Dannyalcatraz said:
I have NEVER heard of those.
Tell us- what were they like? Who made them? When?
They were written by a bloke who was at the Australian National University at the time I was there: Tonio Loewald. He wrote
ForeSight in about '83 and published it in '86.
HindSight was the fantasy supplement, published in 1987. Both were A4-size perfect-bound books: the edition for
ForeSight was about 250 copies,
HindSight 150. They were sold through games shops in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.
ForeSight was presented as an SF game, but easily acted as a realistic modern and historical game, and also acted as the engine for the fantasy material in
HindSight.
ForeSight/HindSight was based in substantial part on Victory Games'
James Bond 007, but considerably generalised, extended, and cleaned up, and with a much more robust and capable tactical combat system based on action points and a [notional] hex grid.
ForeSight had a single central resolution mechanic (the EF/QR system from
JB007), a character generation system that was based on spending generation points to buy attributes, skills &c., a simple but elegant skill/field system for using skills to apply knowledge. The central resolution mechanic was applied to rules for ranged combat, mêlée combat, stealth, observation, infiltration, patrolling, design, construction, defeating security system, programming, hacking, persuasion, seduction, charm, long distance travel (including terrain effects), chase sequences, gambling, disguise, penetrating disguises, poisoning, drowning etc. etc. etc. All in such a simple and elegant way that you could pretty much run any sort of material from a thriller, action adventure, or scam movie using only information that was precalculated and recorded on the character sheet. There was also a functional 3-D Newtonian spaceship combat system in which you never had to deal with vectors (with ship design rules) and a system for randomly generating semi-plausible solar systems and generating the population, government, legal system, and culture of any inhabitable planets. And there was a modification system that allowed you to produces customised variations of weapons and vehicles. And a good system for the capabilities of toolkits. It was a very powerful system, which you could run without hardly ever having to open the book during an exciting sequence.
HindSight's main features (as far as I was concerned) were: (1) A magic system in which magicians created 'Effects' on the fly by combining 'Applications' from fields of knowledge they had studied called 'Fundamentals'. It was very flexible and powerful, but the effectiveness of a magician tended to depend too much on the understanding and cunning of the player, instead of on the abilities of his or her character. and (2) A system allowing the favourites of gods to invoke miracles within their gods' domains at the price of sacrifices of unspent experience. This allowed for three statuses of favourite, corresponding to the initiate, priest, and runelord in RuneQuest. But the whole thing was vastly more flexible that Rune magic.
A new edition of
ForeSight is in playtesting, according to
http://loewald.com/foresight/. But it looks as though it has been 'improved' by leaving modules and detail out rather than by fixing what was bent.
