I’m a big fan of the Fudge roleplaying system. Loved it so much I hoping to have my Reboot adventure (now a full setting) published under the Now Playing Fudge derivative and my bigger project LH published as a full Fudge product.
Don’t get me wrong, I like many of the new ideas of Fate system (which is a derivative of Fudge). There are elements I don’t like but I’ll put that aside. I plan even to get my hands on Spirit of the Century at some point. But when I saw this post on the Fudge List, it saddened me:
Sorry, I almost mentioned you. But I’m afraid Starblazer is going to overshadow Ignition both because Fate has more fans than Fudge, and because Starblazer is coming out first. Even if Ignition is a better product, it’s got a huge handicap.
HQ is apparently successful within its niche, but it’s a small niche… if you’re not interested in the genre/medium, no matter how great the revision is it’s not going to appeal.
Fudge Magic may do well, but there again I’m afraid it’s going to do best if you reach they “Heyyyyy, I could use this with *Fate*!” (or “…with SotC!”) crowd. It’s just a bigger market (and a market that doesn’t have the “I deserve all this for FREE!” mindset that much of the Fudge community is burdened with).
I could be wrong. For your sake, and for the future of Fudge-that-isn’t-Fate, I hope so… but I just don’t see it revitalizing the 1995 ruleset to the level of Fate. As far as people outside our dwindling community are concerned, it’s an antique set of rules… even if you did a rewrite at this point (of the text, without changing the rules), I’m afraid you’re going to run into “Hey, you stole that from Fate” - Fate’s simply a far better presentation, even of (or especially of) things that it inherited from Fudge unchanged.
(I just wish I liked the things it *didn’t* inherit from Fudge.)
It’s sad, because she’s probably right. The Fudge Planet that I thought was neat, no longer exists and instead the URLs point to EvilHat (makers of STOC) where they maintain the equivalent of a Fate planet. Not particularly the nicest way to find out tbh, wondering why my posts were appearing the feed and why it was all only STOC.
It’s enough to put me completely off FATE/STOC before I give it a chance. 
Dude! You’re jumping to some serious conclusions here!
First off, the main reason the Fudge Planet thing hasn’t gotten off the ground is because… almost nobody else in the Fudge-o-sphere is blogging in a way that can get grabbed by an RSS feeder to feed into the Planet. Thus, when the makers of the Planet looked around to get feeds to put into it, they reasonably grabbed our stuff and … what else? So right now it looks like there’s a huge Evil Hat on top of the Planet. But that’s at best a circumstantial effect — not an *announcement* that Fudge Is Dead.
(Actually I just checked out that link after typing the above — the above, I typed based on the history I understood prior to this point. I have no idea why it’s jumping over to the Evil Hat site — it’s possible that they’re grabbing the content of Evil Hat’s front page that contains a redirector to our actual site, and is passing that redirection back on … Which is just weird. I’m going to contact the folks in charge of that site and see if that can be fixed.)
Personally at Evil Hat we deeply hope that Fudge is NOT dead. When we started off on our Fate tangent, our hope was that we could give Fudge a shot in the ass — not a shot in the head. We’ll be very sad if it just lies down and dies … and shouting doomsayings to the skies that that’s what’s happening won’t help it any in that regard.
That said, I will say this much: I don’t know if Starblazer’s going to be better than Ignition or not.
I *can* say that I have never heard of Ignition until you mentioned it here (I’m not on the Fudge list any more).
If anything, that’s more of a problem than whether it’s Fudge or Fate or d20 or Hero or some homebrew — it’s an issue of exposure.
Where can we learn more about it?
(You also don’t attribute the post from the Fudge list. Who wrote it?)
Hello!
Seraphim Guard is doing Ignition. It’s been talked about a few times on the Fudge list, in addition to being talked about a couple of times over at RPG.net. It is a game rising out of the ashes of Gatecrasher, because when we purchased Seraphim Guard we found ourselves in possession of the system for Gatecrasher but not the setting. So, I am taking the parts that I like, redesigning what needs to be redesigned, and putting it together as more of a toolkit for Fudge gamers to apply to any sort of SF role-playing. I’m working out a couple of mini-games that will use the Ignition system while I shake out what I want to do with the game. The first (the one that I am working on currently) is called Bionix.
