Amazing Engine vs Masterbook

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PolarBlues

PolarBlues

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A complementary thread to GURPS vs Fate, this one features the real, titanic clash between universal rulesets. The two giants gaming companies of their day, TSR and Masterbook, between 1993 and 1994 each brought out their universal system, the one game to end all games, supported by a myriad of imaginative settings.

Amazing Engines' offerings included:
Bughunters!
For Faerie, Queen, and Country!
The Galactos Barrier!
Kromosome!
Magitech!
Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega!
Once and Future King!
Tabloid!! (two exclamation marks because the first one is actually part of the game's title)

Masterbook gave us:

Bloodshadows!
Indiana Jones!
Aden!
Necroscope!
Species!
Tank Girl!
Tales from the Crypt!

How could so much awesomeness fail?

True fans and detractors of these games are welcome to duke it out here, no holds barred. This is going to get bloody.

No geese were harmed in the making of this thread. And that is just one of the many things that are wrong with it, along with the April 1st date.
 
lol, they were both pretty bad for different reasons.

Amazing Engine was one of those cases where it was an innovative idea without simultaneously being a good idea.

Some of the settings were well done at least. I think I still have a copy of Faerie , Queen, and Country stashed away somewhere, which was sort of a proto-Castle Falkenstein.

Masterbook, OTOH, was basically the 2D20 of the 90s...
 
Well, I don't recall much of anything about the Amazing Engine system. I remember wanting Bughunters at one point. I owned a copy of Kromosome at one point. I remember the only thing I ever saw in stores was For Faerie, Queen, and Country, and that was like the RPG version of a Rogue One action figure. Those things lingered in stores for a solid decade.

I remember the promotional idea of Amazing Engine was appealing at the time. You could play different campaigns and different characters and have your progress carry over via the character core. That seemed like a good thing from the perspective of my 90s game group, who really didn't like playing other games beyond the main regular campaign because that was "time wasted" not advancing their primary characters.

But none of the settings or premises of the Amazing Engine games seemed worth anything. Most came across as pretty hokey, which honestly describes a good portion of TSR output during that era.

I didn't get into Masterbook either, but I did really like Torg. I liked the system of Torg, but wasn't a fan of the background. I remember I thought that Rifts did the multiple reality invasion backdrop right while Torg did the system right. What I've seen of Masterbook is very similar to Torg in most aspects, so I imagine I'd like Masterbook.

Masterbook has Indiana Jones, so it pretty much wins by default. When reading Torg, I always felt it was written for Indiana Jones. But truthfully, I'd rather just have d6 Indiana Jones. Still, I'd imagine Masterbook would be a good fit.

Bloodshadows has seemed superficially interesting to me, but once I started diving deeper I started discovering some things that make it much less interesting lying under the candy coating of the noir surface.

Species would have been a draw for one player in my old group, but no one else. I can't say I've given Species any mental real estate since the 90s.

Tales from the Crypt could conceivably have been interesting. Although I was more of a Tales From the Darkside and Monsters fan.

So, yeah. Masterbook would probably win for me.
 
Endless Flight said:
Masterbook was just a worse version of the D6 rules.
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One can speculate how things might have panned out for WEG if they had invested as much money and effort that went into launching Masterbook into a D6 based system. It could have potentially filled in the gap Savage World would eventually sieze.

Then again, Torg I believe was reasonably successful and its system was what Masterbook was based on. So maybe it wasn't an issue about the system.
 
I'm not a huge fan of the system but have most of the Masterbook games, except Necroscope which is stupid expensive. If I was going to play in any of those settings today I would just use the books as source books and play with a different system.

I never read or played any of the Amazing Engine games so i can't comment on them.
 
PolarBlues said:
One can speculate how things might have panned out for WEG if they had invested as much money and effort that went into launching Masterbook into a D6 based system. It could have potentially filled in the gap Savage World would eventually sieze.
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I think that was what Legend was meant to be, but it was dead in the water with the Hercules & Xena RPG the only product to make it to shelves.
 
TristramEvans said:
I think that was what Legend was meant to be, but it was dead in the water with the Hercules & Xena RPG the only product to make it to shelves.
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DC Universe also used the Legend system. But it had other issues.
 
I played in a fun Masterbook Indiana Jones game, but the fun was more down to the GM than the system. I can't actually remember any details of the system other than it being needlessly clunky in some way. It's notable that it came out during the time I was working in a game store and was buying RPGs at a faster rate than at any other time in my life, but I never picked it up.

It certainly wasn't as fun as the TSR Indiana Jones game, which I enjoyed at the time.
 
