ForeSight, that obscure SF RPG that I keep mentioning

[Agemegos]

I’ve mentioned ForeSight a number of times, as my favourite RPG and as the native RPG of my setting Flat Black, but since it is very obscure I reckon that my mentions must have left most of you scratching your heads. So I suppose I had better put up a bit of a description and explanation. Here goes!

History​

The way I understand it is that Tonio Loewald was very keen on SPI’s SF RPG Universe, but lamented it lacked a setting. So he designed one for it, but before he finished SPI exploded in a convincing demonstration that a group of gamer buddies does not make an effective management team for a company. TSR ended up with the properties, and was not interested in Tonio’s setting, so he designed his own SF RPG to support his setting. He went on to publish ForeSight (the game) in 1986, ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia (the setting) in 1987, and (seeing that the people who had bought ForeSight were using it as a general-purpose RPG) a fantasy and low-tech supplement (HindSight & the Age of ‘Reason’) in 1988.

ForeSight sold out its initial print run of 400 copies, nearly all by sales at gaming stores in Australia and New Zealand. Without the backing of a distributor it took nearly two years to do so, and was not financially exciting. It has not been re-printed. Tonio brought out a much simpler and cheaper stapled edition in 1990, which he inaccurately called “ForeSight Enhanced”: I say “inaccurately” because in fact it was ForeSight considerably diminished. It did not sell out. Every now and again he stirs toward re-publishing ForeSight, but always intends to completely re-write and re-design it, so that the current draft (available from the ForeSight page at Loewald New Media) is a radically simpler and less complete game with almost nothing surviving from the 1986 edition except the name.

Physical format​

ForeSight first edition consist of 124 page of A4 plain paper perfect-bound into a cover of light stock card. Owing to an error at the printers the paper is an ugly buff colour. I have found this binding amazingly robust. I covered my original copy in self-adhesive acetate film and then abused it like hell for twenty years. Not so much as a single page was even thinking of coming loose when I had the binding sliced off and the pages fed through a scanner. (There was also a very small number of copies bound in cloth-covered hard covers. All are still in the hands of the original owners except mine, which were stolen at a games con.)


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Layout is clean, there is an adequate scattering of graphical elements (illustrations, pictures, forms etc.) to break up the wall of text. The offset printing is adequately sharp, but in my middle age I am starting to find the type tinier than I prefer. (Body text is set in Geneva, about 50 characters across a 77mm column.)


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[Agemegos]

Contents and organisation​

ForeSight was designed and written by a mathematician who was a fan of SPI wargames. This showed. Definitions are explicit and unambiguous. Sequences of operations are set out clearly, with the steps often numbered. Sections are numbered within chapters. The index is at the front.




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Chapter 1​

Four pages, consisting of one column of “[1.0] ForeWord”. Four and a half columns of “[1.1] Definitions” including “GM”, definitions of the game’s attributes, and a definition of the game’s distinction between Skills and Fields of Knowledge. One column of “[1.2] Conventions” covering such topics as “rounding”, “page numbering”, and “lack of explanation”. One column of “[1.3] Technological levels”, and half a column of “[1.4] Design credits” (mine is for “proofreading and playtesting”).

Chapter 2: Characters​

The character representation system in ForeSight is based on that in Victory Games’s James Bond 007, somewhat expanded, generalised, and cleaned up.

A character has nine “attributes” (strength, endurance, dexterity, agility, intelligence, perception, willpower, empathy, and appearance). Each has an “inherent” value in the range 5–12, and a “trained” value which can be up to four points higher, giving a range of 5–16. Trained values may be increased with experience (to a maximum of Inherent + 4), inherent values cannot. This mechanic is support to prevent the experience system from effecting implausible changes to relatively stable dimensions of a character.

A character may have a number of skills—49 are listed, besides generic skills. Each skill has a base value give by its formula (the average or half the average of one or two attributes), on top of which a character may have a number of skill levels limited by his or her highest value for any attribute which appears in the skill’s formula. This is contrived to give PCs a range of PCS (effective value of skill) from 6 to 34.

A character will have familiarities with an array of different gravity ranges, temperature ranges, and environment types. Familiarities range from 0 to 3, with four gravity ranges, five temperature ranges, and 21 types of environment rated separately. Familiarity appears as a variable in the base ease factors of certain skills: eg. Acrobatics has a BEF of G+2, Groundcraft has E+4.

A character will have a number of Fields of Knowledge. About eighty are listed, ranging from Astrophysics through Capture (an unarmed combat field), Ballet (a dance field), and Tracking to Cast Sculpture. Each field of knowledge is used with a skill or skills, or to put it another way it enables skills to be used in a certain field. E.g. a character with Starship Construction can use his Diagnose skill to design starships and his Repair skill to repair them, but he can’t use those skills to diagnose diseases in the skill or to surgically repair the injured unless he also has the Emergency Medical or Standard Medical fields.

A character also has a handedness, a social background, an age, and maybe a goodie or bummer such as a talent or phobia.

Section [2.1] contains the character generation procedure in eight numbered steps, some of which have up to vii numbered sub-steps. Basically it is a point-buy system, or rather three separate point-buy systems: inherent attribute points, years of education (used to buy fields of knowledge), and generation points (used to buy trained attribute points, skills, skill levels, and familiarities) form separate pools with no interconversion allowed. In a feature loathed by players and house-ruled in all campaigns except Tonio’s own, the pools were set randomly (but not independently). The player had a choice of either setting all inherent attributes to a base of 5 and distributing 32 inherent attribute points, or of setting each inherent attribute to d6 + 4 (rolled in order, no repeats) and distributing a further 15 inherent attribute points. Social background was rolled randomly, it gave bonus GPs, years of free education, and starting money with a rough trade-off (those some backgrounds were Just Better and some were Just Worse). Ethnic Background could be rolled randomly, but had no effect anyway. Age was rolled randomly, and had a dramatic effect: older characters got more eduction, more generation points, and dramatically more money—starting funds were multiplied by years of education and by (Age - 14). A goodie or bummer (perhaps several) was rolled on the “Abilities and Limitations” table.

Players hated the random features of Section 2.1 and the dramatic differences in character wealth and ability which they produced. The whole of Section 2.1 was commonly replaced by house rules with a straight point buy, and the most substantive content of the 1990 ForeSight Enhanced was a replacement character generation system, an elaborate but non-random method of partitioning points among the attribute point, generation point, and education pools in accordance with character background but with equal character power for all.

Section 2.2 was a skill list with some notes and definitions, rules for maximum level limits etc. Section 2.3 was a list of fields of knowledge with notes and explanations. Section 2.4 dealt with rules for unfamiliarity.

Section 2.5 was the experience system. Experience points could be spent on the same sorts of things generation points were (and a few extras, such as acquiring familiarity with unfamiliar things, i.e. buying off non-familiarity modifiers), but they were spent differently. Using generation points the prices of high skill levels, high familiarity levels, and high levels of attribute training were the same as those of low ones, i.e. total costs were linear in level. But using experience points, the prices climbed steeply, i.e. total costs were quadratic for skills, cubic for familiarities, and in the case of trained attribute points were quadratic in the trained level achieved (not in the amount of training). This produced a distinct incentive to concentrate in generation on getting a few skills and attributes to very high levels, and then buying lots of low levels with experience points. Tonio declared this to be a design feature, but I house-ruled it, and my house-rules were adopted in ForeSight Enhanced.

Section 2.6 was the fatigue system. Section 2.7 was an optional set of psionics rules with nine psioinics skills and rules for acquiring and using them. Section 2.8 (“Non-Player Characters”) urged the GM not to bother with the full rigmarole of character generation in the case of NPCs, and gave procedures for generating minor supporting cast characters less capable than PCs (unless the end up older!) for friends and associates of PCs.

Section 2.9 “Merits, Demerits, and Notoriety” was a system for keeping track of a PCs progress up the ranks of a hierarchy (or up hierarchy of different levels of being sought by the police). There were no rules for using the resulting rank to obtain favours or resources.

Here's an example of a ForeSight (1st edition) character's character sheet. This character benefits from having rolled high on the age roll, slightly above-average attributes, and a nice goodie (eidetic memory), but he hasn't had much experience spent on him because I never played him much.



To be continued

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 3: Resolution system​

Section 3.0 of ForeSight laid out a cleaned up and generalised version of the Ease Factor:Quality Rating resolution system out of SPI’s James Bond 007. The major change was that where the JB007 version was table-driven, ForeSight’s version was worked by comparing the die roll to various factions of the success chance. Playing ForeSight made me learn to do one-digit by two-digit multiplications, and to divide by two and five.

