Fudge Solo Engine

In my recent post on Ghost Ops I made a reference to another project. That project was an automation of the One Page Solo Engine by Karl Hendricks.

This single page PDF does everything you really need from a solo engine. One the plus side it also has a complex question mechanism but on the down side it is more dice intensive than I personally like (but no where near as many rolls mythic or CRGE).

Hopefully, you should all know now that solo engines work on a weighted Yes/No question and answer mechanism. Questions you would ask your GM you pose to the solo engine such as “Are there any obvious guards?” If you were looking at the front entrance of an airport the answer is very likely a yes but you roll the dice and modify the roll for that likelihood. The engine comes back with one of four common responses No but…, No, Yes, Yes and… . You then use common sense, the game setting and the story so far to decide what that answer means. So a No but… could mean that there are no obvious guards but the area is covered by multiple cameras. A Yes and… could mean there are guards and they seem to be on heightened alert, armed and checking every vehicle.

The One Page Solo Engine has a complex question mechanic. Not every question is a Yes/No. The complex question mechanic uses a pack of playing cards to produce a verb/adverb pair. These can sometimes seem pretty strange. So lets say you see the criminal mastermind in a downtown LA bar with his henchmen. You ask what is he up to or how does he seem? Yes/No is not going to work here but the complex answer comes out with some thing like Creating + Social. You could interpret that as the villain is celebrating something with is henchmen is maybe is courting a gangland rival? Again it is down to the setting, the game and what would make the most sense and advance the story.

Anyway, I wanted to create an automated version of the One Page Solo Engine to do away with all the dice rolling and card drawing. So I bashed together a single webpage with just some plain text, a bit of javascript and some CSS. When I chose to test this with Ghost Ops I then bolted on a Fudge dice roller.

The only part I did not include was the dungeon crawler as Ghost Ops is modern day so I didn’t need a random dungeon.

I have zipped the file up and shared it if you would like to have a play and you can down load it from here. If you save the html file to any device you can use it off line, it does not need to connect to anything, no databases or servers needed to make it work.