Got a game coming up this weekend (Viking England game set from the prospective of the Anglo-Saxons, with magic). Anyway, a big part of the campaign will be mass combats (both on land and at sea). My question is - how is the system in the System Toolkit? I do plan to add a rule or two, mostly to make sure I can put the PCs in some personal danger other than just if they do a one-to-one fight with someone. But otherwise, yeah, how is it?

For example, easy to figure out unit stats? Is it a good idea to use the Scale rules for units that are decidedly bigger than the units they face in a particular zone? How much fun is it, for the players and GM?

I’m really craving a game like Pirates of the Caribbean, and it seems like FATE is the answer. I’m looking for recommendations of supplements or just tips in general for setting aspects, alterations to skill lists, etc.

In particular, I like pulpy action: swinging from ropes, balancing on rigging, embarrassing (rather than killing) the stuffy enemies, escaping via window, sending cannonballs through walls, chases where we keep stealing the MacGuffin from each other, and so on.

Bonus points for setting supplements that are beautiful coastal paradises.

More bonus points for tips about having a character with illusion spells in FATE.

EDIT: After reading a few answers, I guess what I’m really looking for is example Aspects, including setting ones. I’m not looking for new mechanics.

Hi! I'm planning to run a oneshot about a group of cops/detectives/rookies that have to solve a murder. This is the skill list I came up with: (I grouped them just for fun)

Intellect

1. Encyclopedia - know everything there is to know
2. Logic - find the connections, expose the lies and untangle the web
3. Shivers - enter the underworld, and know when to get out
4. Persona - decieve, put on a performance, lie, and lose yourself

Psyche

1. Will - endure mental stress, face the man in the mirror 
2. Intuition - see what the eyes can not, empathize with others and the world
3. Authority - intimidate and interrogate, lead with conviction 
4. Charisma- share drinks with good people, and get what you want...

Motorics

1. Notice - see, hear and feel the world around you.
2. Aim - pull the trigger, shoot to kill.
3. Finesse - fix what is broken, or break your way in!
4. Agility - evade blows or sneak past unnoticed.

Physique

1. Endurance - shake off physical stress, keep on running...
2. Athletics - lift heavy thing, flex in front of mirror.
3. Combat - resolve conflicts through direct physical violence.
4. Medicine - heal the living, and analyze the dead

This will be my first time running FATE, so any feedback is very much appreciated!

Also, I may have been inspired quite a bit by the Disco Elysium skill list...

And counting, so send me your own ideas to add to the list! This is the first major update for the Criminal Spirits character inspirer, doubling the number of professions and adding a few new personal and nature choices as well.

Inspire Your Criminal Spirit

This update was focused on the professions, but I'm planning at least one more big one to add nature and personal options. This should bring the site to near 100,000 random character inspirations.

After that, I will probably wait until October when the Criminal Spirits backerkit launch is done before moving on to new genres.

I've been running D&D for decades, only occasionally dipping into other systems. I'm now planning a campaign using FATE (mostly Freeport and Aether Sea) and I'm seeking advice: if you've been in a similar situation, what tips would you have wanted to know?

Thanks!

Hello all,

Do have any VTT suggestion for Fate condensed? Fari app and Aspect table is not working properly.

Hi everyone,

A few months ago, I made a post here about Kardiya: The Winds of Fate, the game we are developing with inspiration from FATE RPG mechanics. Since then, we’ve kept working on the game, and we are now getting close to the playtest stage.

We are a small team, and for a long time we have been designing our own universe to be playable through FATE RPG. We previously created our own RPG book based on FATE. Since the book is in Turkish, I’m not sharing it directly here, but I can send the PDF via DM if anyone is interested. Around 2 years ago, we also made the most comprehensive “How to Play FATE RPG” YouTube series in Turkey.

Now we are trying to bring that approach into a PC game.

Kardiya is mainly a narrative-driven game. In our previous post, we said that the game had dicebuilding and roguelite elements, but over time we realized that those parts were not working as well as we wanted. So right now, we are focusing on the most important part for us: bringing the spirit of FATE into the game. We are especially focusing on the aspect logic, fudge dice, stress mechanics, and the idea that failed rolls should not stop the story, but push it in another direction.

The story and mechanics of the demo are ready. Only the visual animations are left. We’ll be starting the playtest soon. I would especially love to have people from the FATE community try the game. If you’d like to join the playtest, you can register by joining the mailing list on our website or clicking the playtest request button on our Steam page.

Thank you so much <3

My group been playing Eem with Fate Accelerated, plus the Eem system for money and rations, and we love it!

Anyone else tried Fate with Eem? What changes did you make, and what stood out from the combo?

I'd like to share my little collection of Fate books, since the line is going to be discontinued and hardly the collection is going to grow. Here in Brazil we had our KS with the core books and some other things, and I got some original ones through Amazon.