There is a summary of the resolution system, in large type, suitable to be photocopied and distributed to players, on the back of the chapter flyleaf. More than half the page is taken up by a division table.

The basic story of the EF:QR system is that a character has a PCS representing his ability in a skill. The skill has a Base Ease Factor (always 5 in JB007, in ForeSight they varied somewhat from skill to skill, and often included a variable for the character’s familiarity eg. with the gravity or the environment). Modifiers for circumstance and task difficulty are applied to the Base Ease Factor to yield a modified Ease Factor. Then you multiply the character’s PCS by the task’s EF to get a success chance. Roll d100. A result over Success Chance is a failure (in ForeSight, “Quality rating 7”) and maybe a botch (in ForeSight, “QR10”). A roll of SC or under is a success. If it is under 1/10 of SC (a tabulated value in JB007) it is a Quality Rating 1 (ideal success). If it is under 1/5 of SC but not a QR1 it is a QR2. If it is under 1/2 of SC but not a QR1 or QR2 it is a Quality Rating 3. If it is SC or under but not a QR1, QR2, or QR3, it is a QR4 (bare success). Exceptions: 00 is never better than QR7, even if SC > 99.; 99 is never better than QR4, even if SC>199.

Each quality rating is associated with a “yield percentage” (for use when the amount achieved is important) and a “time to complete” (for use when speed is of the essence). Also, the scale of QRs is appropriate for them to be used as BEFs for opposing tasks, or as a basis for (negative) EFMs for tasks building on the task achieved.

When I first encountered this system I thought it over-elaborate, but I came to appreciate it and the smooth and consistent way in which it handled degree of success in all tasks I grew very fond of it. It is flexible and powerful in proportion to its complexity, and not too complex for a universal task resolution procedure.

§3.1 set a scale for freehand task difficulty modifiers.

§3.2 was a set of rules for using the Charisma and Confidence skills to persuade an NPC to do a favour, based on the NPCs initial demeanour.

§3.3 was a four-step procedure for a PC to seduce an NPC, based on the five-step procedure in James Bond 007/

§3.4 was the repair rules, covering surgical repair of injuries inter alia. The size, complexity, and degree of damage to an object combined to give a time and ease factor modifier for the repair. Quality of equipment and QR of diagnosis modified the EF. The rules covered partial repair.

§3.5 was abstract design and construction rules. §3.6 was research rules. §3.7 was animal training, a four-step task. §3.8 was a four-stage task for penetrating computer systems. § 3.9 was a four-stage task for penetrating electronic security systems.

§3.10 was a neat little system (half a column) using opposing Stealth and Scan rolls (based on Environment Familiarity) to resolve the conditions of contact (range, surprise, initiate) of opposing parties that were travelling, patrolling, or setting ambush in arbitrary terrain.

§3.11 covered teamwork, allowing three modes: division of labour; “many hands make light work”, and “a second opinion”.

§3.12, the conclusion of the Resolution chapter, was a page and a half of guidelines and examples for using skills and setting task difficulty modifiers.

Chapter 4: Combat​

The combat system in ForeSight was, I believe, based on that in SPI’s Commando. It was played on a hex-grid in turns, with each hex representing about a metre, and each turn about 3 seconds. Each character got to do several things in each turn, the number depending on his or her Speed. Speed was based on Agility and Perception, and was modified for fatigue, injury, encumbrance, and stiff or heavy armour on the limbs. The possible actions were listed, their effects and options (eg. hexes where you might end up, facings that you might end up in, etc.) very clearly illustrated with diagrams. The turn sequence was unambiguous and clearly set out.

I loved the ForeSight first edition combat system, but most players found it tricky. You had to be careful about setting up the first turn of a combat (though a few simple rules allowing characters to take opportunity actions to defend themselves before their pulse began in the first turn of a combat would have fixed that). And there were important tactics in the use of the game system, so that a good player with an inferior character could (fairly reliably) defeat a bad player with a superior character. I thought that the solution to this problem was to learn to play the game, but many players did not want to make tactical decision other than on the sort of level and in the sort of terms that their characters would.

In a long-running HindSight game , I had a character who on paper had less than 2% chance to win a fight against any of the other PCs, but who defeated more NPCs than all the others (except the magician) put together. There is a strong case to be made that the combat system in ForeSight was more of an included game than a suitable resolution procedure for an RPG.

§4.1 was combat setup, including a procedure for finding cover in the first seconds of combat, which depended on a Scan roll by the character and the terrain value of the environment.

§4.2 was the sequence of actions for the combat system, the rules for character Speed, the different actions which could be taken with action ponts or by devoting a whole pulse to them.

§4.3 was combat task resolution, including the parry and dodge rules, the armour and injury rules, the rules for getting stunned and recovering from stun, and the standard ease factor modifiers for ranged and mêlée combat.

§4.4 was combat equipment.

There a large (full-page) table of weapons with their performance modifiers, ammo, rate of fire, damage class, ranges (using the same system as in James Bond 007), concealability ratings, draw and reload times, jam ranges, weight, tech level, and cost, and a flag to note which skill they were used with. The same table was used for ranged and mêlée weapons, so that every firearm had full stats for use as a mêlée weapon. The arrangement of the weapons in that table had no pattern that I could see, which was annoying. There weren’t many weapons at each tech level (at ForeSight TL8 you had the protein disruptor (from Universe, I think), the TD (“target-designating”) laspistol and lasrifle, and the DEXAX needler and DEXAX needle rifle (the pistol from Vance’s Planet of Adventure, the rifle by analogy). This shortage was greatly eased by a system in an appendix which allowed one to apply modifiers to base weapons, providing stats for heavier and lighter calibres, shorter formats, target-shooting models etc.

The descriptions of the weapons in §4.4 were minimal. But not I think sub-minimal.

The table of armour was much smaller, but the system was that you bought armour separately for the head, chest, abdomen, each arm, and each leg, so there was scope for customisation. The 21 types of armour in the table included at least to two types (one rigid and one flexible) at each TL from 0 to 9. Each type of armour had separate ratings for its protectiveness against three damage types (mêlée, impact, and beam), a modifier to character speed for each limb dressed in it, a concealability rating, a vision modifier for a helmet made of it (or a usual matching quality of helmet), a base mass, a tech level, and a base cost.

There was a column on exoskeletons, including a load-bearing (“augmented”) and a combat-optimised (“combat”) exoskeleton at each tech level from 7 to 9, plus freaky things called “power roos” at TLs 8 and 9. The section concluded with a column of stats and rules for environment suits: breathing masks, SCUBA, NBC suits, thermal suits, and vacc suits.

§4.5 “Optional Combat Rules” includes stats and rules and special actions for hand grenades, alternative rules for more realistic damage and parrying, minimum strength for weapon use, and equipment listings for high-tech mêlée combat weapons called “battle harness” (from Universe, I think). It concludes with special actions and rules for tripping, knockout blows, entangling attacks, grabs, disarms, restrains (wrestling), knockback attacks, throws (as in Judo), and strangle attacks. But not tackles, which are in an appendix.




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To be continued

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 5: Travel & vehicles​

Chapter 5 began with a table of vehicles. This was rather sparse, especially at lower tech levels. A system of vehicle modifications in an appendix added considerable range and flexibility, but the whole thing was rather unsystematic. Vehicles were arranged without discernible order. The table listed their tech level, pursuit modifier, manoeuvre modifier, redline (an abstract measure of safe handling limits at speed, used in the chase rules), cruising speed and maximum speed (used in the long distance travel rules), ceiling (negative for submersibles), “damage track” (a measure of the injury required to damage them), size (a ‘to-hit’ bonus for ranged combat, also used in ‘Force’ manoeuvres), ‘type’, and cargo and passenger capacity.

Below the vehicle table was the chart of terrain values by terrain type, which really ought to have been in Chapter 1.

§5.1 defined all the vehicle characteristics and gave rules for adjusting them for terrain value (according ot ‘type’).

§5.2 gave procedures for using character’s driving skills and navigation skill, and vehicles’ stats to determine the speed of travel in arbitrary terrain, with one variation for cautious driving and another for “hasty travel”.

§5.3 was the pursuit system, rules for chase scenes based on the chase rules in James Bond 007. The idea was that there was an auction each turn, with different parties bidding levels of difficult and dangerous driving, the winner getting to choose whether to go first or last. There was a clear series of actions, and number of options to choose with significant effects, etc… And there were rules for ramming, exchange of fire, etc. It was supposed to be generalised for air, land, or sea pursuits, but in practice it really only made sense in a land environment, and some manoeuvres only assuming a network of routes and a degree of concealment. The pursuit system included rules for suffering crashes in such scenes, and for vehicles and their occupants being damaged and injured thereby.

