GORE SRD

This is the short story of how I edited together an system reference document (SRD) of the Generic Old-school Role-playing System (GORE) by Goblinoid Games.

(SRD now found here.  PDF here.)

Took a break from grinding away at Wyrms & Warrens stuff for awhile, and was paging through a copy of Bug Hunters!, a  world-book designed back in the day for TSR's old Amazing Engine.  And the idea of cloned space-marines with the injected personalities of folks back home started sounded pretty damn badass.

Amazing Engine seems to run on a percentile based skills system.  I'm not normally a fan of percentile based systems, but I occasionally get nostalgic for the Elder Gods, and the RPPR folks do make all that jazz sound damn sexy.  And and in this mood I thought me the following thoughts in approximate order:

• BRP seems a little less wonky than Amazing Engine.
• I bet you could convert the skills over without much trouble.
• Skill based play without inflating hit points or combat level balance might be pretty interesting.
• Wonder if there are any BRP books on high tech hardware and psychic powers? (The correct answer, belatedly, is yes and yes.)
• No?  Well, BRP weapons are pretty close to v3.5 SRD weapons, so I can just borrow future versions of those.
• And 3.5 SRD spells and psychic powers could easily get ported over with a little tweaking.
• And, neat, someone even came up with a way to convert purchase DC values into actual currency.
• Oh, look! There's an OGL percentile system called GORE that looks pretty neat.  Will actually make it more convenient to customize the game the way I'd like it.
• ... wonder if there's a non-PDF version of GORE for easy editing?

The answer to this last question as far as I could tell was "No".  So I spent the rest of the weekend cutting, pasting, and editing from the PDF to create a .doc version for distribution.

Midway through the process I realized that, OGL or no, I should probably get the author's permission if I was going to repost this document on the web with any legitimate claim that it was the GORE SRD, without inventing another euphemism to roundabout hint that such was the case.

But Daniel Proctor over at Goblinoid was highly supportive of the idea, and with a few tweaks, what I sent him for approval is what you are free to download and edit today.  Hope it's of use to someone else out there.

Now back to the space marine dilemma:  to reinvent the wheel, or not to reinvent the wheel?