This week we wrap up the Fate Core Campaign Setting. All the content’s there, but it’s still in draft; I welcome any and all feedback on it, particularly on the game-y bits I may have gotten horribly wrong. I’m more of a world builder than a game designer, in terms of skill rather than enthusiasm. I enthusiastically design wonderful worlds and enthusiastically craft horribly broken and imbalanced game systems. It’s kind of my thing, as you may know if you played NWN.
In addition, I’ve got the cover to the upcoming vol//003 book to show you. As you can see we’ve managed to keep the visual motif going from cover to cover, which is gonna be kinda awesome in the end. I may need to do a social media contest where you tweet all three covers together and I give you a prize of some type. That’s the kind of thing smart viral marketers making the big bucks do, yes? Yes.
The next update will be the start of //021, slightly delayed to the evening of May 10th because I’ll be flying back into town that afternoon. “Flying from where?” you may ask.
All next week I will be enduring a madcap steeple chase of finicky toddlers and finicky grandparents through the manyfold appendages and orifices of Mickey Mouse. I am unconvinced that this will be a ‘relaxing vacation’ although I am still willing to give it a hearty try. With any luck, it will be an enjoyable experience rather than a harrowing ordeal. If you’d like to smile, laugh, and/or cringe along with me, I’ll be frequently Tweeting the experience and you can follow me over yonder. (Conversely if you enjoy my writing tweets but don’t want vacation spam, I won’t mind if you unfollow me for a week as long as you come back into my gentle and waiting arms in the end. Shhh. Daddy’s got you.)
With any luck I’ll secure some time to write more of //021 in Florida. I actually have a week’s worth done and ready, but I’d like to get farther ahead. I had to sit down and seriously think about upcoming twists, like the mechanics of the bleed, the alliance of Patient 31, and where ultimately all of this is going… this is a major, major turning point chapter. I can’t fly by the seat of my pants anymore, I need my hazy plans to become concrete, or disaster will errupt. My goal is to have all that insanity invisible to the reader, though, LOOKING like a smooth and fully planned experience crafted by a master rather than an easily panicked and anxiety riddled madman. …which I suppose is negated by this blog post so I think I need a distraction so I can run for it HEY LOOK OVER THERE WHAT THE HELL IS THAT
WRT the historical timeline, it looks to me as though you have one setting and three adventure options here. Maybe four, post-Lucidity. I would write them up that way. In other words, give the GM and the players the option of foiling Bedlam, Echo, and Penny’s inner Storm Trooper.themselves — or, of just being in the mix when stuff happens.
I’ve got those options detailed, but I can emphasize that you can certainly rewrite history completely to feature your characters at the center instead.
A few thoughts:
Cass of course is an Insightful Oracle. Her poems are clear examples of using Dream as a mental attack. Maybe she has a second stunt that lets her do that?
It should be mechanically possible to mine the Sideways Signals without a supernatural power … but it doesn’t seem to be. For that matter, what skill governs navigating the City of Angels’ computer networks? Any one of Contacts, Investigation and Orientation would be plausible.
Sideways Affinity and Partial Cubism look like a stunt family, with the first as prerequisite for the second. I can’t see any reason why a Picasso wouldn’t have Sideways Affinity, and Kelsey Jones (the typecase for Partial Cubism) clearly has both. Similarly, Sideways Signals Affinity stands to Sideways Affinity as navigating Sideways Signals does to navigating the Sideways – it isn’t a separate talent, just the same talent applied to electronics instead of physical travel.
Seth Dougal’s character sheet needs to be a GM secret.
I … don’t think it’s possible to represent Bedlam, Echo or Lucid as Fate Core characters on the same level as ordinary City people. After all, any one of them can radically alter locations and other characters with (for them) minor effort, and nobody can oppose them when they do so, except another of them. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jenna Moran’s RPGs, but Patient 23’s personae look a lot like PCs from Nobilis, compared to everyone else.
Hrm. I should turn off comments on the Fate page, to avoid feedback delivered there becoming a spoiler for a player reading with GM spoilers off.
Yeah, Cass is definitely our textbook Insightful Oracle. The ‘attack’ form is sort of a pull-from-my-ass moment, originally her poem was just going to be ‘a poem’ but I couldn’t write a poem to save my life, much less one with enough emotional impact to work in that scene properly. I don’t think it needs a mechanical representation in the campaign book though.
I could see Sideways Affinity without Partial Cubism. An independent mapper with fairly intense kinship with the Sideways may not be cubist, and you could be cubist without walking into the Sideways frequently.
And yeah, no way in heck can Bedlam, Echo, or Lucid be playable characters or even NPCs you ‘fight’. That’s not the way the series works, anyway. Forces that high and mighty you need to deal with diplomatically, while physically dealing with their underlings.
I wasn’t thinking of the “poem” for Gregory Yates – that was Creating an Advantage, which Cass invoked a little later to talk Greg out of shooting the soldier. No, I had in mind her writing a poem as a party trick (as she described it, that poem hit its subject with a consequence) and of course Cass’ shining moment when she broke her jailers’ wills with nothing more than well-placed words. (Though, granted, she’d been given truth serum at the time.)
Yes, one can be cubist without going into the Sideways. But it seems to me that any character infected with cubism will, for that very reason, be a lot better at navigating the Sideways, if they do go there. That is, Partial Cubism implies Sideways Affinity.