GM’s Design Notes

This is where I’ll post my design notes and suchlike. While intended as notes to myself, anyone interested in designing of GMing a fantasy campaign may find something of interest here. Player’s needn’t avoid the page since I won’t be posting things unknown to the PCs here (or if I do they will be clearly labeled as Spoilers), but this page is for game mechanics and other administrivia and as such may well bore them. You have been warned ...

Converting TFT to Fudge:
What was The Fantasy Trip? Ty Beard's TFT resource site is probably the best single website for that, though the Wiki article is pretty good too.
What is Fudge? Read the copyright holder’s Fudge Home Page for details on this open, freeware RPG.

As mentioned, the Backworlds campaign last ran under a house variant of the TFT rules and is now being switched to run under Fudge. Looking over the various flavours of Fudge out there, Five Point Fudge seems closest to TFT, so my plan is to translate existing characters to 5PF and start new ones in my adapted style of Fudge. Alternatively new PCs, especially for pickup games, may be created using Fudge On The Fly.

Capturing the flavour of TFT magic under Fudge has proven a bit trickier. 5PF’s magics draw on a Mana pool calculated from ST + Will and require the Mage gift to activate. Clerical magic has been replaced in the Backworlds campaign by Orb magic which, like any magical artifact, requires one mana point to activate.