Four Colors al Fresco
A Roleplaying Game of Pulp-Style Superheroes in an Alternate Renaissance
This is now the secondary page for Four Colors al Fresco. The official homepage can be found on The Impossible Dream's website. Eventually, this site will be a maintained mirror of the official one. But for right now it's falling by the wayside, and won't necessarily be updated when the official site is.
Open Material
All of the material in the following links is released under the October Open Game License.
- The game rules, as a downloadable PDF of the complete game. Includes the rules; the setting, Italia, including several of the more notable Omegas; glossary of terms; and more.
- The game rules, in an editable format. Currently, this is a mess. Look to see it updated in the next week or so.
- Quick-start rules. Include a summary of character creation, a brief intro to the mechanics, and abbreviated glossary of terms, (and character creation worksheet and character sheet, as soon as i fix the conflict).
- Character Sheet
- Title Sheet
- Villain Character Sheet
- Mastermind Character Sheet
- Glossary of terms, extracted from the main gamebook.
- More Omegas, that aren't detailed in the main gamebook. Most are mentioned in the gamebook, but a few are new, and we've carefully left some of the ones listed in the gamebook undetailed. None of the links to individual characters on that page work yet.
- Map of the larger world of Four Colors al Fresco
- Storypath cards, and other sundry design notes, extracted from the main gamebook.
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Closed Material
The following material is copyrighted by various people, and not Open. However, you are free to use it for personal use. We only ask that you respect the copyright, and not redistribute it, but instead point people back here if you wish to share.
Further Info
The following links lead to material hosted on others' sites, which we think may be of use to the players of Four Colors al Fresco. None of this is our work, so other than letting us know of dead links, there's no point in talking to us about any of it.
- A brief overview of the whys and wherefores of the October Open Game License, and, to a lesser degree, Open Game Licenses in general.
- If you would like greater depth or authenticity than the gamebook provides we can recommend the following websites as good starting points for further naming information:
- Fourteenth Century Venetian Personal Names has both lists and rules for constructing names.
- Italian Names & History of Italian Names is a particularly good site, with links to lots of information on the whys and wherefores of Italian names, including meanings and English equivalents.
- Medieval Names Archive is a wonderful resource for most of Europe and the Mediterranean, and has both lists and construction rules.
- Kabalarians Baby Name Lists are probably the most comprehensive lists of names I've ever seen. Extensive lists sorted by ethnicity/country and gender. The only drawback is that these are current names, not period. But this is a game, not a scholarly work.
- Venezia!: Roleplaying in Renaissance Venice, an article in Pyramid, online. you'll need to be a subscriber to Pyramid to read this.
- Backgrounds to the Italian Renaissance, an article by Richard Hooker that gives a good overview of the Renaissance as a period in history. Hosted on the Washington State University, Pullman, website.
- Brian Misiazsek's Introduction to the Pulps. The name says it all. An excellent intro to the genre.
- The Leonardo Da Vinci Homepage
- A couple of sites with some classic pulp images to get the creative juices flowing, and/or get you in the right mood.
- If you like our game, or if you're looking for something similar, but this isn't quite it, we strongly recommend you take a look at the following RPGs:
- Panels, a supers RPG, available online, which operates on a highly-narrative model, rather than the detail-driven mechanics of most supers RPGs.
- Two Fisted Tales, an excellent pulp RPG. It's no longer available online, but due for paper publication RSN.
