Game System
The base system uses three characteristics (Body, Mind, and Soul) and a range of skills; points are used to purchase characteristics and skills based on one or more of the characteristics. Skills and characteristics are used by opposing them to a target (such as a difficulty number, an opponent's skill or characteristics, etc.) using a 2D6 dice roll. Subsequent revisions to the rules add options including a Magic characteristic, melodramatic character traits, and other complications, but the core system remains unchanged.
Rowland is believed to have pioneered the concept of shareware tabletop role-playing games with this system, although there were earlier shareware computer games with role-playing elements. Users can download the rules from his web site, buy a subscription that entitles them to Forgotten Futures CDs, or buy a copy of the published version of this game. The CDs are also good sources for science fiction books and other period material whose copyright has expired. A proportion of his income from the game is donated to cancer research charities.
Currently several versions of the rules are on line (complete and summary versions in HTML and PDF, and a German translation in PDF), along with a sample adventure set in a Victorian Channel Tunnel, plus eleven game collections (source material plus background worldbook, adventures, etc.), with an expanding collection of additional resources on line and on the CD-ROM. The rules and sample adventure have twice been published in print; in brief form as a booklet given away with Arcane Magazine in 1997, and at full length by Heliograph Inc. in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Forgotten Futures
Famous quotes containing the words game and/or system:
“Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people’s own failure as individuals.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)