1

THE BASICS
Welcome to Fate!
If you’ve never played a roleplaying game before, here’s the basic idea: you
and a bunch of friends get together to tell an interactive story about a group
of characters you make up. You get to say what challenges and obstacles
those characters face, how they respond, what they say and do, and what
happens to them.
It’s not all just conversation, though—sometimes you’ll use dice and the
rules in this book to bring uncertainty into the story and make things more
exciting.
Fate doesn’t come with a default setting, but it works best with any
premise where the characters are proactive, capable people leading
dramatic lives. We give more advice on how to bring that flavor to your
games in the next chapter.

NEW TO FATE
If you’re a new player, all you really need to know is in this chapter and on
your character sheet—the GM will help you figure out the rest. You may
want to check out the cheat sheet just to save your GM some effort, but
otherwise, you should be good to go.
If you’re a new GM, this is just the tip of the iceberg for you. You should
read and get familiar with the whole book.

FOR VETERANS
You might be reading this because you’re familiar with Fate from our other
games, Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game.
Several other popular RPGs, like Galileo Games’ Bulldogs! and Cubicle
7’s Legends of Anglerre, also use the Fate system.
This is a new version of Fate, which we developed to update and
streamline the system. You’ll recognize some of what’s in here, but we’ve
also changed some rules and some terminology. You can find a guide to all
the changes we’ve made near the end of the book.

What You Need to Play

Getting into a game of Fate is very simple. You need:

Between three and five people. One of you is going to be the

gamemaster (or “GM” for short), and everyone else is going to be a
player. We’ll explain what that means in a moment.
A character sheet, one per player, and some extra paper for note-
taking. We’ll talk about what’s on the character sheet below. (GMs,
any important characters you play might have a character sheet also.)
Fate dice, at least four, preferably four per person. Fate dice are a
special kind of six-sided dice that are marked on two sides with a plus
symbol (+), two with a minus symbol (-), and two sides are blank (0).
You can get these dice from many hobby and game stores, often under
their original name, Fudge dice. (For Fate’s purposes we’ll continue to
call them Fate dice, but call them whatever you like!) Evil Hat will
offer Fate dice for sale at www.evilhat.com later in 2013.
 The Deck of Fate is an alternative to Fate dice that will be available
from Evil Hat. It’s a deck of cards that mimics the probability of Fate dice,
and is designed to be used in the same way Fate dice are.

If you don’t want to use Fate dice, you don’t have to—any set of regular six-sided dice will work. If
you’re using regular dice, you read 5 or 6 as +, 1 or 2 as -, and 3 or 4 as 0.

Tokens to represent fate points. Poker chips, glass beads, or anything

similar will work. You’ll want to have at least thirty or more of these
on hand, just to make sure you have enough for any given game. You
can use pencil marks on your character sheet in lieu of tokens, but
physical tokens add a little more fun.
Index cards. These are optional, but we find they’re very handy for
recording aspects during play.

Players and Gamemasters

In any game of Fate, you’re either a player or a gamemaster.
If you’re a player, your primary job is to take responsibility for portraying
one of the protagonists of the game, which we call a player character (or
“PC” for short). You make decisions for your character and describe to
everyone else what your character says and does. You’ll also take care of
the mechanical side of your character—rolling dice when it’s appropriate,
choosing what abilities to use in a certain situation, and keeping track of
fate points.
If you’re a gamemaster, your primary job is to take responsibility for the
world the PCs inhabit. You make decisions and roll dice for every character
in the game world who isn’t portrayed by a player—we call those non-
player characters (or “NPCs”). You describe the environments and places
the PCs go to during the game, and you create the scenarios and situations
they interact with. You also act as a final arbiter of the rules, determining
the outcome of the PCs’ decisions and how that impacts the story as it
unfolds.
Both players and gamemasters also have a secondary job: make everyone
around you look awesome. Fate is best as a collaborative endeavor, with
everyone sharing ideas and looking for opportunities to make the events as
entertaining as possible.

THE EXAMPLE GAME

All of our rules examples in this book refer to the same example game and
setting. The name is Hearts of Steel, a tongue-in-cheek fantasy romp about
a group of troubleshooters for hire. They traipse about the countryside and
get into trouble at the behest of the various petty kings and fief lords who
hire them.
The participants are Lenny, Lily, Ryan, and Amanda. Amanda is the GM.
Lenny plays a thuggish swordsman named Landon. Lily plays the nimble,
dashing, and dangerous Cynere, who also happens to love swords. Ryan
plays Zird the Arcane, a wizard who, by contrast, has absolutely no love for
swords.
Check out Game Creation to see how this game came about. We’ve
included character sheets for the example PCs at the end of the book.

The Character Sheet

Players, your character sheet contains everything you need to know about
your PC—abilities, personality, significant background elements, and any
other resources that character has to use in the game. Here’s an example of
a Fate character sheet, so we can show you all the components.
Aspects
Aspects are phrases that describe some significant detail about a character.
They are the reasons why your character matters, why we’re interested in
seeing your character in the game. Aspects can cover a wide range of
elements, such as personality or descriptive traits, beliefs, relationships,
issues and problems, or anything else that helps us invest in the character as
a person, rather than just a collection of stats.
Aspects come into play in conjunction with fate points. When an aspect
benefits you, you can spend fate points to invoke that aspect for a bonus.
When your aspects complicate your character’s life, you gain fate points
back—this is called accepting a compel.

Lily’s character, Cynere, has the aspect Tempted by Shiny Things on

her sheet, which describes her general tendency to overvalue material
goods and make bad decisions when gems and coin are involved. This
adds an interesting, fun element to the character that gets her into a
great deal of trouble, bringing a lot of personality to the game.
 Aspects can describe things that are beneficial or detrimental—in fact, the
best aspects are both.
And aspects don’t just belong to characters; the environment your
characters are in can have aspects attached to it as well.
Skills
Skills are what you use during the game to do complicated or interesting
actions with the dice. Each character has a number of skills that represent
his or her basic capabilities, including things like perceptiveness, physical
prowess, professional training, education, and other measures of ability.
At the beginning of the game, the player characters have skills rated in
steps from Average (+1) to Great (+4). Higher is better, meaning that the
character is more capable or succeeds more often when using that skill.
If for some reason you need to make a roll using a skill your character
doesn’t have, you can always roll it at Mediocre (+0). There are a couple
exceptions to this, like magic skills that most people don’t have at all. We’ll
talk about skills in greater detail in their own chapter.

Zird the Arcane has the Lore skill at Great (+4), which makes him
ideally suited to knowing a convenient, obscure fact and doing
research. He does not have the Stealth skill, however, so when the game
calls upon him to sneak up on someone (and Amanda will make sure it
will), he’ll have to roll that at Mediocre (+0). Bad news for him.

Stunts
Stunts are special tricks that your character knows that allow you to get an
extra benefit out of a skill or alter some other game rule to work in your
favor. Stunts are like special moves in a video game, letting you do
something unique or distinctive compared to other characters. Two
characters can have the same rating in a skill, but their stunts might give
them vastly different benefits.
 Landon has a stunt called Another Round? It gives him a bonus to get
information from someone with his Rapport skill, provided that he is
drinking with his target in a tavern.

Stress
Stress is one of the two options you have to avoid losing a conflict—it
represents temporary fatigue, getting winded, superficial injuries, and so on.
You have a number of stress levels you can burn off to help keep you in a
fight, and they reset at the end of a conflict, once you’ve had a moment to
rest and catch your breath.
Consequences
Consequences are the other option you have to stay in a conflict, but they
have a more lasting impact. Every time you take a consequence, it puts a
new aspect on your sheet describing your injuries. Unlike stress, you have
to take time to recover from a consequence, and it’s stuck on your character
sheet in the meantime, which leaves your character vulnerable to
complications or others wishing to take advantage of your new weakness.
Refresh
Refresh is the number of fate points you get at the start of every game
session to spend for your character. Your total resets to this number unless
you had more fate points at the end of the last session.

Taking Action
Players, some of the things you’ll do in a Fate game require you to roll dice
to see if your character succeeds or not. You will always roll the dice when
you’re opposing another character with your efforts, or when there’s a
significant obstacle in the way of your effort. Otherwise, just say what
your character does and assume it happens.

To overcome an obstacle
 To create or unlock an advantage for your character, in the form of an aspect you can
use

To attack someone in a conflict

To defend yourself in a conflict

Rolling the Dice

When you need to roll dice in Fate, pick up four Fate dice and roll them.
When you read the dice, read every + as +1, every 0 as 0, and every - as –1.
Add them all together. You’ll get a result from –4 to +4, most often between
–2 and +2.
Here are some sample dice totals:

The result on the dice isn’t your final total, however. If your character has
a skill that’s appropriate to the action, you get to add your character’s rating
in that skill to whatever you rolled.
So, once you’ve rolled the dice, how do you determine what a particular
result means? Glad you asked.

The Ladder
In Fate, we use a ladder of adjectives and numbers to rate the dice results, a
character’s skills and the result of a roll.
Here’s the ladder:

It doesn’t really matter which side of the ladder you use—some people
remember the words better, some people remember the numbers better, and
some people like using both. So you could say, “I got a Great,” or “I got a
+4,” and it means the same thing. As long as everyone understands what
you’re communicating, you’re fine.
Results can go below and above the ladder. We encourage you to come up
with your own names for results above Legendary, such as “Zounds!” and
“Ridiculously Awesome.” We do.
Interpreting Results
When you roll the dice, you’re trying to get a high enough roll to match or
beat your opposition. That opposition is going to come in one of two forms:
active opposition, from someone rolling dice against you, or passive
opposition, from an obstacle that just has a set rating on the ladder for you
to overcome. (GMs, you can also just decide your NPCs give passive
opposition when you don’t want to roll dice for them.)
 Generally speaking, if you beat your opposition on the ladder, you succeed
at your action. A tie creates some effect, but not to the extent your character
was intending. If you win by a lot, something extra happens (like doing
more harm to your opponent in a fight).
If you don’t beat the opposition, either you don’t succeed at your action,
you succeed at a cost, or something else happens to complicate
the outcome. Some game actions have special results when you fail at the
roll.
When you beat a roll or a set obstacle, the difference between your
opposition and your result is what we call shifts. When you roll equal to the
opposition, you have zero shifts. Roll one over your opposition, and you
have one shift. Two over means two shifts, and so on. Later in the book,
we’ll talk about different instances where getting shifts on a roll benefits
you.

Landon is trying to escape an ancient mechanical death trap he

accidentally set off during a “routine” exploration of the Anthari
Catacombs. Dozens of tiny (and some not-so-tiny) spears are shooting
out of the walls in a certain hallway, and he needs to get past them to
the other side.
Amanda, the GM, says, “This is passive opposition, because it’s just a
trap in your way. It’s opposing you at Great (+4). The Anthari really
didn’t want anyone getting to their temple treasure.”
Lenny sighs and says, “Well, I’ve got Athletics at Good (+3), so I’ll
try dodging and weaving through them to cross the hall.”
He takes up the dice and rolls, getting -+++, for a result of +2. This
steps up his result on the ladder by two, from Good (+3) to Superb
(+5). That’s enough to beat the opposition by one shift and succeed.
Amanda says, “Well, it takes equal parts acrobatics and frantic
stumbling, but you manage to make it through to the other side with
only some cosmetic tears in your tunic to show for it. The mechanism
 shows no sign of stopping, though—you’ll still have to deal with it on
your way out.”
Lenny replies, “Just another day at the office,” and Landon continues
his trek through the catacombs.

Fate Points
You use tokens to represent how many fate points you have at any given
time during play. Fate points are one of your most important resources in
Fate—they’re a measure of how much influence you have to make the story
go in your character’s favor.
You can spend fate points to invoke an aspect, to declare a story detail, or
to activate certain powerful stunts.
You earn fate points by accepting a compel on one of your aspects.
A word of warning: don’t use edible things as tokens, especially if the
food hasn’t arrived yet.
Invoking an Aspect
Whenever you’re making a skill roll, and you’re in a situation where
an aspect might be able to help you, you can spend a fate point to invoke it
in order to change the dice result. This allows you to either reroll the dice
or add +2 to your roll, whichever is more helpful. (Typically, +2 is a
good choice if you rolled –2 or higher, but sometimes you want to risk a
reroll to get that +4.) You do this after you’ve rolled the dice—if you aren’t
happy with your total.
You also have to explain or justify how the aspect is helpful in order to
get the bonus—sometimes it’ll be self-evident, and sometimes it might
require some creative narrating.
You can spend more than one fate point on a single roll, gaining another
reroll or an additional +2, as long as each point you spend invokes a
different aspect.
 Cynere is trying to covertly goad a merchant into describing the
security features of his personal vault by posing as a visiting dignitary.
The merchant is giving her passive opposition at Good (+3), and her
Deceive skill is Fair (+2).
Lily rolls. She breaks even, getting a 0. That leaves her result at Fair,
not enough to get the information she wants.
She looks at her character sheet, then to Amanda, and says, “You
know, long years of being Tempted by Shiny Things has taught me a
thing or two about what’s in a treasure hoard and what’s not. I’m going
to impress this merchant by talking about the rarest, most prized
elements of his collection.”
Amanda grins and nods. Lily hands over a fate point to invoke the
aspect, and gets to add +2 to her standing roll. This brings her result to
a Great (+4), which exceeds the opposition. The duly impressed
merchant starts to brag about his vault, and Cynere listens intently....

Declaring a Story Detail

Sometimes, you want to add a detail that works to your character’s
advantage in a scene. For example, you might use this to narrate a
convenient coincidence, like retroactively having the right supplies for a
certain job (“Of course I brought that along!”), showing up at a dramatically
appropriate moment, or suggesting that you and the NPC you just met have
mutual clients in common.
To do this, you’ll spend a fate point. You should try to justify your story
details by relating them to your aspects. GMs, you have the right to veto
any suggestions that seem out of scope or ask the player to revise them,
especially if the rest of the group isn’t buying into it.
Zird the Arcane gets captured with his friends by some tribesfolk from
the Sagroth Wilds. The three heroes are unceremoniously dumped
 before the chieftain, and Amanda describes the chieftain addressing
them in a strange, guttural tongue.
Ryan looks at his sheet and says, “Hey, I have If I Haven’t Been
There, I’ve Read About It on my sheet. Can I declare that I’ve
studied this language at some point, so we can communicate?”
Amanda thinks that’s perfectly reasonable to assume. Ryan tosses over
a fate point and describes Zird answering in the chieftain’s own speech,
which turns all eyes in the village (including those of his friends) on
him in a moment of surprise.
Ryan has Zird look at his friends and say, “Books. They’re good for
you.”

Compels
Sometimes (in fact, probably often), you’ll find yourself in a situation
where an aspect complicates your character’s life and creates unexpected
drama. When that happens, the GM will suggest a potential complication
that might arise. This is called a compel.
Sometimes, a compel means your character automatically fails at some
goal, or your character’s choices are restricted, or simply that unintended
consequences cloud whatever your character does. You might negotiate
back and forth on the details a little, to arrive at what would be most
appropriate and dramatic in the moment.
Once you’ve agreed to accept the complication, you get a fate point for
your troubles. If you want, you can pay a fate point to prevent the
complication from happening, but we don’t recommend you do that very
often—you’ll probably need that fate point later, and getting compelled
brings drama (and hence, fun) into your game’s story.
Players, you’re going to call for a compel when you want there to be a
complication in a decision you’ve just made, if it’s related to one of your
aspects. GMs, you’re going to call for a compel when you make the world
respond to the characters in a complicated or dramatic way.
 Anyone at the table is free to suggest when a compel might be appropriate
for any character (including their own). GMs, you have the final word on
whether or not a compel is valid. And speak up if you see that a compel
happened naturally as a result of play, but no fate points were awarded.

Landon has the aspect The Manners of a Goat. He is attending the

annual Grand Ball in Ictherya with his friends, courtesy of the royal
court.
Amanda tells the players, “As you’re milling about, a sharply dressed
young lady catches Landon sticking out of the crowd. She observes him
for a while, then goes to engage him in conversation, obviously
intrigued by how different he looks among all the stuffy nobles.” She
turns to Lenny. “What do you do?”
Lenny says, “Uh... well, I guess I’ll ask her to dance and play along,
see what I can find out about her.”
Amanda holds up a fate point and says, “And is that going to go
wrong, given Landon’s excellent command of courtly etiquette?”
Lenny chuckles and replies, “Yeah, I presume Landon will offend her
pretty quickly, and that’ll get complicated. I’ll take the fate point.”
Amanda and Lenny play a bit to figure out just how Landon puts his
foot in his mouth, and then Amanda describes some of the royal guard
showing up. One of them says, “You might want to watch how you
speak to the High Duchess of Ictherya, outlander.”
Lenny shakes his head. Amanda grins the grin of the devil.

Start Playing!
These are the basic things you need to know to play Fate. The following
chapters go into greater detail on everything we’ve covered above, and will
show you how to get your game off the ground.
 WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

The Game Creation chapter takes you through the process of setting
up your game, so that should probably be your next stop.
Then Character Creation will show you how to make the characters
you’ll play.
Players, you’ll eventually want to read Actions and Outcomes and The
Long Game, to help you get a better handle on the nuts and bolts of
doing stuff and developing your character during play.
GMs, you’re going to want to familiarize yourselves with the whole
book, but Running the Game and Scenes, Sessions, and Scenarios are
of particular importance to you.
2
GAME CREATION
What Makes a Good Fate Game?
You can use Fate to tell stories in many different genres, with a variety of
premises. There is no default setting; you and your group will make that up
yourselves. The very best Fate games, however, have certain ideas in
common with one another, which we think best showcase what the game is
designed to do.
Whether you’re talking about fantasy, science fiction, superheroes, or
gritty cop shows, Fate works best when you use it to tell stories about
people who are proactive, competent, and dramatic.
Proactivity
Characters in a game of Fate should be proactive. They have a variety of
abilities that lend themselves to active problem solving, and they aren’t
timid about using them. They don’t sit around waiting for the solution to a
crisis to come to them—they go out and apply their energies, taking risks
and overcoming obstacles to achieve their goals.
This doesn’t mean that they don’t ever plan or strategize, or that they’re all
careless to a fault. It just means that even the most patient among them will
eventually rise and take action in a tangible, demonstrable way.
Any Fate game you play should give a clear opportunity for the characters
to be proactive in solving their problems, and have a variety of ways they
might go about it. A game about librarians spending all their time among
dusty tomes and learning things isn’t Fate. A game about librarians using
forgotten knowledge to save the world is.
Competence
Characters in a game of Fate are good at things. They aren’t bumbling fools
who routinely look ridiculous when they’re trying to get things done—
they’re highly skilled, talented, or trained individuals who are capable of
making visible change in the world they inhabit. They are the right people
for the job, and they get involved in a crisis because they have a good
chance of being able to resolve it for the better.
This doesn’t mean they always succeed, or that their actions are without
unintended consequence. It just means that when they fail, it isn’t because
they made dumb mistakes or weren’t prepared for the risks.
Any Fate game that you play should treat the characters like competent
people, worthy of the risks and challenges that come their way. A game
about garbage men who are forced to fight supervillains and get their asses
constantly handed to them isn’t Fate. A game about garbage men who
become an awesome anti-supervillain hit squad is.
Drama
Characters in a game of Fate lead dramatic lives. The stakes are always
high for them, both in terms of what they have to deal with in their world,
and what they’re dealing with in the six inches of space between their ears.
Like us, they have interpersonal troubles and struggle with their issues, and
though the external circumstances of their lives might be a lot bigger in
scope than what we go through, we can still relate to and sympathize with
them.
This doesn’t mean they spend all their time wallowing in misery and pain,
or that everything in their lives is always a world-shaking crisis. It just
means that their lives require them to make hard choices and live with the
consequences—in other words, that they’re essentially human.
Any Fate game that you play should provide the potential and opportunity
for drama among and between the characters, and give you a chance to
relate to them as people. A game about adventurers mindlessly punching
increasing numbers of bigger, badder bad guys is not Fate. A game about
adventurers struggling to lead normal lives despite being destined to fight
ultimate evil is.

WHEN CREATING YOUR GAME:

Setting: Decide what the world that surrounds the protagonists is like.
 Scale: Decide how epic or personal your story will be.
Issues: Decide what threats and pressures inherent to the setting will
spur the protagonists to action.
NPCs: Decide who the important people and locations are.
Skills and Stunts: Decide what sorts of things characters in the setting
are likely to want to do.
Character Creation: Make the PCs.

Setting Up Your Game

The first step in setting up your Fate game is to decide what sort of people
the protagonists are and what sort of world surrounds them. Your decisions
here will tell you virtually everything you need to know to get the ball
rolling: what the protagonists are good at, what they may or may not care
about, what problems they’re likely to get into, what kind of impact these
characters have on the world, and so on. You don’t need complete answers
(because that’s part of the point of playing the game), but you should have
enough of an idea that answering those questions doesn’t draw a blank.
First, we’ll start by talking about your setting. We’ll handle the specifics
on the protagonists later, in Character Creation.

Making the Setting Work in Fate

Decide what the world that surrounds the protagonists is like.
You’re probably already familiar with the idea of a setting, but in short, it’s
everything that the characters interact with, such as people, organizations
and institutions, technology, strange phenomena, and mysteries (crime,
intrigue, and cosmic or historical legend). These are the sort of things that
characters want to engage with, are forced to engage with, look to for help,
or stand in their way.
If you’re using a setting that already exists, from a movie, novel, or other
game book, then many of these ideas are ready for you to use. Of course,
you’ll also likely add your own spin on things: new organizations or
different mysteries to uncover.
 If you’re inventing a setting, you have more work cut out for you. It’s
beyond the scope of this chapter to tell you how to make a setting; we’re
assuming you already know how to do that if that’s what you’re choosing to
do. (Besides, we live in a vast world of media. See tvtropes.org if you
don’t believe us.) One word of advice, though—don’t try to invent too
much up front. As you’ll see over the course of the chapter, you’re going to
be generating a lot of ideas just through the process of game and character
creation, so the details will come in time.

Amanda, Lenny, Lily, and Ryan sit down to talk about the setting.
They’re all jonesing for a low fantasy game, as Lenny and Lily have
recently read some of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. So they
pitch “two guys and a girl with swords.” The world is “vaguely
medieval, Earth with the serial numbers filed off.”
Ryan suggests “guy and girl with swords, and guy without a sword”
so that there’s a difference between the two guys. Also, because he
wants to play someone who is more bookish (for contrast). Everyone’s
on board with this, and they move on.

A Game’s Scale
Decide how epic or personal your story will be.
The setting might be small or it might be vast, but where your stories take
place determines the scale of your game.
In a small-scale game, characters deal with problems in a city or region,
they don’t travel a great deal, and the problems are local. A large-scale
game involves dealing with problems that affect a world, a civilization, or
even a galaxy if the genre you’re playing in can handle that kind of thing.
(Sometimes, a small-scale game will turn into a large-scale one over time,
as you’ve probably seen in long-running novel series or television shows.)
 Amanda likes the vibe of “guy and girl with sword,” and thinks it’ll
shine as a small-scale game, where they might travel from town to
town, but the problems they have to deal with are local—like a thieves’
guild or the regent’s vile machinations.

The Setting’s Big Issues

Decide what threats and pressures inherent to the setting will spur the
protagonists to action.
Every setting needs to have something going on that the characters care
about, often a peril they want to fight or undermine. These are the setting’s
issues.
You’ll come up with two issues as a group and write them down on index
cards or a game creation worksheet. These issues are aspects and will be
available to invoke or compel throughout the entirety of the game.
The issues should reflect the scale of your game and what the characters
will face. They’re broad ideas; they don’t just affect your characters, but
many people in the world. Issues take two forms:

Current Issues: These are problems or threats that exist in the world
already, possibly for a long time. Protagonists tackling these issues are
trying to change the world, to make it a better place. Examples: a
corrupt regime, organized crime, rampant poverty and disease, a
generations-long war.
Impending Issues: These are things that have begun to rear their ugly
heads, and threaten to make the world worse if they come to pass or
achieve a goal. Protagonists tackling these issues are trying to keep the
world from slipping into chaos or destruction. Examples: an invasion
from a neighboring country, the sudden rising of a zombie horde, the
imposition of martial law.

Game and character creation involve making aspects. If you’re new to Fate, read over the Aspects
and Fate Points chapter.
 The default number of issues in a Fate game is two: Either two current
issues (for a story solely about trying to make the world a better place), two
impending issues (for a story about striving to save people from threats), or
one of each. The latter option is common in fiction: think about the stalwart
heroes who work against some impending doom while already discontent
with the world around them.

CHANGING THE NUMBER OF ISSUES

Of course, you don’t have to use the default number of two issues if you
don’t want to—one or three also works, but it will change the resulting
game a bit. A game with one issue will revolve around just that issue—a
quest to rid a city of evil, or to stop evil from happening. A game with three
will show off a busy world, one where the characters’ resources are strained
against multiple fronts. If you think you need to focus down or expand the
scope of your game, talk it over with the group and start by tweaking the
number of issues to best fit what you’re after.

The group thinks about the sort of problems they want to deal with in
the world. Ryan immediately says “organized crime,” and they flesh
that out a little. They come up with the idea of “The Scar Triad,” a
group of thugs who are known for thievery, extortion, and other nasty
things that the world could do without. This is clearly a current issue.
Lily wants the story to also be about something on the verge of
happening, something Really Bad. They come up with an impending
issue: a vile cult that seeks to summon something horrible into the
world (which means they’re also saying that their setting includes
horrible, Lovecraft-inspired things). Lenny calls it “The Doom that Is
to Come,” and Ryan really likes this idea because it gives his bookish
character a hook into things going on in the world.
Making the Issues into Aspects
As we said earlier, issues are aspects. Turn the ideas you have into aspects
that you could conceivably use at different times in the story (often as
compels to the protagonists or as invocations for foes, but clever players
will always find other uses for aspects). Write them down, and then if you
need to add a little bit to remember the context or some details, write those
down alongside the aspects.

Amanda writes down The Scar Triad and The Doom that Is to Come
as two game aspects. She notes down next to The Scar Triad, “They’re
into racketeering and other nasty stuff.” And with The Doom that Is
to Come, “Led by the Cult of Tranquility.”

If you’re new to making aspects, hold off on this for now. You’ll get quite
a bit of practice making aspects for your characters. Once you’re done with
character creation, turn these issue ideas into aspects.

CHANGING ISSUES IN PLAY

The Long Game chapter will talk about this in detail, but issues can change
as the game progresses. Sometimes, the issue evolves into something new.
Sometimes, the characters will successfully fight against it, and it’ll be
gone. And sometimes, new issues will emerge. So the ones you make are
just what you’re starting off with.
Drilling Down
You can also use issues to flesh out smaller, but nonetheless important
pieces of your setting. An important location (a major city or nation, or
even a memorable local restaurant) or organization (a knightly order, a
king’s court, or a corporation) can have impending and/or current issues as
well.
We recommend you start by giving only one issue to each setting element,
just to keep things from getting too bogged down, but you can always add
more as the campaign progresses. Likewise, you don’t have to do this right
now—if you find a setting element becoming more important later in the
game, you can give it issues then.

The Cult of Tranquility keeps popping up in pre-game discussions, so

the group decides that it also needs an issue. After some discussion, the
group decides it’d be interesting if there was some tension in the cult’s
ranks, and makes a current issue called “Two Conflicting
 Prophecies”—different branches of the cult have different ideas of
what the doom is going to be.

Faces and Places

Decide who the important people and locations are.
At this point, you’ve probably got your issues figured out, and you may
have thought of some organizations or groups that feature prominently in
your game.
Now you have to put some faces on those issues and those groups, so that
your PCs have people to interact with when they’re dealing with those
elements. Do they have any particular people who represent them, or stand
out as exemplars of what the issue’s referring to? If you have any ideas at
this point, write them down on an index card: a name, a relationship to the
organization or issue, and an aspect detailing their significance to the story.
Do the same for any notable places in your setting. Are there any
important places where things happen, either important to the world,
important to an issue, or important to the protagonists? If there’s a place
where you envision multiple scenes taking place, then talk about that.
Unlike NPCs, they don’t require aspects.
 The GM may flesh these characters and places out later, depending on
their role in the story. Or one of these ideas might be a great inspiration for
a protagonist! And, of course, new ones will unfold as the story progresses.
If there’s a piece of your setting that’s meant to be a mystery which the
protagonists uncover, define it only in loose terms. The specifics can be
detailed as they are revealed in play.

After a few minutes of discussion, the group writes down:

Hugo the Charitable, a lieutenant in the Scar Triad. His aspect is

Everyone in Riverton Fears Me.
Which brings us to a place, the city of Riverton. There are two rivers
here, so it’s a hub for trade.
Amanda comes up with a sympathetic character, Kale Westal, who
owns a shop in Riverton. She isn’t cowed by Hugo’s extortion, and will
likely fall victim to an “accident.” Her aspect is Stubborn Because
I’m Right.
The Primarch, the leader of the Cult of Tranquility, whose identity is a
mystery. Because that part of the setting is a mystery, they aren’t going
to come up with an aspect or otherwise go any further, leaving those
details to Amanda to figure out in secret.

They could go on, but they know they’ll have more ideas after
character creation and as they play. That’s just enough to paint a
picture of what’s going on at the very beginning of the story.

Make Characters
Each player makes a protagonist.
You can make player characters after finishing game creation, or you can
do it in the middle of this process—follow your instincts here. If you find
yourself talking more about the characters than the world, go to character
creation and then float back around to whatever parts of game creation you
haven’t done yet. Otherwise, go ahead and finish out all of game creation
first.
It’s worth noting that the protagonists should have some connections to the
faces and places you named in the previous step. If it’s difficult to relate the
characters to the setting, then you may want to rethink your protagonists or
revise your game so it will make a better fit for the new characters.
When you’re making characters, you’ll also discover a bit more about the
setting as people talk about who their characters know and what their
characters do. If anything comes up that should be added to your game
creation notes, do so before pushing forward with playing the game.

SKILLS AND YOUR SETTING

A big part of your setting is what people can do in it. The various skills
in Skills and Stunts cover many situations, but you’ll want to look over
them to see if any don’t apply or if there’s a skill you need to add.
Adding a skill is covered in more detail in the Extras chapter.
3
CHARACTER CREATION
Character Creation Is Play
The moment you sit down to make the game and characters, you’re playing
Fate. This style of character creation does three things to reinforce that.
First, character creation tells part of the characters’ stories, just like
any other game session does. Characters that really come alive have
histories of their own and with each other. This establishes where they’ve
been, what they’ve done, and why they continue to act against the issues
they face, together or in opposition. There’s an ongoing story you’re now
stepping into—it’s just that the most interesting parts haven’t happened yet.
Second, it sets the stage for the next part of the story. Each arc of a
story sets up the next, so that they flow into one another in a natural
evolution. Character creation needs to set up the first story arc.
Third, character creation in Fate is collaborative. As with game
creation, character creation is best done as a group activity. Doing all of this
together builds a strong foundation of communication between the players
and GM, and this process has a number of ways to establish connections
between the characters and the setting.
Combined with game creation, character creation can take a full session to
do—this allows everyone to learn about the world and each other’s
characters. You and the other players will talk about your characters, make
suggestions to each other, discuss how they connect, and establish more of
the setting.
You’ll want to keep good notes on this process. You can use the character
sheet and character creation worksheet in the back of this book or
downloadable at FateRPG.com.
Start by determining your character’s high concept and trouble. Then build
your character’s backstory, a process that takes place over three phases.
Once you have that figured out, flesh out your character’s skills and stunts.
Then you’re ready to play!
 WHEN CREATING YOUR CHARACTER:

Aspects: Come up with your character’s high concept and trouble

aspects.
Name: Name your character.
Phase One: Describe your character’s first adventure.
Phases Two and Three: Describe how you’ve crossed paths with two
other characters.
Aspects: Write down one aspect for each of these three experiences.
Skills: Pick and rate your skills.
Stunts: Pick or invent three to five stunts.
Refresh: Determine how many fate points you start play with.
Stress and Consequences: Determine how much of a beating your
character can take.

Your Character Idea

Come up with your character’s high concept and trouble aspects.
Character creation starts with a concept for your character. It could be
modeled after a character from a favorite novel or movie, or it could be
based around some specific thing that you want to be able to do (like break
boards with your head, turn into a wolf, blow things up, etc.). Just like you
did with the game’s issues earlier, you’re going to take your ideas and turn
them into the two central aspects for your character—high
concept and trouble.
Player characters should be exceptional and interesting. They could very
easily find success in less exciting situations than those that come their way
in play. You must figure out why your character is going to keep getting
involved in these more dangerous things. If you don’t, the GM is under no
obligation to go out of her way to make the game work for you—she’ll be
too busy with other players who made characters that have a reason to
participate.
 KEEP BUILDING YOUR SETTING
As you’re making stuff up for your characters, you’ll also make stuff up
about the world around them. You’ll end up talking about NPCs,
organizations, places, things like that. That’s fantastic!
You might also come up with a character concept that adds something
fundamental to the world, like saying “I want to play a wizard” when no
one talked about magic yet. When that happens, discuss with the group if
that’s a part of your setting and make any necessary adjustments.

Because picking a high concept and trouble are linked, they’re grouped
together. You’ll likely have more success coming up with a compelling
character idea if you think about them as one big step rather than two
separate steps. Only after you have that (and a name, of course!) can you
move on to the rest of character creation.
That said, don’t worry too much—if your character idea evolves later on,
that’s great! You can always go back and tinker with the early decisions.

DIALS, DIALS EVERYWHERE

Fate Core isn’t the be-all and end-all of Fate. It’s just a starting point—a set
of default decisions that will work if you use it as-is.
As you get more familiar with the system, you’ll be tempted to change
things in order to suit your individual game or playstyle a little bit
better. That’s totally okay. These defaults aren’t sacrosanct. We expect you
to change them. In fact, throughout the book, we’re going to be pointing out
where the dials are. The next book, the Fate System Toolkit, is all about how
to change and configure the Fate system to meet your needs.
So, tweak away. We don’t mind.