Check out the developer’s blog here: http://wehaveignition.blogspot.com/
Seraphim Guard has a pretty strict policy when it comes to hyping our games. If it isn’t out, we don’t hype it. Why? What’s the point to chiming in on a “Sell Me” thread somewhere to sell people on a game that might not be out for another six-months to a year? Thanks, but I would rather avoid the “Where The Hell Is Ignition?” threads that follow that sort of hyping. Personally, I think that game designers need to spend a little less time hyping and marketing and spending a little bit more time in getting their games together. There’s already too much hype coming from portions of this community.
I am kind of disappointed that you are no longer on the Fudge list, Fred.
Hi Fred again!
I didn’t think I was jumping to conclusions so much as it simply saddened me. I thought the Fudge planet was a great idea tbh, so it depressed me a little to see it uncermonionally disappear, particularly when I invested some time into Fudge generally. I do have a tendency to emote a bit about such things because, well, it’s something I care a little about. I don’t particularly want to see Fudge go, but I’m not sure there is much I can do to help, you know. I think Fudge has lots to give, but it does seem quite hard to convince people of it. TBH didn’t think post would get any comments. When I write about Fudge, I feel to a degree I’m talking to a void.
And also, as a fellow blogger I know wrote once “it’s all about conversation”. Here we are talking about it and saying its not true!
BTW the link for the quote. It’s in the source: I put it in the “cite” tag of the “blockquote” tag but I never realised it doesn’t actually display any sort of link. Doh! If you follow the link, Karen elaborates a little on the demise of the fudge planet and why she forwarded the URLs to Evil Hat.
Like yourself, I didn’t know anything about Ignition or Starblazer till I Karen’s post. Which is really odd, because I do read the Fudge list and try and keep up to date on Fudge stuff. I guess it was all discussed on the Publishers List which I’m not a member (seeing I’m not a publisher etc.).
BTW Why did you drop of the Fudge list, if you don’t mind me asking?
Hi Chris, thanks for dropping by.
I have to admit, I didn’t know anything about Ignition or Starblazer either but then I’m still getting used to the reduced night of sleep having a toddler and baby in the house bring about so I may have, well, not read those threads on the Fudge List!
You make Ignition sound interesting, will certainly drop by the blog.
Interesting. I’ve come to think that marketing is one of the weakest parts of Fudge as proven by the exception of Fate/SOTC.
Ah, well, if Ignition isn’t at the stage where I should have even heard about it, I don’t feel so bad… no point in wondering why I haven’t heard about a movie before they even circulate the first trailer.
For what it’s worth, Mark, I wasn’t asked at all about the repointing of the Fudge Planet thing Karen was doing at Evil Hat’s site… it’s important to remember that this is just Karen in her unilateral decision-making mode — she didn’t act on behalf of Grey Ghost Games, and didn’t act on behalf of Evil Hat, so her actions shouldn’t indicate the future of Fudge (or Fate, for that matter).
As to why I’m not on the Fudge list, there are two reasons, really.
The first is why I left — the list only ever had the same conversations, over and over, ad nauseam. I was on that list for a *long* time, but I have to say it felt pretty rare for something *new* to come up on it. So when I started needing to focus more time on Evil Hat, it fell to the axe of keeping my input streams managable.
The second is that infernal proprietary, doesn’t-function-like-anything-anywhere-else, non-intuitive software at Phoenyx. I tried to sign back up for the list today, or at least use the web interface to post a reply to the thread, and after I think about 17 attempts, I never managed it. If it was a Yahoo or Google Group or a mailman mailing list there’s about a 75% higher chance I’d be back on it by now. But it’s just too damn much work as it is. A crappy reason for it, but there you go.
There’s a third reason (third of two!), but it’s more sort of a spin on it all… the FateRPG list has a lot of population overlap. So I’ve never really felt like I needed to have a dual presence.
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