Fudgeshoe

Gumshoe + Fudge = Gumshoe

Fudgeshoe is an attempt at improving the Gumshoe system by replacing the General ability resolution system with Fudge.

Caveat emptor: I have not yet had a chance to play test these adaptions, so cannot guarantee quality and playability.

Why Do Such a Thing?

Some people who play Gumshoe games enjoy them, but experience some frustration with a system that falls back to 50/50 chance when you run out of points in an ability that has been heavily used in the current session or adventure. This can feel illogical that you are playing a character who is an expert marksman, but is reduced to a 50% chance once you’ve shot a handful of cultists.

Fudge?

Fudge is simple, reliable, and easy to modify and adapt. Plus I rather like it.

Assumptions

I’m going to assume that you are already familiar with the Fudge RPG, and I will be giving very little explanation of it here. If you are not familiar, you can get it for free here. It’s good!

General Abilities

For your Gumshoe game of choice, we keep the existing list of General abilities, using them as the skill list for Fudge.

When creating or adapting your character, you get a number of skill levels equal to half (round up) of the General ability points you get in the variant of Gumeshoe you are playing. The number of skills and point allocations vary quite significantly between variants, depending on the genre and flavour of the game.

Health and Stability

These are each replaced with the standard Fudge wound track, which means that you do not need to spend character creation points on them.

	1,2	3,4	5,6	7,8	9+
	Scratch	Hurt	Very Hurt	Incapacitated	Near Death
Health	◻◻◻	◻	◻	◻	◻
	Rattled	Shaken	Distressed	Incapacitated	Catatonic
Stability	◻◻◻	◻	◻	◻	◻

Investigative Abilities

Investigative abilities work as per the standard Gumshoe rules, with one addition. I am leaving these unconverted, as current Gumshoe GM guidance is that you do not ask for point spends for any clues, even the cool bonus clues that early versions of Gumshoe said to charge points for. Thus, assigning Fudge levels to them doesn’t feel in keeping with Gumshoe.

Instead, the Investigative ability points become Fudge points that the player must justify why that ability gives them an advantage in that situation. This is the same as spending Investigative points for +3 on General ability rolls in Swords of the Serpentine, or Tactical Fact Finding Benefits in Night’s Black Agents.

Combat

Fudge has a few combat systems both in the rules and available online. Personally, for speed and ease of use, I recommend using the systems used in The Princess Bride RPG: Min-Mid-Max damage, and player-facing combat. A basic outline of the two follows.

Damage

The Min-Mid-Max damage system involves rolling 3d6, and picking the minimum (Min), middle (Mid), or maximum (Max) die value and using that as the damage dealt. Which one to use is determined by the weapon used.

Converting the damage table of page 61 of Night’s Black Agents:

Weapon Type	Damage
Fist, kick	Min
Small improvised weapon, blackjack, police baton, shuriken, stake, knife	Min +1
Large improvised weapon, machete, heavy club, crossbow bolt, light firearm (.32 pistol or smaller)	Mid
Sword, fire axe, arrow, hammered stake, heavy firearm (9mm pistol or larger, .30 cal rifle or larger)	Mid + 1
Very heavy firearm (.50 MG, 12.7x99mm anti-materiel rifle)	Max

Player Facing Combat

For melee combat, the players roll their combat skill against a target of the combat skill level of the NPC that they are fighting. If they succeed, they score a hit, if they fail, the PC takes a hit. If they tie, both take a Scratch.

Injury and Healing

Use the standard Fudge rules for First Aid and Medicine.

System Specific Notes

Trail of Cthulhu

Cthulhu Mythos works as a normal skill, with two caveats:

1. As per the ToC rules, it cannot be purchased during character creation
2. It defaults to Terrible rather than poor

Sanity is a normal skill, but its maximum level is Great - Cthulhu Mythos level. Thus the maximum for a character with Terrible Cthulhu Mythos is Superb +1 (a.k.a Legendary), given that Terrible is −2 levels.

Professions

Occupational abilities are half price still, so purchasing one level gets you two.

Night’s Black Agents

Network and Cover

These are a little more complicated than the other General abilities, as they act as the source pools for creating temporary point pools for cover identities and specialist contacts. My answer to this is to take a feature from Fate. These abilities are purchased and have levels like other General abilities, and also have a Stress track each.

These tracks by default have two boxes each, with the number increasing to three if the respective ability is Fair or Good, and four if the ability is Great or Superb.

When you create a new contact or cover identity, check off any one of the empty boxes on the respective track, and that new contact or identity then has its own track of boxes equal in length to the level of box that you checked off. For example, if you checked the third box of your Cover track, the new identity then has a track of three boxes. To test a cover identity (e.g. when crossing a border) or contact (e.g. when obtaining a firearm), you make a test using your character’s ability, then check off a box on the track of the contact or cover that you used. As with the Gumshoe rules, when that cover identity or contact runs out of boxes, they are blown or burned.

You can add more boxes to an identity or contact by checking off another box on your character’s respective track and adding a number of boxes equal to the box number that you checked off, just as with creating a new one. Note that this cannot restore a burned contact or blown cover, so they must have at least one empty box at the time you do this.

Clearing your character’s Network or Cover track requires the expenditure of Fudge points equal to the level of the box cleared—e.g. clearing a level three box costs three Fudge points.

Cherries

These are obtained automatically when the skill that has a Cherry reaches Superb. Cherries for the most part work unaltered, but you may need to adapt some.

Swords of the Serpentine

Talents

As with Cherries in Night's Black Agents, these are gained automatically when a General ability reaches Superb. For the most part they will work unaltered