3...2...1 The Amplitude Engine Has Launched!
It's a go!
The Amplitude Engine — v0.9.0-RC4 is live on itch.io and Gumroad right now.
Long-time readers might remember where this started — me spinning my wheels back in 2016, staring at EABA, Fudge, and Open D6/Mini-Six, trying to decide which universal system to build on. Fudge won, kinda. It just took a while to having a book you can hand someone.
And then last June I posted the guts of the thing — Amp scores, Outcome Tables, the whole apparatus. If you read that post, some of this is going to look different. The core idea survived; the execution got a lot leaner. That's what a year of actually running it at the table will do to a system.
One formula, every kind of conflict
Here's what's left after all that sanding:
OB − DB + Power + 4dF = Total Result
Offense, minus defense, plus power, plus a roll of the dice. That's it. A sword fight, a whispered lie, a chase through the forest — they all resolve through the same equation. Learn it once and you've learned combat, negotiation, and everything in between.
The table-lookup math from last year is gone. In its place: a straightforward sum you can do in your head, with all the tactical texture pushed into how you build OB and Power in the moment rather than into consulting a chart mid-scene.
Where the tactics live
The interesting decisions happen before the dice hit the table. The GM rolls the scene's Landscape — a handful of Fudge dice that lay out the terrain: high ground, a distraction, cover, a sympathetic crowd. Tap a result and you boost your Offensive Bonus, but it costs you Velocity — your speed of action, and effectively your turn order. Grab enough advantage and you go last. Play conservatively and you might get an extra swing in. Strike fast, or strike true — you don't get both.
Get far enough ahead of an opponent's Velocity and you slip Inside the Loop, acting against their intent instead of just their speed. It's initiative that is quite meaningful.
And Momentum — the pool that rewards playing to your flaws and your dramatic failures as much as your wins — means a bad roll isn't just a bad roll. It's fuel for the next one.
Reskin it and run it anywhere
Everything underneath is genre-agnostic by design. "Arcana" is raw, half-understood sorcery in a historical fantasy game, Xenobiology on a spaceship, or Mysteries in an occult horror one-shot — same math, different fiction. The book ships with equipment tags so a "Standard" weapon can mean a longsword, a plasma rifle, or a snub revolver depending on what's on the table, plus six pre-built character templates, a full bestiary with genre reskins, and a complete starter scenario — The Stolen Relic — ready to run scene by scene.
Get it
The book is Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, PDF, ready to go:
It's still an RC — I'd genuinely like to know what breaks at your table.
https://amplitude.sparca.net
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