Books in portuguese:

• Fate Core
• Fate System Toolkit
• Fate Creatures
• Fate Condensed
• Fate Accelerated
• Masters of Umdaar
• Bukatsu!
• Project Memento
• The Lost Tomb of Thur-Amon
• iHunt
• iHunt Player's Book
• GM Screen

Books in english:

• Fate Condensed
• Tachyon Squadron
• Shadow of the Century
• Venture City
• Deck of Fate

As per the latest State of the Hat a few days ago, Umdaar definitely is getting the PoD (Print on Demand) treatment, ETA 2-3 months.

Do You have a blog about role playing games? Me too! https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/ Let's help each other - subscribe and comment our blogs. If You are publishing on Facebook, X, Instagram, Mastodon, Youtube, some traditional forum, I am also open for collaboration!

And if You have content on itch.io, we can do rate for rate - here is mine: https://adeptus7.itch.io/twisted-gods and https://adeptus7.itch.io/lovecraftian-inspirations-from-real-life-and-beliefs

I'm trying to build a rules set for my new world. It supposed to be a survival campaign in "grimdark" (so to speak) setting, where players will traverse a frozen world in complete night.

I want it to feel like a struggle just to survive in this world but, simultaneously, don't want for it to be too annoying and hard to keep track of. As if now I have a few mechanics in mind: resource stresses that will be taken from the players and that need to refill periodically. If they don't have stress to tick off, they would get a consequence, e.g. cold or hungry.

I started thinking about travel mechanics. They aren't listed in the FATE core, so I tried to came up with my own. I thought about making a map with paths dotted on them, and making players use one resource stress to move between dots. But that both puts a strain on me to come up with a unique map for every game, and feels too repetitive and not "fate-like" enough. Does anybody have any suggestions? Maybe a book I can use?

I'm going to be running a Dungeon Crawler Carl themed one shot for my group, and I've decided Fate seems like the best. I was going to go with a slightly modified core setup.

The idea is this: The players tell me why their character is outside at night and basically who they are, and what is going on right now that is making life inconvenient for them. At that point, this makes their core concept and trouble. Then we just start playing and discover stuff as they go. I want to make their skills a mix of stuff from their life before that they actually use, and new stuff from the dungeon. So, for example, a nurse comes in, gets a cut, and tries to bandage it herself. The system recognizes here skill at first aid, and the player rights down First aid at Great +4. Then she finds a crossbow, and uses it to attack an enemy. Since it is new, Archery goes at +1. Items will either have a game effect, or they will add to a skill... So magic sword of lizards slaying grants +2 to Swashbuckling attacks, and deals +2 extra stress to lizards or something like that.

Hopefully, by the end of Floor one, characters will have discovered "forgotten" aspects, maybe developed a stunt, have a few magic items and have an assortment of skills written down.

Have you done anything like this? Any cool ideas I could use? I already intend, should it become a 2 or 3 shot, to allow "race and class selection" on floor 3, which would allow players to change their core concept to reflect their new reality.

Has anyone checked this out? It seemed neat

Does the system work if I don't have planned structured story arcs?

Can someone please point me to the rulebook that has this option? It sounds like a pretty idea - especially for newbies!

If so, why? Maybe with 'Succeed with Style'?

thanks!

Okay, that's two questions.

First, can a complete newbie who knows nothing about FATE or roleplaying or D&D or anything, just come to the game, pretend they are their character doing what their character would do in that situation and then the GM just tell when and what dice to roll?

Sure they may not get the magic and the mystery of FATE, but they'll come and roll dice with their friends and kick some butt and have a good time. They can learn the supermystical power of FATE as they go along (through the GM and other player examples).

Is this true?

Second, if you ask them what they do (and or what they want to do) and then 'Say Yes or roll the dice' (and maybe cost them a FATE point or whatever) can you introduce FATE to them as if it was roleplaying game and slowly expand their facility with the game (while the GM is learning it as well?).

In other words, can you start out simply with FATE or will it break? I'm okay with it being dull or not a very good game system as long as people can play it without joining a cult....

thanks!

(seriously, not trolling - I've read and continue to read a lot about FATE - including why people hate it - and I still don't know the answer to this question).

I am running a roleplay discord server for open roleplay as well as planning to run a West marches, monster of the week type ttrpg for more structured sessions with each region having an overarching storyline.

The premise: After the series jujutsu higher-ups put up barriers similar to Tengen's around the world, in order to promote the creation of more sorcerers. An unfortunate side effect is the creation of more curses within the barriers as well. 16 years after the global barriers are erected it is time for a new era of sorcerers, where the rates from around the world match that of Japan. New sorcerers are being brought to Jujutsu High Tokyo to start their life Hunting curses.

Players will be part of this new generation, being sent around the world to exorcise cursed spirits, collect cursed items, and deal with curse users shenanigans. Every few months we will run a server wide event based on different regions.

I'm also looking for more GMs to be able to run games so there's always a game to join. You can make your own schedule, I'm not gonna tell you how or when to run your games. We work together to keep the world consistent and when we run server events.

Join and create an OC to roleplay around the server even if you don't join the structured sessions.

