In the twilight years of TSR the company took one last stab at the non-D&D segment of the gaming audience with its own attempt at a generic ruleset. Designed by Zeb Cook & incorporating some elements familiar from Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space & the Conan RPG, the result was the Amazing Engine system. The core rules were initially sold as a separate slim booklet & a series of setting books detailed not just the game world but specific setting-related rule changes. PC squishiness, for instance, depends on how fighty the setting is intended to be. In the Aliens-inspired Bughunter setting you ain’t got time to bleed; in TABLOID!, where the PCs are all Weekly World News stringers, you bruise like a week old banana. (By the time the fourth setting book came out, however, TSR started packaging rules & setting in one.)

The very first setting book released remains my favorite: For Faerie, Queen, & Country. I’ve never seen the show, but as I understand it FFQC was the Carnival Row RPG 26 years before Carnival Row. It’s the year 187x & every sort of creature from the folklore of the Isles not only exists but has been integrated (-ish) into Victorian society. The PCs do things like investigate the sinister machinations of the Unseelie Court, fight monsters that have taken up residence in the London sewers, bust up rings of evil magicians, & so forth.

Every Amazing Engine character starts with a bare-bones “core”. It’s a percentile based system with eight attributes grouped into four “pools”. Four of the character’s attributes will be their primary attributes & four will be secondary. We roll 4d10 for the primary attributes & 3d10 for the secondary ones. The concept for this character is workaday hero who develops mystic abilities that only make the higher orders even more nervous, so Fitness, Reflexes, Psyche & Willpower are primary. Note that any four attributes could be primary; we could have gone with two in one pool & one in each of the others.

Physique Rank: 1 Dice:	Intellect Rank: 3 Dice:	Spirit Rank: 2 Dice:	Influence Rank: 4 Dice:
Fitness: 16	Learning: 19	Psyche: 31	Charm: 20
Reflexes: 14	Intuition: 21	Willpower: 19	Position: 20

Ironically, thanks to some trash rolls the secondary attributes end up much stronger than the primary ones! Fortunately the top three ranks get some additional points to allocate, which gives us the chance to get our hero a little back on track. Rank 1 gets 15 points, rank 2 gets 10, & rank 3 gets 5. No value can be increased above 50, however. When we’re done, the core looks like this:

Physique Rank: 1 Dice: 5	Intellect Rank: 3 Dice: 5	Spirit Rank: 2 Dice: 6	Influence Rank: 4 Dice: 4
Fitness: 26	Learning: 20	Psyche: 31	Charm: 20
Reflexes: 19	Intuition: 25	Willpower: 29	Position: 20

Each pool now gets a “dice” score equal to the sum of its stats divided by 10 & rounded up. That value goes up as the stat values increase over time. The pool’s dice only come into play later down the road. In the Amazing Engine the PC’s core acquires experience that can be used in other AE games. After you’ve been playing FFQC for a while, you could switch to, say, Star Wars knockoff The Galactos Barrier. You would create your Galactos Barrier character by splitting each pool’s dice between its two stats & rolling them up. On top of those you get seven free dice to distribute as you like, but as before no one stat can have an initial value above 50.

Anyway. Time to move on to the setting-specific stuff. A FFQC character gets yet another 20 points to add to each stat (!), which gives us this:

Physique Rank: 1 Dice: 5	Intellect Rank: 3 Dice: 5	Spirit Rank: 2 Dice: 6	Influence Rank: 4 Dice: 4
Fitness: 46	Learning: 40	Psyche: 51	Charm: 40
Reflexes: 39	Intuition: 45	Willpower: 49	Position: 40

Step two is to determine the character’s “Blood” – the degree of fae ancestry they possess. Humans have none; the Tainted have a drop or two of ichor in ’em so they get a small increase in their ability to resist fae powers (called glamours) but are vulnerable to cold iron; the Marked are fae enough that they show some physical sign of it, get stronger resistance to glamours, & are vulnerable not just to cold iron but the powers of the clergy; the Blooded are very obviously half fae, yet more buffed/vulnerable, & can use one glamour themself; Fairy characters are full on fae, like Tuatha in a hoop skirt or urisk in a tweed jacket fae & get the full complement of fairy powers & vulnerabilities. A roll of 29 on the Blood table makes our character a straight-up human.