High Concept
Your high concept is a phrase that sums up what your character is about—
who he is and what he does. It’s an aspect, one of the first and most
important ones for your character.
Think of this aspect like your job, your role in life, or your calling—it’s
what you’re good at, but it’s also a duty you have to deal with, and it’s
constantly filled with problems of its own. That is to say, it comes with
some good and some bad. There are a few different directions you can take
this:

You could take the idea of “like your job” literally: Lead Detective,
Knight of the Round, Low-level Thug.
You could throw on an adjective or other descriptor to further define
the idea: Despicable Regent of Riverton, Reluctant Lead Detective,
Ambitious Low-level Thug.
You could mash two jobs or roles together that most people would find
odd: Wizard Private Eye, Singing Knight of the Round Table,
Monster-slaying Accountant.
You could play off of an important relationship to your family or an
organization you’re deeply involved with (especially if the family or
organization are well-connected or well-known): Black Sheep of the
Thompson Family, Low-level Thug for the Syndicate, Scar Triad’s
Patsy in Riverton.

These aren’t the only ways to play with your high concept, but they’ll get
you started. But don’t stress out over it—the worst thing you can do is make
it into too big of a deal. You’ll come up with four other aspects after this
one—you don’t have to get it all nailed right now.

IF YOU GET STUMPED ON ASPECTS

The golden rule of making aspects in character creation: you can always
change it later. If you’re struggling to make an aspect, write out the idea in
as many words as you need to, in order to get it down on paper in the first
place. If a specific phrase pops up after you write it down, great! If not,
maybe someone else at the table can help you come up with an aspect. And
if you’re still stuck, leave it for now—you’ll have plenty of time during
play to refine it.
And if you really need to, it’s okay to leave some blank. Look at Quick
Character Creation for more on leaving parts of your character sheet blank.

High concepts can have overlap among the characters, as long as you have
something to distinguish how your character is different from the others. If
high concepts must be similar among all the characters, such as if the GM
pitches an all-swordsmen story, it’s crucial that the troubles differ.

Lenny and Lily settled on the “guy and girl with sword” idea, and
Ryan’s going with “guy without sword.” But those are just starting
ideas. Now it’s time to turn them into proper high concepts.
Lenny latches onto the idea of tying his concept to an organization,
and starts with “Disciple of…something.” He envisions a character
who has trained in some mysterious martial art, and that involves rival
schools and foes that want to learn those secrets. The group helps him
come up with a suitably mysterious name: Disciple of the Ivory
Shroud. (And now we’ve made a bit more setting: there’s an Ivory
Shroud, mysterious martial arts, and all that implies.)
Lily, on the other hand, doesn’t really know where to go from “girl
with sword.” She’s not interested in the organization thing, so she’s
thinking about adjectives. Eventually, she settles on Infamous Girl
with Sword. (Keeping the “girl with sword” part makes her giggle, so
she wants to say it often during the game.)
Ryan’s idea of “bookish guy without sword” would be a pretty dull
aspect. He thinks about what’s been declared so far: an evil cult who
can summon Bad Things and a mysterious martial arts school. So he
asks “hey, can I be a wizard?” They talk a bit about what that means,
 so that being a wizard doesn’t overshadow the swordsmen and isn’t a
weak idea. After that, he writes down Wizard for Hire.

Trouble
In addition to a high concept, every character has some sort of trouble
aspect that’s a part of his life and story. If your high concept is what or who
your character is, your trouble is the answer to a simple question: what
complicates your character’s existence?
Trouble brings chaos into a character’s life and drives him into interesting
situations. Trouble aspects are broken up into two types: personal
struggles and problematic relationships.

Personal struggles are about your darker side or impulses that are
hard to control. If it’s something that your character might be tempted
to do or unconsciously do at the worst possible moment, it’s this sort
of trouble. Examples: Anger Management Issues, Sucker for a
Pretty Face, The Bottle Calls to Me.
Problematic relationships are about people or organizations that
make your life hard. It could be a group of people who hate your guts
and want you to suffer, folks you work for that don’t make your job
easy, or even your family or friends that too often get caught in the
crossfire. Examples: Family Man, Debt to the Mob, The Scar Triad
Wants Me Dead.

Your trouble shouldn’t be easy to solve. If it was, your character would

have done that already, and that’s not interesting. But nor should it paralyze
the character completely. If the trouble is constantly interfering with the
character’s day-to-day life, he’s going to spend all his time dealing with it
rather than other matters at hand. You shouldn’t have to deal with your
trouble at every turn—unless that’s the core of one particular adventure in
the story (and even then, that’s just one adventure).
Troubles also shouldn’t be directly related to your high concept—if you
have Lead Detective, saying your trouble is The Criminal Underworld
Hates Me is a dull trouble, because we already assume that with your high
concept. (Of course, you can turn that up a notch to make it personal, like
Don Giovanni Personally Hates Me, to make it work.)
Before you go any further, talk with the GM about your character’s
trouble. Make sure you’re both on the same page in terms of what it means.
Both of you may want to find one way this aspect might be invoked or
compelled to make sure you’re both seeing the same things—or to give
each other ideas. The GM should come away from this conversation
knowing what you want out of your trouble.

Lenny wants to contrast the whole “I know an ancient martial art”

vibe. He’s not playing an ascetic monk or anything like that. So he
wants something that will get him into social trouble, something that
has to do with him and not with any specific people or organizations.
So he writes down The Manners of a Goat. His character will
unconsciously make an ass of himself.
Lily likes this idea of her character being her own worst enemy, so
she’s also going for a personal struggle. She’s had the idea for a while
of playing someone who can’t help but be Tempted by Shiny Things,
so she writes that down.
After seeing the other two go for personal struggles, Ryan wants to
add a bit to the setting by having a problematic relationship trouble.
He wants something that’s involved with his high concept, someone he
can’t just fight openly against—he wants to see intrigue in his story. So
he writes down Rivals in the Collegia Arcana (which also names a
group of people in the setting, that Ryan’s character is a part of).

THE “BRIGHT” SIDE OF TROUBLES

Since your trouble is an aspect, it’s something you should also be able
to invoke, right? Because we’ve been so focused on how this complicates
your character’s life, it’s easy to miss how a trouble also helps your
character.
In short, your experience with your trouble makes you a stronger person in
that regard. Dealing with personal struggles leaves you vulnerable to being
tempted or cajoled, but it can also give you a sense of inner strength,
because you know the sort of person you want to be. Problematic
relationships often cause trouble, but people do learn hard lessons from the
troubles they deal with. They especially learn how to maneuver around
many of the smaller issues their troubles present.
Lenny’s The Manners of a Goat could be used to the group’s benefit.
Maybe he turns that up intentionally, to draw attention away from Lily’s
character sneaking around.
With Lily’s Tempted by Shiny Things, we could reasonably say that
Lily’s character is well-acquainted with the value of various shiny things
(and well-acquainted with getting caught and locked in prison, so she
knows a thing or two about escaping).
Ryan’s Rivals in the Collegia Arcana can come in handy when dealing
with rivals he knows well—he knows what to expect from their tactics. He
could also use this aspect to gain aid from people who share his rivals.

INTRO TO CHOOSING ASPECTS

A lot of character creation focuses on coming up with aspects—some are
called high concepts, some are called troubles, but they basically all work
the same way. Aspects are one of the most important parts of your
character, since they define who she is, and they provide ways for you to
generate fate points and to spend those fate points on bonuses. If you have
time, you really might want to read the whole chapter we have dedicated to
aspects before you go through the process of character creation.
 In case you’re pressed for time, here are some guidelines for choosing
aspects.
Aspects which don’t help you tell a good story (by giving you success
when you need it and by drawing you into danger and action when the story
needs it) aren’t doing their job. The aspects which push you into conflict—
and help you excel once you’re there—will be among your best and most-
used.
Aspects need to be both useful and dangerous—allowing you to help shape
the story and generating lots of fate points—and they should never be
boring. The best aspect suggests both ways to use it and ways it can
complicate your situation. Aspects that cannot be used for either of those
are likely to be dull indeed.
Bottom line: if you want to maximize the power of your aspects, maximize
their interest.
When you’re told you need to come up with an aspect, you might
experience brain freeze. If you feel stumped for decent ideas for aspects,
there’s a big section focusing on several methods for coming up with good
aspect ideas in Aspects and Fate Points.
If your character doesn’t have many connections to the other characters,
talk with the group about aspects that might tie your character in with
theirs. This is the explicit purpose of Phases Two and Three—but that
doesn’t mean you can’t do it elsewhere as well.
If you ultimately can’t break the block by any means, don’t force it—leave
it completely blank. You can always come back and fill out that aspect later,
or let it develop during play—as with the Quick Character Creation rules.
Ultimately, it’s much better to leave an aspect slot blank than to pick one
that isn’t inspiring and evocative to play. If you’re picking aspects you’re
not invested in, they’ll end up being noticeable drags on your fun.
Name
If you haven’t already, it’s time to give your character a name!

Lenny names his character “Landon,” a name that’s been in his head
for years. He used it years ago for another roleplaying game, and
decides to bring it back for nostalgia’s sake.
Lily names her character “Cynere,” which is Greek for “thistle.” She
sees Cynere as a beautiful plant, but one that’ll prick you if you get too
close. That fits nicely.
Ryan names his character “Zird,” because it just hit his mind as an
appropriately ridiculous wizardly name. Then he pauses for a moment
before adding “…the Arcane,” because he sees Zird as the sort of guy
who would demand to be known as “Zird the Arcane.”

The Phase Trio

Describe your character’s first adventure. Describe how you’ve crossed
paths with two other characters. Write down one aspect for each of
these three experiences.
Important: Before moving on to this step, you need to have figured out
your high concept, trouble, and name.
The three remaining aspects on your character are made in phases,
together called the phase trio. The first phase is about recent background:
something you did that’s interesting and adventurous. The second and third
are about how the other player characters got involved in that adventure,
and how you got involved in theirs.
This is an opportunity to tell a story about your characters. Each phase will
ask you to write down two things. Use the character creation worksheet (at
the back of this book, or at FateRPG.com) to write down those details.

First, write a summary of what happened in that phase. A couple

of sentences to a paragraph should suffice—you don’t want to
 establish too much detail up front, because you might have to adjust
details in later phases.
Second, write an aspect that reflects some part of that phase. The
aspect can cover the general vibe from the summary, or it can focus on
some piece of it that still resonates with your character in the present
day.

INTRO TO CHOOSING ASPECTS

A lot of character creation focuses on coming up with aspects—some are
called high concepts, some are called troubles, but they basically all work
the same way. Aspects are one of the most important parts of your
character, since they define who she is, and they provide ways for you to
generate fate points and to spend those fate points on bonuses. If you have
time, you really might want to read the whole chapter we have dedicated to
aspects before you go through the process of character creation.
In case you’re pressed for time, here are some guidelines for choosing
aspects.
Aspects which don’t help you tell a good story (by giving you success
when you need it and by drawing you into danger and action when the story
needs it) aren’t doing their job. The aspects which push you into conflict—
and help you excel once you’re there—will be among your best and most-
used.
Aspects need to be both useful and dangerous—allowing you to help shape
the story and generating lots of fate points—and they should never be
boring. The best aspect suggests both ways to use it and ways it can
complicate your situation. Aspects that cannot be used for either of those
are likely to be dull indeed.
Bottom line: if you want to maximize the power of your aspects, maximize
their interest.
 When you’re told you need to come up with an aspect, you might
experience brain freeze. If you feel stumped for decent ideas for aspects,
there’s a big section focusing on several methods for coming up with good
aspect ideas in Aspects and Fate Points.
If your character doesn’t have many connections to the other characters,
talk with the group about aspects that might tie your character in with
theirs. This is the explicit purpose of Phases Two and Three—but that
doesn’t mean you can’t do it elsewhere as well.
If you ultimately can’t break the block by any means, don’t force it—leave
it completely blank. You can always come back and fill out that aspect later,
or let it develop during play—as with the Quick Character Creation rules.
Ultimately, it’s much better to leave an aspect slot blank than to pick one
that isn’t inspiring and evocative to play. If you’re picking aspects you’re
not invested in, they’ll end up being noticeable drags on your fun.

Phase One: Your Adventure

The first phase is your character’s first true adventure—his first book,
episode, case, movie, whatever—starring him.
You need to think up and write down the basic details of this story for the
phase’s summary. The story doesn’t need to have a lot of detail—in fact, a
pair of sentences works pretty well—because your fellow players will add
in their own details to this past adventure in the next two phases (as you
will to theirs).
If you find yourself stuck, look to your character’s high concept and
trouble. Find a dilemma that has a chance of throwing those ideas into
focus. What problem do you get roped into because of your high concept or
trouble? How does the other aspect help or complicate your life?

Landon gets into a bar fight with some of the Scar Triad. He is robbed of his sword and beaten
severely. His life is saved by a veteran soldier named Old Finn. Finn helps to heal Landon, clean him
up, and enlist him in the town militia.
* I Owe Old Finn Everything

Ask yourself the following story questions. If you have trouble answering
them, talk to the other players and the GM for help.

Something bad happened. What was it? Did it happen to you, to

someone you cared about, or to someone that you were coerced into
helping?
What did you decide to do about the problem? What goal did you
pursue?
Who stood against you? Did you expect the opposition you got? Did
some of it come out of nowhere?
Did you win? Did you lose? Either way, what consequences arose
from the outcome?

Once you’ve come up with the adventure, write an aspect that relates to
some part of what happened.
A note on timing: Because two other characters will be involved in the
following phases, this adventure needs to be something that isn’t so early in
your character’s life that he hasn’t met the other protagonists yet. If one of
you has decided that you recently showed up in the story, then the
adventures involving that person happened recently. If some of you have
been friends (or old rivals!) for a long time, then those adventures can take
place further in the past. Your best bet is to not make these adventures
specific in time; you can figure out that part once you know who’s involved
in your story.

Lenny goes through Phase One. He looks at the story questions to help
him figure out the events of the phase, and decides on the following:
The bad thing was that Landon kept getting into scrapes at his local
tavern. He grew up with no sense of discipline or demeanor and
constantly picked fights with people larger and stronger than him.
One thug Landon insulted at the tavern was connected to the Scar
Triad, so some of the thug’s bandit buddies showed up and beat Landon
 to within an inch of his life.
His bleeding body was then found by a veteran soldier named Finn
who healed Landon’s wounds and encouraged him to join the town
militia where he could learn some discipline and fight with honor.
Now Lenny has to write down an aspect related to this story. He
decides to take I Owe Old Finn Everything as his aspect, because he
wants to keep the connection to Finn in his story and give Amanda a
cool NPC to play.

PHASES AND INDEX CARDS

In phase one, you each came up with your own adventure. In phases two
and three, you’re going to trade those stories around as other players’
characters get involved. Figuring out how your character fits into someone
else’s story can be hard to do if you’ve handed your character phase
worksheet to another player, so we recommend that you use index cards (or
whatever scraps of paper you have).
During the first phase—when you’re writing your adventure down on your
worksheet—take a card and write your character’s name and adventure
description. Then you’ll pass the card around during the second and third
phases so people can contribute to your story. That way, you’ll still have
your worksheet when you’re writing your contributions and aspects, and
other people will know what stories they’re supposed to hook into.

As with the high concept and trouble aspects, this (and the following
phases) are further opportunities to flesh out the setting.
Phase Two: Crossing Paths
In the next two phases, you’ll tie the group together by having other
characters contribute a minor, supporting role in your adventure, and vice
versa.
 Once everyone has their adventure written down (which is where our
index card suggestion comes in really handy), you’re ready for phase two.
You can pass to the left or right, or shuffle the stack and hand them out
randomly (trading with the person to your right until you each have one that
isn’t yours). However you decide to do it, every player should now be
holding someone else’s adventure.
Your character has a supporting role in the story you’re holding, which
you get to come up with right now. Briefly discuss it with the player whose
adventure it is and add a sentence or phrase to the summary to reflect your
character’s supporting role. Supporting roles come in three forms: they
complicate the adventure, solve a situation, or both.

Complicating the adventure: Your character managed to make some

part of the adventure uncertain (possibly because of an issue or trouble
aspect). Of course, since that happened in the past, we know you got
out of it all right (or mostly all right, as indicated by the aspect you
take). When describing this, don’t worry about how the situation is
resolved—leave that for someone else, or leave it open. Descriptions
like “Landon starts trouble when Cynere needs him quiet” or “Zird
gets captured by mysterious brigands” are enough to get some ideas
flowing.
Solving a situation: Your character somehow solves a complication
that the main character in the adventure had to deal with, or your
character aids the main character in the central conflict (which is an
opportunity to involve your high concept aspect). When describing
this, you don’t have to mention how the situation was created, just how
your character takes care of it. Descriptions like “Cynere holds off foes
to give Landon time to escape” or “Zird uses his arcane knowledge to
ask the ghosts for information” are enough to give us an idea of what
happens.
Complicating and solving: Here, your character either solves one
situation but creates another, or creates a situation but later solves a
different one. Mash up the two ideas, using the word “later” in
between them, such as: “Landon starts a fight with the Scar Triad
while Zird is trying to lay low. Later, he helps Zird by fighting off
undead while Zird’s casting a spell.”
The default phase trio prioritizes connecting the characters together in a shared backstory. We like
this, because it’s cooperative and gets you talking to one another. That’s not the only way to do it,
though. You could make any significant trifecta of backstory details into a phase trio. Your past, your
present, and your hope for the future is another set of trio elements. The Fate System Toolkit has
more examples of phase work.

The idea is to be a bit self-serving here. You want to put a little spotlight
on your character in order to figure out a good aspect from it: something
you’re known for, something you can do, something you own or have, and
someone you have a relationship with (for good or ill).
Finally, write the adventure idea and your character’s contribution down
on your phase worksheet. This is important, because your character gets an
aspect from the supporting role he played. The person whose adventure it is
should also write down the contribution, if there’s room on his sheet.

Lily has Landon’s starting adventure and needs to decide how she fits
into it.
She decides that Cynere helped solve the situation. After Landon ends
up in the militia, he still has a grudge against the Triad members who
ganged up on him. In fact, they robbed him of his heirloom sword in the
process. Hearing Landon’s tale of woe, Cynere agrees to help steal the
sword back.
She takes the aspect A Sucker for a Sob Story, to reflect the reason
why she got involved.

Landon gets into a bar fight with some of the Scar Triad. He is robbed of
his sword and beaten severely. His life is saved by a veteran soldier named
Old Finn. Finn helps to heal Landon, clean him up, and enlist him in the
town militia.

* I Owe Old Finn Everything

When Landon tells Cynere his story, she takes pity on him and decides to
help him recover his lost sword.

* A Sucker for a Sob Story

Phase Three: Crossing Paths Again

Once everyone’s done with phase two, you’ll trade adventures with
whatever method you chose before, so long as everyone has an adventure
that isn’t theirs or the one they just contributed to. Then you’re ready for
phase three, where you’ll contribute to this second adventure and determine
your next aspect. Follow the directions from phase two.

Lily gets Zird’s starting adventure, a pretty straightforward romp where

Zird battles his Collegia rivals to obtain a magical artifact and return
it to its rightful place.
She decides that she complicates that situation, by wanting the shiny
artifact for herself. Ryan already established that Zird gets the artifact
back to where it belongs, so she only holds it temporarily.
She decides to take I’ve Got Zird’s Back, as a way of reflecting her
willingness to stick her neck out for Zird—the group doesn’t know what
he did to earn such loyalty, but they figure they’ll find out eventually.

And with that, you have your five aspects and a good chunk of
background!

FEWER THAN THREE PLAYERS?

The phase trio assumes that you’ll have at least three players. If you have
only two, consider the following ideas:

Skip phase three and just make up another aspect, either now or in
play.
 Come up with a third, joint-story together, and write about how you
each feature in that one.
Have the GM also make a character. The GM won’t actually play
this character alongside the PCs, though—it should just be an NPC.
Such an NPC can be a great vehicle for kicking off a campaign—if a
friend they’re tied to during character creation mysteriously disappears
or even dies, that’s instant fuel for drama.

If you only have one player, skip phases two and three, leaving the aspects
blank to be filled in during play.
Cynere steals Zird’s artifact. Eventually it returns to Zird’s hands and the
two gain a mutual respect for each other.

* I’ve Got Zird’s Back

Skills
Pick and rate your character’s skills.
Once you have mapped out your character’s phases and chosen aspects,
it’s time to pick skills. You’ll find descriptions and details for each skill in
the Skills and Stunts chapter.
Your skills form a pyramid, with a single skill rated at Great (+4)—which
we’ll usually refer to as the peak skill—and more skills at each lower rating
on the ladder going down to Average (+1):

One Great (+4) skill

Two Good (+3) skills
Three Fair (+2) skills
Four Average (+1) skills

FOR VETERANS: WHY THE PYRAMID?

If you’ve played The Dresden Files RPG, you know that we use skill
columns for that instead of the pyramid.
In this build of Fate, we wanted character creation to be as quick and
accessible as possible, so we went with the pyramid as standard. If you
want to use the columns, go ahead—you get 20 skill points.
Skill columns didn’t completely go away. It’s just reserved for
advancement.

THE SKILL CAP

By default, we make Great (+4) the highest rated skill PCs start with. As
characters advance, they can improve beyond this cap, but it’s more
difficult than improving skills rated below the cap (see Major Milestones).
If you’re making a game about superheroes, pandimensional creatures,
mythic gods or other beyond-human characters, feel free to set the tip of the
skill pyramid—and thus the cap—at Superb (+5) or Fantastic (+6).
 The number of skills you get should be relative to the size of the skill list.
Our default skill list has 18 skills, and the Great pyramid gives you a rating
in 10 of them, which means every character has some capability in over half
of the total number of things you can do, and there’s room for six PCs to
peak (as in, to choose their three top skills) without overlap. You can tweak
this for individual games, especially if you adjust the skill cap. Just keep in
mind that bigger pyramids mean more overlap between characters, unless
your game has a longer skill list.

Mediocre (+0) is the default for any skill you do not take. Sometimes, a
skill will state that it’s unavailable if a character didn’t take it; in those
cases, it’s not even at Mediocre.

Ryan knows that Zird’s not like the other PCs in terms of skills, so he
looks to distance Zird from them as much as possible. The group has
decided that Zird’s magic is going to work off his Lore skill, so he’s
naturally going to focus on that.
He takes Lore as Zird’s peak skill, followed by Crafts and Rapport—
for a wizard, Zird considers himself a fairly social sort. Ryan takes
Athletics, Will, and Investigate because he figures Zird will need them
in his line of work, and a smattering of other skills either because
neither of his friends have them, or because he wants a positive score
in them when everyone’s separated. That ends up being Fight,
Resources, Contacts, and Notice.

Note: a few skills have special benefits, notably those skills that affect the
number of stress boxes and consequences you have available. If you know
you want a certain number of those, put those skills on the pyramid first.

Stunts and Refresh

Pick or invent three to five stunts. Determine how many fate points you
start play with.
Stunts change how skills work for your character. Picking and inventing
stunts are covered in the Skills and Stunts chapter.
You get three stunts for free, and you can take up to two more stunts at the
cost of lowering your refresh by one each. (The gist is this: the more cool
tricks you can do, the more you’ll need to accept compels to get fate
points.) Figuring out stunts can take a while, so you may want to pick one
for now and determine the rest of them during play.

Lily decides to take the Warmaster stunt as one of her freebies: +2 to

Fight rolls made to create an advantage against an opponent, provided
the opponent has a fighting style or weakness she can exploit.
For her remaining free stunts, she picks Second-Story Girl and
Danger Sense. You can see the write-ups for these on her character
sheet.

Adjusting Refresh
A player character in Fate starts with a refresh of 3. That means he’ll start
each session off with at least 3 fate points.
If you pick four stunts, your refresh is 2. If you pick five stunts, your
refresh is 1.
Note: some Fate games will change this setup. Regardless of how stunts
work in your game, you can never have a refresh lower than 1.

You can adjust these defaults if you want to, and give out more free stunts if you want the PCs to
have a lot of cool tricks and special bonuses. You can also change the default refresh rate—higher
refresh means that the PCs won’t need to take compels as often (think 4-color superhero comics), and
lower refresh means they’ll need to take several early in every session in order to have a decent
supply (think Die Hard). Also, the higher your refresh, the more likely it is that players will buy
stunts.
Stress and Consequences
Determine how much of a beating your character can take.
When Fate characters find themselves in harm’s way—a fairly common
occurrence when you’re highly competent, proactive, and facing drama at
every turn—they have two ways to stand their ground and stay on their feet:
stress and consequences.
The Conflicts section of the Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts chapter
fully explains what these mean and how they’re used. In brief, stress
represents the ephemeral toll of participating in a conflict, whereas
consequences are the lingering effects, and sometimes quite traumatic ones,
of taking harm.
Every PC has two different stress tracks. The physical stress track deals
with physical harm, and the mental stress track mitigates mental harm.
The more boxes in a stress track, the more resilient the character is in that
regard. By default, a character has two boxes in each stress track.
Every PC also has three consequence slots. One is mild, one is moderate,
and the last one is severe. Unlike stress, these aren’t classified as either
physical or mental—any of them can apply to any type of harm. As
mentioned above, consequences are the injuries and traumas you can’t just
shake off after the dust settles.
Certain skills and some stunts can add to these defaults. See the Skills and
Stunts chapter for more on that. For the sake of quick reference, these are
the skills in Hearts of Steel that alter stress and consequences:
Physique helps with physical stress, and Will helps with mental stress.
Either skill grants one more stress box of the respective type (physical or
mental) if rated at Average (+1) or Fair (+2), or two more stress boxes if
rated at Good (+3) or higher. At Superb (+5) or higher, they also grant an
additional mild consequence slot. Unlike the standard three, this
consequence slot is specifically restricted to either physical harm
(Physique) or mental harm (Will).
Note: if you’re playing in a setting with different skills, the skills that
affect stress boxes and consequences may change. Take a note of those skill
benefits when you’re making your character.
You can add stress tracks if the characters in your game suffer unique kinds of harm, such
as wealth stress in a very political game. Changing the number of boxes will slow down and
draw out conflicts, which may be more appropriate for high-octane, pulpy genres where characters
are expected to take a lot of hits.

Landon has Good (+3) Physique, which nets him two more physical
stress boxes. His Will, however, is only Average (+1), but that’s still
good enough for one more mental stress box.

Cynere’s Physique is Fair (+2), so she gets a third physical stress box.
But her mental stress track remains at two boxes, thanks to her
Mediocre (+0) Will.

Zird the Arcane, being a rather bookish type, has Mediocre (+0)
Physique, so he has only the default physical stress track of two boxes.
His Fair (+2) Will, though, is good for one bonus mental stress box.
 Because none of these characters has Physique or Will rated at
Superb (+5) or above, each has the default number of consequences:
one mild, one moderate, and one severe.

You’re All Set!

At the end of this process, you should have a character with:

A name
Five aspects, along with some backstory
One Great, two Good, three Fair, and four Average skills
Between three and five stunts
A mental and physical stress track of 2–4 boxes each
A refresh rate of 1–3 fate points

Now you’re ready to play!

GMs, see the Scenes, Sessions, and Scenarios chapter for advice on how to
take the aspects from the PCs’ sheets and from game creation and turn those
into thrilling scenarios for the players to experience.
Players, check out the next chapter for more on how to use your aspects, or
jump straight to Actions and Outcomes to learn more about how to use your
skills to do stuff.

Quick Character Creation

If you want to skip making a detailed character and just want to play, you
can leave most of the character blank and fill in as you play.
 At minimum, you need to have the following filled out to start:

High concept aspect

Best skill
Name

When it comes to your high concept, you can start off vague and refine the
aspect later. Guy with Sword is an okay high concept for this method, and
later you might discover something about your character that puts a spin on
it. When that happens, rewrite the aspect to reflect that spin.
You should know your best skill to start—that gives us further ideas about
your character. If you have any other thoughts on skills, either skills you’re
good at or skills you’re bad at, write those down. (Since you don’t normally
write down any skills you have at lower than Average (+1), just make a note
on your sheet about those skills you’re intentionally saying you don’t have.)
And, of course, you need a name! Maybe a first name is all you need for
the moment, or a nickname. (There’s also the trick of giving yourself a
name, only to later reveal that you’ve been hiding, are undercover, or have
amnesia, and write down what your real name is.)
Starting Play
With this method, you start with 3 refresh, so you’ll start playing with 3 fate
points.
After the first session is over, if you’re planning on playing your character
again, you should take time to fill in the rest of the aspects, skills, and
stunts.
Filling Aspects in Play
Unless you immediately have an idea for your trouble aspect, you’ll fill that
in later. With the other three aspects, since you’re skipping the Phase Trio,
you’ll just make up whatever aspect seems interesting to you at the
moment. Typically you’ll do this when you need an aspect on your
character to achieve something, or you want to turn a situation that’s
happening into something that’s compel-worthy.
 As with high concept, don’t stress about getting this aspect dead-on. After
the session’s over, take some time to look over and tweak the aspects
you’ve created on the fly.
Filling Skills in Play
At any point, if you are using a skill that isn’t on your character sheet, one
of two things happens: you’ll assume the skill is Mediocre (+0), or you’ll
write it down on one of your empty skill slots and roll it at that level. This
choice exists until all of your skill slots are filled in.
If you roll for a skill not on your sheet and choose to go with Mediocre
rather than write it down, you can later fill it in on your sheet as something
higher. For example, you might be called to roll Lore, and choose to roll it
at Mediocre. Later, you might be called to roll it again, and this time you
choose to fill it in at Fair (+2).
Likewise, if you roll well on a skill when you chose to take it at Mediocre,
maybe that’ll inspire you to take that skill later.
Since some skills have secondary benefits, notably adjusting your stress
track and consequences, you can fill those in when you want to declare your
character has such a benefit. Until then, you don’t have those benefits, as
you’re assumed to have that skill at Mediocre.
Filling Stunts in Play
You get three stunts for free, which you can fill in at any time. You can fill
in other stunts at any time, but you must pay a fate point for each one to do
so. That’s because your refresh tells you how many fate points you start the
game with, so by taking a stunt, you should have started with fewer.
If you’re out of fate points, but want to note down a stunt you have
because you’re suddenly struck with the idea, do so. But your character
doesn’t actually have it until you gain a fate point and spend it.
You’ll also need to reduce your refresh by one for the next session for each
extra stunt you take.
4
ASPECTS AND FATE POINTS
DEFINING ASPECTS
An aspect is a phrase that describes something unique or noteworthy about
whatever it’s attached to. They’re the primary way you spend and gain fate
points, and they influence the story by providing an opportunity for a
character to get a bonus, complicating a character’s life, or adding to another
character’s roll or passive opposition.

DEFINING FATE POINTS

GMs and players, you both have a pool of points called fate points you can
use to influence the game. You represent these with tokens, as we mentioned
in The Basics. Players, you start with a certain number of points every
scenario, equal to your character’s refresh. You’ll also reset to your refresh
rate if you ended a mid-scenario session with fewer fate points than your
rate. GMs, you get a budget of fate points to spend in every scene.
When your aspects come into play, you will usually spend or gain a fate
point.
TYPES OF ASPECTS
Every game of Fate has a few different kinds of aspects: game aspects,
character aspects, situation aspects, consequences, and boosts. They mainly
differ from one another in terms of what they’re attached to and how long
they last.
Game Aspects
Game aspects are permanent fixtures of the game, hence the name. While
they might change over time, they’re never going to go away. If you’ve
already gone through game creation, you’ve already defined these—the
current or impending issues that you came up with. They describe problems
or threats that exist in the world, which are going to be the basis for your
game’s story.
Everyone can invoke, compel, or create an advantage on a game aspect at
any time; they’re always there and available for anyone’s use.
Character Aspects
Character aspects are just as permanent, but smaller in scope, attached to an
individual PC or NPC. They describe a near-infinite number of things that
set the character apart, such as:

Significant personality traits or beliefs (Sucker for a Pretty

Face, Never Leave a Man Behind, The Only Good Tsyntavian Is a
Dead Tsyntavian).
The character’s background or profession (Educated at the Academy
of Blades, Born a Spacer, Cybernetic Street Thief).
An important possession or noticeable feature (My Father’s
Bloodstained Sword, Dressed to the Nines, Sharp Eyed Veteran).
Relationships to people and organizations (In League with the
Twisting Hand, The King’s Favor, Proud Member of the Company
of Lords).
Problems, goals, or issues the character is dealing with (A Price on My
Head, The King Must Die, Fear of Heights).
Titles, reputations, or obligations the character may have (Self-
Important Merchant Guildmaster, Silver-Tongued
Scoundrel, Honor-Bound to Avenge My Brother).

You can invoke or call for a compel on any of your character aspects
whenever they’re relevant. GMs, you can always propose compels to any
PC. Players, you can suggest compels for other people’s characters, but the
GM is always going to get the final say on whether or not it’s a valid
suggestion.
Situation Aspects
A situation aspect is temporary, intended to last only for a single scene or
until it no longer makes sense (but no longer than a session, at most).
Situation aspects can be attached to the environment the scene takes place in
—which affects everybody in the scene—but you can also attach them to
specific characters by targeting them when you create an advantage.
Situation aspects describe significant features of the circumstances the
characters are dealing with in a scene. That includes:
 Physical features of the environment (Dense Underbrush, Obscuring
Snowdrifts, Low Gravity Planet).
Positioning or placement (Sniper’s Perch, In the Trees, Backyard).
Immediate obstacles (Burning Barn, Tricky Lock, Yawning Chasm).
Contextual details that are likely to come into play (Disgruntled
Townsfolk, Security Cameras, Loud Machinery).
Sudden changes in a character’s status (Sand in the
Eyes, Disarmed, Cornered, Covered in Slime).

Who can use a situation aspect depends a lot on narrative context—

sometimes it’ll be very clear, and sometimes you’ll need to justify how
you’re using the aspect to make sense based on what’s happening in the
scene. GMs, you’re the final arbiter on what claims on an aspect are valid.
Sometimes situation aspects become obstacles that characters need
to overcome. Other times they give you justification to provide active
opposition against someone else’s action.
Consequences
A consequence is more permanent than a situation aspect, but not quite as
permanent as a character aspect. They’re a special kind of aspect you take in
order to avoid getting taken out in a conflict, and they describe lasting
injuries or problems that you take away from a conflict (Dislocated
Shoulder, Bloody Nose, Social Pariah).
Consequences stick around for a variable length of time, from a few scenes
to a scenario or two, depending on how severe they are. Because of their
negative phrasing, you’re likely to get compelled a lot when you have them,
and anyone who can justifiably benefit from the consequence can invoke it
or create an advantage on it.
Boosts
Boosts are a super-transient kind of aspect. You get a boost when you’re
trying to create an advantage but don’t succeed well enough, or as an added
benefit to succeeding especially well at an action. You get to invoke them for
free, but as soon as you do, the aspect goes away.
 If you want, you can also allow another character to invoke your boost, if
it’s relevant and could help them out.

