New Tri-Tac System Front Cover

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ORtrail ORtrail indicated they were testing it out. Not sure if they reached a final decision yet. There was also some mention of Savage Worlds.
 
Yeah, that is... not good.

Hopefully it's just a placeholder.
 
I hope Tri Tac relaunches their two or three big games but if they do it, they have to have modern production values. The stuff they peddled in the eighties or nineties is not going to sell otherwise.
 
I'm not familiar with Tri-Tac at all, what's the system like ad what games are they known for?
 
huh, has Bureau 13 been around for a while? I seem to remember something like that with a cartoony cover from the 90s.
 
That 1992 cover is the fourth edition of the game, the one I first encountered, but the game itself came out almost a decade earlier.

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I get the impression that Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic and Fringeworthy were pretty popular in the late eighties.
I don't think they were ever at the level of, say, GURPS or Call Of Cthulhu. More of a small but dedicated cult following.
 
Yeah, that's the one with the Phil Foglio cover.

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I actually quite like the cover on the 92 edition. It lets buyers know it’s going to be a more silly, over the top type of X-Files instead of a more serious game like Delta Green. I ran my first Bureau 13 scenario a couple of weeks ago (using Delta Green rules) and I quite liked it.
 
I get the impression that Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic and Fringeworthy were pretty popular in the late eighties. You don't hear much about them these days. It's a shame because they were X-Files before X-Files and SG1 before SG1.

The probably can also set a record for "setting concepts most run with other game systems." I ran Frigeworthy with Hero and B13 with GURPS back in the day, and I heard of a lot of other people using various other systems.
 
The probably can also set a record for "setting concepts most run with other game systems." I ran Frigeworthy with Hero and B13 with GURPS back in the day, and I heard of a lot of other people using various other systems.
Yeah I have never heard anything good about the system. I briefly went through the rules. It appears to be a D100 roll under with hit locations. I need to read it more carefully.
 
Yeah I have never heard anything good about the system. I briefly went through the rules. It appears to be a D100 roll under with hit locations. I need to read it more carefully.

It was but it also was weirdly fussy about how the hit locations were handled (and this is coming from someone who thought Greg Porter's original system for Timelords/WarpWorld/TimeSpace had some virtues) and just generally was overly busy for no good reason. Its not a surprise when you find Richard T. was an offshoot from the people who wrote the original Morrow Project, though at least Richard had internalized the idea that skills might be a thing which took the Morrow People a while.
 
That’s probably a good way to think of it. You know the more I read about Bureau 13 the more it seems that Delta Green got a lot of ideas from them.

More likely both of them were just fishing in the same pond of inspirations. "Secret government agency dealing with the supernatural" is going to call back to a lot of the same things.
 
See I still want to merge MSPE and T&T to do Bureau 13, but I think I'm more inspired by the silliness and fun of the novels and the blurbs in the 92 edition, than anything serious or gritty. I'd prefer that to Openquest, or Savage Worlds, but honestly, D6 would probably be even better.
 
Yeah, that is... not good.

Hopefully it's just a placeholder.

It probably isn't. They may make some tweaks, but the recent history of Tri Tac is games with cluttered visuals, unrestrained use of colour and mediocre editing (example cover below), even before Richard Tucholka died. Not that I'm blind to the faults of earlier editions - I've been a fan since the eighties - or that they've never excelled at layout and editing either. Even the perfect-bound 1992 editions, which generally had excellent cover art, were an organisational catastrophe inside, making a surprisingly simple system with optional more complex elements look insanely complicated from the start.

There's lots to like in Tri Tac games, but my word, you have to dig and sift for it and not be put off by the art direction.

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Didn't Tri-Tac system get kind of borrowed by WoD Mirrors books where they gave alternative stats in Body, Mind, and Soul. Kind of a similar thing down in Age if Sigmar Soulbound.
 
Didn't Tri-Tac system get kind of borrowed by WoD Mirrors books where they gave alternative stats in Body, Mind, and Soul. Kind of a similar thing down in Age if Sigmar Soulbound.
I think you're thinking of Tri-Stat.
 
I've contacted the publisher about the use of the logo, and "OpenQuest" in the title. Shouldn't be a big drama, since they've been in touch about their developers using OQ SRD for this previously :smile:
 
It's a placeholder cover. The idea was to show the (relatively) well know classic Tri Tac RPGs and there has been contact with an artist or two about doing a cover. Stepping all over Newt's IP was just a bonus. :smile:

OpenQuest is the system being play tested with the various TT settings. Which has gone fairly well so far. For many of us who have run a couple BRP-type game systems there's often the feeling you could jot down some notes and run nearly any setting with those rules.

Finally, I want to say that Mel (Richard Tucholka's widow) has been dealing with a lot over the last several years. She isn't trying to to mine his gaming legacy for money, but rather wants the settings to live on, attached to more modern and player-friendly rules. What is the best approach to do that? The answer to that is a work-in-progress, but the intentions are good.
 
It probably isn't. They may make some tweaks, but the recent history of Tri Tac is games with cluttered visuals, unrestrained use of colour and mediocre editing (example cover below), even before Richard Tucholka died. Not that I'm blind to the faults of earlier editions - I've been a fan since the eighties - or that they've never excelled at layout and editing either. Even the perfect-bound 1992 editions, which generally had excellent cover art, were an organisational catastrophe inside, making a surprisingly simple system with optional more complex elements look insanely complicated from the start.

There's lots to like in Tri Tac games, but my word, you have to dig and sift for it and not be put off by the art direction.

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Great cover!
 
With at least B13 and Fringeworthy (the two TriTac games I know best) something BRP based should work with them (though I think modern-period expressions of BRP in settings with common combat have a very mixed history), but the big thing would be the heavy lifting to have a decent psionics system for both and a magic system for the former that lands in the kind of intended power level, and enough support for all the opposition in the former (you'd also need to at least go through the Mellor in the latter, and might need to do some forays into advanced tech since its not hard for the Fringeworthy to stumble across it in old Tehmerlen ruins or some other alternates).
 
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