Chapter 6: General equipment​

Chapter 6 consisted principally of a four-page equipment list. Each piece of equipment was listed with the skill it was used with, the field of knowledge needed to repair it), its weight (mass, actually), tech level, cost, and some brief notes of what it did: where necessary. The listings for holsters included rules for the effects of different carries on concealability and draw time (which should have been in Combat Equipment). The listings for personal fliers included stats that should have been on the vehicle table. Apart from that the list was okay, but too short even with weapons, armour, vehicles, and protective gear listed elsewhere.

The other content of substance in Chapter 6 of ForeSight was the rules for toolkits, which let you work out the cost and mass of a basic toolkit, a standard toolkit, and advanced toolkit, a small facility (repair shop, clinic) or a large facility (engineering shop, hospital), for each technical field of knowledge, by tech level from TL5 to TL10.

To be continued

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 7: Star System and Planet Generation​

The star system and planet generation chapter of ForeSight is what I first built my universe with, and I have since gone to some trouble to purge the results. However, you have to bear in mind that it was designed in 1985, when the Equilibrium Condensation theory was the best we had, and you ought to make some allowance for the fact that it was consciously designed to provide a little more variety than strict realism, and to be implemented with a calculator, pencil, and paper by actual gamers in days when we didn’t all have computers.

The first step was to make a photocopy of the star system design form. This did not have space for moons, and I eventually found that the system produced almost as many habitable moons as habitable planets.

The second step was to find a star in a “suitable” astronomical catalogue and note its Stellar Type (i.e. spectral type). The system had rules for types from B0 to M9 and S9 out to 100 light-years from Sol (including a table of luminosities and masses for spectral classes from M5 VI to B0 Ia0), but noted that it was intended only for F0 to M9 main-sequence stars within 30 light-years. Looking up “stellar type” in a table, you got “range” (which was a chance to have a planet on each row of the table), “radius” (a scaling factor for distance of planet from star: essentially the square root of luminosity), and “mass” (used to calculate the years lengths).

Then you went down the rows of the form. For rows 1 to 10 (corresponding to orbits inside the snow line) you rolled a d10, and for rows 11 to 16 you rolled d6. If the roll was less than or equal to “range” you put a tick in the “orbital radius” column at that row. Then for each row that had a tick in it, you multiplied the “base radius” figure printed in the “orbital radius” row by the “radius” factor for the stellar type, rubbed out the tick and wrote the product in in its place. (To be neat, you might then whiteout the “base radius” figures, but in practise I did not use the form.

For each row with a figure in “radius” you rolled a d10. If it was a 10, the ‘planet’ was an asteroid belt. otherwise a 1–3 gave you a “standard” (terrestrial) planet, and a 4–9 gave you a standard planet in row 1–10 of a gas giant in row 11–16.

For each terrestrial planet, you rolled d10-1 (minus a further 3 if the star was type S) for its size, treating results less than 0 as 0), and wrote that into the “size” column. Size 0 was 2500-km diameter, Size 1 was 3,750 km, Size 2 was 5,000 km, and each size larger increased diameter by 2,500 up to Size 6, then Size 7 was 20,000 km diameter, Size 8 was 30,000 km, and Size 9 was 45,000 km diameter.

For each gas giant you rolled a d10 and consulted a table to see whether you had size G1 (60,000 km) G2 (120,000 km), or G3 (250,000 km). If the star was type S you subtracted 3, results of -2, -1, or 0 giving you size 7, 8, and 9 terrestrials instead of gas giants.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet, applied modifiers, and looked up the planet’s density in a table. Small planets got a +1 (giving higher density), large planets a -1, gas giants a -2, -3, or -4, planets in rows near the star got up to a +6, those beyond the snow line no modifier. Type S stars had +3. You wrote the density in to the density column, and then you multiplied it by the coefficient of gravity for the planet’s size (from the size table). That gave you the surface gravity, which you wrote in to the “gravity” column.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet applied modifiers, and looked up the atmospheric density. A very low density for the planet gave a result of [C] soupy automatically. Otherwise you rolled a d10, added a modifier from the Planet Density table (positive if the planet density relative to Earth’s was 0.5 or lower), a modifier for surface gravity (ranging from +3 for gravity 2.0 gee or over to -8 for gravity 0.2 gee or less), and a modifier for size (from -3 for Size 0 to +5 for Size 9). This gave you a result of from “[-1] none” through “[0] trace” to “[10] soupy” or “[11] soupy”, which you wrote in the “pressure” column.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet, added an opacity modifier from the “atmosphere density” table, and looked up the opacity of the atmosphere in the Atmosphere Opacity table. This gave a result from “[-1] none” to “extreme”, which you wrote into the “opacity” column.

Then you took the temperature modifier off the opacity table (ranging from -35 C for [-1] none to +30 C for extreme [A]—extreme gave an overriding result of hot/cold, and the tables were so contrived that that is what gas giants always got) and you added it to the base temperature for the row (printed on the form in the “basic temperature” column), and wrote the sum in the “mean temperature” column.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet, added modifiers for atmosphere density, and subtracted |(mean temperature - 10)/10| (ignoring fractions). The result (times 10%) gave you the hydrographics percentage of the planet, with anything less that 0% treated as 0%. 100% exactly had scattered islands, but anything over had deep unbroken oceans. The modifiers on this roll worked out so that planets with trace atmospheres or [11] soupy atmospheres did not end up with water, and the [10] soupies and very thins or traces didn’t have much at the best of times and none if their temperatures were far from 10C. You wrote the result into the “hydrographics” column of the form.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet, added the “composition” roll from the Planet Density Table (a negative modifier for planets less than 0.5 the density of Earth), subtracted the absolute value of the opacity modifier from the Atmosphere Density table (thus penalising both thick and thin atmospheres), and added (planet’s hydrographics/20) (rounded off). And looked up the result in the “Atmosphere Composition table”. This told you that the atmosphere was “Hostile: poisonous, oxygen-free”, “Hostile: poisonous, oxygen-free, corrosive”, “Unpleasant: poisonous”, “Unpleasant: oxygen-free”, “Unpleasant: corrosive”, “Tolerable: oxygen-poor”, “Tolerable: contaminated”, “Breatheable: slightly poisonous”, “Breathable: slightly contaminated”, “Earthlike”, or “Invigourating” (sic). You wrote that into the Atmosphere Composition column. The Atmosphere Composition table also gave you an SC for life on the planet. You rolled a d100 against that and determined a quality rating in the usual way. QR7 meant prokaryotes at best. QR4, primitive and unthreatening life, no more advanced that ferns, amphibians, and bony fish. QR3 meant “moderate degree of evolution”: equivalent to dinosaurs and non-sapient mammals. QR2 meant "highly advance, but no-sapient animals, perhaps semi-intelligent and /or very dangerous. QR1 meant sapients. You made a note of this somewhere.

Then you rolled a d10 for each planet, added modifiers for what row it was in and for certain atmosphere compositions (the ones with plenty of oxygen), and consulted a column in the Incident Radiation Table to determine the amount of radiation reaching the surface of the planet. This ranged from “benign” though “harmful” and “dangerous” to “inimical to life”.

Then you multiplied together scores for each planet’s temperature, gravity, atmosphere, hydrographics, and radiation, which gave you a score from 0 (lethal, and quickly) to 3,750 (perfect), and looked it up in a table to get the planet’s Habitability Index. HI 1 was “Paradise: ideal for human habitation”, HI 2 was “Promising: suitable for large-scale colonisation”, HI 3 “Tolerable: unsuitable for large-scale colonisation”, HI4 “marginal: probable death without equipment”, HI 5 “Uninhabitable”, and HI 5* “Inimical: rapid death without equipment”. You wrote the HI into the HI column of the form, and when every row was done you were done with the form and had finished §7.0 Star System Generation.

The system was pretty quick: quicker than it sounds. You could work down the form in columns rather than working out each planet in turn, and that meant a big saving in page-flipping and looking-things-up.

The modifiers interworked with the tables so that you didn’t get obviously absurd planets: not that I noticed back in the 80s, anyway. The “basic temperature” column, which should have gone with the blackbody temperature as 1/sqrt® had been fudged to extend the life zone, and I’m by no means sure that the albedo and greenhouse effects implied by various “atmospheric opacities” were physically realisable. However, you did get some dodgy orbits sometimes. Rows 3 to 7 covered the life zone, and were pretty closely packed. For an F5 to K4 star the “Range” value was 4 or above, and it was not unlikely that you would get a couple or even three planets in orbits that were simply too close for comfort. Outside the life zone things were a bit sparse: you couldn’t get a planet in an orbit corresponding to Mercury’s.

Still. In 1986, without a computer of my own or that I was allowed to program, I thought it was pretty handy.