WHAT ASPECTS DO
In Fate, aspects do two major things: they tell you what’s important about
the game, and they help you decide when to use the mechanics.
Importance
Your collection of game and character aspects tell you what you need to
focus on during your game. Think of them as a message from yourself to
yourself, a set of flags waving you towards the path with the most fun.
GMs, when you make scenarios for Fate, you’re going to use those aspects,
and the connections between aspects, to generate the problems your PCs are
going to solve. Players, your aspects are the reason why your PC stands out
from every other character who might have similar skills—lots of Fate
characters might have a high Fight skill, but only Landon is a Disciple of the
Ivory Shroud. When his path as a disciple comes into play, or the Ivory
Shroud takes action, it gives the game a personal touch that it wouldn’t have
had otherwise.
The game aspects do something similar on a larger scale—they tell us why
we care about playing this particular game in the first place, what makes it
concrete and compelling to us. We can all say, “Oh, we like space opera
games,” but until we drill down to the specifics of a universe where people
will do Anything for Survival, and where The Empire is Everywhere, we
don’t really have anything to attach our interest to.
Situation aspects make the moment-to-moment interactions of play
interesting by adding color and depth to what might otherwise be a boring
scene. A fight in a tavern is generic by nature—it could be any tavern,
anywhere. But when you add the aspect Huge Bronze Devil Statue to the
scene, and people bring it into play, it becomes “that fight we were in at the
Bronze Devil, when I smashed that guy’s head into the statue.” The unique
details add interest and investment.
Deciding When to Use Mechanics
Because aspects tell us what’s important, they also tell us when it’s most
appropriate to use the mechanics to deal with a situation, rather than just
letting people decide what happens just by describing what they do.
GMs, this comes up for you most often when you’re trying to figure out
whether to require a player to roll dice. If a player says, “I climb this ladder
and grab the idol,” and there’s nothing special about the ladder or the idol,
then there’s no real reason to require an overcome action to grab it. But if the
situation aspects tell you that the ladder is a Rotting Rope Ladder and the
idol is Protected by the Wrath of the Gods, then you suddenly have an
element of pressure and risk that makes it worth going to the dice for.
Players, this comes up for you most often when invoking your aspects and
considering compels. Your aspects highlight what makes your character an
individual, and you want to play that up, right? So when the opportunity
comes up to make your character more awesome by invoking, go for it!
When you see an opportunity to influence the story by suggesting a compel
for your character, do it! The game will be much richer for it as a whole.

MAKING A GOOD ASPECT

Because aspects are so important to the game, it’s important to make the best
aspects you can. So, how do you know what a good aspect is?
The best aspects are double-edged, say more than one thing, and keep
the phrasing simple.
Double-Edged
Players, good aspects offer a clear benefit to your character while also
providing opportunities to complicate their lives or be used to their
detriment.
An aspect with a double-edge is going to come up in play more often than a
mostly positive or negative one. You can use them frequently to be
awesome, and you’ll be able to accept more compels and gain more fate
points.
Try this as a litmus test—list two ways you might invoke the aspect, and
two ways someone else could invoke it or you could get a compel from it. If
the examples come easily to mind, great! If not, add more context to make
that aspect work or put that idea to the side and come up with a new aspect.

Let’s look at an aspect like Computer Genius. The benefits of having

this aspect are pretty obvious—any time you’re hacking or working with
technology, you could justify invoking it. But it doesn’t seem like there’s
a lot of room for that aspect to work against you. So, let’s think of a way
we can spice that up a bit.
What if we change that aspect to Nerdy McNerdson? That still
carries the connotations that would allow you to take advantage of it
while working with computers, but it adds a downside—you’re awkward
around people. This might mean that you could accept compels to
mangle a social situation, or someone might invoke your aspect when a
fascinating piece of equipment distracts you.

GMs, this is just as true of your game and situation aspects. Any feature of
a scene you call out should be something that either the PCs or their foes
could use in a dramatic fashion. Your game aspects do present problems, but
they also should present ways for the PCs to take advantage of the status
quo.
Say More Than One Thing
Earlier, we noted several things that a character aspect might describe:
personality traits, backgrounds, relationships, problems, possessions, and so
forth. The best aspects overlap across a few of those categories, because that
means you have more ways to bring them into play.

Let’s look at a simple aspect that a soldier might have: I Must Prove
Myself. You can invoke this whenever you’re trying to do something to
gain the approval of others or demonstrate your competence. Someone
might compel it to bait you into getting into a fight you want to avoid, or
 to accept a hardship for the sake of reputation. So we know it has a
double edge, so far so good.
That’ll work for a bit, but eventually this aspect will run out of steam.
It says just one thing about the character. Either you’re trying to prove
yourself, or this aspect isn’t going to come up.
Now tie that aspect in with a relationship to an organization: The
Legion Demands I Prove Myself. Your options open up a great deal.
Not only do you get all the content from before, but you’ve introduced
that the Legion can make demands of you, can get you into trouble by
doing things you get blamed for, or can send NPC superiors to make
your life difficult. You can also invoke the aspect when dealing with the
Legion, or with anyone else who might be affected by the Legion’s
reputation. Suddenly, that aspect has a lot more going on around it.

GMs, for your situation aspects, you don’t have to worry about this as
much, because they’re only intended to stick around for a scene. It’s much
more important for game and character aspects to suggest multiple contexts
for use.

* I Must Prove Myself

* The Legion Demands I Prove Myself

Clear Phrasing
Because aspects are phrases, they come with all the ambiguities of language.
If no one knows what your aspect means, it won’t get used enough.
That isn’t to say you have to avoid poetic or fanciful expression. Just a
Simple Farmboy isn’t quite as fetching as Child of Pastoral Bliss. If that’s
the tone your game is going for, feel free to indulge your linguistic desires.
However, don’t do this at the expense of clarity. Avoid metaphors and
implications, when you can get away with just saying what you mean. That
way, other people don’t have to stop and ask you during play if a certain
aspect would apply, or get bogged down in discussions about what it means.
 Let’s look at Memories, Wishes, and Regrets. There’s something
evocative about the phrase. It suggests a kind of melancholy about the
past. But as an aspect, I don’t really know what it’s supposed to do. How
does it help you? What are the memories of? What did you wish for?
Without some concrete idea of what the aspect’s referring to, invoking
and compelling it is pretty much impossible.
Suppose we talk about this some, and you specify that you were going
for this idea that your character was scarred from years spent in the
setting’s last great war. You killed people you didn’t want to kill, saw
things you didn’t want to see, and pretty much had all your hope of
returning to a normal life taken away.
I think this is all fantastic, and I suggest we call it Scars from the
War. Less poetic, maybe, but it directly references all the stuff you’re
talking about, and gives me ideas about people from your past I may be
able to bring back into your life.

If you’re wondering if your aspect is unclear, ask the people at the table
what they think it means.

* Memories, Wishes, and Regrets

* Scars from the War

IF YOU GET STUCK

Now you know what makes for a good aspect, but that doesn’t narrow down
your potential choices any—you still have a nearly infinite set of topics and
ideas to choose from.
If you’re still stuck about what to choose, here are some tips to make things
a little easier on you.
Sometimes, It’s Better Not to Choose
If you can’t think of an aspect that really grabs you and the other people at
the table, you’re better off leaving that space blank, or just keeping whatever
ideas you had scribbled in the margins. Sometimes it’s much easier to wait
for your character to get into play before you figure out how you want to
word a particular aspect.
So when in doubt, leave it blank. Maybe you have a general idea of the
aspect but don’t know how to phrase it, or maybe you just have no idea.
Don’t worry about it. There’s always room during the game to figure it out
as you go.
The same thing is true if you have more than one idea that seems juicy, but
they don’t work together and you don’t know which one to pick. Write them
all down in the margins and see which one seems to really sing in play. Then
fill the space in later, with the one that gets the most mileage.
Always Ask What Matters and Why
We said above that aspects tell you why something matters in the game and
why we care about it. This is your primary compass and guide to choosing
the best possible aspect. When in doubt, always ask: what do we really care
about here, and why?
The events of the phases should help you figure out what your aspect
should be. Don’t try to summarize the events of the phase or anything like
that with your aspect—remember, the point is to reveal something important
about the character. Again, ask yourself what really matters about the phase:

What was the outcome? Is that important?

Did the character develop any important relationships or connections
during this phase?
Does the phase help establish anything important about the character’s
personality or beliefs?
Did the phase give the character a reputation?
Did the phase create a problem for the character in the game world?

Assume that each question ends with “for good or ill”—these features,
relationships, and reputations aren’t necessarily going to be positive, after
all. Developing a relationship with a nemesis is as juicy as developing one
with your best friend.
If there’s more than one option, poll the other players and GM to see what
they find interesting. Remember, you should all be helping each other out—
the game works best if everyone’s a fan of what everyone else is doing.

During Cynere’s phase three, Lily states that she complicated Zird’s
story by showing up at an opportune moment and stealing the artifact
that Zird stole from his rivals. Eventually the artifact returns to Zird’s
hands.
She’s trying to tease out what the best aspect would be, and she doesn’t
have a whole lot of information to go on. Going through the questions
above, we see a lot of potential options—she showed off her
underhandedness, she definitely suggested a relationship with Zird of
some kind, and Zird’s rivals might now have a beef with her as well.
Lily polls the rest of the group, and after some talking, everyone seems
to be pretty enthused about Cynere having some kind of aspected
connection to Zird—they did all grow up in the same village, after all.
She decides on I’ve Got Zird’s Back, because it’s specific enough to be
invoked and compelled, but leaves room for development later on in the
game.

Vary It Up
You don’t want all your aspects to describe the same kind of thing. Five
relationships means that you can’t use your aspects unless one of them is in
play, but five personality traits means that you have no connection to the
game world. If you’re stuck on what to pick for an aspect, looking at what
kinds of things your other aspects describe may help you figure out which
way to go for the current phase.
 Lenny ends up with Disciple of the Ivory Shroud and The Manners of
a Goat as Landon’s high concept and trouble. So far, this is a pretty
straightforward character—a violent type whose mouth and demeanor
are always getting him into trouble.
Lenny does his phase one and explains to us that Landon was a
miscreant and street rat that grew up practically as an orphan—his
parents were around, but never really paid too much attention to him or
spent effort reining him in. He eventually decided to enlist in the town
militia after someone saved him from a clobbering in a bar fight and
suggested he do something worthwhile with his life.
Amanda asks him what really matters about this phase, and Lenny
ponders a bit. Landon’s first two aspects are heavy on personal
description—he doesn’t have a lot of relationships yet. So Lenny focuses
on that and decides he wants a connection to the guy who pulled him
into the militia.
They end up naming that guy Old Finn, Landon ends up with the
aspect I Owe Old Finn Everything, and Amanda now has a new NPC
to play with.

Let Your Friends Decide

We’ve talked before about the fact that the game works best if everyone is
invested in what everyone else is doing—collaboration is at the heart of the
game, and we’ll probably say it a lot more times before the end of this book.
You always have the option, especially with aspects, of simply asking the
GM and other players to come up with something on your behalf. Pitch them
the events of the phase, and ask them the same questions they’re going to be
asking of you. What matters to them? What are they excited about? Do they
have suggestions about how to make the events of the phase more dramatic
or intense? What aspect do they think would be most interesting or
appropriate?
You have the final decision as to what your character’s aspects are, so don’t
look at it as giving up control. Look at it as asking your ever-important fan
club and audience what they want to see, and using their suggestions to
jumpstart your own train of thought. If everyone has a bit of input on
everyone else’s characters, the game will benefit from that sense of mutual
investment.

INVOKING ASPECTS
The primary way you’re going to use aspects in a game of Fate is
to invoke them. If you’re in a situation where an aspect is beneficial to your
character somehow, you can invoke it.
In order to invoke an aspect, explain why the aspect is relevant, spend a fate
point, and you can choose one of these benefits:

Take a +2 on your current skill roll after you’ve rolled the dice.
Reroll all your dice.
Pass a +2 benefit to another character’s roll, if it’s reasonable that the
aspect you’re invoking would be able to help.
Add +2 to any source of passive opposition, if it’s reasonable that the
aspect you’re invoking could contribute to making things more
difficult. You can also use this to create passive opposition at Fair (+2)
if there wasn’t going to be any.

THE REROLL VS. THE +2

Rerolling the dice is a little riskier than just getting the +2 bonus, but has the
potential for greater benefit. We recommend you reserve this option for
when you’ve rolled a –3 or a –4 on the dice, to maximize the chance that
you’ll get a beneficial result from rerolling. The odds are better that way.

It doesn’t matter when you invoke the aspect, but usually it’s best to wait
until after you’ve rolled the dice to see if you’re going to need the benefit.
You can invoke multiple aspects on a single roll, but youcannot invoke the
same aspect multiple times on a single roll. So if your reroll doesn’t help you
enough, you’ll have to pick another aspect (and spend another fate point) for
a second reroll or that +2.
The group has to buy into the relevance of a particular aspect when you
invoke it; GMs, you’re the final arbiter on this one. The use of an aspect
should make sense, or you should be able to creatively narrate your way into
ensuring it makes sense.
Precisely how you do this is up to you. Sometimes, it makes so much sense
to use a particular aspect that you can just hold up the fate point and name it.
Or you might need to embellish your character’s action a little more so that
everyone understands where you’re coming from. (That’s why we
recommend making sure that you’re on the same page with the group as to
what each of your aspects means—it makes it easier to justify bringing it
into play.)

Landon is trying to win a contest of wits with a rival in a tavern, and the
skill they’re currently using is Rapport, which they’ve described as
“attempting to shame each other as politely as possible.”
Lenny rolls badly on one of the contest exchanges, and says, “I want to
invoke The Manners of a Goat.” Amanda gives him a skeptical look
and replies, “What happened to ‘as politely as possible’?”
Lenny says, “Well, what I was thinking about doing was making some
kind of ribald but not vulgar innuendo about the guy’s parentage, in
 order to get the crowd at the bar to laugh at him, perhaps despite
themselves. I figure that bawdy put-downs are precisely my cup of tea.”
Amanda nods and says, “Okay, I’ll take that.”
Lenny spends the fate point.

If you want to see more examples of invoking an aspect, we’ve scattered

them throughout the book—they’re so integral to how Fate works that they
naturally end up in many examples of play. Check out here, here, and here.
If the aspect you invoke is on someone else’s character sheet, including
situation aspects attached to them, you give them the fate point you spent.
They don’t actually get to use it until after the end of the scene, though.

THE ELLIPSIS TRICK

If you want an easy way to ensure you have room to incorporate aspects into
a roll, try narrating your action with an ellipsis at the end (“...”), and then
finish the action with the aspect you want to invoke. Like this:
Lily says, “Okay, so I raise my sword up and...” (rolls dice, hates the result)
“...and it looks like I’m going to miss at first, but it turns out to be a quick
feint-and-slash, a classic move from the Infamous Girl with Sword”
(spends the fate point).
Ryan says, “So I’m trying to decipher the runes in the book and...” (rolls
the dice, hates the result) “...and If I Haven’t Been There, I’ve Read About
It...” (spends a fate point) “...and I easily start rambling about their origin.”

Free Invocations
You don’t always have to pay a fate point to invoke an aspect—sometimes
it’s free.
When you succeed at creating an advantage, you “stick” a free invocation
onto an aspect. If you succeed with style, you get two invocations. Some of
the other actions also give you free boosts.
 You also get to stick a free invocation on any consequences you inflict in a
conflict.
Free invocations work like normal ones except in two ways: no fate points
are exchanged, and you can stack them with a normal invocation for a better
bonus. So you can use a free invocation and pay a fate point on the same
aspect to get a +4 bonus instead of a +2, two rerolls instead of one, or you
can add +4 to another character’s roll or increase passive opposition by +4.
Or you could split the benefits, getting a reroll and a +2 bonus. You can also
stack multiple free invocations together.
After you’ve used your free invocation, if the aspect in question is still
around, you can keep invoking it by spending fate points.

Cynere succeeds on an attack, and causes her opponent to take the Cut
Across the Gut consequence. On the next exchange, she attacks him
again, and she can invoke that for free because she put it there, giving
her a +2 or a reroll.

If you want, you can pass your free invocation to another character. That
allows you to get some teamwork going between you and a buddy. This is
really useful in a conflict if you want to set someone up for a big blow—
have everyone create an advantage and pass their free invocations onto one
person, then that person stacks all of them up at once for a huge bonus.

FOR VETERANS
In other Fate games, free invocations were called “tagging.” We thought this
was one bit of jargon too many. You can still call it that if you want—
whatever helps you and your table understand the rule.

COMPELLING ASPECTS
The other way you use aspects in the game is called a compel. If you’re in a
situation where having or being around a certain aspect means your
character’s life is more dramatic or complicated, someone can compel the
aspect. That aspect can be on your character, the scene, location, game, or
anywhere else that’s currently in play. We’ll start with character aspects, and
then talk about situation aspects in a bit.
In order to compel an aspect, explain why the aspect is relevant, and then
make an offer as to what the complication is. You can negotiate the terms of
the complication a bit, until you reach a reasonable consensus. Whoever is
getting compelled then has two options:

Accept the complication and receive a fate point

Pay a fate point to prevent the complication from happening

The complication from a compel occurs regardless of anyone’s efforts—

once you’ve made a deal and taken the fate point, you can’t use your skills
or anything else to mitigate the situation. You have to deal with the new
story developments that arise from the complication.
If you prevent the complication from happening, then you and the group
describe how you avoid it. Sometimes it just means that you agree that the
event never happened in the first place, and sometimes it means narrating
your character doing something proactive. Whatever you need to do in order
to make it make sense works fine, as long as the group is okay with it.
GMs, you’re the final arbiter here, as always—not just on how the result of
a compel plays out, but on whether or not a compel is valid in the first place.
Use the same judgment you apply to an invocation—it should make
instinctive sense, or require only a small amount of explanation, that a
complication might arise from the aspect.
Finally, and this is very important: if a player wants to compel another
character, it costs a fate point to propose the complication. The GM can
always compel for free, and any player can propose a compel on his or her
own character for free.

FOR VETERANS
In other Fate games, you might have seen player-driven compels referred to
as “invoking for effect.” We thought it was clearer to just call it a compel, no
matter who initiates it.
Types of Compels
There are two major categories for what a compel looks like in the
game: events and decisions. These are tools to help you figure out what a
compel should look like and help break any mental blocks.
Events
An event-based compel happens to the character in spite of herself, when the
world around her responds to a certain aspect in a certain way and creates a
complicating circumstance. It looks like this:

You have ____ aspect and are in ____ situation, so it makes sense that,
unfortunately, ____ would happen to you. Damn your luck.

Here are a few:

Cynere has Infamous Girl with Sword while covertly attending a

gladiatorial contest, so it makes sense that, unfortunately, an admirer
would recognize her in the stands and make a huge fuss, turning all eyes
in the arena her way. Damn her luck.
Landon has I Owe Old Finn Everything and is returning to his home
village after hearing it was sacked by barbarians, so it makes sense
that, unfortunately, Old Finn was captured and taken far into the
mountains with their war party. Damn his luck.
Zird has Rivals in the Collegia Arcana and is attempting to get an
audience with their Inner Council, so it makes sense that, unfortunately,
his rivals force the Collegia to demand he provide a detailed account of
his highly-coveted research to re-establish his relationship with the
organization. Damn his luck.

As you’ll see with decision-based compels, the real mileage is in the

complication itself. Without that, you don’t really have anything worth
focusing on—the fact that the PCs continually have complicated and
dramatic things happen to them is, well, exactly what makes them PCs in the
first place.
GMs, event-based compels are your opportunity to party. You’re expected
to control the world around the PCs, so having that world react to them in an
unexpected way is pretty much part and parcel of your job description.
Players, event-based compels are great for you. You get rewarded simply
by being there—how much more awesome can you get? You might have a
difficult time justifying an event-based compel yourself, as it requires you to
assert control over an element of the game that you typically aren’t in charge
of. Feel free to propose an event-based compel, but remember that the GM
has the final say on controlling the game world and may veto you if she’s got
something else in mind.
Decisions
A decision is a kind of compel that is internal to the character. It happens
because of a decision he makes, hence the name. It looks like this:

You have ____ aspect in ____ situation, so it makes sense that you’d
decide to ____. This goes wrong when ____ happens.

Here are a few:

Landon has The Manners of a Goat while trying to impress a dignitary

at a royal ball, so it makes sense that he’d decide to share some boorish,
raunchy humor and/or commentary. This goes wrong when he discovers
she’s the princess of this country, and his offense is tantamount to a
crime. (This example is actually here.)
Cynere has Tempted by Shiny Things while touring an ancient
museum, so it makes sense that she’d decide to, ahem, liberate a couple
of baubles for her personal collection. This goes wrong when she
discovers that the artifacts are cursed, and she’s now beholden to the
Keepers of the Museum if she wants the curse lifted.
Zird has Not the Face! when he gets challenged to a barfight, so it
makes sense that he’d decide to back down from the challenge. This
 goes wrong when the rest of the patrons decide he’s a coward and throw
him unceremoniously out into the street.

So the real dramatic impact from these kinds of compels is not what
decision the character makes, most of the time—it’s how things go wrong.
Before something goes wrong, the first sentence could be a prelude to
making a skill roll or simply a matter of roleplaying. The complication that
the decision creates is really what makes it a compel.

GMs, remember that a player is ultimately responsible for everything that

the character says and does. you can offer decision-based compels, but if the
player doesn’t feel like the decision is one that the character would make,
don’t force the issue by charging a fate point. instead, negotiate the terms of
the compel until you find a decision the player is comfortable making, and a
complication that chains from that decision instead. if you can’t agree on
something, drop it.

The decision part should be very self-evident, and something a player

might have been thinking about doing anyway. The same goes for players
trying to compel NPCs or each other’s PCs—make sure you have a strong
mutual understanding of what that NPC or other character might do before
proposing the compel.
Players, if you need fate points, this is a really good way of getting them. If
you propose a decision-based compel for your character to the GM, then
what you’re basically asking is for something you’re about to do to go
wrong somehow. You don’t even have to have a complication in mind—
simply signaling the GM should be enough to start a conversation. GMs, as
long as the compel isn’t weak (as in, as long as there’s a good, juicy
complication), you should go with this. If the compel is weak, poll the rest of
the group for ideas until something more substantial sticks.

If you offer a decision-based compel, and no one can agree on what the
decision part should be, it shouldn’t cost a fate point to counter—just drop it.
Countering a decision-based compel should only mean that the “what goes
wrong” part doesn’t happen.
GMs, remember that a player is ultimately responsible for everything that
the character says and does. You can offer decision-based compels, but if the
player doesn’t feel like the decision is one that the character would make,
don’t force the issue by charging a fate point. Instead, negotiate the terms of
the compel until you find a decision the player is comfortable making, and a
complication that chains from that decision instead. If you can’t agree on
something, drop it.

Retroactive Compels
Sometimes, you’ll notice during the game that you’ve fulfilled the criteria
for a compel without a fate point getting awarded. You’ve played your
aspects to the hilt and gotten yourself into all kinds of trouble, or you’ve
narrated crazy and dramatic stuff happening to a character related to their
aspects just out of reflex.
Anyone who realizes this in play can mention it, and the fate point can be
awarded retroactively, treating it like a compel after the fact. GMs, you’re
the final arbiter. It should be pretty obvious when something like this occurs,
though—just look at the guidelines for event and decision compels above,
and see if you can summarize what happened in the game according to those
guidelines. If you can, award a fate point.
Compelling with Situation Aspects
Just like with every other kind of aspect use, you can use situation aspects
(and by extension, game aspects) for compels. Because situation aspects are
usually external to characters, you’re almost always looking at event-based
compels rather than decision-based ones. The character or characters
affected get a fate point for the compel.
Here are a few examples:
 Because the warehouse is On Fire, and the player characters are
trapped in the middle of it, it makes sense that, unfortunately, the ruffian
they’re chasing can get away in the confusion. Damn their luck.
The manor house Cynere is searching through is Littered with Debris,
so it makes sense that, unfortunately, the city guard is going to arrive
there before she finds what she’s looking for, which will leave her with a
lot of explaining to do. Damn her luck.
The ancient library Zird is currently working in has Layers of
Dust everywhere, so it makes sense that, unfortunately, while he might
be able to find the information he’s looking for, the bounty hunter
pursuing him will know that he was here. Damn his luck.

USING ASPECTS FOR ROLEPLAYING

Finally, aspects have a passive use that you can draw on in almost every
instance of play. Players, you can use them as a guide to roleplaying your
character. This may seem self-evident, but we figured we’d call it out
anyway—the aspects on your character sheet are true of your character at all
times, not just when they’re invoked or compelled.
Think of your collection of aspects as an oracle—like a tarot spread or tea
leaves. They give you a big picture of what your character’s about, and they
can reveal interesting implications if you read between the lines. If you’re
wondering what your character might do in a certain situation, look at your
aspects. What do they say about your character’s personality, goals, and
desires? Are there any clues in what your aspects say that might suggest a
course of action? Once you find that suggestion, go for it.
Playing to your aspects also has another benefit: you’re feeding the GM
ideas for compels. You’re already bringing your aspects into the game, so all
she has to do is offer you complications and you’re good to go.
GMs, you’ll use your NPCs aspects the same way, but you get an additional
way of “reading the tea leaves”—you can also use them as a way of figuring
out how the world reacts to the characters. Does someone have the
aspect Strongest Man in the World? That’s a reputation that might precede
that character, one that people might know about and react to. People might
crowd in to see that character when he’s passing through.
Also, it suggests something about that character’s physical size and build.
You know that most people are going to give that character a wide berth in a
crowded space, might be naturally intimidated, or might be overly
aggressive or brusque as overcompensation for being intimidated.
But no one’s going to ignore that character. Inserting these kinds of aspect-
related details into your narration can help your game seem more vivid and
consistent, even when you’re not shuffling fate points around.

In a session of Hearts of Steel, Landon comes back to his home village

of Vinfeld, only to find that it has been sacked by barbarians and that
his mentor, Old Finn, has been kidnapped.
Amanda tells him that the other villagers are overjoyed that he’s come
back, and in a scene where he talks to the village elders, she also says
that they want him to stay and help with rebuilding the town.
Lenny looks at some of the aspects on Landon’s sheet: Disciple of the
Ivory Shroud, I Owe Old Finn Everything, The Manners of a Goat,
and Smashing is Always an Option. His read of those aspects is that
they show Landon as being very straightforward (to the point of
rudeness), aggressive, inclined to solve problems through violence, and
very loyal to those he considers his own.
Because of his aspects, there’s not a prayer’s chance in hell Landon’s
going to stay and help the town when Finn might still be alive. And not
only that, he’s going to tell the elders exactly how he feels about the fact
that they didn’t send a rescue party after Old Finn themselves. Probably
he uses words like “spineless” and “worthless.” You know, words that
really make people sympathize with you.
Amanda says that he enrages the elders so much that they’re
pondering banishing him from town for his insolence. She holds up a
 fate point and grins, indicating a compel—his manners are going to get
him kicked out of Vinfeld.
Lenny takes it, accepting that complication. “Screw them anyway,” he
says. “I’ll rescue Finn without their help.”

REMOVING OR CHANGING AN ASPECT

Game and character aspects change through advancement. See
the Milestones section in The Long Game for that.
If you want to get rid of a situation aspect, you can do it in one of two
ways: roll an overcome action specifically for the purpose of getting rid of
the aspect, or roll some other kind of action that would make the aspect
make no sense if you succeed. (For example, if you’re Grappled, you could
try to sprint away. If you succeed, it wouldn’t make sense for you to
be Grappled anymore, so you’d also get rid of that aspect.)
If a character can interfere with your action, they get to roll active
opposition against you as per normal. Otherwise, GMs, it’s your job to set
passive opposition or just allow the player to get rid of the aspect without a
roll, if there’s nothing risky or interesting in the way.
Finally, if at any point it simply makes no sense for a situation aspect to be
in play, get rid of it.

CREATING AND DISCOVERING NEW

ASPECTS IN PLAY
In addition to your character aspects, game aspects, and the situation aspects
that the GM presents, you have the ability to create, discover, or gain access
to other aspects as you play.
For the most part, you’ll use the create an advantage action to make new
aspects. When you describe the action that gives you an advantage, the
context should tell you if it requires a new aspect or if it derives from an
existing one. If you’re bringing a new circumstance into play—like throwing
sand in someone’s eyes—you’re indicating that you need a new situation
aspect.
 With some skills, it’s going to make more sense to stick an advantage to an
aspect that’s already on some other character’s sheet. In this case, the PC or
NPC you’re targeting would provide active opposition to keep you from
being able to use that aspect.
If you’re not looking for a free invocation, and you just think it’d make
sense if there were a particular situation aspect in play, you don’t need to
roll the dice or anything to make new aspects—just suggest them, and if
the group thinks they’re interesting, write them down.

FOR THE GM: EXTREMELY POWERFUL NINJA GM TRICK

So, if you don’t have any aspects made up for a scene or an NPC, just ask
the players what kinds of aspects they’re looking for when they roll to create
an advantage. If they tie or succeed, just write down something similar to
what they were looking for and say they were right. If they fail, write it
down anyway, or write another aspect down that’s not advantageous to them,
so as to contrast with their expectations.

Secret or Hidden Aspects

Some skills also let you use the create an advantage action to reveal aspects
that are hidden, either on NPCs or environments—in this case, the GM
simply tells you what the aspect is if you get a tie or better on the roll. You
can use this to “fish” for aspects if you’re not precisely sure what to look for
—doing well on the roll is sufficient justification for being able to find
something advantage-worthy.
Generally speaking, we assume that most of the aspects in play are public
knowledge for the players. The PCs’ character sheets are sitting on the table,
and probably the main and supporting NPCs are as well. That doesn’t always
mean the characters know about those aspects, but that’s one of the reasons
why the create an advantage action exists—to help you justify how a
character learns about other characters.
Also, remember that aspects can help deepen the story only if you get to
use them—aspects that are never discovered might as well never have
existed in the first place. So most of the time, the players should always
know what aspects are available for their use, and if there’s a question as to
whether or not the character knows, use the dice to help you decide.
Finally, GMs, we know that sometimes you’re going to want to keep an
NPC’s aspects secret, or not reveal certain situation aspects right away,
because you’re trying to build tension in the story. If the PCs are
investigating a series of murders, you don’t exactly want the culprit to
have Sociopathic Serial Murderer sitting on an index card for the PCs to
see at the beginning of the adventure.
In those cases, we recommend you don’t make an aspect directly out of
whatever fact you’re trying to keep secret. Instead, make the aspect a detail
that makes sense in context after the secret is revealed.

Amanda is making an NPC who’s secretly a vampire, the main bad guy
in the scenario she’s planning. He’s also a constable in the town the PCs
are going to, so she doesn’t want to give things away too easily.
Instead of making a Secretly a Vampire aspect, she decides to make a
few personal details instead: Inveterate Night Owl, Tougher Than He
Looks, and Wheels Within Wheels. If the PCs discover a couple of
these, or see them on the table, they might start to suspect the NPC, but
it’s not going to ruin the mystery of the scenario right away.

THE FATE POINT ECONOMY

For the most part, the use of aspects revolves around fate points. You
indicate your supply of fate points by using tokens, such as poker chips,
glass beads, or other markers.
Ideally, you want a consistent ebb and flow of fate points going on
throughout your sessions. Players spend them in order to be awesome in a
crucial moment, and they get them back when their lives get dramatic and
complicated. So if your fate points are flowing the way they’re supposed to,
you’ll end up with these cycles of triumphs and setbacks that make for a fun
and interesting story.
Here’s how that works.
Refresh
Each player gets a number of fate points to start each session off with. That
total is called the refresh rate. The refresh for a default, starting character is
three fate points, but you can opt to spend up to two of your refresh to buy
additional stunts.
You get additional refresh as your character achieves a major
milestone (which we discuss in The Long Game), which you can spend on
getting more stunts or keep in order to increase your starting fate point total.
You can never have less than one refresh at any time.
You might end a session of play with more fate points than your actual
refresh. If that happens, you don’t lose the additional points when you start
the next session, but you don’t gain any either. At the start of a new scenario,
you reset your fate points to your refresh rate no matter what.

STUNTS AND REFRESH

Three Stunts = Refresh of 3

Four Stunts = Refresh of 2
Five Stunts = Refresh of 1

Spending Fate Points

You spend fate points in any of the following ways:

Invoke an Aspect: Invoking an aspect costs you one fate point, unless
the invocation is free.
Power a Stunt: Some stunts are very potent, and as such, cost a fate
point in order to activate.
Refuse a Compel: Once a compel is proposed, you can pay a fate point
to avoid the complication associated with it.
Declare a Story Detail: To add something to the narrative based on one
of your aspects, spend a fate point.

Earning Fate Points

You earn fate points in any of the following ways:

Accept a Compel: You get a fate point when you agree to the
complication associated with a compel. As we said above, this may
sometimes happen retroactively if the circumstances warrant.
Have Your Aspects Invoked Against You: If someone pays a fate
point to invoke an aspect attached to your character, you gain their fate
point at the end of the scene. This includes advantages created on your
character, as well as consequences.
Concede in a Conflict: You receive one fate point for conceding in a
conflict, as well as an additional fate point for each consequence that
you’ve received in that conflict. (This isn’t the same as being taken out
in a conflict, by the way, but we’ll get into that later.)

The GM and Fate Points

GMs, you also get to use fate points, but the rules are a little bit different
than the rules for players.
When you award players fate points for compels or concession, they come
out of an unlimited pool you have for doing so—you don’t have to worry
about running out of fate points to award, and you always get to compel for
free.
The NPCs under your control are not so lucky. They have a limited pool of
fate points you get to use on their behalf. Whenever a scene starts, you get
one fate point for every PC in that scene. You can use these points on
behalf of any NPC you want, but you can get more in that scene if they take
a compel, like PCs do.
You reset to your default total, one per PC, at the beginning of every
scene.
There are two exceptions:

You accepted a compel that effectively ended the last scene or starts the
next one. If that happens, take an extra fate point in the next scene.
You conceded a conflict to the PCs in the previous scene. If that
happens, take the fate points you’d normally get for the concession into
the next scene and add them to the default total.
 If the immediate next scene doesn’t present a significant interaction with
NPCs, you can save these extra points until the next scene that does.

