Jonathan says. . . .
Richard Tucholka’s games taught me to write game rules with humor and concision, and now you can have them yourself. Tucholka passed away recently, but I had the good fortune of meeting him once at Gen Con and telling him how much I had learned from him. Bureau 13 is one of the first non-D&D RPGs I ever played.
Bureau 13 is like X Files but published 10 years before X Files. You play a version of yourself, which is a popular trope in Tucholka’s games. The monster descriptions are punchy and often funny. The hit-location system must be seen to be believed.
FTL: 2448 is a sprawling space opera with an ambitiously large array of playable alien species, and most of them are quite alien. Tucholka’s ability to capture the feel of a species with sparse notes was inspiring, and I have put this style to good use in my own game writing.
Fringeworthy sends you along newly discovered, abandoned pathways that connect alternate realities to each other. The civilization that built the pathways was destroyed by a terrible threat that still lurks somewhere among the many worlds. This setting serves as a way to connect to other Tri Tac games, such as Bureau 13.
Incursion has you piloting a captured starship from one random world to another—you don’t have a map to get back to Earth. It’s sort of like the off-beat sci-fi series Lexx, but five years earlier.
You can read more about Richard Tucholka on the Tri Tac website.
Looks like these games would cost over $100 to buy used, with Bureau 13 going for $50 or so. Fans of Tucholka sell PDFs and reprints of these games, but the reprints are from scans and are lower quality than these old originals. I’d be happy for my collection to go to someone who’s not already a fan, so I’ll part with them for $50 to Planned Parenthood plus shipping. If interested, DM me from my Facebook author’s page.
