Recently I was talking to a friend about sci-fi roleplaying games in a present-day setting – not space opera or cyberpunk, but social science fiction led by issues more than characters. Since this was something they were looking to explore in a short game rather than a fully fledged campaign, I started to consider if a series of one-offs might be the best way to go, and how Fate could be adapted further for one-shot play. I’ve called this a “Black Mirror” hack, because it’s the example of this kind of thing I know best, but since each episode of the show is entirely standalone, no familiarity with the source material is required to try it out. Continue reading
Fate
War of Ashes Beta: Final Summary
The War of Ashes beta playtest comes to a close today. Since the beta test began, I’ve run a session of character generation, a two-part adventure, and a one-off game that was essentially just one big combat to try out the new mechanics some more. That’s given me plenty of time to enjoy what I like about the game, but also plenty of time to work out what I think needs work, and even suggest some changes of my own. Continue reading
Fate of the Musketeers: Swashbuckling Mini-Hack
EDIT: I’ve since written stunt trees for each of six Fighting Approaches, which you can view here. I’ve also removed the option to discover an NPC’s bonuses and penalties (struck through below), for reasons explained in that post.
Last year a friend of mine ran a short Fate Accelerated campaign about the Three Musketeers. Said friend is half-French, and harbours an enthusiasm for the Musketeers that not even my terrible, exaggerated, possibly racist French accent can dent. So it was a great game, with all minimum standards of derring-do and swashbucklery attained. We all agreed to come back to play in another Musketeers campaign at some point, this time using Fate Core, and also characters of our own invention (instead of the Athos/Porthos/Aramis/D’Artagnan line-up of the first game). Continue reading
GenCon: Day One Overview
The first day of my first ever GenCon is over. Feeling pretty zonked, but still wired enough to give a recap of the fun so far.
So here’s what I did today: Continue reading
War of Ashes Beta: Combat Concerns
I intimated in a previous post that our playtest group encountered difficulties with the War of Ashes system, at least in the beta form that exists at the moment. After running a second session, and having some time to think about it on the flight from Britain to America, I think I’m able to better put those concerns into words. Continue reading
War of Ashes Beta: After Action Analysis
I’ve had more time to think about the beta test session of War of Ashes I ran last week.
Lets start with the things I’m really liking. Continue reading
War of Ashes Character Sheets
I finally added the character sheets for the War of Ashes beta-test! You can download them here. I might add NPCs later, but as I mentioned in my Adventure Creation, I wrote up an awful lot of them. I might also add a bit of flavour text for each character, but that sounds like effort, and is therefore undesirable. Continue reading
Last Roll of the Dice: War of Ashes Adventure Creation
Yesterday I finished doing character generation with my War of Ashes playtest group’s fourth player. Tonight they will get to actually play. In addition to the character sheets provided in the last post, I thought it might be interesting to show what I’m actually doing right now: Adventure Creation. Continue reading
“It’s Tyromancy, Not Cheesomancy”: War of Ashes Beta Character Creation
First thing I’ve learned about blogging: never write that you’ll do anything “tomorrow”. I might have met my self-imposed deadline, but that’s as much by good fortune as design.
Anyway, earlier this week I ran a character generation session for the War of Ashes playtest. Continue reading
Roll Plus Hot 