[1:02 PM]polarblues: I am the whole of Polar Blues Press. I built a bunch of roleplaying games that are available free from the UK Roleplaying Collective website (https://ukrpdc.wordpress.com/2017/12/03/polar-blues-press-downloads/). These are all rule-lite Fudge-derived games designed to play fast. DONEUKRP Design Collectivepolarblues2002Polar Blues Press Downloads
[1:04 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Thanks, @polarblues! The floor is open to questions!
[1:04 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): How many games have you created?
[1:07 PM]polarblues: I think it’s six. The Polar Blues Press proper started with Bounty Hunters of the Atomic Wastelands, followed by Cyberblues City (cyberpunk), Lawmen v Outlaws (western) Polar Fudge Adventure (generic) and Polar Fudge Medieval Adventures (fantaasy). Decades before I put only something called Mutant Bikers of the Atomic Wastelands. That is the still the game that gets mentioned the most in forums,
[1:07 PM]polarblues: Do ne
[1:07 PM]MoonHunter: For those that do not know, how different from Core Fudge is “Polar Fudge”?
[1:08 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): I assume that Bounty Hunters of the Atomic Wastelands is post-apocalypse?
[1:11 PM]polarblues: I am not sure there is such a thing as “core Fudge”. The Fudge rulebook pretty much everything is optional. But in spirit of the question, Polar Fudge is quite different from, say, Five Point Fudge, which is probably the best known version. The key change is the Minion Machine to simplfy NPCs, but it also a player-facing system, it only used Attributes (no skills), Gifts and Powers are all pre-build, and while you have Flaws, they dom’t count in terms of character point build. The wound system is also different.
[1:11 PM]polarblues: DONE
[1:12 PM]polarblues: BHAW is post-apocalyptic, mixing B-movie sci-fi and wild west trappings. DONE
[1:13 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): (No need for the DONE after the intro is finished, but thanks! )
[1:13 PM]polarblues: (it probably helps)
[1:13 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): For those unfamiliar, can you give us a high-level overview of Fudge?
[1:19 PM]polarblues: Fudge is what we had before Fate. The key mechanic revolves around a semantic scale which uses words like Mediocre, Good, Superb rather than numbers and a special set of dice (six sided dice with two + signs, two minus signs and two blank side) that produce results between -4 and +4 with arranged over a bell curve. Character’s abilites are rated on the semantic scale (AKA The Ladder these days), as are target numbers. That is what started it all. Beyond that, Fudge has whole range of options that go from basically freeform to GURPS lite, depending on how you build it.
[1:19 PM]polarblues: DONE
[1:19 PM]polarblues: (but I can stop wriing DONE if you prefer)
[1:20 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): (Totally up to you!)
[1:20 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): You mentioned that your version of Fudge uses all attributes, no skills. What attributes do you use?
[1:23 PM]polarblues: There are small differences between games but I consolidated in Polar Fudge the list to THINK, TALK, FIX ,FIGHT, FITNESS and FOCUS. My quest for just having verbs as attributes sadly never quite succeed, but I think I got a list where all the attributes are of fairly equal use, especially as they feed into derived traits.
[1:25 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Is FIGHT used for both melee and ranged combat?
[1:26 PM]Tod C: What are derived traits?
[1:26 PM]polarblues: Yes. I think the older version of BHAW split Fighting and Shooting, but I just combined them now. You can use Gift if you want to specialise further
[1:28 PM]polarblues: Hit Points (based on Fitness), Think Points (meta-currency based on Think) Defence. (average of Fitness and Focus)
[1:29 PM]polarblues: I alway liked the idea that smart characters can make their luck
[1:29 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What is Gift?
[1:34 PM]polarblues: In Fudge Gift are your typical Advantages/Feat and Flaws are Disadvantages. Generally in Fudge these pretty freeform. The notion in, like many point-based system, you spend points for Gifts and earn points during character creation for Flaw. Polar Fudge is different in that the GIfts all pre-built and have varying costs. Flaws are purely freeform. Player can take up as many or few Flaws as they want. There is no mechanical benefit for taking a Flaw, it’s just something you can choose to make your character more interesting.
[1:36 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): How does the Gift work that specializes FIGHT?