Amanda is running a climactic conflict, where the PCs are battling a

nemesis they’ve been trying to subdue for several scenarios now. Here
are the characters in the scene:

Barathar, Smuggler Queen of the Sindral Reach, a main NPC

Og the Strong, one of her chief enforcers, a supporting NPC
Teran the Swift, an old nemesis of the PCs hired to do Barathar’s
bidding, a supporting NPC
Two nameless NPC sergeants
Landon
Cynere
Zird the Arcane

Her total fate point pool for this scene is 3 fate points—one each for
Landon, Cynere, and Zird. If Zird had been elsewhere (say, doing some
arcane research), Amanda would’ve gotten two fate points, one for
Landon and one for Cynere.
Late in the conflict, Barathar is forced to concede so she can get away
with her skin intact. She has taken two consequences in the conflict,
meaning that she gets three fate points for conceding. Those three fate
points carry over to the next scene.
5
SKILLS AND STUNTS
DEFINING SKILLS
A skill is a word that describes a broad family of competency at something
—such as Athletics, Fight, or Deceive—which your character might have
gained through innate talent, training, or years of trial and error. Skills are
the basis for everything your character actually does in the game that
involves challenge and chance (and dice).
Skills are rated on the adjective ladder. The higher the rating, the better
your character is at the skill. Taken together, your list of skills gives you a
picture of that character’s potential for action at a glance—what you’re best
at, what you’re okay at, and what you’re not so good at.
We define skills in two ways in Fate—in terms of the game actions that
you can do with them, and the context in which you can use them. There are
only a handful of basic game actions, but the number of potential contexts
is infinite.
The Basic Game Actions
We cover these in more detail in Actions and Outcomes, but here’s a quick
reference so that you don’t have to flip all the way over there right now.

Overcome: True to its name, you tackle some kind of challenge,

engaging task, or hindrance related to your skill.

Create an Advantage: Whether you’re discovering something that

already exists about an opponent or creating a situation that helps you
succeed, creating advantages allows you to discover and create aspects, and
lets you get free invocations of them.
 Attack: You try to harm someone in a conflict. That harm may be
physical, mental, emotional, or social in nature.

Defend: You try to keep someone from harming you, getting past
you, or creating an advantage to use against you.
There are also some special effects that some skills perform, such as
giving you additional stress boxes for a conflict. See Physique and Will in
the default skill list below for examples.
Even though there are only four actions that all skills adhere to, the skill in
question lends context to the action. For example, both Burglary and Crafts
allow you to create an advantage, but only under very different contexts—
Burglary allows you to do it when you’re casing a place you’re about to
break into, and Crafts allows you to do it when you’re examining a piece of
machinery. The different skills let you differentiate the PCs’ abilities from
one another a bit, allowing each person to have a unique contribution to the
game.

DEFINING STUNTS
A stunt is a special trait your character has that changes the way a skill
works for you. Stunts indicate some special, privileged way a character uses
a skill that is unique to whoever has that stunt, which is a pretty common
trope in a lot of settings—special or elite training, exceptional talents, the
mark of destiny, genetic alteration, innate coolness, and a myriad of other
reasons all explain why some people get more out of their skills than others
do.
Unlike skills, which are about the sort of things anyone can do in your
campaign, stunts are about individual characters. For that reason, the next
several pages are about how to make your own stunts, but we’ll also have
example stunts listed under each skill in the Default Skill List.
Having stunts in your game allows you to differentiate characters that have
the same skills as one another.
 Landon and Cynere both have a high Fight skill, but Cynere also has
the Warmaster stunt, which makes her better at creating advantages
with the skill. This differentiates the two characters a great deal—
Cynere has a unique capability to analyze and understand her enemies’
weaknesses in a way Landon doesn’t.
One might imagine Cynere starting a fight by testing an enemy with
moves and jabs, carefully assessing her opponent’s limits before
moving in for a decisive strike, whereas Landon is happy to wade in
and chop away.

You can also use this to set apart a certain set of abilities as belonging to a
dedicated few, if that’s something your setting needs. For example, in a
contemporary setting, you might feel that there shouldn’t be a base skill that
allows just anyone to have medical training. (Unless, of course, it’s a game
about doctors.) However, as a stunt for another, more general knowledge
skill (like Lore), you can have one character be “the doctor” if that’s what
the player wants.
Stunts and Refresh
Taking a new stunt beyond the first three reduces your
character’s refresh rate by one.

BUILDING STUNTS
In Fate, we allow players to take stunts during character creation, or leave
open the option to take stunts during play. There are a number of example
stunts listed under each skill entry below. These are not a hard and fast list;
rather, they’re there to show you how to create your own (though you can
certainly lift directly from the book if you’d like to).
We also have a list of all the things that stunts can potentially do, to help
you when you’re coming up with them for your game. When in doubt, look
at the listed stunts for guidance, as well as those the example
characters have.
GMs, if you have some particular set of abilities you want to reinforce as being important or unique
to your game, you’re going to want to create a list of stunts that the players can reference during
character creation. Usually, you’ll do this as part of creating extras; see the Extras chapter for more
details.

Adding a New Action to a Skill

The most basic option for a stunt is to allow a skill to do something that it
normally can’t do. It adds a new action onto the base skill in certain
situations, for those with this stunt. This new action can be one that’s
available to another skill (allowing one skill to swap for another under
certain circumstances), or one that’s not available to any skill.
Here are some new action stunts:

Backstab. You can use Stealth to make physical attacks, provided your
target isn’t already aware of your presence.
The Fight in the Dog. You can use Provoke to enter the kinds of
contests that you’d normally need Physique for, whenever your ability
to psych your opponent out with the force of your presence alone
would be a factor.
You’re Never Safe. You can use Burglary to make mental attacks and
create advantages against a target, by staging a heist in such a way as
to shatter their confidence in their security.

Just because you have a stunt doesn’t mean you always have to use it when
it becomes relevant. Using a stunt is always a choice, and you can opt not to
use a stunt if you don’t think it would be appropriate or you just don’t want
to.
For example, you could have a stunt that allows you to use Fight in place
of Athletics when defending against arrows and other missile attacks.
Whenever you’re attacked by an archer, you can choose to use Fight—or
simply use Athletics as anyone else would. It’s entirely your choice.
Adding a Bonus to an Action
Another use for a stunt is to give a skill an automatic bonus under a
particular, very narrow circumstance, effectively letting a character
specialize in something. The circumstance should be narrower than what
the normal action allows, and only apply to one particular action or pair of
actions.
The usual bonus is +2 to the skill total. However, if you want, you can also
express the bonus as two shifts of additional effect after the roll succeeds, if
that makes more sense. Remember, higher shifts on a roll allow your action
to be more effective in certain ways.
You can also use this to establish any effect worth two shifts as an
additional benefit of succeeding at the skill roll. This might be Fair (+2)
passive opposition, the equivalent of a 2-point hit, a mild consequence, or
an advantage that takes Fair (+2) opposition to remove.
Here are some examples of adding a bonus to an action:

Arcane Expert. Gain a +2 bonus to create an advantage using Lore,

whenever the situation has specifically to do with the supernatural or
occult.
Lead in the Air. You really like emptying magazines. Any time you’re
using a fully automatic weapon and you succeed at a Shoot attack, you
automatically create a Fair (+2) opposition against movement in that
zone until your next turn, because of all the lead in the air. (Normally,
you’d need to take a separate action to set up this kind of interference,
but with the stunt, it’s free.)
Child of the Court. Gain a +2 bonus to any attempt to overcome
obstacles with Rapport when you’re at an aristocratic function, such as
a royal ball.
Players, when you’re building stunts that give an action bonus, look out for
situations that seem like they’d only come up rarely in play. Like, the
Arcane Expert stunt above would be inappropriate if your game doesn’t
deal with the supernatural a lot, and Child of the Court will be useless if
your campaign doesn’t deal with the nobility on a fairly regular basis. If you
don’t think you’ll use the stunt at least twice in most of your game sessions,
change the condition associated with the bonus.
GMs, it’s on you to help the players make sure their stunts see use—look
at the conditions they choose here as a “laundry list” of stuff that you want
to trend toward in your sessions.

Creating a Rules Exception

Finally, a stunt can allow a skill to make a single exception, in a narrow
circumstance, for any other game rule that doesn’t precisely fit into the
category of an action. The Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts chapter is
full of different little rules about the circumstances under which a skill can
be used and what happens when you use them. Stunts can break those,
allowing your character to stretch the boundaries of the possible.
The only limit to this is that a stunt can’t change any of the basic rules for
aspects in terms of invoking, compelling, and the fate point economy.
Those always remain the same.
Here are some stunts that create rules exceptions:

Ritualist. Use Lore in place of another skill during a challenge,

allowing you to use Lore twice in the same challenge.
Hogtie. When you use Crafts to create a Hogtied (or similar)
advantage on someone, you can always actively oppose any overcome
rolls to escape the hogtie (also using Crafts), even if you’re not there.
(Normally, if you weren’t there, the escaping character would roll
against passive opposition, making it a lot easier to escape.)
Riposte. If you succeed with style on a Fight defense, you can choose
to inflict a 2-shift hit rather than take a boost.
Balancing Stunt Utility
If you look at most of the example stunts, you’ll notice that the
circumstances under which you can use them are pretty narrow compared to
the base skills they modify. That’s the sweet spot you want to shoot for with
your own stunts—you want them to be limited enough in scope that it feels
special when you use them, but not so narrow that you never see them come
up after you take them.
If the stunt effectively takes over all of the skill’s base actions, it’s not
limited enough. You don’t want a stunt replacing the skill it modifies.
The two main ways to limit a stunt are by keeping its effects to a specific
action or pair of actions (only creating an advantage or only attack and
defend rolls), or by limiting the situations in which you can use it (only
when you’re among nobles, only when it deals with the supernatural, and so
on).
For the best results, use both—have the stunt restricted to a specific action,
which can only be used in a very specific in-game situation. If you’re
worried about the situation being too narrow, back up and think of the ways
the skill might be used in play. If you can see the stunt being relevant to one
of those uses, you’re probably on the right track. If you can’t, you may need
to adjust the stunt a little to make sure it’ll come up.
You can also restrict a stunt by only allowing it to be used once in a certain
period of game time, such as once per conflict, once per scene, or once per
session.

FATE POINT-POWERED STUNTS

Another way to restrict how often a stunt comes into play is to have it cost a
fate point to use. This is a good option if the desired stunt effect is very
powerful, or there doesn’t seem to be a good way for you to change the
wording of the stunt to make it come up less often in play.
Our best advice for determining what really powerful means is that it
either goes beyond the specified limits we gave above (so, if it adds a new
action to a skill and a bonus), or significantly affects conflicts. Specifically,
almost any stunt that allows you to do extra stress in a conflict should cost a
fate point to use.

Lenny’s considering a stunt for Landon called “My Blade Strikes

True.” He wants it to add two shifts to any successful Fight attack
when he wields his personal, custom-forged family sword.
Amanda thinks it over. It fulfills all the criteria for limitations, but
there’s one problem—neither Amanda nor Lenny can envision very
many situations where Landon wouldn’t be using his heirloom sword.
So he’d basically be able to use that stunt every time he attacked
someone, which would replace the normal use of the Fight skill. She
decides that’s too much, and asks him to modify the stunt.
Lenny thinks about it, and says, “Well, how about if it lets me do that
whenever I’m fighting a member of a rival family with my heirloom
sword?”
Amanda asks, “Were we going to establish rival families to the
Darkwoods in this game? I thought the point was for you guys to travel
all over the place and get a bit lost in the world.”
Lenny agrees that it probably wouldn’t come up often enough, and
thinks some more.
Then it comes to him. “How about this—what if, when someone uses
their 2-point stress box to absorb one of my Fight attacks with the
sword, I can make them use their mild consequence instead?”
Amanda likes this, because it’ll come up in nearly every conflict
Landon gets into, but it won’t be something he can take advantage of
every exchange. She asks for a further restriction of one use per
conflict, and they call it done.
On Landon’s sheet, Lenny writes:
 My Blade Strikes True. Once per conflict, you can force the opponent
to use a mild consequence instead of a 2-point stress box on a
successful Fight attack with your heirloom sword.

Stunt Families
If you want to get detailed about a particular kind of training or talent, you
can create a stunt family for it. This is a group of stunts that are related to
and chain off of each other somehow.
This allows you to create things like fighting styles or elite schools in your
setting and represents the benefits of belonging to them. It also helps you
get specific about what types of specialized competencies are available, if
you want to give your game a sense of having distinct “character classes”—
so there might be an “Ace Pilot” or a “Cat Burglar” family of stunts.
Creating a stunt family is easy. You make one stunt that serves as a
prerequisite for all the others in the family, qualifying you to take further
stunts up the chain. Then, you need to create a handful of stunts that are all
related somehow to the prerequisite, either stacking the effects or branching
out into another set of effects.
Stacking Effects
Perhaps the simplest way of handling a related stunt is just making the
original stunt more effective in the same situation:

If the stunt added an action, narrow it further and give the new action a
bonus. Follow the same rules for adding a bonus—the circumstances
in which it applies should be narrower than that of the base action.
If the stunt gave a bonus to an action, give an additional +2 bonus to
the same action or add an additional two-shift effect to that action.
If the stunt made a rules exception, make it even more of an exception.
(This might be difficult depending on what the original exception is.
Don’t worry, you have other options.)

Keep in mind that the upgraded stunt effectively replaces the original. You
can look at it as a single super-stunt that costs two slots (and two refresh)
for the price of being more powerful than other stunts.
 Here are some stunts that stack:

Advanced Warmaster. (requires Warmaster.) When you’re fighting

anyone who is armed with a sword, you get a further +2 bonus to
creating an advantage using Warmaster.
Scion of the Court. (requires Child of the Court.) When you
overcome an obstacle with Child of the Court, you may additionally
create a situation aspect that describes how the general attitude turns in
your favor. If anyone wants to try and get rid of this aspect, they must
overcome Fair (+2) opposition.
Advanced Ritualist. (requires Ritualist.) You gain a +2 bonus when
you use Lore in place of another skill during a challenge. This allows
you to use Lore twice in the same challenge.

Branching Effects
When you branch, you create a new stunt that relates to the original in terms
of theme or subject matter, but provides a wholly new effect. If you look at
stacking effects as expanding a stunt or skill vertically, you can look at
branching effects as expanding them laterally.
If your original stunt added an action to a skill, a branching stunt might
add a different action to that skill, or it might provide a bonus to a different
action the skill already has, or create a rules exception, etc. The mechanical
effect isn’t connected to the prerequisite stunt at all, but provides a
complementary bit of awesome.
This allows you to provide a few different paths to being awesome that
follow from a single stunt. You can use this to highlight different elements
of a certain skill and help characters who are highly ranked in the same skill
differentiate from each other by following different stunt families.
As an example of how this works, let’s take a look at the Deceive skill. If
you look at the skill description, there are several avenues that we might
enhance with stunts: lying, sleight of hand and misdirection, disguise,
creating cover stories, or social conflict.
So let’s make our first stunt something like this:
 Fast Talk. You get a +2 to overcome obstacles with Deceive, provided
you don’t have to talk to the person you’re trying to deceive for more
than a few sentences before blowing past them.

Here are some potential options for branching off of that stunt:

Quick Disguise. (requires Fast Talk.) You’re able to put together a

convincing disguise in a heartbeat, using items from your
surroundings. You can roll Deceive to create a disguise without any
time to prepare, in nearly any situation.
Instant Cover. (requires Fast Talk.) You can whip up a cover story
like no one’s business, even if you haven’t made an effort to establish
it beforehand. Any time you overcome an obstacle in public using
Deceive, automatically add a situation aspect representing your cover
story, and stick a free invocation on it.
Hey, What’s That? (requires Fast Talk.) Gain a +2 bonus whenever
you’re using Deceive to momentarily distract someone, as long as part
of the distraction involves saying something.

Every one of those stunts thematically relates to very quick, spontaneous

uses of Deceive, but they each have a different flavor of awesome.

THE DEFAULT SKILL LIST

Here is a basic list of example skills for you to use in your Fate games
along with example stunts tied to each. They’re the ones we’re using for all
the examples in this book, and should give you a good foundation from
which to tweak your own lists, adding and subtracting skills as best fits
your setting. For more on creating your own skills, see the Extras chapter.
Each skill description contains a list of game actions that you can use the
skill for. This list is not necessarily exhaustive—see our guidelines for what
to do with edge cases.

Skill List
Skill Overcome Create an Advantage Attack Defend
Athletics
X X X
Burglary X X
Contacts X X X
Crafts X X
Deceive X X X
Drive X X X
Empathy X X X
Fight X X X X
Investigate X X
Lore X X
Notice X X X
Physique X X X
Provoke X X X
Rapport X X X
Resources X X
Shoot X X X
Stealth X X X
Will X X X
 CREATING SETTING WITH SKILLS
Skills are one of your primary mechanical ways to reinforce the setting
you’re using or creating for your game. The skills provided in this list are
deliberately generic so that they can be used in a variety of settings, and the
stunts provided continue this trend by not being tied to any particular
setting.
When you’re creating your own setting for use with Fate, you should also
create your own skill list. The default list we provide is a good starting
point, but creating skills specific to your world can help make it seem richer
by reinforcing the story with mechanics. Stunts, too, should reflect the
kinds of abilities available in your world.

SKILLS AND GEAR

Some of the skills, like Shoot and Crafts, imply the need for gear. We
presume by default that if you have a skill, you also have the tools you need
to use it, and that the effectiveness of those tools is built into the skill result.
If you want to make gear special, you’ll want to look at the Extras chapter.

Athletics
The Athletics skill represents your character’s general level of physical
fitness, whether through training, natural gifts, or genre-specific means (like
magic or genetic alteration). It’s how good you are at moving your body. As
such, it is a popular choice for nearly any action-y character.
Athletics is all but ubiquitous among every genre appropriate for Fate—it
would only be unnecessary in a game that focused exclusively on
interpersonal interaction and had no physical conflict.

Overcome: Athletics allows you to overcome any obstacle that

requires physical movement—jumping, running, climbing, swimming, etc.
If it resembles something you’d do in the decathlon, you roll Athletics. You
use overcome actions with Athletics to move between zones in a conflict if
there’s a situation aspect or other obstacle in your way. You also roll
Athletics to chase or race in any contests or challenges that rely on these
types of activities.

Create an Advantage: When you’re creating an advantage with

Athletics, you’re jumping to high ground, running faster than the opponent
can keep up with, or performing dazzling acrobatic maneuvers in order to
confound your foes.

Attack: Athletics is not meant as an attack skill.

Defend: Athletics is a catch-all skill to roll for defense in a physical

conflict, against close-quarters and ranged attacks. You can also use it to
defend against characters trying to move past you, if you’re in a position to
physically interfere with whoever’s making the attempt.

You might decide that Athletics is inappropriate for defense against firearms or other high-tech
ranged weapons in your setting. There really isn’t any other skill that defends against them, though.
If you make this decision, it will make those weapons very, very dangerous. Or have another skill
defend against them.

Athletics Stunts

Sprinter. You move two zones for free in a conflict without rolling,
instead of one, provided there are no situation aspects restricting
movement.
Hardcore Parkour. +2 to overcome actions with Athletics if you are
in a chase across rooftops or a similarly precarious environment.
Dazing Counter. When you succeed with style on a defend action
against an opponent’s Fight roll, you automatically counter with some
sort of nerve punch or stunning blow. You get to attach
theDazed situation aspect to your opponent with a free invoke, instead
of just a boost.

Burglary
The Burglary skill covers your character’s aptitude for stealing things and
getting into places that are off-limits.
In genres that rely on the use of a lot of technology, this skill also includes
a proficiency in the related tech, allowing the character to hack security
systems, disable alarm systems, and whatnot.

Overcome: As stated above, Burglary allows you to overcome any

obstacle related to theft or infiltration. Bypassing locks and traps,
pickpocketing and filching, covering your tracks, and other such activities
all fall under the purview of this skill.

Create an Advantage: You can case a location with Burglary, to

determine how hard it will be to break into and what kind of security you’re
dealing with, as well as discover any vulnerabilities you might exploit. You
can also examine the work of other burglars to determine how a particular
heist was done, and create or discover aspects related to whatever evidence
they may have left behind.

Attack: Burglary isn’t used for attacks.

Defend: Same here. It’s not really a conflict skill, so there’s not a lot
of opportunity to use it to defend
Burglary Stunts

Always a Way Out. +2 on Burglary rolls made to create an advantage

whenever you’re trying to escape from a location.
Security Specialist. You don’t have to be present to provide active
opposition to someone trying to overcome security measures you put
in place or worked on. (Normally, a character would roll against
passive opposition for that.)
Talk the Talk. You can use Burglary in place of Contacts whenever
you’re dealing specifically with other thieves and burglars.

Contacts
Contacts is the skill of knowing and making connections with people. It
presumes proficiency with all means of networking available in the setting.

Overcome: You use Contacts to overcome any obstacle related to

finding someone you need to find. Whether that’s old-fashioned “man on
the street” type of work, polling your information network, or searching
archives and computer databases, you’re able to hunt down people or
somehow get access to them.

Create an Advantage: Contacts allows you to know who the perfect

person to talk to is for anything you might need, or to decide that you know
the perfect person already. It’s likely that you’ll create story details with this
skill, represented by aspects. (“Hey, guys, my contacts tell me that Joe Steel
is the Best Mechanic For A Thousand Miles—we should talk to him.”)

You can also create an advantage that represents what the word on the street
is about a particular individual, object, or location, based on what your
contacts tell you. These aspects almost always deal with reputation more
than fact, such as Known as a Mean Guy or Notorious Swindler. Whether
that person lives up to their reputation is anybody’s guess, though that
doesn’t invalidate the aspect—people often have misleading reputations that
complicate their lives.

Contacts could also be used to create aspects that represent using your
information network to plant or acquire information.

Attack: Contacts isn’t used for attacks; it’s hard to harm someone
simply by knowing people.

Defend: Contacts can be used to defend against people creating social

advantages against you, provided your information network can be brought
to bear in the situation. You might also use it to keep someone from using
Deceive or Contacts to go “off the grid”, or to interfere with Investigate
attempts to find you.
Contacts Stunts

Ear to the Ground. Whenever someone initiates a conflict against

you in an area where you’ve built a network of contacts, you use
Contacts instead of Notice to determine turn order, because you got
tipped off in time.
Rumormonger. +2 to create an advantage when you plant vicious
rumors about someone else.
The Weight of Reputation. You can use Contacts instead of Provoke
to create advantages based on the fear generated by the sinister
reputation you’ve cultivated for yourself and all the shady associates
you have. You should have an appropriate aspect to pair with this
stunt.

Crafts
Crafts is the skill of working with machinery, for good or ill.
The default skill is called Crafts because it’s what we use in the examples,
but this skill might vary a great deal depending on the setting and what kind
of technology is available. In a modern or sci-fi setting, this might be
Engineering or Mechanics instead.

Overcome: Crafts allows you to build, break, or fix machinery,

presuming you have the time and tools you need. Often, actions with Crafts
happen as one component of a more complex situation, making it a popular
skill for challenges. For example, if you’re just fixing a broken door, neither
success nor failure is interesting; you should just succeed and move on.
Now, if you’re trying to get your car to start while a pack of werewolves is
hunting you…

Create an Advantage: You can use Crafts to create aspects

representing features of a piece of machinery, pointing out useful features or
strengths you can use to your advantage (Armor-Plated, Rugged
Construction) or a vulnerability for you to exploit (Flaw in the Cross-
Beam, Hasty Work).
Creating Crafts advantages can also take the form of quick and dirty
sabotage or jury-rigging on mechanical objects in the scene. For example,
you might create a Makeshift Pulley to help you get to the platform above
you, or throw something into the ballista that’s firing on you to give it
a Jammed Pivoting Joint and make it harder to hit you.

Attack: You probably won’t use Crafts to attack in a conflict, unless

the conflict is specifically about using machinery, like with siege weaponry.
GMs and players, talk over the likelihood of this happening in your game if
you have someone who is really interested in taking this skill. Usually,
weapons you craft are likely to be used with other skills to attack—a guy
who makes a sword still needs Fight to wield it well!

Defend: As with attacking, Crafts doesn’t defend, unless you’re

somehow using it as the skill to control a piece of machinery that you block
with.

SO MANY CRAFTS…
If working with different types of tech is important to your game, you might
have several of these skills in your list. So, a futuristic game might have
Engineering, Cybernetics, and Biotechnology, all basically with the same
moves available for their respective type of tech. In such a game, an
individual character can’t be proficient at all of them without expending a
lot of skill ranks.
If you’re going to do this, make sure that you have a reason for it besides
pedantry—if the only thing that splitting the skills gets you is the same
effects with different names, you should keep it more generalized and use
stunts to handle the specialties.

Crafts Stunts
 Always Making Useful Things. You don’t ever have to spend a fate
point to declare that you have the proper tools for a particular job using
Crafts, even in extreme situations (like being imprisoned and separated
from all your stuff). This source of opposition is just off the table.
Better than New! Whenever you succeed with style on an overcome
action to repair a piece of machinery, you can immediately give it a
new situation aspect (with a free invoke) reflecting the improvements
you’ve made, instead of just a boost.
Surgical Strikes. When using Crafts in a conflict involving
machinery, you can filter out unwanted targets from whole-zone
attacks without having to divide up your shifts (normally, you’d need
to divide your roll between your targets).

If building constructs and creating items is a big part of your game, check
out Extras for a discussion of what might result from the use of Crafts.

Deceive
Deceive is the skill about lying to and misdirecting people.

Overcome: Use Deceive to bluff your way past someone, or to get

someone to believe a lie, or to get something out of someone because they
believe in one of your lies. For nameless NPCs, this is just an overcome
roll, but for PCs or named NPCs, it requires a contest, and the target
opposes with Empathy. Winning this contest could justify placing a
situation aspect on your target, if buying into your lie could help you in a
future scene.

Deceive is the skill you use for determining if a disguise works, whether on
yourself or others. You’ll need to have the time and supplies to create the
desired effect. (Note: This is mainly a Hearts of Steelthing; in some games,
this may not be appropriate for Deceive by default and should require a
stunt.)

You can also use Deceive to do small tricks of sleight-of-hand and

misdirection.
 Create an Advantage: Use Deceive to create momentary
distractions, cover stories, or false impressions. You could feint in a
swordfight, putting an opponent Off-Balance and setting you up for an
attack. You could do the whole, “What’s that over there!” trick to give you
a Head Start when you run away. You could establish a Wealthy Noble
Cover Story for when you attend a royal ball. You could trick someone into
revealing one of their aspects or other information.

Attack: Deceive is an indirect skill that creates a lot of opportunities

you can capitalize on, but it doesn’t do direct harm to an individual.

Defend: You can use Deceive to throw off Investigation attempts with
false information and to defend against efforts made to discern your true
motives with the Empathy skill.
Deceive Stunts

Lies upon Lies. +2 to create a Deceive advantage against someone

who has believed one of your lies already during this session.
Mind Games. You can use Deceive in place of Provoke to make
mental attacks, as long as you can make up a clever lie as part of the
attack.
One Person, Many Faces. Whenever you meet someone new, you can
spend a fate point to declare that you’ve met that person before, but
under a different name and identity. Create a situation aspect to
represent your cover story, and you can use Deceive in place of
Rapport whenever interacting with that person.

SOCIAL SKILLS AND OTHER CHARACTERS

Many of the social skills have actions that let you change the emotional
state of another character or make them accept some fact in the story (like
believing one of your lies).
 A successful use of a social skill does not confer the authority to force
another character to act contrary to their nature or how the person
controlling the character sees them. If another PC gets affected by one of
your skills, the player gets input on how their character responds. They
can’t negate your victory, but they can choose what it looks like.
So, you may successfully Provoke by getting in their face and screaming at
them, intending to scare them into hesitation and create an advantage. But if
the other player doesn’t imagine his character reacting that way, you should
work out an alternative—maybe you make him so angry that he’s
unbalanced by his rage, or you embarrass him by making a spectacle around
him in public.
As long as you get your advantage, you’re fine. Use it as an opportunity to
create story with other people, instead of shutting them down.

Drive
The Drive skill is all about operating vehicles and things that go fast.
Like Crafts, how the Drive skill appears in your games is going to depend
a lot on how much action you intend to have inside of vehicles or other
forms of transportation, and what kind of technology is available in your
setting.
For example, a low-tech setting (like Hearts of Steel) might have Ride
instead of Drive, because the main transportation is animal-based. A
futuristic setting revolving around people in a space opera military might
have Drive (for cars), Pilot (for starships), and Operate (for tanks or heavy
military vehicles).

DIFFERENT VEHICLES, DIFFERENT SKILLS

The advice is the same as for Crafts—don’t go nuts with reskinning this
skill unless it makes a real, tangible difference in your game. Especially
consider the option of having one skill that’s modified by stunts
(see Building Stunts).

Overcome: Drive is the equivalent of Athletics when you’re in a

vehicle—you use it to successfully accomplish movement in the face of
difficult circumstances, like rough terrain, small amounts of clearance, or
stunt driving. Obviously, Drive is also ripe for contests, especially chases
and races.

Create an Advantage: You can use Drive to determine the best way
to get somewhere in a vehicle, and a good enough roll might allow you to
learn features of the route that get expressed as aspects, or declare that you
know a Convenient Shortcut or something similar.

Create an Advantage: You can use Drive to determine the best way to get
somewhere in a vehicle, and a good enough roll might allow you to learn
features of the route that get expressed as aspects, or declare that you know
a Convenient Shortcut or something similar.

You can also just read the Athletics description, and then make it about a
vehicle. Advantages created using Drive often revolve around getting good
positioning, doing a fancy maneuver (Did a Barrel Roll, anyone?), or
putting your opponent in a bad spot.

Attack: Drive isn’t usually used as an attack skill (though stunts can
certainly alter this). If you want to ram a vehicle, you can attack with Drive,
but you take the same shifts of harm you inflict.

Defend: Avoiding damage to a vehicle in a physical conflict is one of

the most common uses of Drive. You can also use it to defend against
advantages being created against you or overcome actions of someone
trying to move past you in a vehicle.
Drive Stunts
 Hard to Shake. +2 to Drive whenever you’re pursuing another vehicle
in a chase scene.
Pedal to the Metal. You can coax more speed out of your vehicle than
seems possible. Whenever you’re engaged in any contest where speed
is the primary factor (such as a chase or race of some kind) and you tie
with your Drive roll, it’s considered a success.
Ramming Speed! When ramming another vehicle, you ignore two
shifts of damage. So if you ram and hit for four shifts, you only take
two yourself.

Empathy
Empathy involves knowing and being able to spot changes in a person’s
mood or bearing. It’s basically the emotional Notice skill.

Overcome: You don’t really use Empathy to overcome obstacles

directly—normally, you find out some information with it, and then use
another skill to act. In some cases, though, you might use Empathy like you
would Notice, to see if you catch a change in someone’s attitude or intent.

Create an Advantage: You can use Empathy to read a person’s

emotional state and get a general sense of who they are, presuming you
have some kind of interpersonal contact with them. Most often, you’ll use
this to assess the aspects on another character’s sheet, but sometimes you’ll
also be able to create new aspects, especially on NPCs. If the target has
some reason to be aware that you’re trying to read them, they can defend
with Deceive or Rapport.

You can also use Empathy to discover what circumstances will allow you to
make mental attacks on someone, figuring out their breaking points.

Attack: Empathy can’t really be used in this capacity.

 Defend: This is the skill to go to in order to defend against Deceive
actions, allowing you to pierce through lies and see through to someone’s
true intent. You can also use it to defend against those creating social
advantages against you in general.
Special: Empathy is the main skill you use to help others recover from
consequences that are mental in nature.
Empathy Stunts

Lie Whisperer. +2 to all Empathy rolls made to discern or discover

lies, whether they’re directed at you or someone else.
Nose for Trouble. You can use Empathy instead of Notice to
determine your turn order in a conflict, provided you’ve gotten a
chance to observe or speak to those involved for at least a few minutes
beforehand during this scene.
Psychologist. Once per session you can reduce someone else’s
consequence by one level of severity (severe to moderate, moderate to
mild, mild to nothing at all) by succeeding on an Empathy roll with a
difficulty of Fair (+2) for a mild consequence, Good (+3) for moderate,
or Great (+4) for severe. You need to talk with the person you’re
treating for at least half an hour in order for them to receive the
benefits of this stunt, and you can’t use it on yourself. (Normally, this
roll would only start the recovery process, instead of changing the
consequence level.)

Fight
The Fight skill covers all forms of close-quarters combat (in other words,
within the same zone), both unarmed and using weapons. For the ranged
weapons counterpart, see Shoot.

Overcome: Since you don’t really use Fight outside of a conflict, it’s
not often used to overcome obstacles. You might use it to display your
fighting prowess in a demonstration, or to participate in some kind of
regulated bout or sport fighting, which would allow you to use this skill in a
contest.

Create an Advantage: You’ll probably use Fight for most of the

advantages you create in a physical conflict. Any number of special moves
can be covered with advantages: a targeted strike to stun, a “dirty move,”
disarming, and so on. You could even use Fight to assess another fighter’s
style, spotting weaknesses in his or her form that you can exploit.

Attack: This is self-explanatory. You make physical attacks with

Fight. Remember, this is for close-in work, so you have to be in the
same zone as your opponent

Defend: You use Fight to defend against any other attack or create an
advantage attempt made with Fight, as well as pretty much any action
where violently interposing yourself could prevent it from happening. You
can’t use this skill to defend against Shoot attacks, unless the setting is
fantastical enough that you can catch missiles or swat them from the air or
use laser swords to deflect blasters.
Fight Stunts

Heavy Hitter. When you succeed with style on a Fight attack and
choose to reduce the result by one to gain a boost, you gain a full
situation aspect with a free invocation instead.
Backup Weapon. Whenever someone’s about to hit you with
a Disarmed situation aspect or something similar, spend a fate point to
declare you have a backup weapon. Instead of a situation aspect, your
opponent gets a boost, representing the momentary distraction you
suffer having to switch.
Killing Stroke. Once per scene, when you force an opponent to take a
consequence, you can spend a fate point to increase the consequence’s
severity (so mild becomes moderate, moderate becomes severe). If
your opponent was already going to take a severe consequence, he
 must either take a severe consequence and a second consequence or be
taken out.

