Long ago, I got myself acquainted with Heavy Gear 2nd edition RPG. I liked the basis of the system, but the more I read it, the more I found some of the usual offenders of RPG systems of the time. Agility as a god-stat, Combat Sense skill 2 is mandatory unless you like to do nothing in many of the combat rounds, movement calculations need to be done beforehand by whipping out a calculator to do some fraction counting, and the overall fiddliness of the system made me dump it. But before I had the chance to do that, I fell in love with its seamless integration of the vehicle rules, and the damage system. SilCore as a whole stuck to my mind as a diamond in the rough; probably salvageable, but not without a heck of a lot of brainy type work.

I don’t really know why exactly I decided to give Silhouette Core another look after all these years, I guess I was bored or something, but I broke it into tiny pieces and put it back together. High attribute modifiers apparently are one of the things that have offended people playing it. I’d say the contrary: too much low attribute modifiers is the reason it doesn’t work well. Or rather, the radical contrast between them. This is a dice-system feature and nothing much can be done about it, if one wants to preserve the original game engine. The problems may be alleviated by handing out the essential bits free for everyone.

When I had put it back together, I reverse-engineered to see how it compares with the original, and I saw that the characters made through my method were somewhere between “cinematic PCs” and “cinematic major NPCs”. But that’s the way I like my games pretty much always. I do not want to sit moping in my chair due to an unfortunate Initiative roll, not even bothering to watch as other players get to do all kinds of cool shit.

So in my mind Combat Sense, along with Agility are the main offenders. Combat Sense and ranged defense had to be separated from the skills, so I made derived attributes out of those. In SilCore there are a whole lot of pretty much redundant attributes, so I decided to begin my work by cutting those. I ended up with four attributes, so that all of them would be used in determining Defense and Combat Sense. Alertness + Body for Defense and Intelligence + Spirit for Combat Sense.

I worked on simplifying skills, movement stuff, overall action economy, injuries, you name it. I even added some stuff that I felt was missing, like different close combat maneuvers, which are completely absent from SilCore. I ended up with a 23 page skeleton of a system that goes best for modern-equivalent settings or sci-fi when put some meat on its bones (I never thought that SilCore would be a good fit for fantasy or horror genre).

Anyways, here it is available (with permission from Dream Pod 9). I you have any suggestions, praises, comments, or you would just like to let me know how I have ruined the game, please leave a comment! ;)

SCUMM basic rules v0.2

SCUMM character sheet

Edit – Made a better character sheet.

Edit 2 – Made a change to the damage system.