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Tonio Loewald
Tonio Loewald has written several RPG's. They are ForeSight, HindSight, ForeScene and Foresight Enhanced, published by Tonio Loewald -the first 3 had a hard cover version and a soft cover version, and also Stir Fried Beetles - spaceship construction sup which was going to be published by TAGG at one stage.
The follow was written by Tonio Loewald:
ForeSight was originally designed as a science fiction game system. I was obsessed with elegance and playability. It was crucial that all the rules you needed in play should either be (a) easy to remember or (b) written down on a single sheet of paper (i.e. the character sheet) but also (c) that the rules be realistic enough that people's assumptions about how the real world works could transfer to the game (i.e. someone with no knowledge of the rules could play simply by making realistic choices).
I had other ideas: it should be easy to precisely represent people, cars, guns, planets, etc. and yet not be tedious to do so. ForeSight has definitions for adjectives in certain contexts, so that a "rugged medikit" or a "target pistol" have well-defined properties, allowing rapid, precise, shorthand descriptions of GAME objects that make REAL WORLD sense.
After experimenting with a number of resolution systems (DragonQuest, RuneQuest, Universe, Traveler, Tunnels & Trolls, and TFT pioneered pretty well all the resolution systems in use today) I stumbled on Victory Games James Bond 007 and decided that a [substantially modified version] of its resolution system could be used as the core of a game system with all the virtues I described.
The rules of ForeSight work like this: how good you are at something is referred to as a PCS (primary chance of success): 5 is woeful, 25 is awesome, 12 is mediocre. How easy something is to do is referred to as an EF (ease factor) 0.5 is very difficult, 8 is really easy, 4 is typical. Your actual percentage chance of success is the product of the two. A skill has a "base ease factor"*, which may be a simple formula (E+2*, say), where "E" is your familiarity with the local environment, ranging from 0 to 3. If you're a woodsman in the woods, your "E" might be 3, so your BEF in this case would be 5. Finally, a given task might be modified for difficulty, e.g. darkness might apply a -2 modifier to perception related tasks.
E.g. A woodsman searching the woods might thus incur a -2 modifier in the dark and a -1 modifier for looking for something small, so the BEF of 5 (for example) is modified to 2 before being multiplied by his/her search skill. (* These items represent marked changes to and improvements of the 007 game system. ForeSight's current incarnation bears little resemblance to James Bond 007. The first draft rules were little more than tables substituting for 007's tables.)
Now you know enough to play ForeSight.
ForeSight was originally published in 1986. Copies of ForeSight, ForeScene: The Flawed Utopia, and HindSight & The Age of Reason have been lodged with the National Library and have been issued ISBNs, etc.
Originally, 150 perfect bound copies of ForeSight were produced (I typeset them on a Macintosh; they were printed and bound professionally) and all were sold commercially through gameshops in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. 100 copies each of ForeScene and HindSight were bound, and all sold through the same channels.
ForeSight Enhanced, which works best as a supplement to ForeSight was printed (150 copies, I think) and staple bound (very cheap). About 100 copies were sold, mostly in Canberra.
Foresight
Name Description ForeSight Rules for a generic roleplaying system. ForeScene: The Flawed Utopia Campaign setting for ForeSight. HindSight & The Age of Reason Contains information on how to include Historical, contemporary, near future and fantasy settings ForeSight Enhanced A revised and rewritten edition of ForeSight. Solo on Simiolus An introductory solo adventure for ForeSight.
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My email address is Brett@arielarchives.com.