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Category Archives: fate rpg


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Your First Fate Adventure

As the name might imply, this is an adventure designed to springboard a campaign and introduce people to your gaming world. It is especially useful for getting people that have very little experience with RPGs but want to learn, as they will be able to relate to the characters easily. It can be used as a one-shot adventure, but the players are likely going to want to continue if things go well.

The premise of this adventure is simple. The player characters are all very young adults (or almost adults) that have grown up on stories of adventures and want to experience their own stories for whatever reason. Their character sheets start out very ordinary and mundane, but hopefully between the drive of the players and the experiences of their first real adventure, they will come out being quite fantastical.

The Cast

Have the player characters pick an aspect from each of the categories listed below to build their character. Skill points and stunts listed with that aspect are also added to the character when they choose it for their own. It is, in my experience, a fun way to ease new players into character building. But if you do not think it is a good fit for you or your group, feel free to pre-assemble starting characters beforehand.

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Social Combat in Fate games

Fate games offer wonderful mechanics for diverse combat situations, especially when you consider that they can apply to more than gun fights and tavern brawls. Social combat, for example, has an entire dynamic to it that most other systems limit to a single skill check or at most a contested challenge of skills. In Fate games like Dresden Files and Spirit of the Century, social combat can have lasting consequences that mechanically affect your character.

Now Social Combat technically works the same as physical combat, but my experience is that many players and GMs struggle with that aspect of the game and often overlook it. Perhaps we are more comfortable with physical combat because we have more experience with it thanks to tabletop and video games. Or perhaps we are afraid that our characters will not have much to do in social combat. Or maybe many of us assume that social conflict is boring.

You may be reading thinking none of those things, and that is great! Either way, we’re gonna take a look at Social Combat and simplify it down to the basics. Then we can talk a bit about how to build some exciting encounters with those basics.

Social Attacks

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Introducing: Fate Combat with Dresden Files RPG

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, allow me to introduce to you, directly from Evil Hat Productions, something you will never see anywhere else. There are no hit points, no multi-sided dice, and no automatic bonuses for flanking. That’s right! We have here for you today the one, the only, Fate Combat rules!

And boy oh boy, are they different!

Introducing someone to Fate Core, or any branch of Fate, is considerably easier than getting them into some other RPGs out there. Especially people that have never played a tabletop RPG before. But times are changing. RPGs are getting more popular <insert happy dance>. And people that are coming to learn Fate are rarely blank slates. These are people that have learned to game with D&D, Pathfinder, Dragon AGE, and World of Darkness.

happy dance

Happy dance successfully inserted

The Fate system is a mechanical balance of dice rolls and storytelling. A lot of those mechanics are very different than other game systems. That is great when you are playing the game, but it does make it hard to learn how to play when you expect something similar to the last RPG you learns. So today we are going to look at those comparative differences and hopefully make the switch a little easier.

We are actually using the Dresden Files for today’s example because it is still a very popular Fate system and because it covers a lot of things that Fate Core considers ‘extras’ but are still showing up in printed content. If you want to get into the Dresden Files RPG, it is a great setting for modern fantasy fun!

What Looks the Same

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Adventure April: Another Away Mission: Star Trek Fate rpg

To end out our April of adventures, we offer this Star Trek one shot.You can use it to try out the system and get new people used to boldly going where no one has gone before. It uses the rules we created for playing Fate in the Star Trek universe, and you can listen to our podcast to hear more about what it is like to play.

Star Trek 144 by 144

This particular adventure assumes that everyone in the group is of appropriate rank to go on an away mission to investigate the distress signal. While most groups of players will understand that they need to follow the direction of adventure, you sometimes get a Guy (Galaxy Quest Joke) that wants to stay on the ship. You can use a compel to get them to go down, or you can simply have a higher-ranking NPC officer pull rank and order them down.

Speaking of which, the crew of a Star Trek game could cover any number of positions on a ship. If you send NPCs down with the crew, allow them to succeed automatically in checks to move the plot along (only after PCs have failed), and be sure to have them attacked and killed first. Star Trek red shirt tradition, and all that.

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Adventure April: What did it? Dresden Files Fate rpg

Today’s adventure for April is taken from the old Dresden Files RPG. Well I say old, even though the 3rd book for the RPG just got released within the last year. But since most of the books came out before Fate Core was created, it will always be the old reliable system to me.

