Forgotten Futures

Rules Changes

This rules change is added to FF V onwards, and can be retrofitted to earlier versions without problems:

OPTIONAL RULE: Adding Skills Below Base Values

Under the usual rule, additional skills based on high characteristics cost more than skills based on low characteristics.

Optionally, the referee may allow adventurers to add skills at less than base value with an appropriately reduced bonus point cost. By the time the skill reaches base value it will cost much more than the usual method, but this allows players to spread the cost over several adventures.

For instance, a character with MIND [5] might add Marksmanship [3] for 6 points, rather than Marksmanship [6] for 12 points; just enough to shoot for the pot, not to shoot for the British Olympic team.

Once acquired such skills can only be improved by the normal process, and one point at a time.

Referees are advised to limit the number of below-base skills acquired to MIND/2; once skills are up to the usual base value they don't count towards this limit. The "difficult skills" described in section 1.3.5 may not be acquired this way.

This rules change was suggested by Joerg Baumgartner.

Previous Rules Changes

• FF4
  Added a new skill, Scholar.
  Made minor changes to unarmed combat rules.
  Added optional rules on children and animals (previously in FF3 adventures).
  Added magic rules specific to the game setting in the worldbook.
• FF3
  Revised shotgun data to reduce damage caused by firing both barrels simultaneously.
  Adventures added rules for children and dogs as player characters.
• FF2
  Reduced points available for skills etc. from 25 to 21.
  Added Morse Code skill, replacing 'International', a special skill described in FF1.

Errata

Forgotten Futures III
The list of films in FF3 omits another version of The Lost World (1992, Harmony Gold Pictures), which is distributed as "Jurassic Adventures - The Lost World". There are some changes to the plot;

• It's set in Africa, not South America
• Lord John Roxton is omitted
• Malone is Canadian
• The party on the plateau gains two women (an American photographer and a pseudo-African native guide) and a cute kid.
• The apemen are replaced by African tribesmen.

Not even a turkey; it's bad, but not so bad it's funny or memorable! On the other hand, it is genuinely based on Doyle's book and acknowledges the fact; the Jurassic Park sequel of the same name takes the names of some minor characters and its general background from Doyle, but makes no acknowledgement of this rather important source.

Forgotten Futures I
Another VERY tiny glitch in the Worldbook for the first FF collection; the Timeline shows China joining the A.B.C twice, in 1964 and 1967! The "explanation" is simple:

After China joined, the Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front seized power in 1966; they were politically opposed to the free movement of 'digs, and withdrew from the A.B.C.

China's economy promptly collapsed, and the PRDF was ousted and replaced by a pro-A.B.C. anarcho-syndicalist government in 1967, who promptly rejoined the A.B.C.

Chris Williams has discovered an article which may have been a source of ideas for With The Night Mail; "With Her Majesty's Mails to Ireland", by Edward John Hart, appeared in The Strand Magazine in April 1895 and is an account of a mail packet journey from Holyhead to Kingstown. There are some very striking similarities, and I hope to add it to the Forgotten Futures Library collection eventually.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: Can I write a Forgotten Futures adventure or worldbook?

  A:Yes, provided you don't charge for it, but please read the copyright terms and let me know what you are doing. This also applies to translations etc.

• Q: Will there be magic rules? A fantasy version? Superheroes?

  A: Two of the collections are set in worlds in which psychic phenomena occur, and there are some magic rules in FF4. It's unlikely that there will ever be a "pure" fantasy version of Forgotten Futures, but a collection based on Victorian and Edwardian fantasies for children is a possibility. If I can find some suitable material I may look at this eventually, but no earlier than FF8 or 9.

  Any superhero stories that are even remotely useful for RPG purposes are covered by copyright and/or trademark laws, either of the original story or subsequent material such as comics or films. For example, the first Superman story appeared nearly sixty years ago, but if DC stopped publishing Superman tomorrow the copyright would continue until at least 2067! If you know of an exception, please tell me about it.

  Having said this, I should add that I like superhero stories and RPGs, and have considered writing a worldbook based on my own stories (in Temps and Eurotemps, published by Roc UK), changing the background to avoid copyright problems. If you like this idea, comment when you register.

• Q: Why isn't there a ______ skill? (insert subject of your choice)

  A: When I designed this game it seemed a good idea to give players a few points to spread around a limited range of characteristics and broadly-defined skills, rather than a large number of points and a lot of very specific skills. This is one reason why character generation is very fast for a points-based game.

  Add new skills if you want them, but if possible use or modify an existing skill instead. The "Scholar" skill was added to cover most possibilities that don't correspond to existing skills; for instance, in FF4 it is possible to be a scholar of magic.

  An archaeologist might use the Scientist skill and assume that it is limited to this specific field of study, plus associated fields that aren't normally covered by the skill such as history in general, specialised eras, and so forth; alternatively, take the skill Scholar (Archaeology). A vet would use the Doctor skill; in this case I'd suggest that there should be a -1 penalty if humans are treated, and a +1 bonus when treating the most common domestic animals.

