Tag: FAE
Character Generation for God Machine Chronicle game
- Organised crime.
- Racial tension.
- Milk/local cats going missing.
- Residents being evicted.
- Potential demolition/repurposing.
- Crime/racial tension.
- Eastern europenas.
- Tension between long time residents and influx of immigrants.
- Graffiti tagging, racial slurs.
- Conflict between new/old criminal elements.
- Flags hanging from balconies.
- Evictions.
- Manager evicting housing association people to cram in the more profitable immigrants.
- Residents association pettitions.
- Missing milk/animals.
- Escalating problem.
- Has been reported- no action taken.
- Connected with crazy cat lady?
- Connected with chinese restaurant?
- Residents association.
- Do-gooders.
- Door knocking Christians.
- Leaders of the local scout movement.
- Community events.
- Crazy cat lady.
- See the character from The Simpsons.
- The manager.
- Conservative MP.
- Similar to the fat hacker from Jurassic Park.
- Eastern European Immigrants.
- Wage slaves.
- 500 to a flat.
- Right wingers (organisation).
- Owner of the Red Lion, won’t serve them.
- Illegal immigrants.
- New criminal element.
- Youth criminals/new blood.
- Gangsta wannabees.
- Chavs.
- “Attack the Block.”
- “Kids.”
- A stalker.
- Huge coat and hat.
- Scary male.
- Hangs around.
- “1 Hour Photo.”
- “The Watcher.”
- “Mine Hunters.”
- Infatuation?
- Old polish criminal element.
- Dying breed.
- Boris the Blade – “Snatch.”
- A man smuggling in immigrants.
- Bartek Prusees.
- Bringing in Polish Immigrants.
- New blood.
- Scarred, tattooed villain.
- Danny Trejo.
- Robert Kcvepper.
- Nasty piece of work.
- Newsagents/bargain booze.
- Asian man running shop.
- Illegal poker nights in back room.
- Dodgy cigs, bootlegged booze, misc cheap meat.
- Chip shop.
- Legitimate family business.
- Old patriarch.
- Always open.
- Once a week does free meals for homeless.
- Red Lion pub.
- Plastic, sticky floored pub.
- Known rough pub.
- Boarded up window.
- Cig machine with no cigarettes.
- Mesh over bar.
- Man who knows a man.
- Old man drunks.
- Chinese takeaway.
- Cat meat?
- Human meat?
- Sex trade cover.
- Young prostitute.
- Taken under wing of older prostitute.
- Likes older men.
- Older prostitute.
- Over 50.
- Doing it to put her daughter through ollege.
- Cougar.
- Has a thing for old Polish men.
- An eccentric old shut-in with ties to the Polish mob.
- A multi-lingual hospital worker and self-confessed ‘Lambrini Girl.’
- A young female ex-chemist turned drug dealer.
- A jack-of-all-traders bar stool philosophising lorry driver.
- A wiry criminal problem solver.
- The criminal problem solver: Hired the truck driver to retrieve a shipment of drugs from Eastern Europe (via his contact the shut-in) in order to provide them to the dealer.
- The truck driver was approached by the problem solver to move some of the drug dealers supplies up north as a favour, he was injured whilst on the job and trying to effect a minor repair to his lorry and get chatting to the hospital worker whilst in the waiting room.
- The drug dealer was providing the criminal problem solver with a cut from her dealing, she knows the truck driver as the “pick up man; she frequents the same chip shop as the shut-in and has spoken to him a couple of times.
- The shut-in has chased away the stalker when he was following the hospital worker.
- The hospital worker was feeling sorry for a patient in pain and, knowing that there was a dealer living in the same block as her, bought some weed for the suffering patient; she bumped into the criminal problem solver (who was there to pick up his cut) whilst she was there.
Simplifying space combat in my Rogue Trader hack
Having spent an awful lot of time recently working on my FAE NWOD hack i’ve been going to great lengths to keep the rules as simple as possible, capturing the feel and mood of the World of Darkness without bolting on loads of unnecessary additional rules and sub-systems that would slow the game down without really adding all that much to it; as well as the character generation session for my God Machine Chronicle FAE game this weekend i’ve also got another session of my Rogue Trader FATE game on Sunday (not to mention playing in a Pathfinder game that a friend is running on Saturday) and so i’ve been leafing through my hack rules in advance of the session.