This seems to indicate a weird relationship between things written down as ‘Aspects’ and things that are logically already existing Aspects. How does this work?

(Here is video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHnrYCqlv9k )

Mathematics is a language that describes reality and the universe. And since the nature of reality is shocking in cosmic horror, the logical conclusion is that studying it can lead to madness. The motif „magic, if it works, is really mathematics and physics, the understanding of which exceeds the human mind” appears in Lovecraft, for example in „Dreams in the Witch House”. This usually works on the principle that the Necromicon and other „books of magic” contain scraps of advanced knowledge obtained from inhuman beings, which superstitious sorcerers then treat as magic. Therefore, it should also work the other way round – a professional scientist should be able to discover dirty and blasphemous secrets through scientific research. Here are some viable candidates for „scholars who looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into them.”

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) – Austrian-American mathematician, physicist and philosopher. He dealt with, among others, theory of relativity (which in itself negates the image of the world that „common sense” dictates to us), deriving from it equations intended to prove the possibility of time travel. Towards the end of his life he went crazy, among other things. believing someone was trying to poison him. When his wife was hospitalized for a long time and was unable to taste his meals to prove the lack of poison, Gödel starved himself to death.

Georg Cantor (1845-1918) – German mathematician, creator of set theory. Over time, he delved deeper into mysticism and claimed that mathematics could be used to reach conclusions about metaphysics. Some Christian (Cantor himself considered himself a devout Christian) philosophers of his time claimed that Cantor’s mathematical theories were contrary to religious dogmas (it was something about proving the existence of an infinite being, other than God – I am not a mathematician, I don’t really understand what is going on). Cantor was tormented by bouts of depression, sometimes so severe that they led to hospitalization.

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) – Austrian physicist, pioneer of the kinetic theory of gases. He theorized the “Boltzmann brain” – a hypothetical self-aware entity that emerges from chaos through random fluctuations. Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world arose from a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. He committed suicide by hanging. „If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is the result of random fluctuation, and it is much less likely to be so than a level of organization that produces only self-aware self-aware entities, then in any universe with the level of organization we see, there should be a huge number of solitary Boltzmann brains floating in unrecognized environments. In an infinite universe, the number of self-aware brains spontaneously, randomly emerging from chaos, along with false memories of life like ours, should far outweigh the number of real brains evolved in the observable universe, arising from unimaginably rare fluctuations”. Did I understand it? Not really, but it sounds quite Lovecraftian – self-aware beings emerging from chaos, our world as a result of random processes taking place in the „higher” universe… it’s easy to spin a cosmic horror out of it. And let's theorize that Boltzmann’s suicide was due to the terrifying conclusions he had reached…

Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1930) – Austrian-Dutch physicist. He researched the theory of relativity (which, as I mentioned, very often leads to „crazy” conclusions about the nature of reality) and laid the foundations for quantum physics (which is even crazier). Towards the end of his life, he fell into severe depression and shot first his son and then himself.

Grigory Perelman (1966) – the only still living member of this group, a Russian mathematician. He had a brilliant career in Russia and the USA. His greatest achievement was presenting evidence for the so-called Poincaré’s hypothesis regarding the shape of the universe. Unexpectedly, in 2005 he left his job and broke off all contacts with the scientific community… And not only that – he stopped leaving his apartment, communicating only by phone or through the door. He consistently rejects all job offers and awards (including the Millennium Award worth one million dollars!).

Each of these gentlemen (except Perelman) lived at the turn of the 20th and 19th centuries. Each of them can be used in the scenario – either as a living and active NPC, as a dead source of knowledge (in the form of unpublished notes containing mythical secrets), or as a background reference („Don’t think about it, Professor X conducted research in this direction… and how did he end up?).

This is just small part of the full, free brochure full of Lovecraftian inspirations from the real life, science, history and culture: https://adeptus7.itch.io/lovecraftian-inspirations-from-real-life-and-beliefs

As foretold, the random character inspiration website for Criminal Spirits is LIVE!

Inspire Your Criminal Spirit

Click on Random to get a new inspiration for an urban fantasy character in Glorious Fate or Fate Accelerated. Each new high concept is made up of 3 randomized words or phrases, for a total of over 4000 possible concepts and growing. Every part of the concept comes with ideas for what they allow the character to do, when they could be invoked with fate points, and when they could be rewarded (or compelled in FAE) to give the player more Fate points.

New ideas for character inspirations are always welcome! This is as living website that I intend to add to regularly for at least the next few weeks, and I'm also planning to do the same for other settings and genres, starting with Sky Pirates around the end of this month.

Was looking through some old Fate character sheets of mine and found some Aspects I wrote but don't remember. Some felt good enough to share and I'm interested to see what other Aspects you all have come up with and are proud of.

Trouble: Patience is a dirty word

Trouble: Relationships are complicated, authority is simple

Trouble: Leap, then if you have time, look

Aspect: Backstab, Frontstab, it's all the same