Amazing Engine's main idea was that you played the same "person" in each setting and experience to an extent carried over. Though you could make a totally different character from the core person, it was less than optimal if I recall, For Faery Queen and Country had an excellent magic system. Torg lead to Masterbook and had some issues of its own (The cards made it fiddly and didn't really add any drama to the game in my memory.) Though I liked Torg, Masterbook's second best setting was Shatterzone, but a more efficient system would make it more fun (that is, less fiddly, tighter in rules, etc.)

A note though it wasn't the games (primarily) that caused WEG's downfall, but the shoe company that someone in the higher up borrowed/used money from to finance the game side--it called in the debt as it had begun crumbling, and that crushed WEG. Not that Masterbook games HELPED it much anyway.
 
Silverlion said:
Torg lead to Masterbook and had some issues of its own (The cards made it fiddly and didn't really add any drama to the game in my memory.)
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Oh, the cards added drama all right.

I had been trying to move things over to the Torg system because I really liked it around the mid-90s. I had done some Robotech/Macross II adaptations, and was running some installments of my Robotech game with it. One player really liked the cards. Another player didn't really care for them, but didn't want anyone else to enjoy them.

In retrospect, this latter player was a cause of a lot of problems, and this is just one of many.

Anyway, the player who really liked the cards really adored the concept of Subplot cards. He saw them as super cool and wanted to use them in play. Meanwhile, the other player basically spent his time trying to ensure no one got the cards they wanted. He would never share his cards, and he would make sure to try to bury any card that the other players would have found useful. It didn't help that he had phenomenal luck at card draws.

It came to a head after about three sessions or so. The disruptive player had been drawing all the subplot cards. He had taken to showing he had it and then intentionally discarding it or using it for another function (I don't recall how the cardplay functioned exactly). This was making the player who wanted those cards highly irritated. Finally, card-hater got dealt the Romance sub-plot card, taunted the player who wanted it, and then did his normal thing of dumping the card so no one else could play it.

This caused an argument. The player who wanted to engage with the card mechanics was hurt. The player who wanted to screw with the gameplay was happy that he disrupted everything and got a meltdown out of someone.

The disruptive player made the case that the cards were stupid and didn't add anything to the game. The other players agreed, saying they hadn't really gotten any benefit out of the cards. Of course, that was at least partly due to dickweed player intentionally messing up the cardplay, but they didn't think of it that way. Dickweed player and his crony said we should go back to Palladium and give up on the new system. And that's what ended up happening.
 
I think the current PDF of Shatterzone on DrivethruRPG has an alternative system so you can play without the cards
 
sharps54 said:
I think the current PDF of Shatterzone on DrivethruRPG has an alternative system so you can play without the cards
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Well, even Torg had something like that. I think it amounted to: For a dramatic encounter the villains are +5 on initiative. For a Standard encounter the heroes are +5 on initiative. No guidelines on how to implement Approved Actions. No guidelines on how to implement Dramatic Task Resolution without the cards. I don't remember if there were any guidelines on how to rescale difficulty numbers without the cards beyond "lower the difficulty numbers by a few points", because without the cards the players won't be able to generate as high of result rolls.

One of the neatest things about Torg combat were the Approved Actions on the initiative cards. Basically, each initiative card had an Approved Action for that round. It might be Taunt or Feint or something. And if you did that maneuver successfully, you'd get a bonus card or a Possibility point or something (I don't recall). It encouraged something beyond "I try to hit the dude." It really added flavor to combat. And since a random card draw determined what the Approved Action would be, you didn't have players just spamming the same action every round.

I suppose you could replicate that by the initiative roll cross referenced against a chart. But the cards were far more convenient and easier to reference.

The initiative cards also often had special effects. For Standard encounters these would normally be buffs to the heroes. For Dramatic encounters, these would normally be setbacks. These also added a cool unpredictability to the combat round.

Once again, this was in Torg, but Masterbook seems to have all the same stuff.
 
I was a big Necroscope fan in high school - can't imagine why a 15-year old boy would be into something with lots of gruesome violence and lurid sex - and had the Masterbook system for it as well as every non-adventure supplement I could get my hands on. I managed to run a brief campaign or two with some friends who were also into the books.

We probably did a very bad job of using Masterbook because we jettisoned the drama cards as being too complicated, and likewise abandoned the FX creation rules as not really fitting the role. We did like the unified algorithm mechanic a lot, but ultimately there was a kind of mismatch between the powers they were describing in the E-Branch Guide to Psionics supplement and the kind of things we could put together manually with the FX creation rules, so we stuck with the former - and that turned out to be a mistake itself because those powers were mostly out of keeping with the kind of psychic abilities characters actually used in the Necroscope series.
 