The plan for the next game has always been to include a couple of space fights in them; since we changed to using the FATE rules we haven’t really gone in for any big space combats as we adjusted to using the new rules and it’s about time IMO that we test drive the hack rules for space combat. Originally the space combat rules in my hack were very much based on the Diaspora rules with a few tweaks and alterations by myself; the players have a number of build points which they use to purchase skills, aspects and stunts for their ship with each ship having multiple stress tracks and various other bits and pieces. Although I was quite pleased with it when I first finished writing up that part of the hack, looking at it now the rules really do seem a little bit over the top and more suited to a strategic wargame or miniatures game rather than a narrative-based RP game.
With that in mind I decided to dust off the rules and see if I could simplify them using some of the lessions that i’m current learning from Fate Accelerated Edition.
Ship Construction
The first step, I decided, was to throw out the notion of variable build points (based on vessel size) to create a ship and the use of multiple stress tracks. I decided that i’d give the ships some basic skills (the words in blue show the skills that players can use instead if they are crewing that section(if applicable)); the players can pick one at Great (+4), one at Good (+3), one at Fair (+2) and the remaining one at Average (+1).
- Engine (drive(spacecraft)) – used to make maneuvres and initiative rolls
- Hull (crafts(tech use)) – used in defence and affects stress tracker
- Trade (resources) – used for trading and maintenance
- Weapons (shooting)– used to make attack rolls
Ships would have a refresh of three fate points, deducted by 1 for everyone stunt beyond the first that was taken, they would also receive 5 Aspects (as with normal FATE characters).
By default the ship would receive 2 stress boxes and 3 consequences boxes (with the standard 2, 4 and 6 values) in the same way as a character.
- If the Hull skill is Average (+1) or Fair (+2) then one more stress box is added.
- If the Hull skill is Good (+3) or higher then two more stress boxes are added.
- At Superb (+5) or higher an additional mild consequence slot is added.
Another stunt that would like possesses by the flagship of Admiral Blacks fleet is:
Stunt – Large ship
This stunt adds an additional stress box to the ships character sheet.
Combat Zone Layout
I decide to use three zones for space combat (that I would represent on the table with index cards) with a single ’empty’ card represent the vast emptiness of space and the other two each containing something related to the systems aspects. For example: if the combat took place around Catan Prime then there might be an asteroid in one zone and a burning world.
These elements will be Aspects in their various zones and function as normal Aspects, for instance someone could spend one of their fate points to gain a +2 to a defensive hull roll because they are taking cover behind the asteroid.
Ships would only be able to fire/engage with enemy vessels in the same zone but would be able to move between zones freely on their turn as per the FATE rules, possibly with a roll if there was some sort of impediment to movement (like an asteroid belt or something similar).
Music for my GMC session
- Dan Hall suggested the Cranes for a creepy, ethereal sound.
- Marcus Burggraf suggested a number of possible soundtracks:
- Requiem for a Dream
- Into the Black by Erdenstern
- Halloween by Two steps from Hell
- Vashnevskaya Ira provided a link to his blog post (http://ravenscourtabbey.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/ambientando-partidas-musica-perturbadora.html), although the post itself is in Spanish the links provide some interesting ideas.
First on my list was the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, which had a good mix of eerie acoustic stuff and pounding drumbeats that would work well for the science fiction genre and also for the industrial modern era of the NWOD. I trawled through a number of other soundtracks (including the Final Fantasy Movie soundtrack, Terminator, Interview with a Vampire and others), creating a number of playlists:
- Calm/serenity
- Chase
- Choral
- Combat
- Drifting in space
- Generic industrial
- Horror
- Madness
- Military/marching
- Posh/upper floor
- Realisation
- Romantic
- Sorrow
- Space combat
- Suspense
I also picked a few random tracks because I thought they fight in well with the idea of the God Machine or a particular concept in WH40K.
Hopefully this will give me a fairly decent selection of tunes to use as background in my game.
FAE character sheets for God Machine Chronicle
Morality as Consequences in FAE
Last night and during my lunch hour today i’ve been thinking about the best way to represent morality within my NWOD hack; since all of the games feature some sort of morality (generally represented by a Hierarchy of Sins that causes moral degeneration of the character when it is transgressed against) and a struggle to prevent it from sliding down to a point where the character becomes a monstrous NPC that dances at the whims of the GM, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to say that the descent of morality is a major theme within the entire gameline. The various Morality systems within the different game lines have been given different names, whether it’s the Humanity of Vampire: the Requiem, Wisdom in Mage: the Awakening or Clarity in Changeling: the Lost but broadly they function in the same way, building on the mortal system of morality provided in the core NWOD rulebook to track a characters decline or fall.
