The Fugue system: narrative rules for Amnesia RPGs
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FUGUE is an RPG engine that lets you construct and tell the story of a group of people who begin with complete amnesia¸ and who regain their memories of themselves¸ their pasts¸ their connections¸ their abilities and their secrets as the story goes on.
What really differentiates Fugue from most RPGs is that it's built to tell a story that lasts a pre-determined amount of time (usually four sessions)¸ and leads to a definite final conclusion. Where most RPGs are soap operas¸ ongoing and open-ended with characters entering and leaving the narrative¸ a Fugue game is more like an HBO or Netflix miniseries: there's a fixed number of episodes and the story's done.
Fugue is a narrative game system: it is designed to let players tell a story through collaborative play. That doesn't mean that success is inevitable¸ and it definitely doesn't mean that it's just about making stuff up. The game¸ together with whichever content-set you're playing it with¸ is designed to provide a group of players with a structured¸ set of rules to act as a foundation¸ plus a background and narrative framework that lets them build their stories on top of that foundation. The system is simple¸ easy to learn¸ elegant and intelligent. It uses a deck of Tarot cards instead of dice.
Fugue is the system that drives the Alas Vegas RPG ¸ a 322-page book containing four different campaigns that all use these rules. They are:
- 'Alas Vegas'¸ a nightmarish journey of discovery in a bizarre casino city ruled by warring mob-bosses¸ by James Wallis
- 'Yet Already'¸ frantic time-travel to save a chaotic collapsing universe¸ by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
- 'Warlock Kings'¸ paladins returned to life as generals of a dark army¸ by Allen Varney and Johnstone Metzger
- 'Remembering Cosmic Man'¸ uncovering the twisted histories of superheroes and their foes¸ by Laurent Devernay and Jerome Larre.
Fugue's designer¸ James Wallis¸ is best known as co-creator of the Games 100 storytelling game Once Upon a Time (as seen on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop)¸ the Origins Award-winning publisher of Nobilis 2e¸ and the creator of the multi-award-nominated Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG¸ the original story-game. He is lead designer on the 2016 reboot of the classic dark-humour RPG Paranoia.
Fugue is released under a Creative Commons licence¸ allowing anyone to use it¸ rework it and republish it in their own games¸ including commercial releases. There is more information on this within the document.
The current version of Fugue is version 1.51¸ released 20th February 2018. Updates since v1.501 include clarifications to wording in the But What Happened? table¸ removing unconsciousness from the definition of 'Incapacitated' on page 22¸ and removing minor formatting errors.