Step three is to select the character’s nationality, which doesn’t do much other than influence what sort of name they’ll end up with. (How far you want to lean into the various prejudices of the time is up to you.) The choices are English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Anglo-Irish, or fairly wonderfully Foreign (because as far as Victorians are concerned all foreign devils are fungible). Let’s keep it simple & go with English. Male odd/female even roll on the first die that comes to hand says 4, woman. An online Dickensian name generator tells us she’s named Lavinia Diggingham.

Step four is to select a profession. In best Victorian fashion your choice of profession depends upon your Social Class, which in turn depends on your Position score. Our Position of 40 makes us … whoops. Bourgeoisie. Well, we can fit this person somewhere into the middle layers of society & still stick basically to the original concept. So let’s say that Lavinia is a Mohock, a member of the Swell Mob. In other words she’s a slightly more refined sort of gangster, one who works with (aspires to run?) a network of pickpockets, housebreakers & fences. Maybe think Susan Trinder from Fingersmith. A Mohock gets three Gentry contacts (NPCs she can call in favors from).

Step five is to pick skills & I fall down for a bit here because it takes a minute to realize the rules for which & how many skills to pick are in the core rule guide, not the FFQC book. Lavinia gets Learning/10 = 40/10 = 4 skills that fall under the Mohock’s professional skill groups. She also gets Intuition/15 = 45/15 = 3 skills from any list to represent her personal interests. Mohocks get to pick from the Athletics, Criminal & Marksmanship pools; Lavinia trains in Brawling, Cracksman, Forgery & Pickpocketing. For her personal interest skills she picks Faerie Lore, Folk Medicine & Chemical Analysis. Miss Diggingham is a specialist in creating & planting fraudulent documents (whether in safes or on an individual’s person), though she’s starting to branch out into recreational chemistry & has learned how to identify substances & assess their quality; her innate mystical power helps her both withstand glamours & better understand the Fair Folk. When a scheme goes terribly wrong & violence ensues, she’s also ready to help plaster over the worst of her fellow gang members’ injuries.

Each skill falls under a stat. Your base chance of success equals the value of the stat, but the GM may apply modifiers for easier or more difficult tasks. No Learning-based skill can be attempted untrained, but all the others you can take a stab at with a 1/2 stat chance of success.

As a Mohock, Miss Diggingham has access to d4x10 = 20l. a month (with about 2,000l. buying power in today’s money). She lives in a cold-water flat in a dodgy part of London, but she’s got d6x50 = 300l. squirrelled away in case of emergencies.

Amazing Engine characters have Stamina & Body points. Stamina points are lost to non-lethal damage & burnt to cast spells. When the total reaches 0 you fall unconscious. Run out of Body points & you’re down for the dirt nap. Because FFQC is supposed to be combat light, Miss Diggingham doesn’t get a lot of either. She has Willpower + Reflexes = 49 + 39 = 88 / 5 round up = 18 Stamina points & Fitness = 46 / 5 = 10 Body points. No shrinking violet she, Lavinia can soak up a surprising amount of the physical punishment inherent in a life of crime.

With those two values, Lavinia Diggingham is ready to go. Starting equipment doesn’t even get a mention, so I’m going to assume that she begins play with

Lavinia Diggingham
Mohock

Physique Rank: 1 Dice: 5	Intellect Rank: 3 Dice: 5	Spirit Rank: 2 Dice: 6	Influence Rank: 4 Dice: 4
Fitness: 46	Learning: 40	Psyche: 51	Charm: 40
Reflexes: 39	Intuition: 45	Willpower: 49	Position: 40

Skills: Brawling (Ref), Chemical Analysis (Lea), Cracksman (Lea), Faerie Lore (Int), Folk Medicine (Int), Forgery (Int), Pickpocketing (Int)

Contacts: Gentry x 3

Stamina: 18
Body: 10