To be continued

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 8: Spacecraft design, Construction, & Combat​

§8.1, §8.2, & §8.3: starship specifications, construction, and systems​

I understand that the spacecraft design and construction system in ForeSight was based on that in Universe, each “compartment” in ForeSight corresponding to half of a “pod” in Universe. The big difference is that rather than throwing a few payload pods and drive pods together and calculating performance (a procedure that led to iterative design while players tried to hit magic performance thresholds in the space combat system), in ForeSight you chose your payload systems (and the amount of armour you wanted to put on them) and your drive specs (and the amount of armour you want to put on your drives), and then you calculate how many drive compartments you need.

So the procedure is, roughly, this. You choose what payload systems you want to put in your ship: control systems, generators, electronic warfare systems, lasers, particle accelerators, meson accelerators, conventional or nuclear warheads, launchers, launch-recovery bays, passenger compartments, cargo space etc. Many of them come in variable sizes. Then you choose how much armour you want to put on each of them, calculate its mass with armour, total up an armoured payload mass. Then you choose the level of acceleration you want (in half-gees) and the agility you want, and you choose the endurances you want on those and look up the thrust-to-mass ratio in a table. And then you choose the interstellar rating you want and look up the rating to mass ratio in a table. Then you choose how much armour you want on the acceleration drives, the agility drives, and the star dives, and calculate a thrust-to-mass ratio adjusted for armour, combine the three, subtract one, take the reciprocal, and multiply by the armoured payload (adjusted for bracing in high-performance ships) to get the total drive mass, which you split appropriately to get separate sizes for each of the three drives.

You added up the total number of compartments, which gave you the size of the ship, and how many of them had to be exterior. And you calculated the minimum number of exterior compartments, then chose how many exterior compartment you would actually have. That was the profile of your ship. Then you totted up the total cost. Which was huge.

Weapon optimisation was fiendishly complicated, with non-linear cost-effectiveness, and magical scales all over the place. I reckoned that the best course was to use beam weapons only just big enough to destroy one armoured compartment per shot. A given mass/cost of beam weapons them destroyed a maximum number of compartments per turn. This led to long, slow slogging matches at enormous range. As in Traveller, meson accelerators magically ignored armour, but since they had to take into account evasion in all three directions they were less effective at long range. Warheads were devastating, but since “missiles” did not move in a different medium from “ships”, and didn’t have room for significant ECM, I found that torpedoes (as I preferred to call them) were too vulnerable to point-defensive fire to be worthwhile unless you could charge in to close range in a heavily-armoured torpedo cruiser and then let fly with a salvo at close range.

The rules allowed small torpedoes (eg. the one-compartment torpedoes I designed) to be more heavily armoured than they should have been. The thrust and endurance ratings given for high-tech and long-endurance drives were physically impossible with the relativistic rocket equation. Generators produced more power than should have been possible except to antimatter batteries.

§8.4 Space travel​

Travel time formula for constant burn with turnover. Rules for the behaviour of interstellar drives (a kind of jump drive, but requiring overhaul of the engines rather that refuelling with vast amounts of hydrogen, and working only much further from stars and planets than in Traveller. I worked out that enormous savings were available if transhipment facilities were built as space stations in the jump zone, with non-starships ferrying passengers and cargo between planets and these ‘outwell facilities’, and if interstellar vessels specialised entirely in the interstellar legs of travel.

Standard fares and freight rates were included, but they didn’t stand up to close examination.

§8.5 Space Combat​

Space combat was played out on a hex-grid with ~2000-km hexes and ten-minute turns. The sequence of actions was well-defined, absolutely explicit, and quite practical (movement phase, initiative phase, launch phase, evasion phase, recovery phase, acceleration phase, direct fire phase, impact phase). Vector movement was handled on the hex-grid by giving each vessel a location counter and a destination counter. In the acceleration phase, acceleration drives could be used to move one’s destination counter by one hex per point of acceleration. Unused acceleration combined with agility to produce evasion, which, at ranges of sometimes 400,000 kilometres was effective even against lasers.

There was a 3-dimensional variant, in which each ship had to have a location counter, a shadow location counter, a destination counter, and a shadow destination counter. I never knew anyone to play it.

§8.6 Space combat procedures​

Rules for

• direct fire hit probability {taking into account ECM and ECCM, evasion and range (differently for meson accelerators than lasers and particle accelerators), but not any gunner skill}
• pursuit impact probability (taking into account pursuing craft’s agility and reserve of acceleration, relative velocity, ECM and ECCM, and range to the guiding ship)
• damage. A block of damage was assigned first to an exterior compartment (unless it came from a meson accelerator), and then (if it was sufficient to blow through) to a random compartment and so on until it hit a second (or first, for a meson accelerator) exterior compartment, whereupon if it still sufficed to blow through remaining damage was lost to space. Not that that mattered for heavily armoured ships anyway, since well-designed weapons seldom blew through an armoured exterior compartment with enough oomph to penetrate even light armour on a second compartment.
• detecting and locating enemy craft. We didn’t know then about the impossibility of stealth in space.
• treating cargo as armour.

I don't think the spaceship construction and combat rules were actually meant to be used. I think they were there to deter players from having their characters own or operate speceships.

APPENDICES​

Specific vehicle types​

A system of modifiers (“cheap/old”, “compact”, “luxury”, “sporty”, “fast”, “police/military”, “heavy”, “transport”, and “utility” (equivalent to US English “pickup”) to mix and match on listed vehicles to represent a huge range of variants.

Damage tracks​

The system for converting damage sustained into wound level, for things flimsier or tougher than humans. This ought to have been in Chapter 4 (combat), and besides, a last-minute formatting change (after final proofreading) screwed up the table.

Organism record form​

Sapients​

Brief notes on things that have to be determined to define non-humans as player-character races in ForeSight

How to play ForeSight​

One-column guide to the resolution system, unfortunately split across two pages so that it is awkward to photocopy and distribute.

Specific weapon types​

A system of modifiers to mix and match on listed ranged weapons to represent a huge range of variants. A similar system for mêlée weapons had to wait for HindSight.

Interplanetary Transport Costs and Availability​

Recap of the space travel cost rules from Chapter 8, with rules for determining when the next ship to depart one given port for another given port will do so. Hibersleep and luxury travel cost modifiers are given.

Poisons​

Rules for seven kinds of poison, plus “paralytic poison” (which is usually not fatal), resiting them, and treating characters poisoned with them. No prices.

Falling Damage​

Injury from falls, depending appropriately on local gravity and with a “bigger they are, harder they fall” feature (though it is probably too generous to giants). Rules from breaking a fall with different skills, and for falling onto different surfaces including water, haystacks, specially prepared mounds of cardboard boxes, and correctly-deployed airbags.

Burns​

A table of damage classes for exposure to various intensities of flame, hot objects, corrosive chemicals, cold objects, and electric power sources.

Unusual terrain​

Rules for combat on treacherous footing, loose covered ground, broken ground, narrow or precipitous footing, hexes containing other characters, soft sand, or snow, through doors or panes of glass, in shallow water or mud, and underwater.

Tackling​

Rules for tackling in combat.

Larger Than Life Characters​

Rules for the use of Hero Points as in James Bond 007, and for characters who exceed normal human limits (like Batman in The Dark Knight). These allowed hero points to be spent to raise inherent attributes, raise personal Base Ease Factors for skills, acquire psionic skills and mystic disciplines, and raise one’s damage track. They also allowed hero points to be used “for luck” to alter the QRs of tasks performed by the larger-than-life characters or directly affecting them. These rules were less generous than in JB007 (it took three hero points to turn a failure into a QR4 or botch or vice versa.)

Designer's commentary​

Twelve pages.

---

I hope you’ll forgive my verbosity. I wanted to make it clear that this was a game that packed a lot into 124 pages.

 

[Sharrow]

Section [2.1] contains the character generation procedure in eight numbered steps, some of which have up to vii numbered sub-steps. Basically it is a point-buy system, or rather three separate point-buy systems, because inherent attribute points, years of education (used to buy fields of knowledge), and generation points (used to buy trained attribute points, skills, skill levels, and familiarities) form separate pools with no interconversion allowed. In a feature loathed by players an house-ruled in all campaigns except Tonio’s own, the pools were set randomly (but not independently). The player had a choice of either setting all inherent attributes to a base of 5 and distributing 32 inherent attribute points, or of setting each inherent attribute to d6 + 4 (rolled in order, no repeats) and distributing a further 15 inherent attribute points.

That places a high value on being able to place all your points freely. As long as you only really cared about 2-3 attributes rolling randomly would be pretty safe and quite likely to yield an overall stronger character. I'm sure everyone was aware of that at the time, so presumably this was considered a feature. I'm intrigued as to why.

