Amplitude Engine

What Makes It Different

The Tactical Landscape. 

Before every scene, the GM rolls a pool of Fudge dice representing the environment itself — opportunities to exploit, obstruction to work around. Players tap those dice for bonuses, but every point they take costs them speed. Do you strike fast, or strike true?

Velocity: initiative as a resource. 

Turn order shifts in real time based on how much you commit to accuracy over speed. Get far enough ahead of your opponent and you slip Inside the Loop, acting on their intentions instead of just their turn order.

Momentum: exploiting velocity. 

Earned through major successes, dramatic failures, and playing to your flaws. Spend it for extra accuracy, extra force, a burst of speed, or to simply declare that useful rope is hanging right there.

Genre-agnostic by design. 

The skill list, gifts, and equipment tags are all built to be renamed and reskinned — Arcana becomes Xenobiology in a sci-fi game or Mysteries in occult horror, with the same underlying math holding everything together.

What's Inside

• The complete core engine — the Action Formula, the Intensity Scale, Tactical Flow, and full worked examples across stealth, social, and combat scenes
• Four-step character creation — Attributes, Skills, Gifts, and Equipment, with example builds from Specialist to Prodigy
• A tiered Gift system — Minor, Standard, and Major gifts spanning combat, magic, social, and stealth
• Equipment & scaling rules, including weapon/armor tags and how gear performs against wildly different-sized targets
• A full bestiary — quick NPC generation templates plus fully statted goblins, bandits, trolls, and dragons, with genre-ready variants (noir enforcers, security drones, undead warriors)
• Six pre-built player character templates, ready to hand to a table with zero prep
• A complete one-session starter scenario, The Stolen Relic — tracking, infiltration, negotiation, and a boss fight in a collapsing shrine, fully statted and ready to run
• A full glossary and equipment tag appendix for fast reference at the table

Who This Is For

It's for GMs and players who want the option of tactical depth across everything—combat, negotiation, chases, hacking—without learning a different subsystem for each one. Every action runs through the same logic: position, leverage, and timing are resources as much as raw power. The scene itself is a resource worth fighting over.

Version v0.9.0-RC4 · Universal system, genre-flexible · Requires 4 Fudge dice (4dF), a character sheet, and imagination.