Silverlion said:
frA note though it wasn't the games (primarily) that caused WEG's downfall, but the shoe company that someone in the higher up borrowed/used money from to finance the game side--it called in the debt as it had begun crumbling, and that crushed WEG. Not that Masterbook games HELPED it much anyway.
Click to expand...

From talking and doing business with people who worked at (and with) WEG at the time, the shoe disaster was the only reason it went under. The company had been doing OK financially, and one person used to cite their not throwing their hand into the CCG arena in the 90s as a reason they were doing well, with plans to capitalize on that. Then...Shoemageddon.
 
PolarBlues said:
Then again, Torg I believe was reasonably successful and its system was what Masterbook was based on. So maybe it wasn't an issue about the system.
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I loved Torg, but was meh on Masterbook as a generic system. I did like Bloodshadows and Shatterzone. I guess I didn't think it was really that generic?

And Amazing Engine was anything but Amazing. This seems like pairing a heavyweight with a toddler tbf.
 
Gabriel said:
we should go back to Palladium and give up on the new system.
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Well, there's your problem right there. Palladium? Admittedly, I played it for a while, but looking back on it, I think it was the drugs.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Yikes. It's like asking which flavour of diarrhea you like better. Oh, I'll take cat piss smell with peanut chunks every time. No, wait, make that rotten cabbage and corn nibs... :sick: Blech.
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Not even that. More like skipping an Iron Maiden show to attend a battle of the bands between Saxon and Tygers of Pan Tang. (Tygers by far)
 
I'd argue that The Amazing Engine had a few good game concepts that should have received better support and a few bad ones that shouldn't have been put in print. All told, Bug Hunters, For Faerie Queen and Country, and Tabloid were great concepts that would have done well with a better system and some more support. I think TSR was trying to compete with GURPS, Runequest, and Palladium for the post D&D market. But cheap art, small type, expensive books and a lack luster system with confusing character creation really hobbled its growth.

I think the King Arthur in space book was interesting reading because it was clear that the author had actually read Malory but that's probably my personal bias showing. The Galactos Barrier should have been the most successful rpg of all time. The concept is Starwars but the force is music. The biggest mistake was making the fugue a light sabre / sonic sword. The fugue should have been a musical instrument and duels should have been musical throw downs / dance fights. The art should have been pure heavy metal album cover. Magitech is an idea that comes along from time to time, Pixar's Onward, for instance, but never seems to stick, I think secret magic is simply more interesting. The biggest and most obvious mistake TSR made with The Amazing Engine is the absence of a straight up fantasy setting. Yes, D&D, but when you're trying to get people to try a new system, fantasy is the go-to.

The system falls down at character creation where you roll pools of dice for your attributes and that's how the character experience carries over between systems. The problem, of course, is that the characters still vary too much and the system for doing it is clunky. A simple, light percentile system where you swap out a template but keep the stats would have been better. I also think they should have kept stuff like vehicles compatible across the system so the books would support each other more. The lethality rating for weapons should have been a fixed value for the whole setting. It's a cool little concept, you've got stun and hit points and a number that indicates which you've done and makes lethality scalable between settings but as is, it makes weapon stats incompatible between settings.

System wise, the science fiction games should have been Star Frontiers supplements. I've never quite understood TSR's animosity to what has always been a pretty tight and functional system. Magi tech should have been a D&D thing. I'm not sure what I'd use for For Faerie Queen and Country, not a fan of Castle Falkenstien, which came later but since it's TSR, the Marvel Superheroes mechanics would probably work well enough.

West End Games was busy doubling down on licensed properties which I feel is always a mistake in this industry. The problem parallels the issue in the video game market. The money goes into the license instead of development.
 
David Johansen said:
The biggest and most obvious mistake TSR made with The Amazing Engine is the absence of a straight up fantasy setting. Yes, D&D, but when you're trying to get people to try a new system, fantasy is the go-to.
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I understand what you say, but I've always been told that part of the downfall of TSR was the balkanization of fantasy settings, creating in-house competition for the same customers. I don't know when they realised it, though. Was Amazing Engine published before or after they did? Maybe they deliberately wanted to avoid undermining their other game.

David Johansen said:
West End Games was busy doubling down on licensed properties which I feel is always a mistake in this industry.
Click to expand...

Well, they did have a great, what?, decade? with Star Wars, didn't they.
 
And to be fair, Star Wars wasn't what killed them in the end. It was the shoe store they also owned. Licenses come with a built in audience but they also come with the assumption that the licensed game will be better than one with the serial numbers filed off.

