Ideas in fate

So... it seems I am bad at editing down for shortness. It is a skill I promise to work on! For now, here is part one, artless and a day late. Part 2 and art will be forthcoming! "Remember now initiates. Remember now the days of Light and Fire. Before the blackening of the noontide gate and the loss of the even-star. Remember when this world was once part of something greater. A far flung space confederation, where mighty liners and star slips spanned the unimaginable distances between the stars. When distant Urth spoke in the heavens and its words were law and wisdom. Before the Fourth tide and the before even the seed fell. Remember when we came to Falland's World in glittering ships of chitin and steel. Remember when machines and beasts were seeded and bent to man's will. Remember our heritage, when the Kashaw comes to drive you from hall and home. Remember that this life of tillage is not our lot. Once we were kings. Once we ruled the stars even the god beasts canno...

So, next week I will do a game in a page. This week I am using the spare week in my month to write more about that game. So. I am going to write a game about rebellion. Set in the early modern age, in which the players are rebelling against rich nobles who are trying to use the magical industrial revolution (a bit early) to ascend to become evil gods. Because apparently I cannot write something other than a high concept game. So, here is my pitch; the mages of the setting managed to work out how to harvest a little bit of the magic power and soul of a person to power spells. They also worked out how to turn enough magic and wealth into making someone a new god. Your pcs have seen people having their life sucked out in order to be ground down into working slaves for the rich and the powerful. They've seen the great empire torn apart by a civil war that has seen generations dying for the pride of their princes. They've seen the princes conquer and enslave the rest of the...

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...