• Q: What's your e-mail address?

  A: See the index! OK, forgottenfutures@ntlworld.com if you're too lazy to look. Please note that I cannot take registrations by e-mail.

Survey Results

Unfortunately Wells is still out of the question; the H.G. Wells estate holds his copyright, and actively defends it. While it is possible to get their approval to write material based on his work, such as Stephen Baxter's novel The Time Ships, it is unlikely that a game would be approved. The estate has already blocked plans to release a new edition of his Little Wars. A couple of days in court would bankrupt me, so I'm not going to try to bend the law. This WON'T change until 2016, when the 70 year copyright period finally releases his work, and it might then be possible to do something. Until then PLEASE stop asking...

FF4 contained a story-telling card game; reactions were mixed, with players split fairly evenly between loving it, hating it, and not using it. I may try this idea again.

Here are the main points of the survey:

• Computer System: Now about 93% PC-compatible machines, almost all of them with 1.44 mb floppy drives. Most of the rest are Macs, with a couple of Amigas, three Atari STs, a Power PC (in Mac mode), and one Acorn Archimedes user. These statistics probably mean that most BBS's etc. have this listed as a PC-only item, if they know that it exists at all. PLEASE help spread the word more widely.

• Sources: About two-thirds of the registered users got FF4 directly from the author, mostly as a result of previously registering an earlier collection. Half of the remainder saw reviews and ordered it sight-unseen, the others seem to have obtained it from friends, from shareware libraries, and (increasingly) from web sites. Roughly 2/3 of registered users are based in Britain, most of the rest in America.

• Rules: Most people thought I had things about right, a minority thought they were much too simple; most of this minority used the worldbook as a background for other systems. See Other Games Played, below. Several people use the Forgotten Futures rules to run adventures published for another RPG; since it can no longer harm sales, I'll admit that this game was Space 1889.

• Worldbook: Again, most people thought I had things about right. A few users run games based on backgrounds suggested in the rulebook, or are adapting the rules for entirely different backgrounds; for instance, I've heard of them being used for Babylon 5 and Sherlock Holmes adventures.

• Other Games Played: No real changes here; the overwhelming winners are Call of Cthulhu and Space 1889, with GURPS marginally less popular. This last is the system used by most people who prefer to run FF adventures with their own rules. Most people who use the worldbooks as source material for another game preferred one of these three systems, with the Hero System and Castle Falkenstein trailing at the rear.

  Apart from these games, there are now up to three users each for AD&D, Albedo, Amazing Engine, Battletech, Bushido, Cyberpunk, DC Heroes, Doom, Earthdawn, Fringeworthy, Ghostbusters, Harn World, James Bond, Lost Souls, Marvel Super Heroes, Midgard, Middle Earth Role Playing System, Paranoia, Pendragon, Nethack, Omega, Primal Order, Rolemaster/Middle Earth, Runequest, Shadow World, Shadowrun, Shatterzone, Space Master, Star Wars, Storyteller (Mage, Werewolf, and Vampire), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Time Lord, Toon, and Traveller, and one for a German game whose name I can't decipher.

• Future ideas: There has been some interest in martial arts rules, but not really enough to make them a major priority; I have included some Victorian martial arts material in the Forgotten Futures Library, and an article based on it appeared in Valkyrie #12. Software is also on this borderline. One idea I'm investigating is conversion of some of the spreadsheet templates to stand-alone programs - regrettably these will probably be PC compatible only. Diceless rules are emphatically unpopular.

• Sources for future collections: By far the most common requests are still for H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Neither is likely, for reasons given above and in the copyright page.

  More replies suggested Frankenstein; an interesting idea, but on its own not really ideal as a background for a role playing game. Dracula also got more votes, but 'Vampire: The Masquerade' and the Dracula RPG (published by Leading Edge, now apparently defunct, and based on Coppola's film) already cover this ground exhaustively. Early plays based on Frankenstein and on The Vampire, one of the earlier British vampire stories, will be appearing in FF6. Abbot's Flatland has been suggested in the past, but there are inevitably a few problems associated with a game whose characters are (literally) two-dimensional. I own a copy, and I'm thinking about it.

If you register or re-register, please take the trouble to fill in the survey form again; some of the questions are different.

News

• Charity Disk: Due to a lack of material from other authors, and serious time problems, I've had to drop the idea of a separate charity disk. Some of the material it would have contained will be in FF6. Thanks to Phil Masters, Sheila Thomas, and Matthew Hartley for the work they contributed, and to Mike Cule, Christopher Beiting, and others for research etc.

• The Wonderful World Of Floppies: The situation on older disk formats remains unchanged. I can no longer accept new registrations from users with 720 k DSDD 3.5" disks or any 5.25" disk format. I am continuing to support existing 720 k users, though I suspect that most will request the ASCII version of these files. A Zip disk containing the entire FF library and all FF games material is available; I hope to convert all of this material to HTML and offer it on CD-Rom shortly.

• Paper Publication: This is now very likely! Check my web page for an announcement, hopefully very soon.