THE ART(S) OF FIGHTING

It’s a given that most games that you play with Fate will feature a decent
amount of action and physical conflict. This is another area of emphasis,
like with the Crafts skill, where the skills you choose to have for combat
speak volumes on what your game’s about.
In the examples, we’ve got Fight and Shoot as separate skills, to give us a
basic division without getting too much into minutiae. Notably, though, this
suggests that fighting with a weapon and fighting bare-handed are pretty
much the same—there’s no inherent advantage in doing one over the other.
It’s a pretty common choice to further separate unarmed and armed melee—
into Fists and Weapons, for example.
You could specialize even further if you wanted different classes of
weapons to have their own skills (Swords, Polearms, Axes, Plasma Guns,
Slugthrowers, etc.), but again, we recommend you not go too crazy with
this unless it’s really important to your setting. Specialized weapon use can
also be modeled by using extras.

Investigate
Investigate is the skill you use to find things out. It’s a counterpart to Notice
—whereas Notice revolves around situational alertness and surface
observation, Investigate revolves around concentrated effort and in-depth
scrutiny.

Overcome: Investigate obstacles are all about information that’s hard

to uncover for some reason. Analyzing a crime scene for clues, searching a
cluttered room for the item you need, even poring over a musty old tome to
try and find the passage that makes everything make sense.
Racing against the clock to collect evidence before the cops show up or
disaster occurs is a classic way to use Investigate in a challenge.

Create an Advantage: Investigate is probably one of the most

versatile skills you can use to create an advantage. As long as you’re
willing to take the time, you can find out just about anything about anyone,
discover nearly any detail about a place or object, or otherwise make up
aspects about nearly anything in the game world that your character could
reasonably unearth.

If that sounds broad, consider the following as just a few of the possibilities
for using Investigate: eavesdropping on a conversation, looking for clues at
a crime scene, examining records, verifying the truth of a piece of
information, conducting surveillance, and researching a cover story.

Attack: Investigate isn’t used to make attacks.

Defend: Same here.

Investigate Stunts

Attention to Detail. You can use Investigate instead of Empathy to

defend against Deceive attempts. What others discover through gut
reactions and intuition, you learn through careful observation of
microexpressions.
Eavesdropper. On a successful Investigate roll to create an advantage
by eavesdropping on a conversation, you can discover or create one
additional aspect (though this doesn’t give you an extra free
invocation).
The Power of Deduction. Once per scene you can spend a fate point
(and a few minutes of observation) to make a special Investigate roll
representing your potent deductive faculties. For each shift you make
on this roll you discover or create an aspect, on either the scene or the
 target of your observations, though you may only invoke one of them
for free.

Lore
The Lore skill is about knowledge and education. As with some other skills,
we called it Lore because that fits the particular flavor of our examples—
other games might call it Scholarship, or Academics, or something like that.
If your game has a reason to prioritize different fields of knowledge as
being separate from one another, you might have several skills that follow
the same basic template. For example, you might have a Lore skill that’s
reserved for supernatural and arcane knowledge, and a Scholar skill for
more traditional education.

Overcome: You can use Lore to overcome any obstacle that requires
applying your character’s knowledge to achieve a goal. For example, you
might roll Lore to decipher some ancient language on a tomb wall, under
the presumption that your character might have researched it at some point.

Frankly, you can use Lore as a go-to skill any time you need to know if
your character can answer a difficult question, where some tension exists in
not knowing the answer.

Create an Advantage: Like Investigate, Lore provides a lot of very

flexible opportunities to create advantages, provided you can research the
subject in question. More often than not, you’ll be using Lore to get a story
detail, some obscure bit of information that you uncover or know already,
but if that information gives you an edge in a future scene, it might take the
form of an aspect. Likewise, you can use Lore to create advantages based
on any subject matter your character might have studied, which gives you a
fun way to add details to the setting.

Attack: Lore isn’t used in conflicts.

(In our examples, the magic that Zird the Arcane uses is based on Lore, so
that’s a unique exception to this—he could conceivably use Lore for
magical attacks and defenses. See the Extras chapter for more details about
ways to do magic and powers.)

Defend: Lore isn’t used to defend.

Lore Stunts

I’ve Read about That! You’ve read hundreds—if not thousands—of

books on a wide variety of topics. You can spend a fate point to use
Lore in place of any other skill for one roll or exchange, provided you
can justify having read about the action you’re attempting.
Shield of Reason. You can use Lore as a defense against Provoke
attempts, provided you can justify your ability to overcome your fear
through rational thought and reason.
Specialist. Choose a field of specialization, such as herbology,
criminology, or zoology. You get a +2 to all Lore rolls relating to that
field of specialization.

Notice
The Notice skill involves just that—noticing things. It’s a counterpart
to Investigate, representing a character’s overall perception, ability to pick
out details at a glance, and other powers of observation. Usually, when you
use Notice, it’s very quick compared to Investigate, so the kinds of details
you get from it are more superficial, but you also don’t have to expend as
much effort to find them.

Overcome: You don’t really use Notice to overcome obstacles too

often but when you do it’s used in a reactive way: noticing something in a
scene, hearing a faint sound, spotting the concealed gun in that guy’s
waistband.

Note that this isn’t license for GMs to call for Notice rolls left and right to
see how generally observant the players’ characters are; that’s boring.
Instead, call for Notice rolls when succeeding would result in something
interesting happening and failing would result in something just as
interesting.

Create an Advantage: You use Notice to create aspects based on

direct observation—looking over a room for details that stand out, finding
an escape route in a debris-filled building, noticing someone sticking out in
a crowd, etc. When you’re watching people, Notice can tell you what’s
going on with them externally; for internal changes, see Empathy. You
might also use Notice to declare that your character spots something you
can use to your advantage in a situation, such as a convenient Escape
Route when you’re trying to get out of a building, or a Subtle Weakness in
the enemy’s line of defense. For example, if you’re in a barroom brawl you
could make a Notice roll to say that you spot a puddle on the floor, right
next to your opponent’s feet that could cause him to slip.

Attack: Notice isn’t really used for attacks.

Defend: You can use Notice to defend against any uses of Stealth to
get the drop on you or ambush you, or to discover that you’re being
observed.
Notice Stunts

Danger Sense. You have an almost preternatural capacity for detecting

danger. Your Notice skill works unimpeded by conditions like total
concealment, darkness, or other sensory impairments in situations
where someone or something intends to harm you.
Body Language Reader. You can use Notice in place of Empathy to
learn the aspects of a target through observation.
Reactive Shot. You can use Notice instead of Shoot to make quick,
reactive shots that don’t involve a lot of aiming. However, because
you’re having a knee-jerk reaction, you’re not allowed to concretely
identify your target before using this stunt. So, for example, you might
be able to shoot at someone you see moving in the bushes with this
 stunt, but you won’t be able to tell if it’s friend or foe before you pull
the trigger. Choose carefully!

Physique
The Physique skill is a counterpart to Athletics, representing the character’s
natural physical aptitudes, such as raw strength and endurance. In our
example game, we have this skill broken out as something separate in order
to create two distinct types of physical characters—the nimble guy
(represented by Athletics) and the strongman (represented by Physique).
In your game, you might not find this distinction necessary to make with
separate skills—though you might still let players make that distinction
with stunts and aspects.

Overcome: You can use Physique to overcome any obstacles that

require the application of brute force—most often to overcome a situation
aspect on a zone—or any other physical impedance, like prison bars or
locked gates. Of course, Physique is the classic skill for arm-wrestling
matches and other contests of applied strength, as well as marathons or
other endurance-based challenges.

Create an Advantage: Physique has a lot of potential for

advantages in physical conflict, usually related to grappling and holding
someone in place, making them Pinned or Locked Down. You might also
use it as a way of discovering physical impairments possessed by the target
—grappling the old mercenary tells you that he has a Bum Leg or
somesuch.

Attack: Physique is not used to harm people directly—see the Fight

skill for that.

Defend: Though you don’t generally use Physique to defend against

attacks, you can use it to provide active opposition to someone else’s
movement, provided you’re in a small enough space that you can
effectively use your body to block access. You might also interpose
something heavy and brace it to stop someone from getting through.
 Special: The Physique skill gives you additional physical stress or
consequence slots. Average (+1) or Fair (+2) gives you a 3-point stress box.
Good (+3) or Great (+4) gives you a 3-point and a 4-point stress box.
Superb (+5)and above give you an additional mild consequence slot along
with the additional stress boxes. This slot can only be used for physical
harm.
Physique Stunts

Grappler. +2 to Physique rolls made to create advantages on an

enemy by wrestling or grappling with them.
Take the Blow. You can use Physique to defend against Fight attacks
made with fists or blunt instruments, though you always take 1 shift of
stress on a tie.
Tough as Nails. Once per session, at the cost of a fate point, you can
reduce the severity of a moderate consequence that’s physical in nature
to a mild consequence (if your mild consequence slot is free), or erase
a mild consequence altogether.

Provoke
Provoke is the skill about getting someone’s dander up and eliciting
negative emotional response from them—fear, anger, shame, etc. It’s the
“being a jerk” skill.
To use Provoke, you need some kind of justification. That could come
entirely from situation, or because you have an aspect that’s appropriate, or
because you’ve created an advantage with another skill (like Rapport or
Deceive), or because you’ve assessed your target’s aspects (see Empathy).
This skill requires that your target can feel emotions—robots and zombies
typically can’t be provoked.

Overcome: You can Provoke someone into doing what you want in
a fit of emotional pique. You might intimidate them for information, piss
them off so badly that they act out, or scare them into running away. This
will often happen when you’re going up against nameless NPCs or it isn’t
worthwhile to play out the particulars. Against PCs or important NPCs,
you’ll need to win a contest. They oppose with Will.

Create an Advantage: You can create advantages representing

momentary emotional states, like Enraged, Shocked, or Hesitant. Your
target opposes with Will.

Attack: You can make mental attacks with Provoke, to do emotional

harm to an opponent. Your relationship with the target and the
circumstances you’re in figure a great deal into whether or not you can use
this action.

Defend: Being good at provoking others doesn’t make you better at

avoiding it yourself. You need Will for that.
Provoke Stunts

Armor of Fear. You can use Provoke to defend against Fight attacks,
but only until the first time you’re dealt stress in a conflict. You can
make your opponents hesitate to attack, but when someone shows
them that you’re only human your advantage disappears.
Provoke Violence. When you create an advantage on an opponent
using Provoke, you can use your free invocation to become the target
of that character’s next relevant action, drawing their attention away
from another target.
Okay, Fine! You can use Provoke in place of Empathy to learn a
target’s aspects, by bullying them until they reveal one to you. The
target defends against this with Will. (If the GM thinks the aspect is
particularly vulnerable to your hostile approach, you get a +2 bonus.)

Rapport
The Rapport skill is all about making positive connections to people and
eliciting positive emotion. It’s the skill of being liked and trusted.
 Overcome: Use Rapport to charm or inspire people to do what you
want, or to establish a good connection with them. Charm your way past the
guard, convince someone to take you into their confidence, or become the
man of the hour at the local tavern. For nameless NPCs, this is just an
overcome action, but you may have to enter a contest to sufficiently
ingratiate yourself to a named NPC or PC.

Create an Advantage: Use Rapport to establish a positive mood on a

target or in a scene or to get someone to confide in you out of a genuine
sense of trust. You could pep talk someone into having Elevated
Confidence, or stir a crowd into a Joyful Fervor, or simply make
someone Talkative or Helpful.

Attack: Rapport doesn’t cause harm, so you don’t use it for attacks.

Defend: Rapport defends against any skill used to damage your

reputation, sour a mood you’ve created, or make you look bad in front of
other people. It does not, however, defend against mental attacks. That
requires Will.
Rapport Stunts

Best Foot Forward. Twice per session, you may upgrade a boost you
receive with Rapport into a full situation aspect with a free invocation.
Demagogue. +2 to Rapport when you’re delivering an inspiring
speech in front of a crowd. (If there are named NPCs or PCs in the
scene, you may target them all simultaneously with one roll rather than
dividing up your shifts.)
Popular. If you’re in an area where you’re popular and well-liked, you
can use Rapport in place of Contacts. You may be able to establish
your popularity by spending a fate point to declare a story detail, or
because of prior justification.

Resources
Resources describes your character’s general level of material wealth in the
game world and ability to apply it. This might not always reflect cash on
hand, given the different ways you can represent wealth in a particular
setting—in a medieval game, it might be tied to land or vassals as much as
gold; in the modern day, it might mean a number of good lines of credit.
This skill is in the default list to give you a basic, easy way to handle
wealth as an abstraction without getting into minutiae or bookkeeping.
Some people might consider it odd to give a static skill rating for something
that we’re used to seeing as a finite resource. If that bothers you, see this
sidebar for ways to limit Resources.

Overcome: You can use Resources to get yourself out of or past any
situation where throwing money at the problem will help, such as
committing bribery or acquiring rare and expensive things. Challenges or
contests might involve auctions or bidding wars.

Create an Advantage: You might use Resources to grease the

wheels and make people more friendly, whether that represents an actual
bribe (I Scratch Your Back...) or simply buying drinks for people (In Vino
Veritas). You can also use Resources to declare that you have something
you need on hand, or can quickly acquire it, which could give you an aspect
representing the object.

Attack: Resources isn’t used for attacks.

Defend: Resources isn’t used to defend.

Resources Stunts

Money Talks. You can use Resources instead of Rapport in any

situation where ostentatious displays of material wealth might aid your
cause.
Savvy Investor. You get an additional free invoke when you create
advantages with Resources, provided that they describe a monetary
return on an investment you made in a previous session. (In other
 words, you can’t retroactively declare that you did it, but if it happened
in the course of play, you get higher returns.)
Trust Fund Baby. Twice per session, you may take a boost
representing a windfall or influx of cash.

LIMITING RESOURCES
If someone is using the Resources skill a bit too often, or you just want to
represent how continually tapping into your source of wealth provides
diminishing returns, you can try one of the following ideas:

Any time a character succeeds at a Resources roll, but doesn’t succeed

with style, give them a situation aspect that reflects their temporary
loss of wealth, like Thin Wallet or Strapped for Cash. If it happens
again, just rename the aspect as something worse—Strapped for
Cash becomes Dead Broke, Dead Broke becomes Debt to Creditors.
The aspect is not a consequence, but it should make good compel
fodder for characters who are shopping until they drop. It can go away
if the character takes a break from spending cash, or at the end of the
session.
Every time the character succeeds at a Resources roll, decrease the
skill by one level for the remainder of that session. If they succeed at a
Resources roll at Mediocre (+0), they can no longer make any
Resources rolls that session.

If you really want to get crazy, you can make finances a category of
conflict and give each character a wealth stress track, giving them extra
stress boxes for having a high Resources, but we don’t recommend going
that far unless you plan on making material wealth a major part of your
game.

Shoot
The counterpart to Fight, Shoot is the skill of using ranged weaponry, either
in a conflict or on targets that don’t actively resist your attempts to shoot
them (like a bull’s-eye or the broad side of a barn).
Again, as with Fight, if it’s important to your setting to make a distinction
between different types of ranged weaponry, you might separate this out
into skills like Bows, Guns, Energy Weapons, etc. Don’t go nuts with this
unless it’s key to your game.

Overcome: Unless, for some reason, you need to demonstrate your

Shoot ability in a non-conflict situation, you probably won’t be using this
skill for normal obstacles much. Obviously, contests involving Shoot are a
popular staple of adventure fiction, and we recommend you look for the
opportunity to have them if you have a character who specializes in this.

Create an Advantage: In physical conflicts, Shoot can be used to

perform a wide variety of moves, like trick shots, keeping someone under
heavy fire, and the like. In cinematic games, you might even be able to
disarm people and pin their sleeves to walls—pretty much anything you’ve
seen in an action movie. You could also make the argument for creating
aspects based on your knowledge of guns (like placing a Prone to
Jams aspect on an opponent’s gun).

Attack: This skill makes physical attacks. You can make them from
up to two zones away, unlike with Fight. (Sometimes the range will change
with the weapon.)

Defend: Shoot is unique in that it doesn’t really have a defense

component to it—you’d use Athletics for that. You could use it to lay down
some covering fire—which might act as a defense for your allies or provide
opposition to someone else’s movement—though it could just as easily be
represented by creating an advantage (Covering Fire or Hail of Bullets, for
example).
Shoot Stunts

Called Shot. During a Shoot attack, spend a fate point and declare a
specific condition you want to inflict on a target, like Shot in the
 Hand. If you succeed, you place that as a situation aspect on them in
addition to hitting them for stress.
Quick on the Draw. You can use Shoot instead of Notice to determine
turn order in any physical conflict where shooting quickly would be
useful.
Uncanny Accuracy. Once per conflict, stack an additional free invoke
on an advantage you’ve created to represent the time you take to aim
or line up a shot (like In My Sights).

Stealth
The Stealth skill allows you to avoid detection, both when hiding in place
and trying to move about unseen. It pairs well with the Burglary skill.

Overcome: You can use Stealth to get past any situation that
primarily depends on you not being seen. Sneaking past sentries and
security, hiding from a pursuer, avoiding leaving evidence as you pass
through a place, and any other such uses all fall under the purview of
Stealth.

Create an Advantage: You’ll mainly use Stealth to create aspects on

yourself, setting yourself in an ideal position for an attack or ambush in a
conflict. That way, you can be Well-Hidden when the guards pass by and
take advantage of that, or Hard to Pin Down if you’re fighting in the dark.

Attack: Stealth isn’t used to make attacks.

Defend: You can use this to foil Notice attempts to pinpoint you or
seek you out, as well as to try to throw off the scent of an Investigate
attempt from someone trying to track you.
Stealth Stunts

Face in the Crowd. +2 to any Stealth roll to blend into a crowd. What
a “crowd” means will depend on the environment—a subway station
 requires more people to be crowded than a small bar.
Ninja Vanish. Once per scene, you can vanish while in plain sight by
spending a fate point, using a smoke pellet or other mysterious
technique. This places the Vanished boost on you. While you’re
vanished, no one can attack or create an advantage on you until after
they’ve succeeded at an overcome roll with Notice to suss out where
you went (basically meaning they have to give up an exchange to try).
This aspect goes away as soon as you invoke it, or someone makes that
overcome roll.
Slippery Target. Provided you’re in darkness or shadow, you can use
Stealth to defend against Shoot attacks from enemies that are at
least one zone away.

Will
The Will skill represents your character’s general level of mental fortitude,
the same way that Physique represents your physical fortitude.

Overcome: You can use Will to pit yourself against obstacles that
require mental effort. Puzzles and riddles can fall under this category, as
well as any mentally absorbing task, like deciphering a code. Use Will
when it’s only a matter of time before you overcome the mental challenge,
and Lore if it takes something more than brute mental force to get past it.
Many of the obstacles that you go up against with Will might be made part
of challenges, to reflect the effort involved.

Contests of Will might reflect particularly challenging games, like chess, or

competing in a hard set of exams. In settings where magic or psychic
abilities are common, contests of Will are popular occurrences.

Create an Advantage: You can use Will to place aspects on yourself,

representing a state of deep concentration or focus.

Attack: Will isn’t really used for attacks. That said, in settings where
you allow psychic abilities, full-on psychic conflict might be something you
can do with this skill. That’s the sort of thing that would be added to Will
by taking a stunt or extra.

Defend: Will is the main skill you use to defend against mental
attacks from Provoke, representing your control over your reactions.
Special: The Will skill gives you additional mental stress boxes or
consequence slots. Average (+1) or Fair (+2) gives you a 3-point stress box.
Good (+3) or Great (+4) gives you a 3-point and a 4-point stress box.
Superb (+5) and above give you an additional mild consequence slot along
with the additional stress boxes. This slot can only be used for mental harm.
Will Stunts

Strength From Determination. Use Will instead of Physique on any

overcome rolls representing feats of strength.
Hard Boiled. You can choose to ignore a mild or moderate
consequence for the duration of the scene. It can’t be compelled
against you or invoked by your enemies. At the end of the scene it
comes back worse, though; if it was a mild consequence it becomes a
moderate consequence, and if it was already moderate, it becomes
severe.
Indomitable. +2 to defend against Provoke attacks specifically related
to intimidation and fear.
6
ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES
IT’S TIME FOR ACTION!
You roll the dice when there’s some kind of interesting opposition
keeping you from achieving your goals. If there’s no interesting
opposition, you just accomplish whatever you say you’re trying to do.
As we’ve said in prior chapters, characters in a Fate game solve their
problems proactively. Players, during the game you’re going to do a lot—
you might break into the bad guy’s fortress, pilot a starship past a minefield,
rally a group of people into a protest, or poll a network of informants to get
the latest word on the street.
Whenever you take action, there’s a good chance that something or
someone is going to be in your way. It wouldn’t be an interesting story if
the bad guy just rolled over and handed you victory on a plate—clearly,
he’s got some crazy security measures to keep you out of his place. Or the
mines are unstable and already blowing up around you. Or the protesters are
really scared of the cops. Or someone’s been bribing the informants to keep
quiet.
That’s when it’s time to take out the dice.

Choose the character’s skill that is appropriate to the action.

Roll four Fate dice.
Add together the symbols showing on the dice. A + is +1, a - is –1, and
a 0 is 0.
Add your skill rating to the dice roll. The total is your result on the
ladder.
If you invoke an aspect, add +2 to your result or reroll the dice.

Cynere needs to bribe her way past the guards keeping her from
entering the city of Thaalar. Amanda says she’ll do this as a straight-up
 overcome action, because the guards are nameless NPCs anyway and
not really worth a conflict.
Lily looks through Cynere’s skill list and picks Resources as her skill,
hoping she can scrounge enough out of her coin purse to satisfy them.
Her Resources skill is Average (+1), so she’ll add one to whatever
result she gets from rolling the dice.
She rolls and gets:

Her total result is +2 (+1 from her dice and +1 from her skill of
Average), which corresponds to a Fair on the ladder.

Opposition
As we said in The Basics, whenever you roll the dice, you’re comparing
your roll to your opposition. Opposition is either active, meaning it’s
another person rolling dice against you, or passive, meaning that it’s just a
set rating on the ladder which represents the influence of the environment
or situation you’re in. GMs, it’s your job to decide what the most reasonable
source of opposition is.

Amanda decides to roll active opposition against Lily on behalf of the

guards. She decides the most appropriate opposing skill is Will—
they’re trying to resist the temptation of bribery, after all.
The guards are nameless NPCs with no reason to be particularly
strong of will, so she gives them a Mediocre (+0). She rolls and gets:

...for an incredibly lucky result of +3!

That gives her a Good (+3) result, beating Lily’s roll by one.
 FOR THE GM: ACTIVE OR PASSIVE?
If a PC or a named NPC can reasonably interfere with whatever the action
is, then you should give them the opportunity to roll active opposition. This
does not count as an action for the opposing character; it’s just a basic
property of resolving actions. In other words, a player doesn’t have to do
anything special to earn the right to actively oppose an action, as long as the
character is present and can interfere. If there’s any doubt, having an
appropriate situation aspect helps justify why a character gets to actively
oppose someone else.
If there is no character in the way, then look at your situation aspects in
this scene to see if any of them justify some sort of obstacle, or consider the
circumstances (like rough terrain, a complex lock, time running out, a
situational complication, etc.). If something sounds interesting, choose
passive opposition and set a rating on the ladder.
Sometimes you’re going to run into edge cases, where something
inanimate seems like it should provide active opposition (like an automated
gun) or an NPC can’t provide proactive resistance (like if they’re unaware
of what the PC is doing). Follow your gut—use the type of opposition that
fits the circumstances or makes the scene more interesting.

THE FOUR OUTCOMES

When you roll the dice, either you’re going to fail, tie, succeed, or
succeed with style.
Every roll you make in a Fate game results in one of four outcomes,
generally speaking. The specifics may change a little depending on what
kind of action you’re taking, but all the game actions fit this general pattern.
Fail
If you roll lower than your opposition, you fail.
 This means one of several things: you don’t get what you want, you get
what you want at a serious cost, or you suffer some negative mechanical
consequence. Sometimes, it means more than one of those. It’s the GM’s
job to determine an appropriate cost. (See this box.)
Tie
If you roll the same as your opposition, you tie.
This means you get what you want, but at a minor cost, or you get a lesser
version of what you wanted.
Succeed
If you roll higher than your opposition by 1 or 2 shifts, you succeed.
This means you get what you want at no cost.
Succeed with Style
If you roll higher than your opposition by 3 or more shifts, you succeed
with style.
This means that you get what you want, but you also get an added benefit
on top of that.

FOR THE GM: SERIOUS COST VS. MINOR COST

When you’re thinking about costs, think both about the story in play and the
game mechanics to help you figure out what would be most appropriate.
A serious cost should make the current situation worse somehow, either by
creating a new problem or exacerbating an existing one. Bring in another
source of opposition in this scene or the next one (such as a new opposing
NPC or an obstacle to overcome), or ask the player to take a consequence at
their lowest free level, or give someone who opposes the PC an advantage
with a free invocation.
A minor cost should add a story detail that’s problematic or bad for the PC,
but doesn’t necessarily endanger progress. You could also ask the PC to
take stress or give someone who opposes the PCs a boost.
 It’s okay if the minor cost is mainly a narrative detail, showing how the PC
just barely scratched by. We give more advice about dealing with costs
on in Running the Game.

FOR THE GM
HOW HARD SHOULD SKILL ROLLS BE?
For active opposition, you don’t really need to worry about how hard the
roll is—just use the NPC’s skill level and roll the dice like the players do,
letting the chips fall where they may. We have guidelines about NPC skill
levels in Running the Game.
For passive opposition, you have to decide what rank on the ladder the
player has to beat. It’s more an art than a science, but we have some
guidelines to help you.
Anything that’s two or more steps higher than the PC’s skill level—Fair
(+2) skill and Great (+4) opposition, for example— means that the player
will probably fail or need to invoke aspects to succeed.
Anything that’s two or more steps lower than the PC’s skill level—Fair
(+2) skill and Mediocre (+0) opposition, for example—means that the
player will probably not need to invoke aspects and have a good chance of
succeeding with style.
Between that range, there’s a roughly equal chance that they’ll tie or
succeed, and a roughly equal chance that they will or won’t need to invoke
aspects to do so.
Therefore, low difficulties are best when you want to give the PCs a
chance to show off and be awesome, difficulties near their skill levels are
best when you want to provide tension but not overwhelm them, and high
difficulties are best when you want to emphasize how dire or unusual the
circumstances are and make them pull out all the stops.
Finally, a couple of quick axioms:
 Average is called Average for a reason—if nothing about the opposition
sticks out, then the difficulty doesn’t need more than a +1.
If you can think of at least one reason why the opposition sticks out, but
otherwise just can’t decide what the difficulty should be, pick Fair (+2). It’s
in the middle of a PC’s range of skills, so it provides a decent challenge for
every skill level except Great (+4), and you want to give PCs a chance to
show off their peak skill anyway.

THE FOUR ACTIONS

When you make a skill roll, you’re taking one of four actions:
overcome, create an advantage, attack, or defend.
There are four types of actions you can take in a game of Fate. When you
make a skill roll, you have to decide which of these you’re going to try.
The skill descriptions tell you which actions are appropriate for that skill
and under which circumstances. Usually, the action you need to take will be
pretty obvious from the skill description, your intent, and the situation in
play, but sometimes you might have to talk it over with the group to find
out which is the most appropriate.
The four actions are: overcome, create advantage, attack, and defend.

Overcome
Use the overcome action to achieve assorted goals appropriate to your
skill.
Every skill has a certain niche of miscellaneous endeavors that fall under
its purview, certain situations where it’s an ideal choice. A character with
Burglary tries to jimmy a window, a character with Empathy tries to calm
the crowd, and a character with Crafts tries to fix the broken axle on his
wagon after a desperate chase.
When your character’s in one of these situations and there’s something
between her and her goals, you use the overcome action to deal with it.
Look at it as the “catch-all” action for every skill—if it doesn’t fall into any
other category, it’s probably an overcome action.
The opposition you have to beat might be active or passive, depending on
the situation.

When you fail an overcome action, you have two options. You can
simply fail, which means you don’t attain your goal or get what you
were after, or you can succeed at a serious cost.
When you tie an overcome action, you attain your goal or get what
you were after, but at a minor cost.
When you succeed at an overcome action, you attain your goal
without any cost.
When you succeed with style at an overcome action, you get a boost
in addition to attaining your goal.

You may occasionally run into situations where it seems appropriate to

provide a different benefit or penalty for a given action result than the one
listed. It’s okay to go back to the basic description of the four outcomes and
sub in something that makes sense.
For example, on the overcome action it says you get a boost in addition to
success when you succeed with style. But if that overcome roll is going to
end the scene, or you can’t think of a good boost, You may choose to offer a
story detail as an extra benefit instead.

Landon stalks around the siege tower of the Red Emperor’s fortress,
trying to sabotage the ballistas. If he succeeds, the army who hired him
has a much better chance in the field when they attack tomorrow
morning.
Amanda says, “Okay, so you make it to the top of the tower, and you
start working. But then, you hear footsteps echoing below you in the
tower—sounds like the next guard patrol got here just a bit early.”
 “Damn,” Lenny says. “Figures I’d get the one guard squad with real
discipline. I need to disable these and get out—if they find me, General
Ephon already told me he’d disavow my existence.”
Amanda shrugs a bit and says, “Work fast? You’re looking at passive
opposition here—crunched for time, and dealing with intricate
machinery bits, so I’ll call that Great (+4).”
Landon has the Crafts skill at Average (+1). Lenny grumbles and
says, “Should have convinced Zird to do this.” He rolls, getting a +2,
for a Good (+3) result. Not good enough.
Landon chips in a fate point and says, “Well, you know what I always
say... Smashing Is Always an Option,” referring to one of his aspects.
Amanda chuckles and nods, and with the invocation, he manages a
Superb (+5). That’s enough to succeed, but not enough to succeed with
style, so Landon accomplishes his objective at no cost.
He describes how he hastily dismantles the ballista, applying rather
violent sabotage before diving for a hiding spot as the guards get
closer...

Create an Advantage
Use the create an advantage action to make a situation aspect that gives
you a benefit, or to claim a benefit from any aspect you have access to.
The create an advantage action covers a broad range of endeavors, unified
around the theme of using your skills to take advantage (hence the name) of
the environment or situation you’re in.
Sometimes, that means you’re doing something to actively change your
circumstances (like throwing sand in an opponent’s eyes or setting
something on fire), but it could also mean that you’re discovering new
information that helps you (like learning the weakness of a monster through
research), or taking advantage of something you’ve previously observed
(like your opponent’s predisposition to a bad temper).
When you roll to create an advantage, you must specify whether you’re
creating a new situation aspect or taking advantage of an aspect that’s
already in place. If the former, are you attaching that situation aspect to a
character or to the environment?
Opposition might be active or passive, depending on the circumstances. If
your target is another character, their roll always counts as a defend action.
If you’re using create an advantage to make a new aspect…

When you fail, you either don’t create the aspect, or you create it but
someone else gets the free invoke—whatever you end up doing works
to someone else’s advantage instead. That could be your opponent in a
conflict, or any character who could tangibly benefit to your detriment.
You may have to reword the aspect to show that the other character
benefits instead—work it out with the recipient in whichever way
makes the most sense.
When you tie, you get a boost instead of the situation aspect you were
going for. This might mean you have to rename the aspect a bit to
reflect its temporary nature (Rough Terrain becomes Rocks on the
Path).
When you succeed, you create a situation aspect with a free
invocation.
When you succeed with style, you get a situation aspect with two free
invocations instead of one.

While deep in the Caverns of Yarzuruk, Cynere is in the unfortunate

position of having to fight some animated temple golems.
The first couple of exchanges have not gone well, and she’s taken a
couple of big hits already. Lily says, “Amanda, you said there was a lot
of filigree and furnishings and stuff laying around, right?”
Amanda nods, and Lily asks, “Can I knock some of it over in order to
trip these guys up a bit? I imagine if they’re big, clodhopping golems,
 they aren’t as agile as I am.”
She says, “Sounds fine to me. Sounds like you’re trying to create an
advantage with Athletics. One of the golems gets to roll a defend action
against you, just because it’s close enough to get in your way.”
Cynere has Athletics at Great (+4). Lily rolls and gets a +1, for a
Superb (+5) result. The nearest golem rolls to defend and only gets a
Fair (+2). Cynere succeeds with style! Lily places the aspect Cluttered
Floor on the scene and notes that she can invoke that aspect twice for
free.
Amanda describes the golems’ difficulty with their footing, and now
Cynere’s got a little bit of an advantage in the coming exchange...

If you’re using create an advantage on an existing aspect…

When you fail, you give a free invoke on that aspect to someone else
instead. That could be your opponent in a conflict, or any character
who could tangibly benefit to your detriment.
When you tie or succeed, you place a free invocation on the aspect.
When you succeed with style, you place two free invocations on the
aspect.

Zird is approaching a local merchant he’s been hired to get close to

(i.e. spy on) for the sultan of Wanir, in the famous bazaar of Wanir’s
capital city.
Ryan says, “I’m going to use Rapport to create an advantage, get this
guy to open up to me. I don’t know what I’m looking for in terms of an
aspect—just some juicy observation I can use later or pass on to
Cynere.” He has the Friendly Liar stunt, so he can do this without
needing Deceive, despite the fact that he’s hiding his real intent.
 Amanda says, “Works for me. He’s a merchant, so his Deceive’s pretty
high. I’m going to say it’s passive opposition, though, because he’s not
really suspicious of you. Try and beat a Great (+4).”
Ryan rolls. His Rapport skill is Good (+3), and he manages a +1 on
the dice, for a tie.
Amanda looks at her notes, grins, and says, “Okay, here’s what you
notice. This merchant is obviously a very social fellow, boisterously
engaging other shop owners and potential customers as he makes his
rounds. This geniality takes on more of a flirtatious, suggestive air any
time he speaks to young men—he can’t seem to help that.”
She slides an index card with the aspect Sucker for a Pretty
Man written on it, to indicate that the merchant’s aspect is now public.
Ryan notes that he has a free invocation on that aspect.
“Pretty man, huh?” Ryan says. “Does he think I’m pretty?”
Amanda grins. “He certainly thinks you’re friendly…”
Ryan rolls his eyes. “The things I do for business...”

Attack
Use the attack action to harm someone in a conflict or take them out of
a scene.
The attack action is the most straightforward of the four actions—when
you want to hurt someone in a conflict, it’s an attack. An attack isn’t always
physical in nature; some skills allow you to hurt someone mentally as well.
Most of the time, your target will actively oppose your attack. Passive
opposition on an attack means you’ve caught your target unaware or
otherwise unable to make a full effort to resist you, or the NPC isn’t
important enough to bother with dice.
 In addition, passive or not, the opposition always counts as a defend action
so you can look at these two actions as being inexorably intertwined.