[1:36 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): (brb)
[1:38 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): (back)
[1:41 PM]polarblues: A Fight related Gift might be something like Martial Arts (increase unarmed damage) or a Leadership (which allows you to reroll initiative for the team) or Superior Weapon. Bear in mind there is no tracking money in Polar Fudge. Characters are assumed to have whatever makes sense (which called Free Stuff) but to get higer grade gear required a Gift. I should also talk about the Initiative which is also a little odd in Polar Fudge.
[1:41 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Certainly!
[1:46 PM]polarblues: In Polar Fudge initiative is team based – players and allies vs Minions and hostile NPCs. At the start of each round the GM rolls 1d6, On an even resuslt, the player’s side goes first, on an odd result the Minions go first. Additionally on a 6 the players all get +1 on every on any action while a ‘1’ the NPC get a bonus, usually another Minion joins the battle or one you thought dead gets back up. So it’s very swingy. WIldly so. It’s a feature.
[1:47 PM]polarblues: The way Minions are generated is also interesting.
[1:47 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Oh? How’s that?
[1:56 PM]polarblues: Minions are super simple, Tunnely and Trolls simple. They just have one Attribute, Rank and, usually 1-6 Hit Points and optionally Gifts and Flaws. But where Polar Fudge differs from most games is that Minions of the same type (say orcs or pirates or radioactive lizards) don’t share the same base stats. So a group of pirates might contain #1 Rank: Good, Hit Points:2 , #2 Rank: Mediocre Hit Points: 5, #3 Rank:Great, Hit Points:2. The priates as a group would probably all the the same Gift. Where this get fun is when you get a whole bunch of multi-coloured d6 and colour code the ranks to the dice colour. Then you put all the dice in an opaque jar. When you need an encounter you blindly pull some dice out and roll them and just like that you have a unique encounter which could laughably easy or impossible. Either way it is never dull. Make sense of the dice you draw blindly gives each Minion its own role and personality. And no bookkeeping because the dice do that for you.
[1:56 PM]polarblues: For a major NPC, you can build it like a PC of course.
[1:57 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Interesting technique!
[1:58 PM]polarblues: It’s one of those “it shouldn’t work, but it does”
[1:58 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Heh.
[1:59 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What sorts of paranormal abilities do you offer in your various games?
[2:02 PM]polarblues: BHAW is full of Gamma World style mutations. With Polar Fudge Adventures I created a set of generic effect that can be reskinned to act like magic or mutant powers or gadgets, simialr but simpler to how Savage Worlds does it. In many way Polar Fudge plays like the kid version of Savage Worlds, which is funny because I only got into Savage Worlds recently/
[2:03 PM]polarblues: The other game it is stye-wise close to is ICONS, but of course they are both Fudge-derived and player-facing systems (or at least ICONS used to be).
[2:04 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): So I take it that BHAW is a fairly “gonzo” setting?
[2:13 PM]polarblues: Yes, they are all. BHAW goes for the Thundarr, Gamma World style gonzo but dresses it up as a western (with sheriffs, saloons and such) and by default works around bounty hunting where the villain usually has some super-science gimmick. Originally I was for Fate, but I’ve since released it using the latest Polar Fudge rules. Cyberblues City is just very funny. The pitch was cyberpunk with light rule and light tone – at time when all the cyberpunk games were either really crunchy, really dark or both. I had a lot fun writing it and even now I think it’s the funniest book I’ve written. I very proud of that. Lawmen v Outlaws is just a straight western. It actually started off as my attempt to make a generic verion of my Fudge rules. I got bored with the generic stuff, ended up writting it as a wester and then running a fun campaign for it. I got back, after several failed attempts to writing a generic version of my Fudge rules and that became Polar Fudge Adventures. It do think it is the best iteration of these rules. Since then I rewrote BHAW with the Polar Fudge rules (as mentioned above) as test of concept. It was a breeze. And finally I wrote the Polar Fudge Medieval Adventure based on material developed during the Polar Fudge playtest.
[2:13 PM]polarblues: Polar Fudge Medieval isn’t the standard fantasy.
[2:16 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What is Polar Fudge Medieval Adventure like?
