These days having to wait for things feels so old fashioned! I have grown used to pdf rulebooks and if I want something I can have it right now.
For years now I have been using a tablet PC for virtually all my rules look ups at the gaming table that my ‘books’ are normally selected pages printed off and filed. The actual pages are selected on a session by session basis so I have the minimum amount of dead tree at the table.
One reason for this is that I tend not to play my face to face game at home, I have to take myself and all my gaming stuff half way across the UK and I try and use public transport as much as possible as well. I do have a car but public transport is environmentally more sustainable than everyone running around in their own cars. Anyway, that is a bit of a digression!
So I am conditioned into wanting my PDFs on demand which is bad enough but I will also confess to wanting a free pdf quick start or at least a ‘lite’ version so I can try before I buy.
The Deryni Adventure Game is only available as a physical print book and it is not on RPGNow/Drivethru. That absolutely threw me! Wanting to get my hands on this game lead me to email greyghostgames directly asking if there was a pdf available and the awesome Ann Dupuis has actually put a copy of the printed book in the post for me. I will be reviewing this game properly when have had a real chance to look at the book and hopefully actually play it.
In the mean time I am still looking for my instant gratification fix. My first impression of Princess Bride was a little dismissive but I have taken another look at the quickstart pdf and although the game isn’t what I am looking for ‘off the peg’ there is more good stuff here than I gave it fair credit for at first glance.
Having read the Bride QS and not being able to get my hands instantly on Deryni I needed something else to satisfy my fudge craving. So I started to have a detailed read of the Fudge engine. That is a free PDF and I have had it knocking around on my hard drive ever since I first looked at the Ghost Ops QS booklet. There were terms used in the QS that were not clearly explained so I went back to the source to understand how the thing actually worked.
So now my brain is ticking along thinking I have the Ghost Ops booklet as a model for how I want a fudge game to look and feel. There are really good bits in the Bride QS. So if I took bits from here and bits from there and filled in the missing bits from the original fudge rules how hard would it be to create the game I am looking for?
Despite a promise to myself not to start any more projects until I have finished more of my ongoing stuff I found myself with a two page Word document of which Attributes and Skills I think I need.
I finally reined myself in and I have saved that document for future reference. The good thing is that now I want to work on that darf fantasy game I spent this evening completing and editing pass of one chapter of a game I am working on and started writing up the creature stats for the bestiary for that game. There is still loads to do and it is mostly the difficult bit of actually writing the full text rather than the fun bit of creating mechanics. I hope this burst of energy is sustained and I can really crack on with this project with my plans for a dark fantasy fudge game as the carrot to get things done.
If you are into fudge look out for some future posts about fantasy fudge as these are definitely in the pipeline!