When you fail at an attack, you don’t cause any harm to your target.
(It also means that your target succeeded on the defend action, which
could get you saddled with other effects.)
When you tie an attack, you don’t cause any harm, but you gain
a boost.
When you succeed on an attack, you inflict a hit on your target equal
to the number of shifts you got. That forces the target to try and “buy
off” the value of your hit by taking stress or consequences; if that’s not
possible, your target gets taken out of the conflict.
When you succeed with style on an attack, it works like a normal
success, but you also have the option to reduce the value of your hit by
one to gain a boost as well.

Cynere is locked in combat with Drisban, one of the famed Scarlet

Twenty, the elite guard of Antharus. In her inimitable fashion, Cynere
attempts to slice him open with her flashing blade.
Cynere’s Fight skill is at Good (+3). Drisban defends with his Fight at
Great (+4). Lily rolls and gets a +2, for a Superb (+5) attack.
Amanda rolls for Drisban and gets a –1, bringing his total to Good
(+3). Lily wins by two, inflicting a 2-shift hit.
But she decides that isn’t good enough. “I’m also invoking Infamous
Girl With Sword,” she says, “because for heaven’s sake, this is what I
do, and I’m not letting this punk off easy.”
Lily chips in her fate point, making her final result Epic (+7). She gets
4 shifts and succeeds with style, cutting into him with a flourish. She
chooses to inflict a 4-shift hit, but she could also have inflicted a 3-shift
hit and taken a boost, if she’d wanted to.
Now Drisban needs to use stress or consequences to stay in the fight!
Defend
Use the defend action to avoid an attack or prevent someone from
creating an advantage against you.
Whenever someone attacks you in a conflict or tries to create an advantage
on you, you always get a chance to defend. As with attacks, this isn’t
always about avoiding physical sources of danger—some of the skills allow
you to defend against attempts to harm your mind or damage your resolve.
Because you roll to defend as a reaction, your opposition is almost always
active. If you’re rolling a defend action against passive opposition, it’s
because the environment is hostile to you somehow (like a blazing fire), or
the attacking NPC isn’t important enough for the GM to bother with dice.

When you fail at a defense, you suffer the consequences of whatever

you were trying to prevent. You might take a hit or have an advantage
created on you.
When you tie a defense, you grant your opponent a boost.
When you succeed at a defense, you successfully avoid the attack or
the attempt to gain an advantage on you.
When you succeed with style at a defense, it works like a normal
success, but you also gain a boost as you turn the tables momentarily.

CAN I DEFEND AGAINST OVERCOME ACTIONS?

Technically, no. The defend action is there to stop you from taking stress,
consequences, or situation aspects—basically, to protect you against all the
bad stuff we represent with mechanics.
But! You can roll active opposition if you’re in the way of any action, as
per the guidelines. So if someone’s doing an overcome action that might fail
because you’re in the way, you should speak up and say, “Hey, I’m in the
way!” and roll to oppose it. You don’t get any extra benefits like the defend
action gives you, but you also don’t have to worry about the
aforementioned bad stuff if you lose.

NO STACKED EFFECTS!
You’ll notice that the defend action has outcomes that mirror some of the
outcomes in attack and create an advantage. For example, it says that when
you tie a defense, you grant your opponent a boost. Under attack, it says
that when you tie, you receive a boost.
That doesn’t mean the attacker gets two boosts—it’s the same result, just
from two different points of view. We just wrote it that way so that the
results were consistent when you looked up the rule, regardless of what
action you took.
You’ll notice that the defend action has outcomes that mirror some of the
outcomes in attack and create an advantage. For example, it says that when
you tie a defense, you grant your opponent a boost. Under attack, it says
that when you tie, you receive a boost.
That doesn’t mean the attacker gets two boosts—it’s the same result, just
from two different points of view. We just wrote it that way so that the
results were consistent when you looked up the rule, regardless of what
action you took.

Zird the Arcane is arguing a magical thesis before the council of the
Collegia Arcana. But one of the adjutants on the council, an old rival
named Vokus Skortch, has it in for Zird. He wants not only to see Zird
fail, but to damage Zird’s self-confidence by forcing him to misstep and
doubt himself. The group agrees that they know each other well enough
that Skortch could affect him this way, so the conflict is on.
As Zird finishes his opening argument, Amanda describes how Skortch
uses Provoke as an attack, poking holes in Zird’s theories and forcing
him to reevaluate. Skortch has a Provoke of Good (+3).
Zird defends with Will, which he has at Fair (+2). Amanda rolls for
Skortch and gets a +1, for a total of Great (+4). Ryan rolls for Zird and
gets a +2, tying at Great (+4). Zird doesn’t have to deal with taking a
hit, but he does grant Skortch a boost, which Amanda decides to
call Momentarily Tripped Up.
7
CHALLENGES, CONTESTS,
AND CONFLICTS

ZOOMING IN ON THE ACTION

Most of the time, a single skill roll should be enough to decide how a
particular situation in play resolves. You’re not obligated to describe actions
in a particular timeframe or level of detail when you use a skill. Therefore,
you could use a single Athletics roll to find out whether you can safely
navigate a rock face that will take days to climb, or use that same single
skill roll to find out whether you can safely avoid a swiftly falling tree that’s
about to crush you.
Sometimes, however, you’ll be in a situation where you’re doing
something really dramatic and interesting, like pivotal set pieces in a movie
or a book. When that happens, it’s a good idea to zoom in on the action and
deal with it using multiple skill rolls, because the wide range of dice results
will make things really dynamic and surprising. Most fight scenes fall into
this category, but you can zoom in on anything that you consider
sufficiently important—car chases, court trials, high-stakes poker games,
and so on.
We have three ways for you to zoom in on the action in Fate:

Challenges, when one or more characters try to achieve something

dynamic or complicated
Contests, when two or more characters are competing for a goal
Conflicts, when two or more characters are trying to directly harm
each other

CHALLENGES
A single overcome action is sufficient to deal with a straightforward goal or
obstacle—the hero needs to pick this lock, disarm this bomb, sift out a vital
piece of information, and so on. It’s also useful when the details of how
something gets done aren’t important or worth spending an intense amount
of time on, when what you need to know is whether the character can get
something done without any setbacks or costs.
Sometimes, however, things get complicated. It’s not enough to pick the
lock, because you also have to hold off the hordes of attacking zombies and
set up the magical ward that’s going to keep pursuers off your back. It’s not
enough to disarm the bomb, because you also have to land the crashing
blimp and keep the unconscious scientist you’re rescuing from getting hurt
in said landing.
A challenge is a series of overcome actions that you use to resolve an
especially complicated or dynamic situation. Each overcome action uses
a different skill to deal with one task or part of the situation, and you take
the individual results as a whole to figure out how the situation resolves.
GMs, when you’re trying to figure out if it’s appropriate to call for a
challenge, ask yourself the following questions:

Is each separate task something that can generate tension and drama
independently of the other tasks? If all the tasks are really part of the
same overall goal, like “detaching the detonator,” “stopping the timer”,
and “disposing of the explosive material” when you’re disarming a
bomb, then that should be one overcome action, where you use those
details to explain what happened if the roll goes wrong.
Does the situation require different skills to deal with? Holding off the
zombies (Fight) while pushing down a barricade (Physique) and fixing
your broken wagon (Crafts) so that you can get away would be a good
instance for a challenge.

To set up a challenge, simply identify the individual tasks or goals that

make up the situation, and treat each one as a separate overcome roll.
(Sometimes, only a certain sequence for the rolls will make sense to you;
that’s okay too.) Depending on the situation, one character may be required
to make several rolls, or multiple characters may be able to participate.
 Zird the Arcane is attempting to finish the consecration ritual of the
Qirik in order to sanctify the ground of the roadside inn and grant it the
protection of the Qirik gods. Normally, this wouldn’t be too interesting,
except that he’s trying to get it done before a horde of slavering, flesh-
hungry zombies he unwittingly set free earlier in the adventure
overruns the inn.
Amanda sees several different components to this scene. First there’s
the ritual itself, then there’s keeping the inn boarded up, and finally
there’s keeping the panicking inhabitants of the inn calm. That calls for
Lore, Crafts, and some kind of social skill—Ryan immediately chooses
Rapport.
Thus, Ryan will be rolling all three of those skills separately, one for
each component Amanda identified. She sets the opposition for each of
these at Good (+3)—she wants him to have even chances, while
leaving room for a variable outcome.
Now they’re ready to start.

To conduct a challenge, call for each overcome action in whichever order

seems most interesting, but don’t decide anything about how the situation
turns out until after you’ve collected all the results—you want to have the
freedom to sequence the events of each roll in the order that makes the most
sense and is the most entertaining. Players, if you get a boost on one of your
rolls, feel free to use it on another roll in the challenge, provided you can
justify it.
GMs, after the rolls have been made, you’ll consider the successes,
failures, and costs of each action as you interpret how the scene proceeds. It
could be that the results lead you into another challenge, a contest, or even a
conflict.

Ryan takes a deep breath and says, “All right, let’s do this.” He takes
up the dice.
He decides to tackle securing the inn first, so he rolls his Good (+3)
Crafts skill and gets a 0 on the dice. That ties the roll, allowing him to
achieve the goal at a minor cost. Amanda says, “I’m going to say that I
get a boost called Hasty Work to use against you if I need it—you are
working fast, after all.”
Ryan sighs and nods, and then goes for the second goal in the
challenge, which is calming the locals with his Good (+3) Rapport. He
makes his roll and gets a terrible –3 on the dice! Now he has the option
to fail or to succeed with a major cost. He goes for success, leaving
Amanda to think of a good major cost.
She thinks a moment. How to make calming the villagers costly? Then
she grins. “So, this is a story thing more than a mechanics thing, but
you know… you’re using Rapport, so you’re probably being pretty
inspirational right now. I could see you inadvertently convincing some
of these farmers and peasants that those zombies are no real threat,
and that they totally can go out and fight with little consequence.
Because your magic is keeping them safe, right?”
Ryan says, “But they have to be in the inn for that to work!” Amanda
is just grinning. Ryan sighs again. “Okay, fine. Some people get totally
the wrong idea and are potentially going to get themselves killed. I can
just hear them now… Zird, why did you let my husband die? Augh.”
Amanda grins some more.
Ryan goes for the final part of the challenge—the ritual itself, cast
with his Great (+4) Lore. Amanda invokes the boost she got earlier and
says, “Yeah, you totally have very distracting zombies chipping apart
your barricades. Very distracting.” That pushes the difficulty for the
final roll up to Superb (+5).
 He rolls a +2 and gets a Fantastic (+6), enough to succeed with no
cost.
Amanda nods and together they finish describing the scene—Zird
finishes the ritual just in time, and the holy power of the Qirik descends
on the inn. Some zombies on the verge of breaking in get sizzled by the
holy aura, and Zird breathes a sigh of relief… until he hears the
panicked screams of villagers outside the inn…
But that’s next scene.

If you have any boosts that went unused in the challenge, feel free to keep
them for the rest of this scene or whatever scene you’re transitioning to, if
the events of the challenge connect directly to the next scene.
Advantages in a Challenge
You can try to create an advantage during a challenge, for yourself or to
help someone else out. Creating an advantage doesn’t count towards
completing one of the challenge goals, but failing the roll could create a
cost or problem that negatively impacts one of the other goals. Be careful
using this tactic; advantages can help complete tasks more effectively and
create momentum, but trying to create them is not without risk.
Attacks in a Challenge
Because you’re always up against passive opposition in a challenge, you’ll
never use the attack action. If you’re in a situation where it seems
reasonable to roll an attack, you should start setting up for a conflict.

CONTESTS
Whenever two or more characters have mutually exclusive goals, but
they aren’t trying to harm each other directly, they’re in a contest. Arm
wrestling matches, races or other sports competitions, and public debates
are all good examples of contests.
GMs, answer the following questions when you’re setting up a contest:
 What are the “sides”? Is every character in the contest in it for herself,
or are there groups of people opposing other groups? If you have
multiple characters on a side, they roll together using the Teamwork
rules.
What environment does the contest take place in? Are there any
significant or notable features of that environment you want to define
as situation aspects?
How are the participants opposing each other? Are they rolling against
each other directly (like in a straight sprint race or a poker match), or
are they trying to overcome something in the environment (like an
obstacle course or a panel of judges)?
What skills are appropriate for this contest? Does everyone have to roll
the same one, or do several apply?

Zird the Arcane has been felled in a battle with a shadowy group of
assassins who ambushed him and Cynere just outside of town! Cynere
finishes off the last of them, ending the conflict, then starts toward her
fallen friend.
That’s when the assassins’ leader, a cutpurse she knows well as Teran
the Swift, blinks in with teleportation magic next to Zird’s unconscious
form! He starts casting another teleportation spell, clearly intending to
leave with Zird. Cynere breaks into a run. Can she get there before
Teran finishes his spell?
Amanda looks through the questions for setting up the contest.
The previous conflict scene had a situation aspect of Muddy Ground,
so she decides to keep that in play.
Clearly, Teran and Cynere are directly opposing each other, so they’ll
be providing active opposition.
Teran’s going to be rolling his Lore skill for the contest, because he’s
casting a spell. Because this is a pretty straightforward movement-
 related situation for Cynere, Amanda and Lily agree that Athletics is
the most appropriate skill to roll.

Now you can get started.

A contest proceeds in a series of exchanges. In an exchange, every
participant gets to make one skill roll to determine how well they do in that
leg of the contest. This is basically an overcome action.
Players, when you make a contest roll, compare your result to everyone
else’s.

If you got the highest result, you win the exchange. If you’re rolling
directly against the other participants, then that means you got the
highest rank on the ladder out of everyone. If you’re all rolling against
something in the environment, it means you got the most shifts out of
everyone.

Winning the exchange means you score a victory (which you can just
represent with a tally mark or check mark on scratch paper) and describe
how you take the lead.

If you succeed with style and no one else does, then you get to
mark two victories.
If there’s a tie for the highest result, no one gets a victory, and an
unexpected twist occurs. This could mean several things depending
on the situation—the terrain or environment shifts somehow, the
parameters of the contest change, or an unanticipated variable shows
up and affects all the participants. GMs, you should create a new
situation aspect reflecting this change.
The first participant to achieve three victories wins the contest.
Cynere has Athletics at Great (+4). Teran has Lore at Good (+3).
In the first exchange, Lily rolls poorly for Cynere and ends up with an
Average (+1). Amanda rolls a 0 on the dice and stays at Good (+3).
Amanda wins, so Teran wins the exchange and takes 1 victory. Amanda
describes Teran completing the first major rune of the spell, raising a
lambent green glow into the air.

In the second exchange, Lily turns the tables, rolling exceptionally

well and getting a Superb (+5), whereas Amanda only gets a Fair (+2)
for Teran. That’s a success with style, so Lily picks up two victories and
the lead. Lily describes Cynere in a full-on sprint, bearing down on
Teran.

In the third exchange, they tie at Good (+3)! Amanda now has to
introduce an unexpected twist into the contest. She thinks about it for a
moment, and says, “Okay, so it looks like some of the various magical
reagents on Zird’s belt pouch are reacting weirdly with the magic of
Teran’s spell, throwing Magical Distortions into the air.” She writes
down that situation aspect on an index card and puts it on the table.
In the fourth exchange, they tie again, this time at Great (+4). Lily
says, “Forget this noise. I want to invoke two aspects—one, because I
 have I’ve Got Zird’s Back on my sheet, and Magical Distortions,
because I figure that they’re going to interfere more with his
spellcasting than my running.” She passes Amanda two fate points.
That puts her final result at Legendary (+8), another success with
style and another two victories. That gives her four victories to Teran’s
one, and she wins the exchange and the contest!

Amanda and Lily describe how she snatches Zird just before Teran
finishes his spell, and he teleports away without his prize.

Creating Advantages in a Contest

During any exchange, you can try to create an advantage before you make
your contest roll. If you’re targeting another participant, they get to defend
normally. If someone can interfere with your attempt, they provide active
opposition as normal.
Doing this carries an additional risk—failing to create an advantage
means you forfeit your contest roll, which means there’s no way you can
make progress in the current exchange. If you at least tie, you get to make
your contest roll normally.
If you’re providing a bonus via the Teamwork rules, failing to create an
advantage means the lead character doesn’t benefit from your help this
exchange.

Cynere tries to throw mud in the eyes of Teran the Swift as she’s
running to save Zird. Lily says she wants to create an advantage, with
 Teran as her target and a new aspect called Mud in the Eyes.
(Imaginative, we know.)
She rolls Athletics to create the advantage and gets a Great (+4).
Teran rolls Athletics to defend and gets a Good (+3).
Teran gets mud in his eyes as Cynere intended, and Lily marks that
she has a free invocation on it.
Because Lily didn’t fail, she gets to make her contest roll normally.
Amanda decides that being semi-blinded isn’t going to stop Teran from
continuing to cast, so he also gets to roll normally.

Attacks in a Contest
If someone tries to attack in a contest, then they’re doing direct harm, and it
ceases to be a contest. You should immediately stop what you’re doing and
start setting up for a conflict instead.

CONFLICTS
In a conflict, characters are actively trying to harm one another. It could be
a fist fight, a shootout, or a sword duel. It could also be a tough
interrogation, a psychic assault, or a shouting match with a loved one.As
long as the characters involved have both the intent and the ability to
harm one another, then you’re in a conflict scene.
Conflicts are either physical or mental in nature, based on the kind of harm
you’re at risk of suffering. In physical conflicts, you suffer bruises, scrapes,
cuts, and other injuries. In mental conflicts, you suffer loss of confidence
and self-esteem, loss of composure, and other psychological trauma.
Setting up a conflict is a little more involved than setting up contests or
challenges. Here are the steps:

Set the scene, describing the environment the conflict takes place in,
creating situation aspects and zones, and establishing who’s
participating and what side they’re on.
Determine the turn order.
 Start the first exchange:
On your turn, take an action and then resolve it.
On other people’s turns, defend or respond to their actions as
necessary.
At the end of everyone’s turn, start again with a new exchange.

You know the conflict is over when everyone on one of the sides
has conceded or been taken out.
Setting the Scene
GMs and players, you should talk briefly before you start a conflict about
the circumstances of the scene. This mainly involves coming up with quick
answers to variations of the four W-questions, such as:

Who’s in the conflict?

Where are they positioned relative to one another?
When is the conflict taking place? Is that important?
What’s the environment like?

You don’t need an exhaustive amount of detail here, like precise measures
of distance or anything like that. Just resolve enough to make it clear for
everyone what’s going on.
GMs, you’re going to take this information and create situation aspects to
help further define the arena of conflict.

Landon, Zird, and Cynere are breaking into a dockside warehouse in

order to find smuggled goods on behalf of their latest employer.
Unfortunately, someone tipped the smuggler off. Now Og, one of his
thug lieutenants, is at the warehouse waiting for them to show up, and
he brought along four friends.
The participants in the conflict are pretty obvious—the PCs, plus Og
and four nameless enforcers, all NPCs under Amanda’s control. The
 warehouse is the environment, and the group takes a moment to talk
about it—boxes and crates everywhere, large and open, there’s
probably a second floor, and Amanda mentions the loading door is
open because they’re waiting for a ship to come in.

Situation Aspects
GMs, when you’re setting the scene, keep an eye out for fun-sounding
features of the environment to make into situation aspects, especially if you
think someone might be able to take advantage of them in an interesting
way in a conflict. Don’t overload it—find three to five evocative things
about your conflict location and make them into aspects.
Good options for situation aspects include:

Anything regarding the general mood, weather, or lighting—dark or

badly lit, storming, creepy, crumbling, blindingly bright, etc.
Anything that might affect or restrict movement—filthy, mud
everywhere, slippery, rough, etc.
Things to hide behind—vehicles, obstructions, large furniture, etc.
Things you can knock over, wreck, or use as improvised weapons—
bookshelves, statues, etc.
Things that are flammable

SITUATION ASPECTS AND ZONES IN MENTAL CONFLICTS

In a mental conflict, it might not always make sense to use situation aspects
and zones to describe a physical space. It’d make sense in an interrogation,
for example, where the physical features of the space create fear, but not in
a really violent argument with a loved one. Also, when people are trying to
hurt each other emotionally, usually they’re using their target’s own
weaknesses against them—in other words, their own aspects.
So, you may not even need situation aspects or zones for a lot of mental
conflicts. Don’t feel obligated to include them.
 Considering our warehouse again, Amanda thinks about what might
make good situation aspects.
She decides that there are enough crates in here to make free
movement a potential problem, so she picks Heavy
Crates and Cramped as aspects. The loading door is open, which
means that there’s a large dock with water in it, so she also picks Open
to the Water as a situation aspect, figuring that someone might try to
knock someone in.

As the scene unfolds, players might suggest features of the environment

that are perfect as aspects. If the GM described the scene as being poorly lit,
a player should be able to invoke the Shadows to help on a Stealth roll even
if she hadn’t previously established it as an aspect. If the feature would
require some intervention on the part of the characters in the scene to
become aspect-worthy, then that’s the purview of the create an advantage
action. Usually the barn doesn’t catch On Fire! without someone kicking
over the lantern. Usually.
Zones
GMs, if your conflict takes place over a large area, you may want to break it
down into zones for easier reference.
A zone is an abstract representation of physical space. The best definition
of a zone is that it’s close enough that you can interact directly with
someone (in other words, walk up to and punch them in the face).
Generally speaking, a conflict should rarely involve more than a handful
of zones. Two to four is probably sufficient, save for really big conflicts.
This isn’t a miniatures board game—zones should give a tactile sense of the
environment, but at the point where you need something more than a
cocktail napkin to lay it out, you’re getting too complicated.

If you can describe the area as bigger than a house, you can probably
divide it into two or more zones—think of a cathedral or a shopping
center parking lot.
 If it’s separated by stairs, a ladder, a fence, or a wall, it could be
divided zones, like two floors of a house.
“Above X” and “below X” can be different zones, especially if moving
between them takes some doing—think of the airspace around
something large, like a blimp.

When you’re setting up your zones, note any situation aspects that could
make moving between those zones problematic. They’ll be important later,
when people want to move from zone to zone. If that means you need more
situation aspects, add them now.

Amanda decides the warehouse needs to be multiple zones. The main

floor is big enough, in her mind, for two zones, and the Heavy
Crates she mentioned earlier make it hard to freely move between
them.
She knows there’s also a second floor ringing the inner walls, so she
makes that an additional zone. She adds Ladder Access Only to the
scene.
If, for some reason, someone decides to run outside, she figures that
can be a fourth zone, but she doesn’t think she needs any aspects for it.
She sketches the rough map on an index card for everyone to see.
Establishing Sides
It’s important to know everyone’s goal in a conflict before you start. People
fight for a reason, and if they’re willing to do harm, it’s usually an urgent
reason.
The normal assumption is that the player characters are on one side,
fighting against NPCs who are in opposition. It doesn’t always have to be
that way, however—PCs can fight each other and be allied with NPCs
against each other.
Make sure everyone agrees on the general goals of each side, who’s on
which side, and where everyone is situated in the scene (like who’s
occupying which zone) when the conflict begins.
It might also help, GMs, to decide how those groups are going to “divvy
up” to face one another—is one character going to get mobbed by the bad
guy’s henchmen, or is the opposition going to spread itself around equally
among the PCs? You might change your mind once the action starts, but if
you have a basic idea, it gives you a good starting point to work from.

In our continuing warehouse fight example, the sides are obvious—Og

and his buddies want to do in the PCs, and the PCs want to keep that
from happening.
Ryan asks Amanda about finding the smuggled goods, and Amanda
replies, “If you think you can sneak in a moment during the fight to
look for them, go for it. We’ll see what happens.”
The conflict starts with everyone on the main warehouse floor.
Amanda decides that Og and one of his friends are going to go after
Landon, two of the other thugs are going after Cynere, and the final
one is going to chase after Zird.

Turn Order
Your turn order in a conflict is based on your skills. In a physical conflict,
compare your Notice skill to the other participants. In a mental conflict,
compare your Empathy skill. Whoever has the highest gets to go first, and
then everyone else in descending order.
If there’s a tie, compare a secondary or tertiary skill. For physical conflicts,
that’s Athletics, then Physique. For mental conflicts, Rapport, then Will.
GMs, for a simple option, pick your most advantageous NPC to determine
your place in the turn order, and let all your NPCs go at that time.
Cynere has a Notice of Good (+3), higher than everyone else, so she
goes first.
Zird has a Notice of Average (+1), so he goes second.
Landon and Og both lack the Notice skill. Landon has Athletics at
Good (+3), and Og has it at Fair (+2), so Landon goes third and Og
goes last.
The Exchange
Exchanges in a conflict are a little more complicated than in contests. In an
exchange, every character gets a turn to take an action. GMs, you get to go
once for every NPC you control in the conflict.
Most of the time, you’re going to be attacking another character or
creating an advantage on your turn, because that’s the point of a conflict—
take your opponent out, or set things up to make it easier to take your
opponent out.

GMs, if you have a lot of nameless NPCs in your scene, feel free to have them use passive opposition
to keep your dice rolling down. Also, consider using mobs instead of individual NPCs to keep
things simple.

However, if you have a secondary objective in the conflict scene, you

might need to roll an overcome action instead. You’ll encounter this most
often if you want to move between zones but there’s a situation aspect in
place making that problematic.
Regardless, you only get to make one skill roll on your turn in an
exchange, unless you’re defending against someone else’s action—you can
do that as many times as you want. You can even make defend actions on
behalf of others, so long as you fulfill two conditions: it has to be
reasonable for you to interpose yourself between the attack and its target,
and you have to suffer the effects of any failed rolls.
Full Defense
If you want, you can forgo your action for the exchange to concentrate on
defense. You don’t get to do anything proactive, but you do get to roll all
defend actions for the exchange at a +2 bonus.

In the first exchange of our warehouse fight, Cynere goes first. Lily has
Cynere attack the thug that’s eyeing her. That’s her action for the
exchange—she can still roll to defend whenever she needs to, but she
can’t do anything else proactive until her next turn.
On Ryan’s turn, he has Zird do a full defense—normally, he’d be able
to defend and get an action this exchange, but instead, he gets a +2 to
his defense rolls until his next turn.
On Lenny’s turn, he has Landon create an advantage by placing an
aspect on Og called Hemmed In, hoping to corner him between some
crates. That’s his action for the exchange.
Amanda goes last, and she just has all of her NPCs attack their
chosen targets.

Resolving Attacks
A successful attack lands a hit equivalent to its shift value on a target. So if
you get three shifts on an attack, you land a 3-shift hit.
If you get hit by an attack, one of two things happen: either you absorb the
hit and stay in the fight, or you’re taken out.
Fortunately, you have two options for absorbing hits to stay in the fight—
you can take stress and/or consequences. You can also concede a
conflict before you’re taken out, in order to preserve some control over
what happens to your character.
If, for whatever reason, you want to forego your defense and take a hit (like,
say, to interpose yourself in the path of an arrow that’s about to skewer your
friend), you can.
Because you’re not defending, the attacker’s rolling against Mediocre (+0)
opposition, which means you’re probably going to take a bad hit.

Stress
One of your options to mitigate the effect of a hit is to take stress.
The best way to understand stress is that it represents all the various
reasons why you just barely avoid taking the full force of an attack. Maybe
you twist away from the blow just right, or it looks bad but is really just a
flesh wound, or you exhaust yourself diving out of the way at the last
second.
Mentally, stress could mean that you just barely manage to ignore an
insult, or clamp down on an instinctive emotional reaction, or something
like that.
Stress boxes also represent a loss of momentum—you only have so many
last-second saves in you before you’ve got to face the music.
On your character sheet, you have a number of stress boxes, each with a
different shift value. By default, all characters get a 1-point and a 2-point
box. You may get additional, higher-value stress boxes depending on some
of your skills (usually Physique and Will).

When you take stress, check off a stress box with a value equal to the shift
value of the hit. If that box is already checked, check off a higher value box.
If there is no higher available box, and you can’t take any consequences,
you’re taken out of the conflict.
You can only check off one stress box per hit.
Remember that you have two sets of stress boxes! One of these is for
physical stress, the other for mental; you’ll start with a 1-shift and a 2-shift
box in each of these. If you take stress from a physical source, you check
off a physical stress box. If it’s a mental hit, check off a mental stress box.
After a conflict, when you get a minute to breathe, any stress boxes you
checked off become available for your use again.

Og batters Landon with a whopping 3-shift hit on this exchange,

wielding a giant club with spikes.
Looking at his character sheet, Lenny sees that he’s only got two
stress boxes left—a 2-point and a 4-point.

Because his 3-point box is already checked, the hit must be absorbed
by a higher-value box. He reluctantly checks off the 4-point box.

Amanda and Lenny describe the outcome—Landon gets his sword up

just in time to barely deflect a blow that shatters a nearby crate,
peppering Landon’s face with splintered wood. One inch closer, and it
might have been his face that got splintered.
Landon has one more stress box on his sheet, a 2-shift box. That
means his reserves are almost gone, and the next major hit he takes is
going to hurt bad....

Consequences
The second option you have for mitigating a hit is taking a consequence. A
consequence is more severe than stress—it represents some form of lasting
injury or setback that you accrue from the conflict, something that’s going
to be a problem for your character after the conflict is over.
 Consequences come in three levels of severity—mild, moderate, and
severe. Each one has a different shift value: two, four, and six, respectively.
On your character sheet, you have a number of available consequence slots,
in this section:

When you use a consequence slot, you reduce the shift value of the attack
by the shift value of the consequence. You can use more than one
consequence at a time if they’re available. Any of the hit’s remaining shifts
must be handled by a stress box to avoid being taken out.
However, there’s a penalty. The consequence written in the slot is an
aspect that represents the lasting effect incurred from the attack. The
opponent who forced you to take a consequence gets a free invocation, and
the aspect remains on your character sheet until you’ve recovered the
consequence slot. While it’s on your sheet, the consequence is treated like
any other aspect, except because the slant on it is so negative, it’s far more
likely to be used to your character’s detriment.
Unlike stress, a consequence slot may take a long time to recover after the
conflict is over. Also unlike stress, you only have one set of consequences;
there aren’t specific slots for physical versus mental consequences. This
means that, if you have to take a mild consequence to reduce a mental hit
and your mild consequence slot is already filled with a physical
consequence, you’re out of luck! You’re going to have to use a moderate or
severe consequence to absorb that hit (assuming you have one left). The
exception to this is the extra consequence slot you would get from a Superb
(+5) Physique or Will is reserved for physical or mental harm, respectively.
Still, it’s better than being taken out, right?

Cynere gets teamed up on by three of the thugs during this exchange,

and with the help of a huge die roll and some situation aspects, they
manage to land a 6-shift attack on her. She’s escaped harm so far this
fight, and still has all her stress boxes and consequences available.
 She has two ways to take the hit. She could take one severe
consequence, which negates 6 stress. She could also take a moderate
consequence (4 stress) and use her 2-point stress box.
She decides that it’s not likely she’s going to get hit for that much
again, so she takes the severe consequence to keep her stress track
open for smaller hits.
Amanda and Lily agree to call the severe consequence Nearly
Gutted. Cynere takes a wicked slash from one of the thugs’ swords,
gritting her teeth through the pain....

Naming a Consequence

Here are some guidelines for choosing what to name a consequence:

Mild consequences don’t require immediate medical attention. They hurt,
and they may present an inconvenience, but they aren’t going to force you
into a lot of bed rest. On the mental side, mild consequences express things
like small social gaffes or changes in your surface emotions.
Examples: Black Eye, Bruised
Hand, Winded, Flustered, Cranky, Temporarily Blinded.
Moderate consequences represent fairly serious impairments that require
dedicated effort toward recovery (including medical attention). On the
mental side, they express things like damage to your reputation or
emotional problems that you can’t just shrug off with an apology and a
good night’s sleep. Examples: Deep Cut, First Degree
Burn, Exhausted, Drunk, Terrified.
Severe consequences go straight to the emergency room (or whatever the
equivalent is in your game)—they’re extremely nasty and prevent you from
doing a lot of things, and will lay you out for a while. On the mental side,
they express things like serious trauma or relationship-changing harm.
Examples: Second-Degree Burn, Compound Fracture, Guts Hanging
Out, Crippling Shame, Trauma-Induced Phobia.

WHAT SKILL DO I USE FOR RECOVERY?

In Hearts of Steel, physical recovery can only happen through the use of a
Lore stunt, which Zird the Arcane has taken. This makes physical fights
dangerous and suggests that actual medical training is quite rare. For mental
recovery, we use the Empathy skill.
If you want it to be easier to help people recover physically, you could add
it as a default action to a skill. Lore is a good default option, but we could
see it as a function of Crafts, too. It might even be important enough in your
game to add a Medic or Survival skill.
Likewise, if you want to restrict access to mental recovery, make it an
Empathy or Rapport stunt, rather than having it built in to a skill.

Recovering from a Consequence

In order to regain the use of a consequence slot, you have to recover from
the consequence. That requires two things—succeeding at an action that
allows you to justify recovery, and then waiting an appropriate amount of
game time for that recovery to take place.
The action in question is an overcome action; the obstacle is the
consequence that you took. If it’s a physical injury, then the action is some
kind of medical treatment or first aid. For mental consequences, the action
may involve therapy, counseling, or simply a night out with friends.
The difficulty for this obstacle is based on the shift value of the
consequence. Mild is Fair (+2), moderate is Great (+4), and severe is
Fantastic (+6). If you are trying to perform the recovery action on yourself,
increase the difficulty by two steps on the ladder.
Keep in mind that the circumstances have to be appropriately free of
distraction and tension for you to make this roll in the first place—you’re
not going to clean and bandage a nasty cut while ogres are tromping
through the caves looking for you. GMs, you’ve got the final judgment call.
If you succeed at the recovery action, or someone else succeeds on a
recovery action for you, you get to rename the consequence aspect to show
that it’s in recovery. So, for example, Broken Leg could becomeStuck in a
Cast, Scandalized could become Damage Control, and so on. This doesn’t
free up the consequence slot, but it serves as an indicator that you’re
recovering, and it changes the ways the aspect’s going to be used while it
remains.
Whether you change the consequence’s name or not—and sometimes it
might not make sense to do so—mark it with a star so that everyone
remembers that recovery has started.
Then, you just have to wait the time.