[2:16 PM]polarblues: It’s sort of based on Plantegenet England locked in a civil war with surreal comedy touches. The idea is that the current king is so unpopular that some the baron raise his dead elder brother, Duncan from the dead. Thus starting the Zombie Prince Duncan Rebellion. Characters are all human but their is magic. THe monsters tend to be unique beasts.
[2:17 PM]polarblues: DONE
[2:17 PM]polarblues: Just to say – that “play test” ended up spawning a campaign that lasted over a year.
[2:17 PM]polarblues: Long afte the game was released
[2:18 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What is magic like in the setting?
[2:23 PM]polarblues: It’s the same set of powers from the Polar Fudge Adventures – 24 or 25 different powers that can be reskinned, some are sort of things you’d expect like fireballs, some just goof like turning people into frogs or talking with trees. My games always have a fair bit of humour.
[2:23 PM]polarblues: There are no character classes but example characters include a druid, an apprentice mage and a witch.(edited)
[2:24 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Do you just distinguish between magic types by spell choice?
[2:26 PM]polarblues: Only in terms of spell, innate ability and gadget/item. The rest is down to how the player reskins the specific of the effect.
[2:26 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Ah, I see. Is that one of the elements that you see resembling Savage Worlds?
[2:27 PM]polarblues: Yes. I Polar Fudge Medieval I also produced a list of over-the-top names for the spells, but in play people tend to just use the basic name of the effect.
[2:28 PM]polarblues: I suppose the other thing to mention is that I do my own illustrations. It’s half the fun. I’m not that good, but I am getting better.
[2:28 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): In Polar Fudge Medieval Adventures, how likely is the average peasant to have seen magic or monsters?
[2:31 PM]polarblues: Normally, not very. The setting has more Ivanhoe, Prince Vallian or even Arthorian aspects. So you might have a wyrm or one-off weird ghestalt beast in the woods (I’ve got a tables to help create and name them), but of course with the zombie civil war, undead things are pretty common.
[2:34 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): In Bounty Hunters of the Atomic Wastelands, are all of the PCs human (or mutated humans, at least)?
[2:35 PM]polarblues: Humans but optionally with mutant powers or converted to cyborgs.
[2:40 PM]polarblues: As I mentioned at the start, it’s all free. This is my hobby. I just write the games I want to run, the way I like to run them. Sometimes I convince myself that they are good enough that worth sharing, but you know, there are a lot of great games out there already. Still being free means I do reach a large audience. I’m not sure how good the stats from WordPress are but BHAW apparently has been downloaded some 4000 times, Cyberblues City 2000, the rest are in the few hundred range. Obviously not everyone who downloads will play or even read my games.
[2:42 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What are the rules for cybernetics in BWAW and your cyberpunk game (assuming that they are identical)?
[2:44 PM]polarblues: They are just GIfts. In the new BHAW you can reskin a Gift or Power as being cyber. Cyberblues City has some Gifts that are specifcally cybernetic enhancements.
[2:45 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): What was your thinking in making all of your offerings free and not “pay what you want”?
[2:49 PM]polarblues: It’s a mixture of things. I do like the ideal of sharing free over the Internet, that was the foundation of Fudge. I also admit that I really did not fancy getting into the business side of things.
[2:51 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Fair enough!
[2:52 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): In the time remaining, is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to bring up?
[2:55 PM]polarblues: I’ve haven’t got any new games in the pipeline. The most likely project would be to redo the artwork in some of my older games. I know I can do better now that I have more experience. Other than that, the pattern is running games for my group, if I hit a campaign that I feel is a bit special I might write up as a game. Or not.
[2:57 PM]polarblues: The illustration part is really as interesting to me.
[2:59 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Thanks very much for joining us, @polarblues!
[2:59 PM]polarblues: Thank you for inviting me
[2:59 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): Usual reminder: If you’ve enjoyed this Q&A and would like to treat me to a coffee or two, you can do so at https://www.ko-fi.com/gmshoe. Anything’s appreciated! Ko-fiBuy Dan Davenport a Coffee. ko-fi.com/gmshoeBecome a supporter of Dan Davenport today! ❤️ Ko-fi lets you support the creators you love with no fees on donations.
[2:59 PM]Dan (Hardboiled GMshoe): If you’ll give me a minute, I’ll get the log posted and link you!
[2:59 PM]polarblues: Sure