Section 2.5 was the experience system. Experience points could be spent on the same sorts of things generation points were (and a few extras, such as acquiring familiarity with unfamiliar things, i.e. buying off non-familiarity modifiers), but they were spent differently. Using generation points the prices of high skill levels, high familiarity levels, and high levels of attribute training were the same as those of low ones, i.e. total costs were linear in level. But using experience points, the prices climbed steeply, i.e. total costs were quadratic for skills, cubic for familiarities, and in the case of trained attribute points were quadratic in the trained level achieved (not in the amount of training). This produced a distinct incentive to concentrate in generation on getting a few skills and attributes to very high levels, and then buying lots of low levels with experience points. Tonio declared this to be a design feature, but I house-ruled it, and my house-rules were adopted in ForeSight Enhanced.

That sort of incentive turns up again and again (White Wolf's games are notorious for it, for example), and the only game I ever played where it didn't seem to matter much was Twilight: 2000 2e, and that's because nobody's character ever seemed to last long enough for it to matter.

 

[Sharrow]

I hope you’ll forgive my verbosity. I wanted to make it clear that this was a game that packed a lot into 124 pages.

An interesting review. I've often wondered about this game, as you've mentioned it many times over the years and I've never managed to get my hands on a copy, aside from those versions up on the website.

To a certain extent I miss the days when rpgs were written like that. The clarity and brevity of that style would be beneficial to many modern rpgs, in my opinion.

 

[Agemegos]

That places a high value on being able to place all your points freely. As long as you only really cared about 2-3 attributes rolling randomly would be pretty safe and quite likely to yield an overall stronger character. I'm sure everyone was aware of that at the time, so presumably this was considered a feature. I'm intrigued as to why.

The designer liked semi-random character generation because he thought characters ought to be unequal and that players ought to be presented with varied roleplaying challenges. He made semi-random attribute point generation more attractive so that every would prefer it. Which everyone did, and tended to play the characters on which they had rolled well. IMO the game works better — characters specialise more, and niche protection, once agreed upon, is more stable — with the lower total of inherent attribute points.

Another manifestation of this idea was randomly-rolled ages, which made characters very unequal: education points, generation points, and starting money all increased markedly with age. We players very much disliked that. I circulated a simple hack for a single fixed budget constraint (generation, education, and increased inherent attribute points all coming out of the same pool). All the GMs in the circle at ANU used my hack. That irritated Tonio into designing a non-random character generation system for ForeSight Enhanced. Unfortunately a simple budget constraint was too simple for Tonio, and the system of “Background factors” obliged players to muck about choosing features of character background to adjust the division of their resources into three pools.

An interesting review. I've often wondered about this game, as you've mentioned it many times over the years and I've never managed to get my hands on a copy, aside from those versions up on the website.

I’m probably going to talk to the designer this week. Would you like me to ask him about sharing a scan for the purposes of scholarship, study, and review?

 

[Sharrow]

I’m probably going to talk to the designer this week. Would you like me to ask him about sharing a scan for the purposes of scholarship, study, and review?

I would, though realistically I doubt I'll ever to the 'review' part.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

The author should put it on drivethrurpg.com even if he is working on a new edition.

 

[Agemegos]

The author should put it on drivethrurpg.com even if he is working on a new edition.

Real life ate his career as a games designer: he's working on a start-up. And I don't think he has a soft copy other than my dodgy scans. Remember that this is product that dates to 1986 and that the PDF standard wasn't promulgated until 1991.

 

[thebigh]

If there was a Kickstarter or something to resurrect this little gem, I would back it. This kind of space warfare RPG is right up my alley, and the fact that it's from the 1980s just adds to it.

I think, if the source files still exist, there must be conversion software to convert it all to PDF. So I do not think that will be a hindrance.

 

[burbles]

I think, if the source files still exist, there must be conversion software to convert it all to PDF. So I do not think that will be a hindrance.

Look, it been a while, so I could be remembering wrong.

But I'm pretty sure that the standard storage item was 5 1/4 inch disk. I haven't seen too many of those drives around the place!

It's not the source file type but the storage media that I'd be worried about.

 

[thebigh]

Look, it been a while, so I could be remembering wrong.

But I'm pretty sure that the standard storage item was 5 1/4 inch disk. I haven't seen too many of those drives around the place!

It's not the source file type but the storage media that I'd be worried about.

I still have a 5.25 drive kicking around somewhere, and quite a few of my old floppies from the mid to late 80s still work. It's not a hopeless cause.

 

[Agemegos]

It mightn't be a hopeless cause if anyone could find the disks. But they were lost more than thirty years ago.

 

[Silverlion]

It is fascinating. Around that same era, I recall finding an RPG in my local comic's store (give or take a few years.) I've never seen it anywhere else, and I suspect it was produced locally somehow. I never bought it because frankly nothing in it caught my attention. I used to have a very deep collection thanks to Wargames West. So I'm surprised whenever I learn of a game that even I didn't/don't know about like this one.

 

[Agemegos]

It is fascinating. Around that same era, I recall finding an RPG in my local comic's store (give or take a few years.) I've never seen it anywhere else, and I suspect it was produced locally somehow.

Those were the early days of desktop publishing: Apple LaserWriters and Aldus Pagemaker were the new hot thing, and doing your own typesetting seemed like a new frontier. And we didn't have PDF or the World-Wide Web — very few of us even had access to the Internet. Getting things printed and bound was how you distributed your work back then.

 

[Sharrow]

Look, it been a while, so I could be remembering wrong.

But I'm pretty sure that the standard storage item was 5 1/4 inch disk. I haven't seen too many of those drives around the place!

It's not the source file type but the storage media that I'd be worried about.

It was written up on a Mac according to the credits (and the font choices), so it'll be 3.5" floppies, assuming they still exist.

 

[Gringnr]

The designer liked semi-random character generation because he thought characters ought to be unequal and that players ought to be presented with varied roleplaying challenges. He made semi-random attribute point generation more attractive so that every would prefer it. Which everyone did, and tended to play the characters on which they had rolled well. IMO the game works better — characters specialise more, and niche protection, once agreed upon, is more stable — with the lower total of inherent attribute points.

Another manifestation of this idea was randomly-rolled ages, which made characters very unequal: education points, generation points, and starting money all increased markedly with age. We players very much disliked that. I circulated a simple hack for a single fixed budget constraint (generation, education, and increased inherent attribute points all coming out of the same pool). All the GMs in the circle at ANU used my hack. That irritated Tonio into designing a non-random character generation system for ForeSight Enhanced. Unfortunately a simple budget constraint was too simple for Tonio, and the system of “Background factors” obliged players to muck about choosing features of character background to adjust the division of their resources into three pools.



I’m probably going to talk to the designer this week. Would you like me to ask him about sharing a scan for the purposes of scholarship, study, and review?

Yes, please! This sounds awesome!

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Real life ate his career as a games designer: he's working on a start-up. And I don't think he has a soft copy other than my dodgy scans. Remember that this is product that dates to 1986 and that the PDF standard wasn't promulgated until 1991.

Right, but I meant a scanned copy like all the old 70s and 80s stuff from TSR and other publishers that are on drivethrurpg.com already.

 

[Agemegos]

Right, but I meant a scanned copy like all the old 70s and 80s stuff from TSR and other publishers that are on drivethrurpg.com already.

Yeah, that would certainly be possible if Tonio were interested. The OCR didn’t work well in the scan I had done, but scanning works better now and I think it could be done more carefully.

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 3: Resolution system​

Section 3.0 of ForeSight laid out a cleaned up and generalised version of the Ease Factor:Quality Rating resolution system out of SPI’s James Bond 007.

Oops! James Bond 007 was published by Victory Games, not SPI.

 

[Agemegos]

ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia

History

Tonio Loewald wrote The Gamemaster's Guide to the Universe as a setting for SPI's Universe, then designed the RPG ForeSight as an engine for the setting because Universe had gone under in the wreck of SPI. After he published ForeSight he re-wrote The Gamemaster's Guide to the Universe as a setting for ForeSight, and in 1987 he published that as ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia. I'm not sure what the print run was on that, but it did not sell out. Although he designed and ran a series of successful and well-regarded annual events at CanCon in Canberra, all set in ForeScene, the product did not sell, and as far as I know no-one but hum has ever set a campaign there.

Physical format

Similar in format to ForeSight first edition, ForeScene consist of 100 pages of A4 plain paper perfect-bound into a cover of light stock card. The paper is good-quality, opaque, and white; this time the mistake at the printers consisted of losing the master for page 42. I have found this binding amazingly robust. My copy has been treated with scant care for thirty-five years; the spine has only just recently worn through at the lower end. (There was also a very small number of copies bound in cloth-covered hard covers. All are still in the hands of the original owners except mine, which were stolen at a games con.)