I don't think The Amazing Engine was ever a large enough portion of TSR's output and revenue to influence the sale of D&D settings either way but it would have been cool to have something like Dark Sun or the pulp Buck Rogers setting for The Amazing Engine. At leas if The Amazing Engine had been amazing.
 
David Johansen said:
System wise, the science fiction games should have been Star Frontiers supplements. I've never quite understood TSR's animosity to what has always been a pretty tight and functional system.
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The story I've heard is that Star Frontiers was shelved to make room for the Buck Rogers RPG. That was more potentially lucrative for Lorraine Williams, as TSR had to license Buck Rogers from her family. Admittedly, the mixed reaction the Zebulon's Guide couldn't have helped the game line either.

Either way, I think Star Frontiers had already been a dead line for over five years by the time Amazing Engine was published, so it probably wasn't on anyone's mind anymore.
 
Baulderstone said:
The story I've heard is that Star Frontiers was shelved to make room for the Buck Rogers RPG. That was more potentially lucrative for Lorraine Williams, as TSR had to license Buck Rogers from her family. Admittedly, the mixed reaction the Zebulon's Guide couldn't have helped the game line either.

Either way, I think Star Frontiers had already been a dead line for over five years by the time Amazing Engine was published, so it probably wasn't on anyone's mind anymore.
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I suppose everyone will want to string me up for this, but I think dropping Star Frontiers for Buck Rogers was a good idea. XXVc was a much better game than Star Frontiers.

I know that during the 80s, I didn't like that Star Frontiers was a completely different system from D&D. It would have been so much better as a D&D player had the sci-fi game merely been a D&D variant. My opinion on the matter is a bit different now, but back then, having that compatibility would have been a good thing. XXVc had that compatibility.

Did anyone view Star Frontiers as CURRENT sci-fi? I know my crew didn't. Nor did anyone at the game shops. It wasn't until years later that I finally realized that it was Forbidden Planet sci-fi. My age group had been looking for movie Trek and Star Wars sci-fi. Star Frontiers didn't feel "hip" to us nerds. I know I've heard in the past that the people who did play it simply jettisoned all the setting and race stuff and homebrewed their own Star Trek and Star Wars.

XXVc was odd, but it did feel like a more current setting. I think a lot of the people who were interested in it were disappointed that it wasn't based on the 1980 TV show iteration of the franchise. Regardless, the setting had some potential. Maybe it was presented with a little too much of that burgeoning 90s 'tude, but I think it ages well. I think the biggest flaw is that some of the stuff that might have been cooler and more marketable was buried under the Buck Rogers coat of paint and branding.

The other big flaw with XXVc was that it was 1990. I think if XXVc had been released in 1986 then it would have been a much different story.

I've read elsewhere that XXVc was originally developed completely independent of the Buck Rogers branding, and the decision to slap the license on was made at the very end of production when things moved to art and marketing. In other words, it was the RPG equivalent of a video game which a studio had worked on for some time, and then marketing comes along and says they have a license and need a game to stick on it. And it definitely shows.

Sorry. I have an irrational fondness for XXVc.
 
The Butcher said:
That the Brave New World tour? Caught that one in 2001, at Rock In Rio. My very first rock show and my first exposure to Iron Maiden... life-changing stuff.
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Thats the one, yeah. I would love to see them in Rio, the crowds are always insane.
 
Gabriel said:
I've read elsewhere that XXVc was originally developed completely independent of the Buck Rogers branding, and the decision to slap the license on was made at the very end of production when things moved to art and marketing. In other words, it was the RPG equivalent of a video game which a studio had worked on for some time, and then marketing comes along and says they have a license and need a game to stick on it. And it definitely shows.

Sorry. I have an irrational fondness for XXVc.
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I really don't like the 2E D&D system for it, but the setting was on edge of its time (gene-transhuman elements, living minds in computers, etc.) Even if the interior art was terrible most of the time the covers were brilliant. Although my brain always tells me that on one book cover that the Venusians are really what the RAM gene-modified shocktroops looked like, and I'm alright with that. (My brain wants reptile men with tails--more Marvel's The Lizard. Than the weird grays.)
 
XXVc. was the best iteration of D&D 2e by a fairly long shot but if I had my druthers TSR would have dropped D&D for Star Frontiers based fantasy. For that matter, The Amazing Engine would have been a lot better with Star Frontiers or even D&D as a system and I'm not a big fan of the latter.

