This review was published at RPG Now. ¹
Comparing the price with other products on my RoleplayingBookshelf, I’ll add that this book is *too expensive*. Märchen Fudge are our (German) replacement rules using Fudge dice.
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We started a campaign using this material, and we had lots of fun. This is probably going to be a big jump if you’ve played rules-heavy stuff like D&D, Rolemaster, etc. It’s a lot like Subjective Fudge, if you’ve ever tried it.
Character generation is very easy if you’re feeling inspired (about 20 seconds for Zorcerer of Zo compared to anything from 20 minutes to 2 hours in D&D).
The rules have a few elegant design elements. My favorite: In a contest, both parties pick the quality they’re using (dragon uses his monster quality, princess uses her fencing quality), add a modified determined by a die roll, and the difference is your “damage”. But instead of hit-points, you just reduce your qualities (your pick) by as many ranks as you took damage. If any drops below “poor”, you faint. (The heroes don’t die in a fairy tale.) The book also suggests that you generate story hooks based on the qualities players like to reduce first when they take damage. That was also an interesting idea. After a few moments of rest, everybody recovers fully from contests, so there’s very little book-keeping involved.