The printing in ForeScene is sharp. But the type is very tiny, and the running text is laid out in three columns. There are forms, tables, diagrams, a bit of white space, and a few small pieces of art here and there, but they are not adequate to break up the wall of text, which tends to look like this:



Contents and organisation

The contents of ForeScene consist of sixty articles on various topics that are arranged alphabetically by their titles, of which some are whimsical. For example, the article on the authority and responsibilities of a spaceship captain is "I'm the Captain, So There!", which is on p.38 between "Historical Overview" and "Interplanet Transit Authority". The Table of Contents is, mercifully, at the front. It is also repeated on the back cover:



There were supposed to be sixty-one articles, but the printers omitted p.42, which contained the article on the judicial system.

The articles in ForeScene are a jumble. There are weapons and equipment that perhaps ought to have been with the other weapons and equipment in ForeSight. There are rules for bionic Modifications. There are rules for Alien Races, Androids, and Robots, including playing them as PCs, but these are very different from and quite unbalanced against the rules for characters in ForeSight. There are replacement tables for generating populations and governments for planets inside the Federation. There is an ecosystem generator that generates weird critters for alien planets. There's a random encounter system for encountering people of various professions with rough stats, probable equipment, and suggestions for the nature of the PCs' encounter with them. There are rules for working out what rank and how much money your character has accumulated in "Life Before Character Generation".

Fourteen Megacorporations get a paragraph of description each, likewise six interstellar newspapers (they print on demand). About fifteen interstellar NGOs and interesting branches of the Federal government get longer descriptions. But only one planet (Earth) is described at all and that very briefly. Four other planets in the Federation's "urban core" are listed but not described. All other planets inside the Federation and outside it in the Beyond are meant to be implied by the star system and planet generation systems. In short, there's no actual setting in this setting.

And then the utopian Federation is described by way of articles on its government, monetary system, transport regulations, taxation system, interplanet transit authority, [general lack of] armed forces, etc. And most of this was in my view hopelessly impractical utopianism meant to air the author's ideals about wealth, taxation, money, population growth, and suppressing corruption in government. During playtesting I argued that the economics didn't make sense, but was ignored. Whether I'm right or wrong about that most of its effect was to make the Federation a sybaritic post-industrial idyl well-policed enough that there was little scope for adventures inside it. And the outside of it, the Beyond, was readily accessible but wholly un-described except to the extent that its worlds were implied by the planet generation system in ForeSight.

Regular players of ForeSight in my experience used ForeScene as a source for extra SF equipment, vehicles, and weapons, and particularly for the bionic modifications, for use in campaigns set in other universes. Perhaps the best thing in it was the "verbose" ForeSight character sheet, which had the characteristics of the forty most common and useful skills pre-filled on it.

 

[Agemegos]

HindSight and the Age of “Reason”

HindSight, as we called it for short, is the fantasy supplement to ForeSight. It has been the backbone of my fantasy GMing since it was in playtest, and is the native RPG engine of my fantasy setting Gehennum (which I have burbled about on many RPG forums over the years).

History

During 1986 and 1987 Tonio Loewald noticed that a lot of the roleplayers he knew, particularly in the RPG club at ANU, were using his SF RPG engine ForeSight as a sort of general-purpose RPG. We were not just running SF games in our own Traveller-like universes and other SF settings (such as near-future Earth, cyberpunk-alikes, and retro-SF inspired by Verne, Burroughs, and Doyle), but also using it for contemporary action (replacing James Bond 007), pulp-era adventures (replacing Justice, Inc.), wainscot fantasy and intrusion fantasy (replacing Call of Cthulhu), Westerns and other Victorian-era adventures, swashbuckling intrigue, and so on. It was mostly satisfactory simply to run ForeSight at the appropriate tech level, but it needed more detailed lower-tech equipment, weapons, and vehicles, and a few adjustments to character generation. So he added a bunch of the corresponding material to the fantasy supplement he was working on, and in 1988 published it as HindSight and the Age of “Reason”.

The initial print run of HindSight was 250 copies, which did not sell out.

Physical format

Like ForeSight and ForeScene, HindSight was offset printed on plain paper, and bound in a surprising robust cover of light stock card. It is ninety pages. This time there were no mistakes at the printer. The paper is smooth, opaque, and white; the type is clear and beautifully sharp, and the layout has returned to ForeSight's two columns of Geneva. Even at my advanced age I can read HindSight comfortably without my reading glasses.

As was also the case with ForeSight and ForeScene, a very small number of copies of HindSight were bound in cloth-covered hardback. All those copies are still in the hands of the original owners except for mine, which were stolen at a games convention.



As on ForeScene, the table of contents is repeated on the back cover, in this case in the same type as inside the books and without any artwork.




Inside, the layout makes decent use of white space, and there are some tables and well-laid-out small items to relieve the wall of text, but there are no diagrams and no interior art. It's solid stuff.




Contents

The first item in HindSight, on the reverse of the title page, is three-quarters of a page of errata for ForeSight, most of them having to do with the star system and planet generators and the spaceship construction rules.

Chapter 1

One page of 1.0 Introduction and 1.1 Historical Accuracy, the latter a rebuttal of the suggestion that historical accuracy ought to apply to fantasy settings.

The text starts with fifteen pages of [1.2] Age of Reason. This is a collection of supplementary and optional rules for playing adventures in historical and low-tech settings.

[1.2.1] Technological levels defines tech-level sequences for magic and "religion" (clerical magic, rune magic, divine interventions).

[1.2.2] Character generation Contains changes to character generation procedures for using ForeSight in historical settings. Ethnic and Social background are no longer rolled because no tables could be made general enough for the wide variety of settings. The free skills are a bit different. And there are rules for when to use the low-tech versions of skills and how to upgrade to the high-tech ones where the logic of the setting permits.

[1.2.3] Repair and Diagnose extends the rules for those skills to lower tech levels than were treated in ForeSight.

[1.2.4] Combat introduces specific skills for different mêlée weapon that were all lumped together in the SF core game. There are also a few new combat actions and an experimental (and unsuccessful) new "continuous" combat system, and a rule requiring each character to roll separate initiative instead of doing once for each side.

In a series of sections at the end of [1.2] that are (strangely) un-numbered:
All of the new (low tech) skills and fields and all of the old (science fiction) skills and fields are set out together in consolidated tables, and the psionic skills and their descriptions are repeated from ForeSight. New "Mystic Disciplines" representing the super-human abilities of martial artists and ninjas and so on in wuxia movies and so on. And finally there is a page listing the stats of strangely specific collections of firearms and of aircraft.

Chapter 2: Characters

[2.0] Characters is a collection of rules for generating HindSight characters for standard fantasy settings, in particular for the author's version of a standard fantasy setting (Fvaldanon). In a rule that I think nobody ever used, you were supposed to roll a race (Human, Diver, Flyer, Fenri, Heroic Elf, Non-mammalian Elf, Dwarf, Boggy (satirical take on hobbits), Centaur, Giant, Sprite, Lizardperson, Orc, Goblin) rather than rolling an ethnic background in ForeSight, and also roll a social status within a blandly mediaeval social hierarchy. Descriptions and attribute ranges for the different races followed in [2.1] Nonhuman characters. They were not balanced, nor intended to be. Instead, each race had an experience factor by which experience awards were increased or reduced to compensate for starting disabilities and advantages.

[2.2] Contained several sets of alternative rules for generating magicians, with optional rules to emulate different sorts of source material.

[2.3] Mystic Disciplines was a module of optional rules for characters with abilities like those of ninjas and mystical martial arts in cheesy TV and Chinese martial-arts movies.

Chapter 3: Magic

Twenty-six closely-set pages of magic rules, including a few optional "switches" to make the system have somewhat different effects, for instance a "fire & forget" option that made it work like D&D magic. In HindSight a magician had one or more magical skills for producing magical effects: Ritual was most reliable but took hours; Incantation was riskier but took only a few seconds or a turn in combat; Casting was hardest to learn but could be done in a second or less; Minor Incantation was easy and quick and optionally available to characters who lacked the gift of magic, but was limited to less-powerful effects. What a magician could do with those skills was determined by which of 25 areas of magic they had studied, and how deeply. You designed a magical effect by combining "applications" from different basic and advanced "fundamentals" (which were fields of knowledge), and calculated the combined "intensity" and "energy" of the effect. The intensity was a negative modifier to the roll to produce the effect. The energy determined how long it took (unless you could use Casting) and how much fatigue it cost.

