I guess of the infamously awful RPGs, it has the most fascinating mechanical mess.

Something like RaHoWa would be pointless and just gross, Wraeththu is just homoerotic world building, HYBRID could be interesting but the mental illness angle is a little intimidating.

I think the fact that it took that much time and effort just to complete character generation.

Rolling a character by hand is an ordeal (which I have never even bothered with myself, just watched on YouTube). You can accidentally generate a character who is dead.

You lack so much agency in character creation that it’s something that should be entirely done by a computer. You roll for your marriage status and number of siblings.

I also plan this more as a way to develop my skills for the true project, which would be The Campaign. I need to experiment with ncurses UI design, because that would be a project worth honoring with aesthetic effort.

It’s an interesting challenge. I debate on whether I want to ever release it or not - I don’t want to draw attention to the grosser aspects, just the mechanical ones. This is mostly to answer the question “is it possible to complete a campaign of FATAL?” in perhaps the only ethical way.

character.h alone is roughly 14,000 lines of code. This is just character generation and access to the rolls. The code itself is poorly optimized and might prove a similar object of “Bile Fascination” if released.

I have an urge to do something similar for “The Campaign for North Africa,” but this would be worth developing a better thing in ncurses for.