The wonderful folks at Gnome Stew make a lot of good articles about running games, and over the last few years they have published some helpful books as well. I’ve taken several characters out of their book of 1000 NPCs and a few tips from their book on prep work, but my all-time favorite book is Eureka – 501 Adventure Plots. It has inspired a lot of adventures I want to run, some of which I actually have.

Today’s blog is a Fate Core adventure based off of one of their plots: Test Run (page 191). This is a science fiction/fantasy adventure for starting off a campaign of space travel. The story also works great for campaigns in Firefly, Star Wars, and Diaspora. But for mechanics, we will be talking pure Fate Core.

A quick note on skills. This game assumes that Crafts is basically the engineering skill and Drive is the piloting skill. Hacking is covered by Burglary. Also there are no rules in place for a ship’s skills or abilities, as everything really depends on the players. The ships have aspects, of course, that can be used to boost skill checks and help define what a ship can and cannot do, but no stunts or extras mechanically. I will have a couple of notes on character building at the end of the adventure.

Each scene is described below with my brainstorming thoughts below the scene name followed by each challenge in this scene. Like all Fate Core games, there is a lot of room for creativity. Feel free to add as you wish. I’m sure your players will! (General advice for dealing with creative players is also included).

Scene 1: HIRING

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