This system was amazingly flexible and powerful, and a lot of fun in the hands of someone who enjoyed figuring out how to solve problems with it. And it would the way that magic notionally ought to work, by a combination of ritual skill with arcane knowledge, different magicians able to know different areas of magic. But it wasn't well balanced against other character abilities — the playtest groups kept getting tubbed when their magician's player couldn't make it — and rewarded system mastery way too richly. Most players found the system utterly intimidating, opaque, and hard to use. I only ever had two magician PCs in all my HindSight campaigns.

Chapter 4: Religion

The chapter on "religion" was ten pages of rules for religious magic, Runequest-style rune magic, miracles, divine interventions, and so on. This worked quite differently from magic. Each follower, avatar, and priest had a "piety factor" that they had to maintain by general conduct and specific deeds pleasing to their god. And then they sacrificed experience points to their gods in appropriate rituals and got intervention points in exchange. When the time came, they could petition their god for a specific "intervention" (rune spell, miracle). The GM assigned a "PIC" to the intervention based on how powerful it was (there were sufficient examples and guidelines), and the character could then raise that by spending intervention points, multiplying their eventual "intervention chance" (PIC plus modifier for intervention points spent) by their piety factor for a percentage chance that the god would intervene as requested. (Gods had particular major realms and minor realms; intervention-point expenditures were more efficacious in the major realms.)

Among sections numbered 4.1 to 4.11 supplying rules and guidelines for followers and interventions, [4.8] Avatars & Priests provided rules for characters corresponding to runelords and runepriests in Runequest 2.

The religion system in HindSight was a lot less forbidding and a lot easier to drive than the magic system, and it was much more popular with players in my campaigns.

Chapter 5: Encounters

Encounters includes random tables for rolling encounters on, with one-line combat stats for "non-player characters" from Assassin to Tribesperson and "creatures" from Skeleton to Wyvern and from Leopard to Large Fish.

Chapter 6: Equipment

A price-list of fantasy and low-tech equipment and services, not very systematic or comprehensive.

Chapter 7: Alchemy, Herbalism, & Other Arts

This chapter contains rules for, and rules for making, poisons, and medicinal tonics and lotions. Also, somewhat out-of-place rules for diseases and other afflictions such as sunburn and saddle-sores. And rules for using astrology in campaign settings where it works.

Appendices

A.1 is rules for mounted combat. We only used them once in playtest (there are no horses in my fantasy setting), and found that (a) characters trying to fight from horses that they can't control very well turn out to be hilarious and (b) character fighting from horseback who can control their mounts reliably are murder on four legs amongst the tiros.

A.2 is rules for "new" weapons that are used differently differently from the way that ForeSight assumes as typical: main-gauche daggers, shields, whips, garottes.

A.3 is combat rules for characters a lot larger or smaller than humans.

A.4 is rules for breaking weapons.

A.5 applies the weapons modification rules from ForeSight to the new ("primitive") weapons listed in HindSight.

A.6 contains "casting modes" for magic-users who work their effects by means other than the assumed method of chanting incantations, making gestures, and manipulating ingredients and magical tools, or are otherwise specialised.

 

[Agemegos]

Chapter 7: Star System and Planet Generation​

To be continued

I realise now that continued at the wrong spot, skipping over parts [7.1] Detailing Planets and [7.2] Detailing the Human Population of a Planet.

[7.1] had:
(1) a rule for rolling the day length of a planet, and a formula for the daily temperature variation on a planets as a result of its day length and atmospheric opacity,
(2) a procedure for rolling what moons a planet had (this was a bit of an afterthought, but when I came to use this system to generate a system around every solitary main-sequence star between 10% and 1000% as luminous as Sol within fifty light-years (from the Gliese 3 catalogue) it turned out that half of the inhabited worlds in my universe were moons of giant planets in the habitable zones of stars, and I got two profusely habitable systems (Tau Ceti and Lambda Aurigae) each with several giant planers in its habitable zone.
(3) a procedure for mapping a planet, which assigned one of the terrain types from the Travel rules in Chapter 5 to each of 320 sub-zones on an unfolded-icosahedral map. That was cool-ish but pretty slow, and turned out to be a bit hard to computerise faithfully.

In [7.2] you used the planets Habitability Index, distance from Sol, and density to determine when it was settled by humans, what sort of organisation undertook the settlement, and what population density of settlers arrived in the initial [25 years of] colonisation. Then you looped through 25-year "generations" since then rolling for population growth or shrinkage on a table that indexed D10 rolls with habitability indexes, the rolls and indexes being modified for the current value of population density. This procedure was tedious, depended on an assumed history of colonisation, and did not produce excellent results.

Then you used population density, the radius of the planet, and the hydrographic percentage to calculate the population.

Next you used the population and age of the colony to roll its two technology levels relative to the campaign base-line. Hard tech level and soft tech level (biotech, basically) were rolled separately, with dense planets getting a bonus to hard tech and a penalty to soft tech, and low-density planets getting the reverse.

Next you rolled the government type on a big table, with modifiers for population density and the type of the original coloniser.

And then you rolled a number of times equal to the numbers of generations the colony had existed, for hard tech level and soft tech level each, to see whether bad government had produced tech level loss.

Then you rolled for the settlement structure (ranging from "nomadism and primitive agriculture" to "megaplexes") in an elaborate system involving population, hard lech level, government type, and a die roll.

Then you rolled on a table of "Social features" D6/2 - 1 (round up) times, modified for population density, population, and the nature of the original colony. A lot of the entries on the table were a lot of fun.

Then you rolled the law level (modified for government type and the planets higher tech level) and calculated the degree of corruption. And rolled on a table for a "legal feature", i.e. a quirk of the law or the legal system.

Finally, you calculated how much cargo went through the planet's spaceports (a function of population and tech levels). And from the order of magnitude of the cargo volume plus the planet's hard tech level you calculated the quality of its spaceport facilities: N (no formal spaceports), G (ground facilities), O (orbital facilities), or T (tower facility or other non-rocket launch facilities).


As I said, ForeSight packed a lot into its 124 pages.

 

[Kobayashi]

Thanks for this, I knew nothing about this game. Really like the "Flawed utopia" concept.

 

[Agemegos]

The author should put it on drivethrurpg.com even if he is working on a new edition.

Tonio and I are discussing a project that would include reconstructing the text and tables of original ForeSight from scans &c. and working up his revised version into a complete game, and publishing them as .epub and PDF on the Apple Books Store, Kindle Store, and Lulu. Should I push for drivethrurpg as well?

 

[thebigh]

I'm not sure. What would be the arguments against drivethrurpg?

 

[Bunch]

Tonio and I are discussing a project that would include reconstructing the text and tables of original ForeSight from scans &c. and working up his revised version into a complete game, and publishing them as .epub and PDF on the Apple Books Store, Kindle Store, and Lulu. Should I push for drivethrurpg as well?

Honestly I would bet you make the most money by going exclusive with DTRPG but maybe robertsconley could give hard numbers.

 

[Agemegos]

I'm not sure. What would be the arguments against drivethrurpg?

I don't know that there will be any. It's very early in preliminary discussions. I'm really asking whether Apple, Kindle, and Lulu are on the map at all as places to market RPG content.

Honestly I would bet you make the most money by going exclusive with DTRPG but maybe robertsconley could give hard numbers.

We should certainly consider DTRPG, but I don't think an exclusive dealership is compatible with Tonio's wider goals. Not that there is anything to announce yet.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Tonio and I are discussing a project that would include reconstructing the text and tables of original ForeSight from scans &c. and working up his revised version into a complete game, and publishing them as .epub and PDF on the Apple Books Store, Kindle Store, and Lulu. Should I push for drivethrurpg as well?

I would say you should as it's the largest market for PDF atm. Lulu does have some market, but drivethru is much larger.

 

[Parkaboy]

I’ve mentioned ForeSight a number of times, as my favourite RPG and as the native RPG of my setting Flat Black, but since it is very obscure I reckon that my mentions must have left most of you scratching your heads. So I suppose I had better put up a bit of a description and explanation. Here goes!

History​

The way I understand it is that Tonio Loewald was very keen on SPI’s SF RPG Universe, but lamented it lacked a setting. So he designed one for it, but before he finished SPI exploded in a convincing demonstration that a group of gamer buddies does not make an effective management team for a company. TSR ended up with the properties, and was not interested in Tonio’s setting, so he designed his own SF RPG to support his setting. He went on to publish ForeSight (the game) in 1986, ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia (the setting) in 1987, and (seeing that the people who had bought ForeSight were using it as a general-purpose RPG) a fantasy and low-tech supplement (HindSight & the Age of ‘Reason’) in 1988.

