ForeSight 1986
⚠️ Work in progress — a machine restoration, not a clean text (yet). These pages are automatically extracted from the original 1986 first edition and still carry OCR noise — garbled table cells, stray characters, the odd run-together line. They are published because they're rough: help us finish restoring them.
This is the original ForeSight (Tonio Loewald, 1986, ISBN 0958789401) — the edition that actually shipped and was playtested hard for years. In all that time, no errors turned up beyond the single 1987 errata sheet, which is folded in below. That track record is why the 1986 numbers are treated as calibration ground-truth for the modern edition: where the streamlined rules and the original disagree on a probability, the original has the table evidence.
Why it's here
The out-of-print 1986 rules are hard to find, and a number of players want a faithful, readable copy very badly. So rather than sit on a private extraction, it's public — rough edges and all — as a base the community can correct toward a fully-restored original.
Read alongside the original
Every chapter is machine-extracted, so the source scan is the ground truth. Download it and compare: ForeSight 1986 — original scan (PDF, 37 MB). Each page here carries a small ForeSight 1986 · p.N ↗ link that opens the PDF at that exact page — so a correction can point right at the original.
How the extraction works (so you can read around the noise)
- Prose is reflowed into flowing paragraphs using the original's indentation, and lightly de-noised. This is a best-effort cleanup, not a faithful typesetting — expect residual OCR glitches (mangled title-graphics, the odd wrong letter, split words). Nothing is knowingly reworded and no rule is "improved"; when in doubt, trust the PDF.
- Stat charts are being reconstructed into live, filterable data tables (the weapon chart, damage table, vehicle table, and more are done — browse and filter them). Charts not yet reconstructed are shown verbatim in monospaced blocks.
- This section is site-only on the web, and also ships as its own ePub volume — separate from the streamlined edition; it's a different book.
Help finish it
Corrections are hugely welcome — this is exactly the kind of thing a few dozen readers can fix faster than one person. Spot a mangled table cell, a dropped word, a chart that needs rebuilding?
- File an issue or a pull request on the repo: github.com/tonioloewald/foresight-rpg — cite the page number from the source marker.
- The source lives in
src/rules/1986-*.md; table blocks are the priority.
The 1987 errata
The only known corrections to the 1986 rules, printed Fri, Oct 23 1987, keyed to the book's chapter-page codes (2xx Characters, 3xx Resolution, 5xx Travel, 7xx Star System, 8xx Starships):
- Skills / Limit (205R) — "1 indicates a skill where talent is as important as experience; 1.5 indicates a skill where experience outweighs talent. A character may not possess a skill at a level higher than the highest of the attributes … in the skill's formula, multiplied by its limit, plus two (rounded off)." (The headline fix; already present in this printing.)
- Resolution table (facing 301) — the "30" row / "QR4" column entry should be 30.
- Travel (501R) — the terrain-value limit for submarine vehicles should be 2.
- Travel (502L) — the net Red(line) rating is normal Red plus (Modified Terrain Value)/2 (still misprinted as "minus" — see the inline note on the Travel page); and "(or 1 if this is lower)" means divide by one only if the result would be lower.
- Pursuit (504L) — "double back" is the old name for the reverse manoeuvre.
- Star System (703R) — the Incident Radiation Table's bottom row was displaced; a corrected table + collected modifiers were issued.
- Starships (804R) — Hibersleep compartments do not consume 0.25 power; they run on bleed power from the drives.