For a mild consequence, you only have to wait one whole scene after
the recovery action, and then you can remove the aspect and clear the
slot.
For a moderate consequence, you have to wait one whole session after
the recovery action (which means if you do the recovery action in the
middle of a session, you should recover sometime in the middle of
next session).
For a severe consequence, you have to wait one whole scenario after
the recovery action.

Cynere ended up with the severe consequence Nearly Gutted as the

result of the fight.
Back at the inn, Zird attempts to bandage up the cut. He has a stunt
called, “Scholar, Healer” which allows him to use his Lore skill for
recovery obstacles. He makes his Lore roll at a difficulty of Fantastic
(+6) and succeeds.
This allows Cynere’s Nearly Gutted aspect to be
renamed Bandaged and start the recovery process. After the next
 whole scenario, she’ll be able to erase that aspect from her sheet and
use her severe consequence again in a subsequent conflict.

POTIONS AND OTHER INSTA-HEALING

Many genres have some sort of mechanism by which characters can quickly
recover from injuries. Fantasy settings have the ubiquitous healing potion or
spell. Sci-fi has superscience dermal regenerators or biogel. Usually, these
mechanisms exists because many games express injuries in terms of a
constant numerical penalty that drastically affects a character’s
effectiveness.
In Fate, however, a consequence is largely just like any other aspect. It
only comes into play when someone pays a fate point to invoke it (after the
initial free invoke, of course), or when it’s compelled.
At best, powerful healing should simply eliminate the need to roll for a
recovery action, or should reduce the severity of a consequence by one level
or more. So, a healing potion might turn a severe consequence into a
moderate one, making the recovery time much shorter. The PC should have
to spend at least one scene where the consequence could affect things,
before you let it go away.

Extreme Consequences

In addition to the normal set of mild, moderate, and severe consequences,

every PC also gets one last-ditch option to stay in a fight—the extreme
consequence. Between major milestones, you can only use this option
once.
An extreme consequence will absorb up to 8-shifts of a hit, but at a very
serious cost—you must replace one of your aspects (except the high
concept, that’s off limits) with the extreme consequence. That’s right, an
extreme consequence is so serious that taking it literally changes who you
are.
 Unlike other consequences, you can’t make a recovery action to diminish
an extreme consequence—you’re stuck with it until your next major
milestone. After that, you can rename the extreme consequence to reflect
that you’re no longer vulnerable to the worst of it, as long as you don’t just
switch it out for whatever your old aspect was. Taking an extreme
consequence is a permanent character change; treat it as such.
Conceding the Conflict
When all else fails, you can also just give in. Maybe you’re worried that
you can’t absorb another hit, or maybe you decide that continuing to fight is
just not worth the punishment. Whatever the reason, you can interrupt any
action at any time before the roll is made to declare that you concede the
conflict. This is super-important—once dice hit the table, what happens
happens, and you’re either taking more stress, suffering more consequences,
or getting taken out.
Concession gives the other person what they wanted from you, or in the
case of more than two combatants, removes you as a concern for the
opposing side. You’re out of the conflict, period.
But it’s not all bad. First of all, you get a fate point for choosing to
concede. On top of that, if you’ve sustained any consequences in this
conflict, you get an additional fate point for each consequence. These fate
points may be used once this conflict is over.
Second of all, you get to avoid the worst parts of your fate. Yes, you
lost, and the narration has to reflect that. But you can’t use this privilege to
undermine the opponent’s victory, either—what you say happens has to
pass muster with the group.
That can make the difference between, say, being mistakenly left for dead
and ending up in the enemy’s clutches, in shackles, without any of your
stuff—the sort of thing that can happen if you’re taken out instead. That’s
not nothing.

Og proves to be too much for Landon to handle in the warehouse

conflict, having hit with several devastating attacks in the course of the
fight.
 Before Amanda’s next turn, Lenny says, “I concede. I don’t want to
risk any more consequences.”
Landon’s taken both a mild and a moderate consequence. He gets a
fate point for conceding, as well as two more fate points for the two
consequences he took, giving him three total.
Amanda says, “So, what are you trying to avoid here?”
Lenny says, “Well, I don’t want to get killed or captured, for starters.”
Amanda chuckles and says, “Fair enough. So, we’ll say that Og
knocks you out cold and doesn’t bother to finish you off, because he
still has Cynere and Zird to deal with. He may even think you’re dead. I
feel like the loss needs some more teeth, though. Hm...”
Ryan pipes up with, “How about he takes your sword as a trophy?”
Amanda nods. “Yeah, that’s good. He knocks you out, spits on you,
and takes your sword.”
Lenny says, “Bastard! I’m so getting him back for that one...”

Getting Taken Out

If you don’t have any stress or consequences left to buy off all the shifts of
a hit, that means you’re taken out.
Taken out is bad—it means not only that you can’t fight anymore, but that
the person who took you out gets to decide what your loss looks like and
what happens to you after the conflict. Obviously, they can’t narrate
anything that’s out of scope for the conflict (like having you die from
shame), but that still gives someone else a lot of power over your character
that you can’t really do anything about.
Character Death
So, if you think about it, there’s not a whole lot keeping someone from
saying, after taking you out, that your character dies. If you’re talking about
a physical conflict where people are using nasty sharp weapons, it certainly
seems reasonable that one possible outcome of defeat is your character
getting killed.
In practice, though, this assumption might be pretty controversial
depending on what kind of group you’re in. Some people think that
character death should always be on the table, if the rules allow it—if that’s
how the dice fall, then so be it.
Others are more circumspect, and consider it very damaging to their fun if
they lose a character upon whom they’ve invested hours and hours of
gameplay, just because someone spent a lot of fate points or their die rolls
were particularly unlucky.
We recommend the latter approach, mainly for the following reason: most
of the time, sudden character death is a pretty boring outcome when
compared to putting the character through hell. On top of that, all the story
threads that character was connected to just kind of stall with no resolution,
and you have to expend a bunch of effort and time figuring out how to get a
new character into play mid-stride.
That doesn’t mean there’s no room for character death in the game,
however. We just recommend that you save that possibility for conflicts that
are extremely pivotal, dramatic, and meaningful for that character—in other
words, conflicts in which that character would knowingly and willingly risk
dying in order to win. Players and GMs, if you’ve got the feeling that
you’re in that kind of conflict, talk it out when you’re setting the scene and
see how people feel.
At the very least, even if you’re in a hardcore group that invites the
potential for character death on any taken out result, make sure that you
telegraph the opponent’s lethal intent. GMs, this is especially important for
you, so the players will know which NPCs really mean business, and can
concede to keep their characters alive if need be.
Movement
In a conflict, it’s important to track where everyone is relative to one
another, which is why we divide the environment where the conflict’s
taking place into zones. Where you have zones, you have people trying to
move around in them in order to get at one another or at a certain objective.
 Normally, it’s no big deal to move from one zone to another—if there’s
nothing preventing you from doing so, you can move one zone in
addition to your action for the exchange.
If you want to move more than one zone (up to anywhere else on the map),
if a situation aspect suggests that it might be difficult to move freely, or if
another character is in your way, then you must make an overcome action
using Athletics to move. This counts as your action for the exchange.
GMs, just as with other overcome rolls, you’ll set the difficulty. You might
use the number of zones the character is moving or the situation aspects in
the way as justification for how high you set passive opposition. If another
character is impeding the path, roll active opposition and feel free to invoke
obstructing situation aspects in aid of their defense.
If you fail that roll, whatever was impeding you keeps you from moving. If
you tie, you get to move, but your opponent takes a temporary advantage of
some kind. If you succeed, you move without consequence. If you succeed
with style, you can claim a boost in addition to your movement.

In our continuing warehouse conflict, Cynere wants to go after one of

Og’s thugs, who has started shooting arrows down from the second
floor. That requires her to cross one zone to get to the access ladder for
the second floor, and then climb it, making her opponent two zones
away.
She’s currently mixing it up with a thug herself, whose Fight is at Fair
(+2).
Lily tells Amanda her intent, and Amanda says, “Okay, the thug
you’re fighting is going to try and keep you from getting away, so he’s
going to provide active opposition.”
Cynere’s Athletics is Great (+4). She rolls and gets +0, for a Great
result. The thug rolls his opposition, and rolls –1, for a result of
Average (+1). That gives Cynere three shifts, and a success with style.
Lily and Amanda describe Cynere faking out the thug, vaulting over a
crate, and taking the ladder two rungs at a time to get up top. She takes
 a boost, which she calls Momentum.
The thug up top swallows hard, bringing his crossbow to bear...

Advantages in a Conflict
Remember that aspects you create as advantages follow all the rules
for situation aspects—the GM can use them to justify overcome actions,
they last until they’re made irrelevant or the scene is over, and in some
cases they represent as much a threat to you as an opponent.
When you create an advantage in a conflict, think about how long you
want that aspect to stick around and whom you want to have access to it.
It’s difficult for anyone besides you and your friends to justify using an
advantage you stick to a character, but it’s also easier to justify getting rid of
it—one overcome action could undo it. It’s harder to justify getting rid of an
aspect on the environment (seriously, who is going to move that Huge
Bookcase you just knocked over?), but anyone in the scene could
potentially find a reason to take advantage of it.

COVER FIRE AND OTHER IMPOSITIONS

When you’re trying to prevent someone else from getting attacked, the
main way to do it is by creating an advantage. You can pass your buddy the
invocation and make it harder to hit them.
You could also put yourself directly between the attack and the intended
target, such that the bad guy has to get through you to get to your buddy.
Then you’re just defending as normal and taking the stress and
consequences yourself.
If you want to defend other people without directly interposing yourself
between them and the attack, you’ll need a stunt.

In terms of options for advantages, the sky’s the limit. Pretty much any
situational modifier you can think of can be expressed as an advantage. If
you’re stuck for an idea, here are some examples:
 Temporary Blinding: Throwing sand or salt in the enemy’s eyes is a
classic action staple. This places a Blinded aspect on a target, which
could require them to get rid of the aspect with an overcome action
before doing anything dependent on sight. Blinded might also present
opportunities for a compel, so keep in mind that your opponent can
take advantage of this to replenish fate points.
Disarming: You knock an opponent’s weapon away, disarming them
until they can recover it. The target will need an overcome action to
recover their weapon.
Positioning: There are a lot of ways to use advantages to represent
positioning, like High Ground or Cornered, which you can invoke to
take advantage of that positioning as context demands.
Winded and Other Minor Hurts: Some strikes in a fight are
debilitating because they’re painful, rather than because they cause
injury. Nerve hits, groin shots, and a lot of other “dirty fighting” tricks
fall into this category. You can use an advantage to represent these,
sticking your opponent with Pain-Blindness or Stunned or whatever,
then following up with an attack that exploits the aspect to do more
lasting harm.
Taking Cover: You can use advantages to represent positions of cover
and invoke them for your defense. This can be as general as Found
Some Cover or as specific as Behind the Big Oak Bar.
Altering the Environment: You can use advantages to alter the
environment to your benefit, creating barriers to movement by
scattering Loose Junk everywhere, or setting things On Fire. That last
one is a favorite in Fate.

Other Actions in a Conflict

As stated above, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to do
something else while your friends are fighting. You might be disarming a
death trap, searching for a piece of information, or checking for hidden
assailants.
In order to do this, GMs, set the player up with a modified form of
challenge. One of the tasks is likely “defend yourself”—in any exchange
where someone attacks you or tries to create an advantage on you, you must
defend successfully in order to be able to take one of the other actions in the
challenge. So long as no one has successfully attacked you or stuck an
advantage on you, you can use your action to roll for one of the challenge
goals.

FREE ACTIONS
Sometimes it just makes sense that your character is doing something else
in conjunction with or as a step toward their action in an exchange. You
quick-draw a weapon before you use it, you shout a warning before you
kick in a door, or you quickly size up a room before you attack. These little
bits of action are colorful description more than anything else, meant to add
atmosphere to the scene.
GMs, don’t fall into the trap of trying to police every little detail of a
player’s description. Remember, if there’s no significant or interesting
opposition, you shouldn’t require a roll—just let the players accomplish
what they say they do. Reloading a gun or fishing for something in your
backpack is part of performing the action. You shouldn’t require any
mechanics to deal with that.

Cynere is trying to get a door open so that she and her friends can
escape into an ancient vault rather than fighting off endless hordes of
temple guardians.
Amanda says, “Well, let’s call it a Fair (+2) Crafts action to get the
door open, and a Fair (+2) Physique roll to push it open enough to
slide through, because it’s one of those heavy vault doors. The other
action is defending yourself.”
On that exchange, Cynere successfully defends against an attack, so
she uses her action to pick the lock. She fails, and decides to succeed at
a cost. Amanda figures the easiest thing is to hit her with a
 consequence because she’s in a fight. So she gets the door open, but not
before one of the temple guardians gives her a Gouged Leg.
On the next exchange, she fails to defend against an attack, so she
doesn’t get to roll for the challenge.
On the third exchange, she defends and succeeds with style at the
Physique roll to get the door open. She signals to her friends and takes
a Head Start boost, because it’s about to be a chase…

Ending a Conflict
Under most circumstances, when all of the members of one side have either
conceded the conflict or have been taken out, the conflict is over.
GMs, once you know a conflict has definitively ended, you can pass out all
the fate points earned from concession. Players, take the fate points for
when your aspects were invoked against you, make a note of whatever
consequences you suffered in the fight, and erase any checks in your stress
boxes.

After much struggle and insanity, the warehouse conflict is finally over.
Amanda concedes the conflict on behalf of Og and his remaining thug,
meaning that the PCs stay alive and can proceed to check out the
smuggled goods they were interested in.
Because it was a concession, Og gets away to fight another day.
Because Lenny conceded to Amanda in an earlier example, Og also
gets away with Landon’s sword as a personal trophy.
Because Lenny conceded, he gets fate points. One for conceding, and
another two for the mild and moderate consequences he took in the
conflict. All the invocations used against him were free, so that’s all he
gets. Three fate points.
Ryan gets two fate points, because Amanda let one of the thugs invoke
his Not the Face! twice against him during the conflict.
 Lily gets no fate points, because all the invocations against her were
free, from advantages and boosts. Because she won, she doesn’t get
awarded for the consequences she took.

Transitioning to a Contest or Challenge

You may find yourself in a conflict scene where the participants are no
longer interested in or willing to harm one another, because of some change
in the circumstances. If that happens, and there’s still more to resolve, you
can transition straight into a contest or challenge as you need. In that case,
hold off on awarding the end-of-conflict fate points and whatnot until
you’ve also resolved the contest or challenge.

In an earlier example, Cynere managed to get a vault door open so the

three PCs could escape an endless horde of temple guardians. They all
decide to run and try to lose them.
Now, the guardians and the PCs have mutually opposing goals but
can’t harm one another, so now it’s a contest. Instead of running the
next exchange, Amanda just starts setting up for the chase.
Even though the PCs have some consequences and are due some fate
points, they won’t get them until after we find out if they can get away,
or if they get caught.

TEAMWORK
Characters can help each other out on actions. There are two versions of
helping in Fate—combining skills, for when you are all putting the same
kind of effort into an action (like using Physique together to push over a
crumbling wall), and stacking advantages, for when the group is setting a
single person up to do well (like causing multiple distractions so one person
can use Stealth to get into a fortress).
When you combine skills, figure out who has the highest skill level among
the participants. Each other participant who has at least an Average (+1) in
the same skill adds a +1 to the highest person’s skill level, and then only the
lead character rolls. So if you have three helpers and you’re the highest, you
roll your skill level with a +3 bonus.
If you fail a roll to combine skills, all of the participants share in the
potential costs—whatever complication affects one character affects all of
them, or everyone has to take consequences. Alternatively, you can impose
a cost that affects all the characters the same.

Continuing with our temple chase example, because it’s group vs.
group, everyone decides it’d be easier to just combine skills.
Of the three PCs, Cynere has the highest Athletics, at Great (+4).
Landon has Good (+3) Athletics and Zird has Average (+1) Athletics,
so they each contribute +1. Cynere rolls the contest on behalf of the
PCs at Fantastic (+6).
Amanda’s temple guardians only have Average (+1) Athletics, but
there are five of them, so they roll Superb (+5) for the purposes of the
contest.

When you stack advantages, each person takes a create an advantage

action as usual, and gives whatever free invocations they get to a single
character. Remember that multiple free invocations from the same aspect
can stack.

Zird and Cynere want to set Landon up for an extremely big hit on
Tremendor, the much-feared giant of the Northern Wastes.
Both Cynere and Zird roll to create an advantage on their turns,
resulting in three free invocations on a Flashy Distraction they make
from Zird’s magical fireworks (which succeeded to create the
advantage) and Cynere’s glancing hits (which succeeded with style to
add two more free invocations).
 They pass those to Landon, and on his turn, he uses them all for a
gigantic +6 to his attack.
8
RUNNING THE GAME
WHAT YOU DO
If you’re the gamemaster, then your job is a little different from everyone
else’s. This chapter is going to give you a bunch of tools to make that job
easier during play.
We already talked a little bit about the GM’s job in The Basics, but let’s
take a more detailed look at your unique responsibilities.
Start and End Scenes
One of your primary responsibilities during the game is to decide
definitively when a scene begins and ends. This might not seem like that big
a deal, but it is, because it means that you’re the person primarily
responsible for the pacing of each session. If you start scenes too early, it
takes a long time to get to the main action. If you don’t end them soon
enough, then they drag on and it takes you a long time to get anything
significant done.
The players will sometimes help you with this, if they’re keen on getting to
the next bit of action, but sometimes they’ll naturally be inclined to spend
too much time bantering in character or focusing on minutiae. When that
happens, it’s your job to step in like a good movie editor and say, “I think
we’ve pretty much milked this scene for all it’s worth. What do we want to
do next?”
We have more advice on starting and ending scenes in the next
chapter, Scenes, Sessions, and Scenarios.

DRAMA IS BETTER THAN REALISM

In Fate, don’t get too bogged down trying to maintain absolute consistency
in the world or adhere to a draconian sense of realism. The game operates
by the rules of drama and fiction; use that to your advantage. There should
be very few moments in the game where the PCs are free of conflicts or
problems to deal with, even if it’d be more “realistic” for them to get a long
breather.
When you’re trying to decide what happens, and the answer that
makes the most sense is also kind of boring, go with something that’s
more exciting than sensible! You can always find a way later on to justify
something that doesn’t make immediate sense.

Play the World and the NPCs

As the gamemaster, it’s your job to decide how everyone and everything
else in the world responds to what the PCs do, as well as what the PCs’
environment is like. If a PC botches a roll, you’re the one who gets to
decide the consequences. When an NPC attempts to assassinate a PC’s
friend, you’re the one who gets to decide how they go about it. When the
PCs stroll up to a food vendor in a market, you get to decide what kind of
day the vendor is having, what kind of personality he or she has, what’s on
sale that day. You determine the weather when the PCs pull up to that dark
cave.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do this in a vacuum—you have a lot of tools
to help you decide what would be appropriate. The process we outline
in Game Creation should provide you with a lot of context about the game
you’re running, whether that’s in the form of aspects like current and
impending issues, specific locations that you might visit, or NPCs with
strong agendas that you can use.
The PCs’ aspects also help you decide how to make the world respond to
them. As stated in the Aspects and Fate Points chapter, the best aspects
have a double edge to them. You have a lot of power to exploit that double
edge by using event-based compels. That way, you kill two birds with one
stone—you add detail and surprise to your game world, but you also keep
the PCs at the center of the story you’re telling.
This facet of your job also means that when you have NPCs in a scene, you
speak for and make decisions for them like the players do for their PCs—
you decide when they’re taking an action that requires dice, and you follow
the same rules the players do for determining how that turns out. Your NPCs
are going to be a little different than the PCs, however, depending on how
important they are to the story.

LET THE PLAYERS HELP YOU

You don’t have to shoulder the whole burden of making up world details
yourself. Remember, the more collaborative you get, the more emotional
investment the players are going to have in the result, because they shared
in its creation.
If a character has an aspect that connects them to someone or something in
the world, make that player your resident “expert” on whatever the aspect
refers to. So if someone has Scars from the Great War, poll that player for
information whenever the Great War comes up in conversation. “You notice
that this sergeant is wearing a veteran’s mark, which is a rare decoration
from the War. What hardcore crap do you have to do to get one of those? Do
you have one?” Some players will defer back to you, and that’s fine, but it’s
important that you keep making the offer so as to foster a collaborative
atmosphere.
Also, one of the main uses of the create an advantage action is precisely to
give players a way to add details to the world through their characters. Use
that to your advantage when you draw a blank or simply want to delegate
more control. One good way to do this during play is to answer the player’s
question with a question, if they ask for information.
Ryan: “Is there a way to disrupt this magical construct without killing the
subjects trapped in it?”
Amanda: “Well, you know that it’s using their life force to power itself. If
there were a way to do that, what do you think it’d look like? I mean, you’re
the expert wizard, you tell me.”
 Ryan: “Hm... I think there’d be some kind of counter-incantation, like a
failsafe mechanism in case things go horribly wrong.”
Amanda: "Yeah, that sounds good. Roll Lore to see if that's there."

Judge the Use of the Rules

It’s also your job to make most of the moment-to-moment decisions about
what’s legit and what’s not regarding the rules. Most often, you’re going to
decide when something in the game deserves a roll, what type of action that
is (overcome, attack, etc.) and how difficult that roll is. In conflicts, this can
get a little more complicated, like determining if a situation aspect should
force someone to make an overcome action, or deciding whether or not a
player can justify a particular advantage they’re trying to create.
You also judge the appropriateness of any invocations or compels that
come up during play, like we talked about in the Aspects and Fate
Points chapter, and make sure that everyone at the table is clear on what’s
going on. With invocations, this is pretty easy—as long as the player can
explain why the aspect is relevant, you’re good to go. With compels, it can
get a little more complicated, because you need to articulate precisely what
complication the player is agreeing to.
We provide some more tips on judging the use of rules below.

YOU’RE THE CHAIRMAN, NOT GOD

Approach your position as arbiter of the rules by thinking of yourself as
“first among equals” in a committee, rather than as an absolute authority. If
there’s a disagreement on the use of the rules, try encouraging a brief
discussion and let everyone talk freely, rather than making a unilateral
decision. A lot of times, you’ll find that the group is self-policing—if
someone tries to throw out a compel that’s a real stretch, it’s just as likely
that another player will bring it up before you do.
Your job is really to have the “last word” on any rules-related subject,
rather than to dictate from your chair. Keep that in mind.
Create Scenarios (and Nearly Everything Else)
Finally, you’re responsible for making all of the stuff that the PCs encounter
and react to in the game. That not only includes NPCs with skills and
aspects, but it also includes the aspects on scenes, environments, and
objects, as well as the dilemmas and challenges that make up a scenario of
Fate. You provide the prompts that give your group a reason to play this
game to begin with—what problems they face, what issues they have to
resolve, whom they’re opposing, and what they’ll have to go through in
order to win the day.
This job gets a whole chapter all on its own. See Scenes, Sessions, and
Scenarios.

WHAT TO DO DURING GAME CREATION

As outlined in Game Creation, inventing or deciding on a setting is often a
collaborative effort between you and your players. In that sense, the best
thing you can do as GM during the game-creation process is to be open to
new ideas and be generous with your own, just like everyone else. Play off
of and expand upon the suggestions that the others offer up. Your players
will be more invested in the game if they feel like they’ve had a hand in
building it.
Of course, if everyone’s amenable, there’s nothing stopping you from
showing up with a clear vision of exactly what you want to run. “Okay, this
is going to be a game about the Cold War in the ‘60s, except it’s all
steampunk and mechs. Go!” Just make sure everyone’s on board if you go
that route. Even one player who isn’t into it, and doesn’t really feel inclined
to get into it, can really affect the game.
Out There vs. Down Here
Speaking of steampunk mechs in a ‘60s-era Soviet Union, it’s a good idea to
consider just how “out there” you want to get. High-concept ideas are a lot
of fun, but if they’re too difficult to relate to then your players may have
trouble wrapping their heads around the game you’re proposing. Where that
line is exactly will vary from group to group (and player to player), so
there’s no definitive answer here. Just be aware that every departure from
the familiar—whether that’s the real world or well-established genre
conventions—has the potential to be a conceptual hurdle for your players.
Get everyone on the same page and make sure to go over any questions in
advance.
The opposite approach is to set the game down here, in the real world, with
perhaps only one or two notable departures with greater ramifications that
you can explore as you go. The easiest way to communicate a setting like
this is to name a time and place you’re all familiar with, then tack on the
exception. For example, “It’s like modern-day London, but robots are
commonplace” or “It’s post-World War II Los Angeles, but some returning
veterans have supernatural powers.”
Top Down vs. Bottom Up
There’s also the matter of how broad the scope of the game will be. Some
like to start with the big picture first and drill down to the details, while
others prefer to start with the here and now and develop the big picture as
they go. These are often called “top down” and “bottom up,” respectively.
Neither one’s better than the other, but each has its pros and cons.
With the top-down approach, you’ll determine most of the setting in
advance—stuff like who the movers and shakers are, the locations of
important cities, the nature of important organizations, and so on. This has
the advantage of providing a clear sense of how the world fits together. For
example, if you’ve decided that the Kingdom of Talua is in a perpetual state
of conflict between five powerful Houses vying for control, then you know
right away that anyone of note in the kingdom is likely to come from one of
those Houses—and if they aren’t, it’ll have to be for a very good reason.
The downside, of course, is that unless you’re working from a pre-existing
setting from a movie, TV show, book, video game, or whatever, it’s usually
a lot of work on the front end. It also requires the players to show up with a
pretty thorough understanding of it all, which can be daunting. But if
everyone’s up to speed, it can make for a very enjoyable and rewarding
game.
If you’re going bottom-up, though, you’ll start with whatever’s
immediately important to the PCs. That might be anything from a few
notable NPCs in their hometown to the name of the guy who works in the
next cubicle over. Then the group figures out the details as the story goes
along. There’s no need to have an idea of how things fit into the world,
because everyone will make that up as you go. The world just spirals out
from whatever you start with.
The potential downside here is that it requires quite a bit of improvisation
and thinking on your feet. That goes for everyone at the table, GM and
players alike. For you, the GM, that might not be such a big deal—running a
game almost always involves a degree of flying by the seat of one’s pants—
but not all players are going to be ready for that sort of responsibility. In
addition, if your players like to immerse themselves in their characters and
see the game world through their eyes, they may find it jarring to
occasionally break from that perspective to, say, invent a name on the spot
for the enchanted axe they just found or tell you what happened to
the last Shadow Director of the CIA.
Fate can handle either, but the system’s support for player-driven
contributions to the narrative in the form of aspects and story details really
makes the bottom-up method sing. If that’s the way you like to play anyway,
great! If not, no pressure—but give it a try sometime.
Small Scale vs. Large Scale
There’s already been some discussion of game scale in Game Creation, but
it’s worth a little more discussion.
As laid out in that chapter, small-scale stories concern events closely
connected to the PCs, and probably within a very limited geographical area.
Large-scale games are the opposite: epic tales spanning nations, planets, or
galaxies with world(s)-shaking consequences. Both types of stories can be a
lot of fun—winning the title of Grand Emperor of the Galactic Reach can be
just as rewarding as winning the hand of the prettiest girl in the village.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking the two are mutually exclusive.
Here are a couple ways to combine them.

Start Small and Grow: This is the classic zero-to-hero story in which
an unassuming individual with no pretensions to glory is suddenly
swept up in events beyond the scope of his experience. Consider Luke
Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope. He starts off a nobody moisture
farmer, racing T-16s and getting up to the odd bit of mischief at Tosche
 Station. Then a pair of droids come into his life and inject a little
mystery: Who’s this Obi-Wan Kenobi? Before he knows it, he’s
consorting with smugglers, rescuing a princess, and striking a blow for
the Rebellion. It’s a classic case of starting small-scale and expanding
into a large-scale story.
Peaks and Valleys: Here, you’re alternating the large-scale with the
small, using the latter almost as something of a breather. Typically, the
large-scale storylines will deal with matters of state, the conquering of
planets, the banishing of unthinkable Beings From Beyond, and the
like, while the small-scale storylines will be of a more personal nature,
with few if any connections to the earth-shaking events transpiring in
the characters’ lives. For example, you might spend a session or two
tussling with that Grand Emperor, then change focus to a character
reconnecting with her father or coming to the aid of a friend in need.
The small-scale sessions serve as something of a breather between all
that epic action, and give the players a chance to delve into some
unexplored corners of their characters. Plus, if you want to connect the
small- and large-scale stories down the line, you can—and the payoff
will be all the more satisfying for the players.

Extras: Do You Need Them?

Does your setting require things like superpowers, magic, high-tech
gadgetry, or something else that falls outside the confines of the mundane?
Either way, you’re going to want to figure that out now, before play begins.
See the Extras chapter for more on what extras are and how you can make
use of them in your game.

WHAT TO DO DURING PLAY

Now that you’ve gone through the process of game creation with the
players, let’s take a detailed look at how to approach your various jobs
during a session of play.
The Golden Rule
Before we go into specifics, here’s our general Golden Rule of Fate:
 Decide what you’re trying to accomplish first, then consult the
rules to help you do it.

This might seem like common sense, but we call it out because the order is
important. In other words, don’t look at the rules as a straitjacket or a hard
limit on an action. Instead, use them as a variety of potential tools to model
whatever you’re trying to do. Your intent, whatever it is, always takes
precedence over the mechanics.
Most of the time, the very definition of an action makes this easy—any
time your intent is to harm someone, you know that’s an attack. Any time
you’re trying to avoid harm, you know that’s a defense.
But sometimes, you’re going to get into situations where it’s not
immediately clear what type of action is the most appropriate. As a GM,
don’t respond to these situations by forbidding the action. Instead, try to nail
down a specific intent, in order to point more clearly to one (or more) of the
basic game actions.

THE SILVER RULE

The corollary to the Golden Rule is as follows: Never let the rules get in
the way of what makes narrative sense. If you or the players narrate
something in the game and it makes sense to apply a certain rule outside of
the normal circumstances where you would do so, go ahead and do it.
The most common example of this has to do with consequences. The rules
say that by default, a consequence is something a player chooses to take
after getting hit by an attack in a conflict.
But say you’re in a scene where a player decides that, as part of trying to
intimidate his way past someone, his PC is going to punch through a glass-
top table with a bare fist.
Everyone likes the idea and thinks it’s cool, so no one’s interested in what
happens if the PC fails the roll. However, everyone agrees that it also makes
sense that the PC would injure his hand in the process (which is part of what
makes it intimidating).
 It’s totally fine to assign a mild consequence of Glass in My Hand in that
case, because it fits with the narration, even though there’s no conflict and
nothing technically attacked the PC.
As with the Golden Rule, make sure everyone’s on the same page before
you do stuff like this.

Due to a failure on a previous roll, Cynere has accidentally set off a

deadly magical trap while in pursuit of the Idol of Karlon-Kar, an
ancient god of destruction. Amanda describes the hall as continually
filled with fiery bolts of death, seemingly in a random configuration,
with the pedestal holding the idol located on the far end of the hall from
where Cynere’s currently standing.
Lily says, “Well, there’s nothing for it. I’m going after the idol. I take
off down the hall, keeping my eye out for fiery death bolts.”
Amanda thinks, because she knows that dice are going to have to come
out on this. If Cynere is moving through the hall, it looks most like
an overcome action to do the movement. But with the fiery death bolts
in the room, it seems more like Lily would need to defend herself. There
are also two ways she could handle the trap—it’s technically just
passive opposition against Lily to prevent her passing through the room
safely, but because it can do damage, it seems more like an attack.
So Amanda asks, “Lily, we need to go to dice, but what exactly do you
want to accomplish here? Are you mainly trying to make sure you don’t
get hit, or are you blasting through the hall to get to the idol?”
Lily doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, the idol, for sure.”
Amanda asks, “So you’re willing to take damage in the process?”
Lily says, “Yeah. Throwing myself into danger as usual.”
Amanda says, “Okay, so we can do it in one roll. Here’s how we’ll
handle it. You roll Athletics against Fantastic (+6) opposition. If you
 make it, you’re through the trap and don’t take any harm. If you don’t
make it, you’re stuck in the hallway and will have to try again to make
it all the way through. We’re also going to treat that failure like a failed
defense roll, so you’re going to take a hit as well. Because of all the
fiery death and whatnot.”
Lily winces, but nods and gathers up her dice.

In this example, Amanda combined effects from overcome and defend to

determine what happens to Cynere. This is totally okay, because it fits their
intent and it makes sense given the situation they described. She might have
decided to do both rolls separately, and that would have been fine too—she
just wanted to get it all into one roll.
If you’re ever in doubt during play, come back to the Golden Rule and
remember that you have the flexibility to do the same kind of thing as you
need to. Just make sure that when you do this, you and the players are on
the same page.
When to Roll Dice
Roll the dice when succeeding or failing at the action could each
contribute something interesting to the game.
This is pretty easy to figure out in regards to success, most of the time—
the PCs overcome a significant obstacle, win a conflict, or succeed at a goal,
which creates fodder for the next thing. With failure, however, it’s a little
more difficult, because it’s easy to look at failure in strictly negative terms
—you fail, you lose, you don’t get what you want. If there’s nothing to build
on after that failure, play can grind to a halt in a hurry.
The worst, worst thing you can do is have a failed roll that means nothing
happens—no new knowledge, no new course of action to take, and no
change in the situation. That is totally boring, and it discourages players
from investing in failure—something you absolutely want them to do, given
how important compels and the concession mechanic are. Do not do this.
If you can’t imagine an interesting outcome from both results, then don’t
call for that roll. If failure is the uninteresting option, just give the PCs what
they want and call for a roll later, when you can think of an interesting
failure. If success is the boring option, then see if you can turn your idea for
failure into a compel instead, using that moment as an opportunity to funnel
fate points to the players.

SITUATION ASPECTS ARE YOUR FRIEND

When you’re trying to figure out if there’s a good reason to ask the PCs to
make an overcome roll, look at the aspects on your scene. If the existence of
the aspect suggests some trouble or problem for the PC, call for an
overcome roll. If not, and you can’t think of an interesting consequence for
failure, don’t bother.
For example, if a character is trying to sprint quickly across a room, and
you have a situation aspect like Cluttered Floors, it makes sense to ask for
a roll before they can move. If there is no such aspect, just let them make
the move and get on to something more interesting.

