcorn initiative", which I am a huge fan of. It's the initiative style where each player decides who goes next. Like, I go then I say you get to go, etc. Here's a write-up of a version of it.)

The book starts off telling us what we need and telling us what's been changed from Fate Core. Then it goes into the first order of business with any Fate or FUDGE game: what's your setting? Because, remember, these are generic games. I'll talk more about that shortly.

Special Insert: Holy shit... I  just remembered vaguely that maybe I did play in at least one session of Fate several years ago. I have this crude memory of a tank and a revolution... no wait... that's not MY memory! It's a memory of a podcast where they played Fate? Holy shit I'm getting old.
/insert

Next it goes into describing characters. These are the main elements of a character:

I can see the DNA of FUDGE here because there is no straight list of attributes. You have to define your character by their Aspects and Skills and stuff. Now, in FUDGE, from what I remember, you're asked to come up with your own list of attributes. So maybe you're going to do western action and you decide that all characters will have Grit, Smarts, Shootin', and Ridin' as their main attributes. In Fate it seems to be less centralized. Each character has their own individual list of attributes.

This appears to be a very player-facing, player-friendly game.

I remember some podcast or another in which the host expressed a little confusion about how to use Aspects vs. Skills. The text says that Aspects are who you are while Skills are what you can do. That seems like a reasonable distinction but I can also see where it would be confusing in play. If my Aspect is that I'm The World's Deadliest Assassin and I have a Skill called Stab a Bastard... actually as I type this it kinda makes sense, doesn't it? The Aspect is broad and the Skill is narrow.

In fact, that is exactly the descendant of the FUDGE structure. You'd select an attribute, such as Dexterity, and then you'd have your skill, such as dancing. Dex is broad, dance is narrow.

Fate Ladder

Things are rated in +/- with an adjective to describe them. This is straight FUDGE, but they've added 2 additional levels at the top and bottom of the ladder. What I remember about this ratings table is that it doesn't satisfy the desire for granularity. People who love percentile systems where they can get +1% incremental improvements will not love the adjective ladder. However, this is very efficient and clear. It should be intuitive that the person who is a Good shot is a better shot than the person who is Fair. And that's what Steffan O'Sullivan was going for when he created FUDGE. Bravo.

There's a list of 19 standard Skills, such as Athletics, Lore, and Stealth. This list is similar to what you'd see in modern D&D and it seems like it would cover most of the bases for a generic game.

Skills are ranked per the adjective ladder. All PCs begin with 1 Great, 2 Good, 3 Fair, 4 Average, and the rest Mediocre. Seems legit and simple. No fiddly bits here.

Then the text tells you that when you're building your setting you'll want to consider do you want to keep this list or do you want to change it? This list seems custom-made for the most bog standard kind of RPG experience: exploring, fighting, getting treasure. So if you're thinking of using Fate to do a teenage angst drama club melodrama then maybe you'll get rid of Shoot in favor of Freestyle Rap.

I like the FUDGE dice roller.

Stunts are cool and unique things your PC can do that others cannot. Like... Smack Talk Smack Frenzy.

As we get into the details of how to play I spy a really nice, important bit of advice: fiction first. That is, describe what you want to do then figure out how it works in the system. This seems intuitive but I think we all get caught up in what's on our character sheet and forget that this is how RP works.

I played in some D&D 4e games (I think about 10 sessions in total) and this was a really big problem. Let me be clear: the game was fun. I enjoyed the hell out of playing it and would gleefully play again. But I was not doing much roleplaying. It was mostly battle mat combat with minis. I did spend most of my time analyzing my character sheet and deciding which powers to use next. This is the opposite of roleplaying. Fun, but not RP.

No, this is not a sourcebook.

There's a "bogus rule". This seems to be there as a mitigating factor for handling players that will milk the shit out of a system. These are the players who are hardcore gamers. If it is possible to get +10 instead of +9 they will velociraptor the fuck out of that fence until they get +10. So... "I bring down my axe into the wizard's skull. I'm using my... Raised by Frogs Asepct... because... when I leap up I'm looking frog-legged."

Other players: "BOGUS. Denied."

There's a nice bit about creating aspects (small "a") during conflicts. If I'm reading this correctly, it's just a way to formalize the use of terrain, environment, conditions, etc. So if you knock a bookcase over in front of a door maybe that becomes an aspect of the battle: BOOKCASE BLOCKADE. So when your villain tries to escape you can invoke BOOKCASE BLOCKADE and get some mods. Or something like that.

I dig that idea. Not sure how it works in play as I've never tried it. It does feel like the traditional turf of the GM to keep tabs on how that stuff affects a scene. You can do this in any RPG, narratively. But Fate gives you a crunchy rule for it.

There's a lot more to this book. It's 58 pages and what I've talked about so far is through page 28 or something. There is a lot of advice about playing and running the game, NPCs, character development Fate Points, etc. I feel like this book contains a lot of useful tips that are widely applicable to RP in general, not just this game.

And this fucker is free. So, no reason not to check it out. Will I play it? I dunno. Definitely not on my hit list to run and I'll most likely never run it. But I'd happily play in a game being ran by someone else.

FUDGE

Sometime in 1994 or 1995 I had stumbled upon Shadis Magazine and got a subscription immediately. This was about 5 years after I moved from my hometown and our original AD&D group disbanded forever. I had moved to GURPS, for a time, and was feeling rather isolated in my gaming needs. I was running random games here and there, maybe once or twice a year, and creating gaming junk on my own. Discovering Shadis was like realizing that yes indeed other people do this too!

From the pages of that magazine I must have found out about FUDGE, Steffan O'Sullivan's seminal "freeform universal do-it-yourself gaming experience". And I had to have it. So I sent off an order for a copy. As you can see, I got #94 in a 200 copy limited run, which I assume was the game's first printing/edition (?).

I was mind-melted by the cool-ass Lego-style building blocks that this game represented and I wanted to make something immediately. But I never did. I never even read the entire book. I think it was because I was just so isolated at the time. I didn't have any gamer friends and when I did get to run something or play something it was either AD&D or I used a loosey-goosey system I invented called the ROC RPG (Random Order Creations).

Years later it seems that FUDGE inspired and underpinned Fate. So I should be interested in and excited about maybe trying this game. Yet I'm not. In fact, when a 14-yo kid showed me his copy of Fate and wanted to talk about it I just didn't know what to say. I talked about having FUDGE back in the day and I had listened to a few podcasts about Fate so I knew a little about it. But I couldn't muster the desire to play it, even with this sparkly-eyed kid clearly wanting to play it. I can be a bit of a selfish guy and at that time I wanted to run Barrowmaze using B/X D&D.

Not sure what the point of this is other than to explore this weird memory. I'm always thinking about things I did in the past and why I did them. Or why I didn't. I wish I was more proactive and I wish I worked harder at things. I cringe when I think of all the years I didn't play many games or make much art or create things in general. Holy hell, am I getting old?

I hope that kid is running games now, Fate or otherwise.

Here's my copy. #94... from '94!