Interactive History

The Interactive History concept was introduced by the Aria gameline. The idea was that instead of persons (or in addition to persons) the players would play whole societies. The way this differs from for example playing Civilization (or any other game of strategy) is that the culture is given the highlight.

The rules given by Aria for IH provide a rough way to resolve military but, more importantly, also social and political conflicts. The results are highly interpretative: to really work they need to fleshed out by the players and the GM. This means some work, but when done, it gives a highly enjoyable gaming experience!

To make the game easier to approach, we have converted the original rules to FUDGE. In addition, we have made several other changes to the original rules, as the need for them has become apparent. The purpose of this page is to collect the fudgified IH-rules to one place for easy reference.

• http://www.iki.fi/juuso/ihfudge

Short description

The idea of Interactive History is to let each player the society of their choice. Besides nations, the players may choose to lead another kind of societies: secret societies, or churches. The player has several options to do. He can

• expand his country by war or diplomacy
• increase his own power in his country
• or, and this is the most fun, change the culture of his country: guide the path of a nation from barbaric kingdom to an advanced peace-loving democracy - or the other way around

The flow of game is divided to rounds, with each round equaling 1, 5, 10 or any other number of years, as decided by the GM. Each round is divided to three phases: events, action declaration and resolution phase.

In the events phase any important events occuring during the year are determined and preliminary resolved. The events happen somewhen during the present round, or at the latter half of the previous round. Unless the happening time is explicitly specified it can be assumed that the ruling agencies will know about them by the middle of the round and will have time to make some kind of action regarding them. Different types of of events include:

1. Disasters (~10% chance for a 5 year period) and lesser events. This represents a random regressive element in the game.
2. Critical junctures resulting from societal/political unrest.
3. Some actions may have resulted in delayed effects. Their occurance is declared at this point.

In the actions declaration phase the actions of the ruling agency are declared. The last phase is the resolution phase. The declared actions are resolved in an appropriate order. The results result in regressions (some attributes drop), improvements (attributes increase) or incidentals and reactions (minor changes). The GM does most of his job at this phase.

-- Juuso Vesanto - 06 Sep 2003