- Injury to another, theft – mild morality consequence.
- Arson, manslaughter – moderate morality consequence.
- Murder or other heinous acts – severe morality consequence.
- Mild consequences – clear at the end of the scene.
- Moderate consequences – clear at the end of the next session.
- Severe consequences – clear at the end of the scenario.
Thoughts on my FAE World of Darkness hack thus far
This is the first in a short series of blog posts detailing the thought processes behind the creation of my FAE World of Darkness hack.
- Establishing the Basics
First thing I needed to do when I began work on the FAE nWoD hack was to detail how much the hack rules were going to adhere to and deviate from the basic rules of the Fate Accelerate Edition.
- Aspects
- Approaches
- Stunts
- Stress Tracks
- Crumbling Integrity
- Vampires
- Spending Blood and Feeding
- Diablerie
- Predators Taint
- Blood Bonding
- Sunlight
- In Conclusion
- Drew Hamblin suggested using Humane and Bestial as the only two Approaches; I personally love this idea, but I think it would be a bit too vague for some.
- Todd Grotenhuis suggested using Conditions to represent the hunger of an ill-fed vampire, unfortunately Conditions are part of the FATE toolkit and I don’t have that yet; i’m definitely planning to have a look at it when the toolkit becomes available to the public.
- Paul Vencill mentioned that the Humane and Bestial Approaches may only really be suitable for Vampires and Werewolves and may not work as well for other supernaturals – this is definitely something that i’ll be putting more consideration into as I expand the hack to include other supernaturals. Paul also raised a very good point that perhaps I was cleaving a bit too closely to the rules of the World of Darkness when perhaps I should be looking less at the rules and more at keeping the themes of the games, this will definitely be kept in mind as I rework the hack.
World of Darkness FAE hack, work in progress
Okay, so i’ve started work on my nWod FAE hack, i’ll put up some more of my thought processes behind it when I get chance.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3N7nFBlEi_7Q0lWNkxHOGliejg/edit?usp=sharing
Constructive comments/suggestions welcome.
Musings on Fate Accelerated Edition
I’ve been recently considering using some version of the FATE system to run the God Machine Chronicle World of Darkness game that i’ll be starting in a week or twos time (i’ll be putting up a post about the GMC game separately at some point in the near future); having become increasingly non-plussed at the more complicated rules systems inherent in many roleplaying games and given my recently switch to using a slightly adapted version of FATE core rules for my Rogue Trader game (there is a post on that here and my FATE hack is available for download here) I started considering using some version of FATE to run a world of darkness game.
Obviously a world of darkness game involving the various supernatural strains that populate the game world would require some sort of consideration for the various powers and abilities of the different creatures; luckily for me my GMC is a short-term (4 or 5 sessions only) that is going to feature entirely mortals and so this isn’t a hurdle that I need to handle at the moment (although several individuals on the various G+ communities have been extremely helpful). Adam Boothroyd suggested that I might want to have a look at Fate Accelerated Engine, a streamlined version of the FATE core system.
Size
Looking at FAE the most immediately obvious difference between it and FATE core is the size of the two PDFs, with Core weighing in at 300+ pages and FAE only being about 50 pages in length; skimming through the book it seems that a lot of the stuff that has been trimmed is the abundance of GMing advice that has been provided in the Core book, this is understandable and the FAE book itself isn’t shy about pointing out where you can locate stuff in its parent tome.
Approaches
Another major difference is that, unlike Core, FAE eschews the use of the more common skills present in most RPGs, instead positing the use of six approaches describing the manner that characters approach an action with rather than a specific skill (for example, instead of looking at your Fighting skill you might look at your Forceful approach).
The six approaches described in the game are:
- Careful
- Clever
- Flashy
- Forceful
- Quick
- Sneaky
- Stunts that give you a +2 bonus in certain situations
- The second type of Stunt allows you to make something true, do something cool or otherwise ignore the rules in some way.
A highly useful RPG that I look forward to trying out 🙂