Fuzion energy

Fuzion began as an ill-fated attempt to combine the Interlock and Hero System game mechanics. And for a while there in the late 20th century it was riding high. Long before anybody had uttered the phrase "OGL", the basic Fuzion rules were released free on the web under an open license. Before you knew it there were a huge number of free supplements and Fuzion based rpgs available on the web.

But the bubble soon burst. With few exceptions, the die-hard fans of both Interlock and Hero rejected the new integration. The lead designers soon abandoned the project. Hasbro released D&D under the OGL, sucking the wind out of Fuzion's sails. All of those great resources slowly started vanishing from the web.

All of this was getting to me a while ago when I blogged that Fuzion was a vanishing game. I was being a bit overly negative, since it wasn't long after that post that a free Fuzion Star Wars game appeared. But my interest in Fuzion was really renewed when I stumbled upon the Fuzion Library, a Russian site that collects almost all the great Fuzion resources one one page. Some of the material duplicates what you'll find on Chritian Conckle's TranzFuzion and Otto Blix's Studio187, but there's some great supplements there that I thought had all but disappeared from the web. Not only are the full rpgs, like Babylon 5 and the Lovecraftian Tekeli Li, there's also the Heroic Abilities supplement that provides a complete, Hero-style power system for the game. Seeing all this stuff again reminds me why I like Fuzion, and has really rekindled my interest in the game.