It’s Free RPG Day

It is here, in any case. I’m throwing up an old homebrew roleplaying game my brother and I made after college. I was going to make some self-deprecating shame jokes at this point, but I don’t think it’s a bad game for the time. It’s mainly spliced together from pre-deluxe Savage Worlds and Fate 2.0 (not Dresden Files, not even Spirit of the Century). That puts it somewhere around 2003-2006.

We built this to run Star Wars, because we adapt everything to run Star Wars, but since then it’s been used for modern spy action, Mutants Down Under, Rifts, street-level superheroes, Stargate-esque sci-fi, D&D fantasy, and a surprisingly immersive (horrifyingly so) Vietnam campaign. Reading it now it’s pretty clear I fell into the usual trap of making mechanics for fighting and then half-assing everything else, but it worked. Actually, this was our first game to have someone *else* run it, and there’s still a PbP game doddering along after, like, a decade.

As I work on my “Tightrope” idea, I keep coming back to Buskit. Cortex is one of my main inspirations currently, and rereading Buskit it’s eerie how similar they are in some ways. You could put Savage Worlds, Buskit, Cortex, and Fate on a graph and they’d all sit roughly equidistant from each other.

What’s With the Name?

We playtested the earliest mechanics by rolling dice on an old bucket, which we called the “buskit”.

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2 responses to “It’s Free RPG Day”

  1. The Skill List is Dead, Long Live the Skill List – Don't Roll a One Avatar

    […] talked about my weird hack of Savage Worlds and Fate before. There’s ten traits, each with a number of specializations that let you essentially […]

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  2. Star Wars, the LS Swap of Gaming – Don't Roll a One Avatar

    […] we come across gets used for at least a Star Wars one-shot, if not a full campaign. One of my early attempts at game design was intended for this noble […]

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