The worst parts of XXVc. were the D&D parts. The Buck Rogers parts were bolted on and easily dropped. At least they didn't give us a setting where the big damn hero already saved the day and all that's left for the PCs to do is sweep up a bit of clutter that's lying around. I've heard that TSR went with XXVc. as a Title because they ran some marketing studies and found the name Buck Rogers actually reduced the chances of people wanting to buy it. Whether those "studies" amounted to asking their buddies we'll never know.

Ah well, if my tastes were mainstream we'd live in a very different world.
 
The Butcher said:
That the Brave New World tour? Caught that one in 2001, at Rock In Rio. My very first rock show and my first exposure to Iron Maiden... life-changing stuff.
Click to expand...
The first time I saw Iron Maiden was in Toronto on November 30, 1984 on the Live After Death tour. It was un-fucking-believable, one of the top three greatest live shows I’ve ever seen (along with Pink Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason tour and Rush’s farewell tour).

I wanted to see the Book of Souls tour when they came to Canada in 2019, but the concert date was scheduled for three days before I came back from a trip to Japan for a karate gasshuku, so I missed it.

I’ll definitely see them next time they come through, though (which will be my fourth time seeing them).
 
Both games had their virtues, but the settings for AE were, on the whole, much better than the system, and while I get the virtues of the card play for Masterbook (and TORG and Shatterzone) I know a lot of people who found it waaay too intrusive.
 
Gabriel said:
Oh, the cards added drama all right.

I had been trying to move things over to the Torg system because I really liked it around the mid-90s. I had done some Robotech/Macross II adaptations, and was running some installments of my Robotech game with it. One player really liked the cards. Another player didn't really care for them, but didn't want anyone else to enjoy them.

In retrospect, this latter player was a cause of a lot of problems, and this is just one of many.

Anyway, the player who really liked the cards really adored the concept of Subplot cards. He saw them as super cool and wanted to use them in play. Meanwhile, the other player basically spent his time trying to ensure no one got the cards they wanted. He would never share his cards, and he would make sure to try to bury any card that the other players would have found useful. It didn't help that he had phenomenal luck at card draws.

It came to a head after about three sessions or so. The disruptive player had been drawing all the subplot cards. He had taken to showing he had it and then intentionally discarding it or using it for another function (I don't recall how the cardplay functioned exactly). This was making the player who wanted those cards highly irritated. Finally, card-hater got dealt the Romance sub-plot card, taunted the player who wanted it, and then did his normal thing of dumping the card so no one else could play it.

This caused an argument. The player who wanted to engage with the card mechanics was hurt. The player who wanted to screw with the gameplay was happy that he disrupted everything and got a meltdown out of someone.

The disruptive player made the case that the cards were stupid and didn't add anything to the game. The other players agreed, saying they hadn't really gotten any benefit out of the cards. Of course, that was at least partly due to dickweed player intentionally messing up the cardplay, but they didn't think of it that way. Dickweed player and his crony said we should go back to Palladium and give up on the new system. And that's what ended up happening.
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That has much less to do with bad rules than dickweed players.

JG
 
Silent Green said:
I understand what you say, but I've always been told that part of the downfall of TSR was the balkanization of fantasy settings, creating in-house competition for the same customers. I don't know when they realised it, though. Was Amazing Engine published before or after they did? Maybe they deliberately wanted to avoid undermining their other game.
Click to expand...

That has been a popular internet theory, I believe floated by Ryan Dancey.

But Ben Riggs research and talks on the fall of TSR at Gencon based on his upcoming book on the subject have found it had more to do with returned books from Randomhouse and variety of other factors.
 
Of Amazing Engine series I think I playing the following:

For Faerie, Queen, and Country - I am not into Victoriana, fantasy or not but the other players enjoyed it.
MagiTech - the GM totally ripped of the plot of Terminator and it was a fun scenario through it don't remember the MagiTech aspect making much of difference .
The Galactos Barrier - we played pirates and I was enjoyed but the GM pulled the game after just one session.
Bug Hunters - I found playing colonial marines a bit bland and I think it ended with a party wipeout in the first and only session.
I had a copy of Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega but I was never inspired to run it as I preferred running Gamma World.

Of the Masterbook games I only played Tank Girl. I enjoyed that, I had a fun character and I ran one session of Aden, which went well, but afterwards I wasn't quite where to go with it so I left it there. Did the same with Bloodshadows but I don't think it counts as I ran it using Fudge instead.
 
From what I've read (no direct experience), Bloodshadows does a bait and switch. It presents itself as this early 20th century pulp, noir game with vampires. But it's actually some alien planet where everyone just decided to play dress up and there's some struggle for all reality or something.

It's something where I'm really interested in the surface hook, but any time I've read anything beyond the most superficial level, I find myself put off by it.
 
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