Ideas in fate

So, I figure I should probably write out what this blog is for and how I am going to use it. First of all I am going to be writing weekly. If I promise to write more often than that then I am going to miss it too often, and I would rather be reliable and less frequent. I will be using it one week a month to talk about a game I am writing up fully. I am going to write this eventually in long form as a real game to eventually publish, so I make no apologies that I will be thinking about and posting about it here. I will use one a  month to write up whatever setting is taking up my thoughts that month. I need to write up the ideas for games that get into my head or I won't be able to clear them from my mind. I will probably write up a couple of thousand words of settings and the rules for fate I feel like I would need to hack into the game to make it work. I will write a little bit about how I run fate and my advice for one aspect of the game. This will often be mechanical sorts

How I run a boss fight Right, this is a thing close to my heart. I was dearly hoping that the adversary book would have a chapter on it, but I am going to put my opinion on how to run a good boss fight here. This is not just theory crafting; I have been running games with a lot of combat and conflicts in fate for a while now, and some of them have involved complex set ups to keep the fight challenging and involving. The disadvantage a boss has in a fight is action economy and size of stress tracks. Because the players will be taking a lot more actions than the boss, they get the chance to get a lot more done. As such, if they are sensible, they will be creating advantage in an attempt to stack up enough advantage to succeed when they make attacks. The boss must have an attack and defence skill higher than the fight skills of the players. If not he is going down in a round or two with no challenge. The players can spam attacks and take the villain out. The bad guy won&#

The world is changing. It had persisted in a similar state for what seemed almost untold years, going back to the great days of antiquity. But then they changed it, the mad geniuses. Orin Al-Hamar invented the greatest breakthrough in alchemy for many a century. Far from the work to build a stone to make one prince or philosopher immortal, he instead made the breakthrough to create blasting powder, a recipe so simple and requiring so little power, that even an apprentice could spend a day making it in decent quantities. Tammuz IV, also known as the conqueror, finally overcame the spires of the City of the World’s Dreams, and in so doing forged himself a mighty empire and destroyed the ancient society of the wise. Those sorcerers who had attracted many of the truly powerful over the last thousand years disappeared from this mortal realm ahead of the conquering army, and the lesser apprentices and journeymen who served them fled west, bringing magical theory and crafts to a so