ForeSight sold out its initial print run of 400 copies, nearly all by sales at gaming stores in Australia and New Zealand. Without the backing of a distributor it took nearly two years to do so, and was not financially exciting. It has not been re-printed. Tonio brought out a much simpler and cheaper stapled edition in 1990, which he inaccurately called “ForeSight Enhanced”: I say “inaccurately” because in fact it was ForeSight considerably diminished. It did not sell out. Every now and again he stirs toward re-publishing ForeSight, but always intends to completely re-write and re-design it, so that the current draft (available from the ForeSight page at Loewald New Media) is a radically simpler and less complete game with almost nothing surviving from the 1986 edition except the name.

Physical format​

ForeSight first edition consist of 124 page of A4 plain paper perfect-bound into a cover of light stock card. Owing to an error at the printers the paper is an ugly buff colour. I have found this binding amazingly robust. I covered my original copy in self-adhesive acetate film and then abused it like hell for twenty years. Not so much as a single page was even thinking of coming loose when I had the binding sliced off and the pages fed through a scanner. (There was also a very small number of copies bound in cloth-covered hard covers. All are still in the hands of the original owners except mine, which were stolen at a games con.)


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Layout is clean, there is an adequate scattering of graphical elements (illustrations, pictures, forms etc.) to break up the wall of text. The offset printing is adequately sharp, but in my middle age I am starting to find the type tinier than I prefer. (Body text is set in Geneva, about 50 characters across a 77mm column.)


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Is it on Drive-Thru or anywhere else?

 

[Agemegos]

Is it on Drive-Thru or anywhere else?

Not yet, but one of the things that I am procrastinating from doing is correcting a scan and marking-up the text for publication. The author plans to make the original text and a new version available on the Net some time soon.

 

[burbles]

Not yet, but one of the things that I am procrastinating from doing is correcting a scan and marking-up the text for publication. The author plans to make the original text and a new version available on the Net some time soon.

Do you know whether this is Far West soon (12 years late and counting), or sooner? I understand that you're not the person who can control this in any way, but just thought I'd ask!

 

[Agemegos]

Do you know whether this is Far West soon (12 years late and counting), or sooner? I understand that you're not the person who can control this in any way, but just thought I'd ask!

No, I don't.

 

[Gringnr]

Not yet, but one of the things that I am procrastinating from doing is correcting a scan and marking-up the text for publication. The author plans to make the original text and a new version available on the Net some time soon.

I may know a guy who can (and probably will, I'd need to ask him) clean up that scan for you real nice.

 

[CRKrueger]

Contents and organisation​

ForeSight was designed and written by a mathematician who was a fan of SPI wargames. This showed. Definitions are explicit and unambiguous. Sequences of operations are set out clearly, with the steps often numbered. Sections are numbered within chapters. The index is at the front.




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Chapter 1​

Four pages, consisting of one column of “[1.0] ForeWord”. Four and a half columns of “[1.1] Definitions” including “GM”, definitions of the game’s attributes, and a definition of the game’s distinction between Skills and Fields of Knowledge. One column of “[1.2] Conventions” covering such topics as “rounding”, “page numbering”, and “lack of explanation”. One column of “[1.3] Technological levels”, and half a column of “[1.4] Design credits” (mine is for “proofreading and playtesting”).

Chapter 2: Characters​

The character representation system in ForeSight is based on that in Victory Games’s James Bond 007, somewhat expanded, generalised, and cleaned up.

A character has nine “attributes” (strength, endurance, dexterity, agility, intelligence, perception, willpower, empathy, and appearance). Each has an “inherent” value in the range 5–12, and a “trained” value which can be up to four points higher, giving a range of 5–16. Trained values may be increased with experience (to a maximum of Inherent + 4), inherent values cannot. This mechanic is support to prevent the experience system from effecting implausible changes to relatively stable dimensions of a character.

A character may have a number of skills—49 are listed, besides generic skills. Each skill has a base value give by its formula (the average or half the average of one or two attributes), on top of which a character may have a number of skill levels limited by his or her highest value for any attribute which appears in the skill’s formula. This is contrived to give PCs a range of PCS (effective value of skill) from 6 to 34.

A character will have familiarities with an array of different gravity ranges, temperature ranges, and environment types. Familiarities range from 0 to 3, with four gravity ranges, five temperature ranges, and 21 types of environment rated separately. Familiarity appears as a variable in the base ease factors of certain skills: eg. Acrobatics has a BEF of G+2, Groundcraft has E+4.

A character will have a number of Fields of Knowledge. About eighty are listed, ranging from Astrophysics through Capture (an unarmed combat field), Ballet (a dance field), and Tracking to Cast Sculpture. Each field of knowledge is used with a skill or skills, or to put it another way it enables skills to be used in a certain field. E.g. a character with Starship Construction can use his Diagnose skill to design starships and his Repair skill to repair them, but he can’t use those skills to diagnose diseases in the skill or to surgically repair the injured unless he also has the Emergency Medical or Standard Medical fields.

A character also has a handedness, a social background, an age, and maybe a goodie or bummer such as a talent or phobia.

Section [2.1] contains the character generation procedure in eight numbered steps, some of which have up to vii numbered sub-steps. Basically it is a point-buy system, or rather three separate point-buy systems: inherent attribute points, years of education (used to buy fields of knowledge), and generation points (used to buy trained attribute points, skills, skill levels, and familiarities) form separate pools with no interconversion allowed. In a feature loathed by players and house-ruled in all campaigns except Tonio’s own, the pools were set randomly (but not independently). The player had a choice of either setting all inherent attributes to a base of 5 and distributing 32 inherent attribute points, or of setting each inherent attribute to d6 + 4 (rolled in order, no repeats) and distributing a further 15 inherent attribute points. Social background was rolled randomly, it gave bonus GPs, years of free education, and starting money with a rough trade-off (those some backgrounds were Just Better and some were Just Worse). Ethnic Background could be rolled randomly, but had no effect anyway. Age was rolled randomly, and had a dramatic effect: older characters got more eduction, more generation points, and dramatically more money—starting funds were multiplied by years of education and by (Age - 14). A goodie or bummer (perhaps several) was rolled on the “Abilities and Limitations” table.

Players hated the random features of Section 2.1 and the dramatic differences in character wealth and ability which they produced. The whole of Section 2.1 was commonly replaced by house rules with a straight point buy, and the most substantive content of the 1990 ForeSight Enhanced was a replacement character generation system, an elaborate but non-random method of partitioning points among the attribute point, generation point, and education pools in accordance with character background but with equal character power for all.

Section 2.2 was a skill list with some notes and definitions, rules for maximum level limits etc. Section 2.3 was a list of fields of knowledge with notes and explanations. Section 2.4 dealt with rules for unfamiliarity.

Section 2.5 was the experience system. Experience points could be spent on the same sorts of things generation points were (and a few extras, such as acquiring familiarity with unfamiliar things, i.e. buying off non-familiarity modifiers), but they were spent differently. Using generation points the prices of high skill levels, high familiarity levels, and high levels of attribute training were the same as those of low ones, i.e. total costs were linear in level. But using experience points, the prices climbed steeply, i.e. total costs were quadratic for skills, cubic for familiarities, and in the case of trained attribute points were quadratic in the trained level achieved (not in the amount of training). This produced a distinct incentive to concentrate in generation on getting a few skills and attributes to very high levels, and then buying lots of low levels with experience points. Tonio declared this to be a design feature, but I house-ruled it, and my house-rules were adopted in ForeSight Enhanced.

Section 2.6 was the fatigue system. Section 2.7 was an optional set of psionics rules with nine psioinics skills and rules for acquiring and using them. Section 2.8 (“Non-Player Characters”) urged the GM not to bother with the full rigmarole of character generation in the case of NPCs, and gave procedures for generating minor supporting cast characters less capable than PCs (unless the end up older!) for friends and associates of PCs.

Section 2.9 “Merits, Demerits, and Notoriety” was a system for keeping track of a PCs progress up the ranks of a hierarchy (or up hierarchy of different levels of being sought by the police). There were no rules for using the resulting rank to obtain favours or resources.

Here's an example of a ForeSight (1st edition) character's character sheet. This character benefits from having rolled high on the age roll, slightly above-average attributes, and a nice goodie (eidetic memory), but he hasn't had much experience spent on him because I never played him much.

View attachment 47102

To be continued

That charsheet’s an original Macintosh printout isn’t it?

I’d buy a pdf of the original text, reformatted or no.

 

[sharps54]

I would also happily pay for a scan of the original.

 

[Gringnr]

That charsheet’s an original Macintosh printout isn’t it?

I’d buy a pdf of the original text, reformatted or no.

I would also happily pay for a scan of the original.

Big same