Even though I have no plans to run another Dresden Files adventure any time soon, I still have a lot of them planned out that I never got to use. This one is an intro adventure for players a bit unfamiliar with the Dresden world. You can use it to introduce a new creature into an existing campaign, or pull the plot towards a villain you are hoping to use as a primary antagonist. But more on that later.

This adventure is divided into three scenes: the crime, the chase, and the confrontation. It assumes that the group would be interested in investigating the mysterious murders and stopping the thing behind it. If the group is more reactionary, feel free to have it attack in a public place in front of them or even against them and then flee, replacing scene 1 with a couple rounds of combat before moving to scene 2.

Scene 1: The Crime

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Adventure April: The Waning of the New Moon

Adventures In April continues with a fun wuxia adventure. This adventure works fine with Fate Core, but we highly recommend trying it in its full Tian Xia glory as you will have a lot more fun with the kung fu extras that they have designed for their setting.

The Waning of the New Moon is a one-shot adventure that can easily start a full RPG campaign. The party study together at the same monastery, though they probably have very different teachers, and must defend it against an attack while their masters are gone. A fellow student is captured, so the party has to go and rescue him.

This adventure is divided into 4 scenes: Sakura Falls, Wicked Soldiers, Finding Finfin, and Looming Darkness. Each scene is detailed below with an overview and broken down into possible skill challenges for the scene. An extra paragraph for Tian Xia is also included.

Scene 1: Sakura Falls

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Adventure April: TimeStress: A Timetravel Fate Adventure

For all you Chrono Trigger and Doctor Who fans, here is a campaign starter for a time traveling adventure. We’ve talked about it, hinted at it, and touched on it long enough. Now let’s take a look at how to actually do it with an example you can pick up and use yourself!

The campaign is based on Fate Core, and there is a little bit of set up involved. We’ll walk you through all of that and offer some tips for character creation in your world building. The actual adventure brings everyone together and sets them off in the direction you choose for world building.

If you would rather just use this as a one shot to bring a lot of wacky people together from across time, just skip the next section and ignore the part about the “something more out there” at the end.

World Building a Timeline

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Adventure April: Jewel Heist (The Legacy Con)

Remember a while back when we ran a one-shot based on the Crime World setting in Volume 2 of Fate Worlds? Well today’s April Adventure is going to be that very adventure we ran. I’ve taken my 2 pages of notes and reworked them into a format that other people (lucky you) can actually understand and use to run your own adventure.

For those of you that have not heard the podcast yet, here is the basic plot and pitch: The Baron of Bloont is auctioning several rare and valuable artifacts at an auction this weekend, most notably the rare Legacy Diamond. You simply must see this gem for yourself, but even the invitations to the auction are expensive. So you and your team have decided to steal the diamond instead. After all, a bad man like the Baron does not deserve such a prize. Get together with your crew, make a plan, and slip past all the security measures the night before the auction to steal the diamond. Oh, and try to get out alive with the prize. That’s important, too.

The group “wins” if they can get the Legacy Diamond from the mansion with at least one crew member free and able to sell the item. Alternatively they can steal enough valuables for a total of 6 wealth levels for a lesser but still somewhat rewarding victory. Also, if they prevent the Baron from proposing to Felicia Parsons, they gain an ally that would be very interested in buying their loot and setting them up with future work.

How Crime World Works

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Star Trek Fate: Ep.55: The Clash pt.1

Now that they have their ship, should they stay or should they go?

Taylor = Q
Joshua = Lt. Canton
Kevin = Lt. Commander Kelvek
Tracy = Captain Vegral

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Adventure April: Avatar: The Last Airbender

Every week this month we are going to put out an adventure for you to enjoy. This weeks adventure is from Avatar: the last Airbender. Enjoy!

I am a HUGE fan of Nickelodeon’s Avatar series, and in the early stages of Fate (before Fate Core) I made my own version of a Fate hack for the series. We’ve mentioned this before, even shared some stunts from the game in our first Sample Stunts blog post. Now that it is April, and the Google Doc is up, we figured why not share an opening adventure.

Just a heads up: this is not a Fate Core game, so the skill names are very different than what you are used to. It does use Fate Points, fudge dice, aspects, and stress so those of you that play Fate Core should still be able to play it easily enough. Converting the system should not take too much work if you are interested.

For the sake of simplicity, this fan hack adventure is set before the events of The Last Airbender and before the fire nation invaded. It is divided into 3 scenes, each with their own skill challenges and tips for the GM.

Scene 1: Festival

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