Making Failure Awesome

If the PCs fail a roll in the game and you’re not sure how to make that
interesting, try one of the following ideas.
Blame the Circumstances
The PCs are extremely competent people (remember, that’s one of the
things Fate is about). They aren’t supposed to look like fools on a regular or
even semi-regular basis. Sometimes, all it takes is the right description to
make failure into something dynamic—instead of narrating that the PC just
borked things up, blame the failure on something that the PC couldn’t have
prevented. There’s a secondary mechanism on that lock that initially looked
simple (Burglary), or the contact broke his promise to show up on time
(Contacts), or the ancient tome is too withered to read (Lore), or a sudden
seismic shift throws off your run (Athletics).
That way, the PCs still look competent and awesome, even though they
don’t get what they want. More importantly, shifting the blame to the
circumstances gives you an opportunity to suggest a new course of action,
which allows the failure to create forward momentum in your story. The
contact didn’t make his appointment? Where is he? Who was following him
to the rendezvous? The ancient tome is withered? Maybe someone can
restore it. That way, you don’t spend time dwelling on the failure and can
move on to something new.
Succeed at a Cost
You can also offer to give the PCs what they want, but at a price—in this
case, the failed roll means they weren’t able to achieve their goals without
consequence.
A minor cost should complicate the PC’s life. Like the above suggestion,
this focuses on using failure as a means to change up the situation a bit,
rather than just negating whatever the PC wanted. Some suggestions:

Foreshadow some imminent peril. “The lock opens with a soft click,
but the same can’t be said for the vault door. If they didn’t know you
were here before, they sure do now.”
Introduce a new wrinkle. “Yes, the Guildmaster is able to put you in
touch with a mage who can translate the withered tome—a guy named
Berthold. You know him, actually, but the last time you saw him was
years ago, when he caught you with his wife.”
Present the player with a tough choice. “You brace the collapsing
ceiling long enough for two of the others to get through safely, but not
the rest. Who’s it going to be?”
Place an aspect on the PC or the scene. “Somehow you manage to land
on your feet, but with a Twisted Ankle as a souvenir.”
Give an NPC a boost. “Nikolai surprises you a bit by agreeing to your
offer, but he does so with a wry smile that makes you uneasy.
Clearly, Nikolai Has A Plan.”
Check one of the PC’s stress boxes. Careful with this one—it’s only a
real cost if the PC’s likely to take more hits in the same scene. If you
don’t think that’s going to happen, go with another choice.

A serious cost does more than complicate the PC’s life or promise
something worse to come—it takes a serious and possibly irrevocable toll,
right now.
 One way you can do this is by taking a minor cost to the next level. Instead
of suspecting that a guard heard them open the vault, a few guards burst in
the room, weapons drawn. Instead of being merely cut off from their allies
by a collapsing ceiling, one or more of those allies ends up buried in the
debris. Instead of merely having to face an awkward situation with
Berthold, he’s still angry and out for their blood.
Other options could include:

Reinforce the opposition. You might clear one of an NPC’s stress

boxes, improve one of their skills by one step for the scene, or give
them a new aspect with a free invocation.
Bring in new opposition or a new obstacle, such as additional enemies
or a situation aspect that worsens the situation.
Delay success. The task at hand will take much longer than expected.
Give the PC a consequence that follows logically from the
circumstances—mild if they have one available, moderate if they
don’t.

If you’re stuck for just how serious a serious cost should be, you may want
to use the margin of failure as a gauge. For instance, in the vault-opening
example, above—the one where the guards hear the PC and burst in the
room—if the player failed their Burglary roll by 1 or 2, the PCs outnumber
the guards. Not a tough fight, but a fight nonetheless. If they failed it by 3 to
5, it’s an even match, one that’s likely to use up resources like fate points or
consequences. But if they failed by 6 or more, they’re outnumbered and in
real danger.
Let the Player Do the Work
You can also kick the question back to the players, and let them decide what
the context of their own failure is. This is a great move to foster a
collaborative spirit, and some players will be surprisingly eager to hose their
own characters in order to further the story, especially if it means they can
keep control of their own portrayal.
It’s also a great thing to do if you just plain can’t think of anything. “Okay,
so, you failed that Burglary roll by 2. So you’re working the lock, and
something goes wrong. What is it?” “You missed that Alertness roll. What
don’t you notice as you’re sneaking up to the queen’s chambers?” It’s better
if the question is specific, like those examples—just saying, “Okay, tell me
how you fail!” can easily stall things by putting a player on the spot
unnecessarily. You want to let the player do the work, not make them.
Setting Difficulties
When you’re setting passive opposition for an action, keep in mind the
difficulty “break points” that we mentioned in Actions and Outcomes—
anything that’s two or more steps above the PC’s skill is probably going to
cost them fate points, and anything that’s two or more below the PC’s skill
will be a breeze.
Rather than “modeling the world” or going for “realism,” try setting
difficulties according to dramatic necessity—things should generally be
more challenging when the stakes are high and less challenging when they
aren’t.
(Functionally, this is the same as setting a consistent difficulty and
assessing a circumstantial penalty to the roll to reflect rushing the task or
some other unfavorable condition. But psychologically, the difference
between a high difficulty and a lower difficulty with a penalty is vast and
shouldn’t be underestimated. A player facing a higher difficulty will often
feel like they’re being properly challenged, while that same player facing a
large penalty, likely chosen at the GM’s discretion, will often feel
discouraged by it.)
Setting a difficulty low is mainly about showcasing a PC’s awesomeness,
letting them shine in a particular moment and reminding us why this
character is in the spotlight. You can also set lower difficulties during
periods when you know the PCs are low on fate points, giving them the
chance to take compels in order to get more. You should also set lower
difficulties on anything that’s in the way of the PC’s getting to the main
action of a scene—you don’t want them to get stalled at the evil overlord’s
drawbridge if the point of the scene is confronting the evil overlord!
Finally, some actions should take lower difficulties by default, especially if
no one’s contesting or resisting them. Unopposed efforts to create
advantages in a conflict should never be harder than Average (+1) or Fair
(+2), and neither should attempts to put an aspect on an object or location.
Remember that opposition doesn’t have to always take the form of an NPC
getting in the way—if the evil mastermind has hidden the evidence in his
office away from prying eyes, you might consider that a form of opposition,
even though the mastermind might not be physically present.
If the PCs are overflowing in fate points, or it’s a crucial moment in the
story when someone’s life is on the line, or the fate of many is at stake, or
they’re finally going against foes that they’ve been building up to for a
scenario or two, feel free to raise difficulties across the board. You should
also raise difficulties to indicate when a particular opponent is extremely
prepared for the PCs, or to reflect situations that aren’t ideal—if the PC’s
are not prepared, or don’t have the right tools for the job, or are in a time
crunch, etc.
Setting the difficulty right at the PC’s skill level is, as you might imagine,
sort of a middle ground between these two extremes. Do this when you
want some tension without turning things up to 11, or when the odds are
slightly in the PC’s favor but you want a tangible element of risk.

IMPORTANT: JUSTIFY YOUR CHOICES

Your only other constraint in setting difficulties goes back to the Silver Rule
above—you need to make sure that your choices make sense in the context
of the narrative you’re creating. While we don’t want you to get crazy with
trying to model the world too much and thus box yourself into a useless set
of constraints (“Locks in the village of Glenwood are generally of Good
quality, due to their proximity to a rich iron mine.”), don’t look at this
purely as a numbers game either. If the only reason for setting a difficulty at
Superb (+5) is because it’s two higher than the PC’s skill level and you want
to bleed his fate points off, you strain credibility.
In that sense, you can look at setting difficulties as being a lot like
invoking aspects—there needs to be a good reason that backs up your
choice in the story. It’s totally okay if that justification is something you’re
about to make up, rather than something you know beforehand. Situation
aspects are a great tool for this—if the players already know that the cave
they’re in is Pitch Black and Cramped as Hell, it’s easy to justify why it’s
so hard to stay quiet as they Stealth through the tunnels. No one will bat an
eye at you looking at the relevant situation aspects and giving a +2 to the
opposition for each one, because it mirrors the invoke bonus they get.
Either way, don’t skip the justification part—either let the players know
what it is immediately when you tell them the difficulty, or shrug
mysteriously and then let them find out soon thereafter (as in, the time it
takes to think it up).
You might also try using “out of place” difficulties to indicate the presence
of unanswered questions during the game—for some odd reason, the stable
you’re trying to break into has an Epic (+7) lock on the door. What could be
so important in there that you don’t know about?
Or maybe you’re trying to finish the famed initiation test of the scholastic
Amethyst Order, and the test is only a Fair (+2) Lore roll—what’s the deal?
Are they going easy on you? Is your appointment a political necessity? Who
pulled the strings on that? Or is it just that the reputation of the Order’s
scholars is a fabrication?

Dealing with Extraordinary Success

Sometimes, a PC is going to roll far in excess of the difficulty, getting a lot
of shifts on the roll. Some of the basic actions already have a built-in effect
for rolling really well, like hitting harder on a good attack roll.
For others, it’s not so clear. What’s happens when you get a lot of shifts on
a Crafts roll or an Investigate roll? You want to make sure those results have
some kind of meaning and reflect how competent the PC’s are.
Here are a few choice options.

Go Gonzo with the Narration: It might seem superfluous, but it’s

important to celebrate a great roll with a suitable narration of over the
 top success. This is a great time to take the suggestions above
for Making Failure Awesome and applying them here. Let the success
affect something else, in addition to what the PC was going for, and
bring the player into the process of selling it by prompting them to
make up cool details. “Three extra shifts on that Burglary roll—tell me,
is anyone ever going to be able to lock that crypt again?” “So you got
five shifts on that Contacts roll—tell me, where does Nicky the Fink
usually go when he’s running out on his wife, and what do you say
when you find him there?”
Add an Aspect: You can express additional effects of a good roll by
placing an aspect on the PC or on the scene, essentially letting them
create an advantage for free. “So your Resources roll to bribe the guard
succeeded with four shifts. She’ll let you through the gate all right, and
she’ll also act as Available Backup if you should need some help
later.”
Reducing Time: If it’s important to get something done fast, then you
can use extra shifts to decrease the time that it takes to do an action.

Dealing with Time

We recognize two kinds of time in Fate: game time and story time.
Game Time
Game time is how we organize play in terms of the real players sitting at the
table. Each unit of game time corresponds to a certain amount of real time.
They are:

Exchange: The amount of time it takes all participants in a conflict to

take a turn, which includes doing an action and responding to any
action taken against them. This usually doesn’t take longer than a few
minutes.
Scene: The amount of time it takes to resolve a conflict, deal with a
single prominent situation, or accomplish a goal. Scenes vary in length,
from a minute or two if it’s just a quick description and some dialogue,
to a half hour or more in the case of a major setpiece battle against
a main NPC.
 Session: The sum total of all the scenes you run through in a single
sitting. A session ends when you and your friends pack it up for the
night and go home. For most people, a session is about 2 to 4 hours,
but there is no theoretical limit—if you have few obligations, then
you’re only really limited by the need for food and sleep. A minor
milestone usually occurs after a session.
Scenario: One or more sessions of play, but usually no more than four.
Most of the time, the sessions that make up a scenario will definitively
resolve some kind of problem or dilemma presented by the GM, or
wrap up a storyline (see Scenes, Sessions, and Scenarios for more on
scenarios). A significant milestone usually occurs at the end of a
scenario. You can look at this like an episode of a television show—the
number of sessions it takes to tell one story.
Arc: Several scenarios, usually between two and four. An arc typically
culminates in an event that brings great change to the game world,
building up from the resolution of the scenarios. You can look at an arc
like a season of a television show, where individual episodes lead to a
tumultuous climax. You’re not always guaranteed to have a
recognizable arc, just like not all TV shows have a plotline that carries
through the whole season—it’s possible to bounce from situation to
situation without having a defined plot structure. Major
milestones usually happen at the end of an arc.
Campaign: The sum of all the time you’ve sat at a table playing this
particular game of Fate—every session, every scenario, every arc.
Technically, there’s no upper limit to how long a campaign can be.
Some groups go for years; others get to the end of an arc and then stop.
We presume that a typical group will go for a few arcs (or about ten
scenarios) before having a grand finale and moving on to another game
(hopefully another Fate game!). You might set up your campaign as a
kind of “super-arc,” where there’s one massive conflict that everything
else is a smaller part of, or it might simply consist of the smaller
individual stories that you tell in your scenarios.

Story Time
Story time is what we call the time as the characters perceive it, from the
perspective of being “in the story”—the amount of time it takes for them to
accomplish any of the stuff you and the players say that they do during play.
Most of the time, you’ll do this as an afterthought, mentioning it in passing
(“Okay, so it takes you an hour to get to the airport by cab”) or mentioning
it as part of a skill roll (“Cool, so after 20 minutes of sweeping the room,
you find the following…”).
Under most circumstances, story time has no actual relation to real
time.For example, a combat exchange might take a few minutes to play out
in real time, but it only covers what happens in the first few seconds of a
conflict. Likewise, you can cover long swaths of time simply by saying that
it happens (“The contact takes two weeks to get back to you—are you doing
anything while you wait, or can we just skip to the meeting?”). When used
this way, it’s really just a convenience, a narrative device in order to add
verisimilitude and some consistency to your story.
Sometimes, though, you can use story time in creative ways to create
tension and surprise during the game. Here’s how.
Deadline Pressure

Nothing creates tension like a good deadline. The heroes only have a certain
number of minutes to disable the death trap, or a certain amount of time to
get across the city before something blows up, or a certain amount of time
to deliver the ransom before loved ones get aced by the bad guys, and so on.
Some of the game’s default actions are made to take advantage of deadline
pressure, such as challenges or contests—they each limit the number of rolls
that a player can make before something happens, for better or for worse.
You don’t have to limit yourself to using just those two, though. If you set
a hard deadline for something bad in one of your scenarios, you can start
keeping track of the amount of time everything takes, and use it as a way to
keep the pressure on. (“Oh, so you want to browse all the town’s historical
archives? Well, you have three days until the ritual—I can give you a Lore
roll, but just the attempt is probably going to eat up one of those days.”)
Remember, nearly everything takes time. Even a basic attempt to create an
advantage using Empathy requires you to sit with the target for a little
while, and if every action the PCs are taking is chipping away at a clock, it
may be time they don’t have.
 Of course, it’d be no fun if there was nothing they could do to improve a
deadline situation, and it’d be no fun if the crawl toward the deadline was
predictable.
Using Story Time in Success and Failure

Therefore, when you’re using story time to create deadline pressure, feel
free to incorporate unpredictable jumps in time when the PCs do really well
or really badly on a roll.
Taking extra time is a great way to make failure awesome as per the
guidelines above, especially using the “Success at a Cost” option—give the
players exactly what they want, but at the cost of taking more time than they
were trying to spend, thus risking that their efforts will come too late. Or it
could be the thing that pushes a deadline over the edge—maybe things
aren’t completely hopeless, but now there are extra problems to deal with.
Likewise, reward extreme success by reducing the amount of time it takes
to do something while the PCs are under deadline. That historical research
(Lore) that was going to take a day gets wrapped up in a few hours. While
looking for a good merchant (Contacts) to get your supplies, you manage to
find another one who can fulfill your order that same day rather than in a
week.
If time is a factor, you should also be able to use invocations and compels
to manipulate time, to make things easier or more complicated respectively.
(“Hey, I’m a Garage Bunny, so fixing this car shouldn’t take me that long,
right?” “Oh, you know what? Your sheet says I Can’t Get Enough of the
Fun and Games… doesn’t it make sense that if you’re looking for a guy in
a casino, it’d be easy to get caught up in distractions? All those machines
and stuff…”)

HOW MUCH TIME IS A SHIFT WORTH?

Just like with any other roll, the number of shifts you get (or the amount you
fail by) should serve as a barometer for just how severe the time jump is.
So, how do you decide just how much to award or penalize?
It really depends on how much time you decide the initial action is going
to take. We usually express time in two parts: a specific or abstract measure
of quantity, then a unit of time, such as “a few days,” “twenty seconds,”
“three weeks,” and so on.
We recommend you measure in the abstract and express all the game
actions as half, one, a few, or several of a given unit of time. So if you
imagine something taking six hours, think of it as “several hours.” If you
imagine something taking twenty minutes, you can either call that “several
minutes” or round up to “half an hour”, whichever feels closest.
This gives you a starting point for moving up and down. Each shift is
worth one jump from wherever your starting point is. So if your starting
point is “several hours,” and it benefits the PCs to speed things up, then it
works like this: one shift jumps the time down to “a few hours,” two shifts
down to “one hour,” and three shifts down to “a half hour.”
Going past either end of the spectrum moves you down to several
increments of the next unit of time or up to half the next unit of time,
depending on which direction you’re going. So four shifts on the
aforementioned roll might jump you from “several hours” to “several
minutes.” Failing by one, conversely, might jump you from “several hours”
to “half a day.”
This allows you to quickly deal with time jumps no matter where you’re
starting from, whether the actions you have in mind are going to take
moments or generations

Story Time and the Scope of an Action

It’s easy to think of most actions that a PC takes being limited to anything
that the character can directly affect, and working on a “person-to-person”
scope. And most of the time, that’s going to be precisely the case—after all,
Fate is a game about individual competence shining in the face of dramatic
adversity.
However, consider for a moment what a PC might do with that competence
and all the time in the world to accomplish a particular action. Imagine a
month-long Rapport roll for a negotiation, where the PC gets to talk with
every delegate in detail, rather than just focusing on a single conference.
Imagine a weeks-long Investigate, charting out every detail of a target’s
personal routine.
By allowing each roll to represent a long period of time, you can “zoom
out” to handle events that reach far beyond the individual player character
making the roll, and affect the setting in a big way. That month-long
Rapport roll might result in charting a new political course for the country
the PC is negotiating for. That Investigate roll might be the start of bringing
in one of the most notorious criminals in the setting, one that’s been
hounding the PCs for a whole campaign.
This is a great way to make long breaks in story time more interactive,
rather than bogging the game down with long narration or trying to
retroactively come up with what happened during that time. If the PCs have
long-term goals they want to accomplish, see if you can find a way to turn
that into a contest, challenge, or conflict that covers the whole break, or just
have them make a single skill roll to see if something unexpected happens.
If they happen to fail the roll, whatever you invent as a consequence will
make good material for the game going forward.
Remember that if you do this with a conflict or a contest, that you scale
each exchange appropriately—if a conflict is taking place over the course of
a year, then each exchange might be a month or two, and everyone should
describe their actions and the results of their actions in that context.

During a major milestone in the campaign, Landon shifted his high

concept to Former Ivory Shroud Disciple, as a result of discovering a
plot from within their ranks to take over a small kingdom as their own.
Amanda wants to jump the campaign six months forward, and she
suggests that if Landon goes on the run, they’re going to try to hunt him
down. She sees an opportunity to create material for the next part of the
game, so she says, “I think we should find out if Landon starts the next
scenario in their clutches or not.”
 They decide to do it as a conflict, with each exchange representing one
confrontation between Landon and the Shroud’s trackers. It goes badly
for him and he concedes, taking a moderate consequence into the next
session. Amanda suggests that they want to bring Landon back into the
fold rather than hurt or kill him, so Lenny decides to take I Don’t
Know What’s Right Anymore, reflecting the seeds of doubt they’re
planting in his mind.
When we see Landon again, he’ll be in the clutches of the Ivory
Shroud, struggling with his loyalties.

Zoom In, Zoom Out

There’s no rule that says you’re required to keep your rolls consistent in
terms of story time. One cool trick you can do is use the result of one roll to
segue into another roll that takes place over a much smaller period in time,
or vice versa. This is a great way to open a new scene, contest, or conflict,
or just introduce a change of pace.

During the aforementioned six-month break, Cynere has been

researching the demon compatriots of the horrific Arc’yeth, who soul-
burned her in the last arc of the campaign. She decides to go it alone,
even though Zird offered to help, and ends up rolling her newly
acquired Average (+1) Lore to succeed at an overcome roll.
She ends up doing really well, and Amanda describes Cynere getting
lost in research for a few months. Then Amanda says, “Awesome. You
return home with the dirt of the trail on you, weary to the bone, hands
stained with ink, but your search has uncovered the hiding place of
Arc’yeth’s right hand in the Circle of Thirteen, a minor demon named
Tan’shael (all these apostrophes!). You fall into bed, ready to start the
search in the morning... and are wakened in the middle of the night by a
crashing sound coming from your study.”
 Lily says, “Well, hell, I get up and rush in there, grabbing my sword as
I go!”
Amanda says, “Great—you notice that your research notes are gone,
and that the window is broken open. You hear footsteps rushing away
into the night.”
Lily says, “Oh, hell no. I’m going after him. Her, it, them, whatever.”
Amanda says, “Great! That’s using Athletics, and let’s do a contest
and see if you can catch the culprit.” (Notice, GMs, that this is now
happening in immediately consecutive time—we went right from rolling
for months-long stuff, to rolling for the seconds it takes for Cynere to
give chase.)
The contest goes badly for Cynere, and the person gets away. Lily
immediately says, “Screw that. Someone in town has to know
something, or he left some clue behind, or something. I’m going to roll
Investigate.”
Lily rolls and succeeds with style, and Amanda says, “A week later,
you’re in the village of Sunloft, outside the Shoeless Horse tavern,
where she (it’s a she, by the way) is rumored to be staying. Oh, and you
got some shifts, so I’ll just go ahead and tell you her name is Corathia
—she dropped it to someone in your hometown while trying to find your
place. That’s worth an aspect, I Know Your Name, which you might
use to undermine her confidence.”
(GMs, see what happened? One roll jumped a week, but Amanda and
Lily are playing it at the table in continuous time.)
Lily says, “I bust the door down and scream her name.”
Amanda says, “Everyone backs away from a lithe woman at the bar,
who sneers at them and goes for her sword, bounding off the stool and
aiming a whistling cut at your face.”
 “It’s on!” Lily says, and goes for dice to defend. (Now it’s a conflict
and happening in super zoomed-in time.)

Judging the Use of Skills and Stunts

By now, you pretty much have all the advice you need to deal with skill and
stunt use—the individual descriptions in Skills and Stunts, the action
descriptions and examples in Challenges, Contests, and Conflicts, and the
advice immediately above about setting difficulties and how to handle
success and failure.
The only other major problem you’ll have to worry about is when you run
into an “edge case” with a skill—a player wants to use it for an action that
seems like a bit of a stretch, or a situation comes up in your game where it
makes sense to use a skill for something that’s not normally a part of its
description.
When you run into this, talk it over with the group and see what everyone
thinks. It’s going to end up one of three ways:

It’s too much of a stretch. Consider creating a new skill.

It’s not a stretch, and anyone can use the skill that way from now on
under the same conditions.
It wouldn’t be a stretch if the character had a stunt that allowed it.

A lot of the criteria you’re going to rely on for these conversations will
come from the work you and the players did with the skill list at game
creation. See Skills and Stunts for advice on figuring out what the limits are
for a skill and what the dividing line between a skill and a stunt is.
If you decide that a certain use of a skill needs a stunt, allow the player in
question the chance to spend a fate point to temporarily “borrow” that stunt
for the current roll if he or she wants. Then, if they want to keep the bonus,
they have to spend a point of refresh to buy it (presuming they have any
available), or wait for a major milestone to pick it up.
Aspects and Details: Discovery vs. Creation
From the player’s point of view, there’s almost no way to know what you’ve
made up beforehand and what you’re inventing in the moment, especially if
you’re the kind of GM who doesn’t display or consult any notes at the table.
Thus, when a player tries to discover something you haven’t made up yet,
you can treat it as if they were making a new aspect or story detail. If they
succeed, they find what they’re looking for. If they fail, you can use what
they were looking for as inspiration to help you come up with the real
information.
If you’re really comfortable with improvising, this means that you can
come to the table with very little prepared beforehand, and let the players’
reactions and questions build everything for you. You may need to ask some
prompting questions first, to narrow down the scope of what information the
player’s looking for, but after that, the sky’s the limit.

Zird the Arcane is scouting an ancient ritual site, looking for a good
place to work on banishing the curse that’s been placed on the nearby
village of Belwitch, the mayor of which is paying him good money for
the effort.
Ryan says, “I’m going to spend some time in a local library,
researching some history about the site. I’d like to use Lore to create an
advantage.”
Amanda thinks for a moment. She didn’t really have anything special
planned for the site, because all her energy was focused on detailing
the nature of the curse and what would be required to get rid of it,
because it’s being maintained by a force more powerful than the PCs
currently realize.
“What kind of info are you looking for?” Amanda asks. “Just book
report-type details, or...?”
Ryan says, “Well, what I really want to know is if anyone’s used the
site for dark or nefarious magic... if this village has a local boogeyman
or spook story centered around that site.”
 Amanda says, “Oh, cool. Yeah, roll your Lore, opposition is Fair
(+2).” Unexpectedly, Ryan rolls a –4 and ends up with a Mediocre
(+0), meaning that he failed. Ryan decides not to spend any fate points
on the roll.
Wanting to turn the failure into something awesome, she says, “Well,
you don’t get an aspect for it, but what you find out is actually the
opposite of what you’re looking for—the site has an impeccable
reputation as a place of blessed power, and the records you find all talk
about healing and harvest rituals that brought great plenty and good
fortune to the area.”
Ryan says, “If the site is so powerful, how did the village become
cursed?”
Amanda shrugs. “Guess you’ll have to investigate further if you want
to find out.”
In her notes, she jots something briefly about the fact that the site is
now magically defiled and that the town’s priest is keeping that a
secret, changing Ryan’s suggestion a little bit and adding some
material for him if he decides to ask around.

Skills and Specific Measurements

Looking over the skill descriptions, you might notice that there are a few
places where we give an abstraction for something that in real life depends
on precise measurement. Physique and Resources are strong examples—
many people who are into strength training have some idea of how much
weight they can dead lift, and people spend specific amounts of money from
a finite pool when they buy things.
So how much can a character with Great (+4) Physique bench press? How
much can a character with Fair (+2) Resources spend before going broke?
The truth is, we have no idea, and we’re reluctant to pursue a specific
answer.
 Though it may seem counter-intuitive, we find that creating minutiae like
that detracts from the verisimilitude of the game in play. As soon as you
establish a detail like, “Great Physique can dead lift a car for five seconds,”
then you’re cutting out a lot of the variability that real life allows.
Adrenaline and other factors allow people to reach beyond their normal
physical limits or fall short of them—you can’t factor every one of those
things in without having it take up a large amount of focus at the table. It
becomes a thing for people to discuss and even argue about, rather than
participating in the scene.
It’s also boring. If you decide that a Fair (+2) Resources can buy anything
that’s 200 gold pieces or less, then you’ve removed a great deal of potential
for tension and drama. Suddenly, every time you have a Resources-based
problem, it’s going to hinge on the question of whether or not the cost is 200
gold pieces, rather than whatever the point of the scene is. It also turns
everything into a simple pass/fail situation, which means you don’t really
have a good reason to roll the skill at all. And again, this is not realistic—
when people spend money, it’s not about the raw dollar amount as much as
it is a question of what someone can presently afford.
Remember, a skill roll is a narrative tool, meant to answer the following
question: “Can I solve X problem using Y means, right now?” When you get
an unexpected result, use your sense of realism and drama to explain and
justify it, using our guidelines above. “Oh, you failed that Resources roll to
bribe the guard? Guess you spent just a bit more at the tavern last night than
you thought... wait, why is your belt pouch gone? And who’s that shady
character walking a little too quickly just past the line of guards? Did he just
wink at you? That bastard... now what do you do?”
Dealing with Conflicts and Other Weird Stuff
The most complicated situations you’re going to encounter as a GM will be
conflicts, hands down. Conflicts use the most rules in the game and pack
them into a small amount of time compared to everything else in the system.
They require you to keep track of a lot of things at once—everyone’s
relative position, who’s acting against whom, how much stress and what
consequences your NPCs have taken, and so on.
 They’re also where your movie-watching brain will come to the fore,
especially if your game features a lot of high-octane physical conflict.
Action sequences you see in media don’t always conform to the structured
order of turns that Fate has, so it can be hard to see how they correspond
when you’re trying to visualize what happens. Sometimes, people will also
want to do crazy actions that you hadn’t thought of when you were
conceiving the conflict, leaving you at a loss for how to handle them.
Here are some tools to help you handle things with grace and speed.
Affecting Multiple Targets
Invariably, if you play Fate long enough, someone’s going to try to affect
multiple people at once in a conflict. Explosions are a staple of physical
conflict, but are by no means the only example—consider tear gas or some
kind of high-tech stunner. You can extend this to mental conflict also. For
example, you might use Provoke to establish dominance in a room with
your presence, or Rapport to make an inspirational speech that affects
everyone listening.
The easiest way to do this is to create an advantage on the scene, rather
than on a specific target. A Gas-Filled Room has the potential to affect
everyone in it, and it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that
the Inspirational Mood in a room could be contagious. In this context, the
aspect presents an excuse to call for a skill roll (using the overcome action)
from anyone in the scene who attempts to get past it. Generally speaking, it
won’t cause damage, but it will make things more difficult for those
affected.

Landon stalks the battlefield in search of a worthy opponent.

“Who’s the biggest, toughest-looking guy around here?” Lenny asks
Amanda.
“That’s easy,” Amanda answers. “You immediately spot a towering 7-
foot-tall warrior, clearly not entirely human, armed with an
unnecessarily flanged axe and flanked by three underlings. They call
him Gorlok the Demon-Blooded.”
 “Yeah, that sounds good,” Lenny says. “I’m gonna kill him.”
“I like it. His three henchmen move to intercept. They’re not exactly 7-
foot-tall half-demons, but they seem to know what they’re doing.”
Lenny sighs. “I don’t have time for these mooks. I want to make it
clear to them that they’re not up to this. You know, wave my sword
around menacingly and look like even more of a bad-ass. I want these
guys to know that this fight is between me and Gorlok.”
“Sounds like you want to put an aspect on the zone. Give me a
Provoke roll.”
Lenny rolls a –3, and adds his Fair (+2) Provoke for a total of Poor (–
1). He needed a Mediocre (+0), so he’s failed. But Amanda likes the
idea of Landon and Gorlok facing off here without anyone else getting
in the way, so she decides to give it to him, but at a cost.
“All right,” she says, “what’s it going to be?”
Lenny doesn’t hesitate. He writes down a mild mental
consequence: This Guy is Bigger Than I Thought....
“Cool. They look at you, then back to Gorlok. He waves a hand
dismissively. ‘Go, find another to kill,’ he growls. ‘This one’s mine.’”

Things get more complicated when you want to filter specific targets,
rather than just affect a whole zone or scene. When that happens, divide
your resulting total up against every target, who all get to defend as per
normal. Anyone who fails to defend either takes stress or gains an aspect,
depending on what you were trying to do. (Note: If you create an advantage
to put an aspect on multiple targets, you do get a free invocation for each
one.)

Zird the Arcane is unleashing fiery death upon his foes in a magical
fashion, as is his wont. He has three such foes, charging at him across a
 battlefield. Zird figures it’s probably Landon’s fault he’s found himself
in this circumstance.
Zird’s magic uses his Lore skill, and he does extremely well, getting an
Epic (+7) result.
He knows he wants to get one of them pretty good, so he opts to divide
his spread up as Superb (+5), Average (+1), and Average (+1). That
adds up to +7, which was his roll, so he’s all good. Now Amanda has to
defend for all three of them.
The first defender rolls a Mediocre (+0) and takes 5 stress. This is a
nameless NPC (see below), so Amanda decides he’s out of the fight, and
describes him screaming and batting at flames.
The second defender gets a Fair (+2), beating the attack roll. He
charges forward undaunted.
The third defender gets a Mediocre (+0) as well, taking a single point
of stress. Amanda checks his lone stress box and describes him
sacrificing his shield to deflect the blast.

Attacking a whole zone or everyone in a scene is something you’re going

to have to judge by circumstance, like any other stretch use of a skill.
Depending on the circumstances of your setting, this might be a totally
normal thing to do (for example, because everyone uses grenades and
explosives), it might be impossible, or it might require a stunt. As long as
you can justify it, you don’t need to apply any special rules—you roll for
the attack, and everyone in the zone defends as normal. Depending on the
circumstances, you may even have to defend against your own roll, if
you’re in the same zone as the attack!

COMPELS AND MULTIPLE TARGETS

Just a quick note: players who want to compel their way out of a conflict
don’t get a free lunch on affecting multiple targets, whether it’s one aspect
or several that justify the compel. A player must spend one fate point for
each target they wish to compel. One fate point compels one individual,
period.

Environmental Hazards
Not every participant in a conflict is another PC or NPC. Plenty of things
without self-awareness can potentially threaten PCs or keep them from their
goals, whether it’s a natural disaster, a cunning mechanical trap, or high-
tech automated security.
So, what do you do when the PCs go up against something that isn’t a
character?
Simple: treat it as a character. (This is the Bronze Rule of Fate: You can
treat everything like a character. We’re going to get into a lot of different
ways to work with that in the Extras chapter, but let’s stay on topic for
now.)

Is the hazard something that can harm a PC? Give it a skill and let it
make attacks just like an opponent.
Is it more of a distraction or harassment than a direct threat? Let it
create aspects.
Does it have sensors it can use to discover a PC’s aspects? Give it a
skill for that.

And in return, let the PCs use their skills against the threat just like they
would an opponent. An automated security system might be vulnerable to
“attacks” from a PC’s Burglary skill, or they might escape a trap by winning
an Athletics contest. If it makes sense for the hazard in question to take a
good deal of effort to surpass, give it a stress track and let it take a mild
consequence or two. In other words, cleave to whatever makes narrative
sense—if a fire is too big for a PC to put out, the scene should focus on
avoidance or escape, and work like a challenge.

Cynere, Landon, and Zird are exploring the Caverns of Kazak-Thorn,

in pursuit of one of the demonic opponents that Cynere’s been so
interested in lately. Of course, the demon princess in question doesn’t
 appreciate being hunted by pesky adventurers and has summoned the
powers of darkness to stand between our heroes and herself. So it goes.
They come to the bottom floor of the cave system, only to find it full of
wisps of inky darkness, writhing around snakelike and cutting off the
light where they whip about. Zird rolls Lore, and Amanda tells him that
they are magical hunger spirits—not individual entities so much as
pure expressions of hunger, ready to devour anything they touch. He
throws a stone into the corridor and watches the tendrils turn it to ash.
“I think I speak for us all when I say ‘Yikes,’” Ryan says.
He asks about banishing the monsters. Amanda shakes her head a
touch. “You’re in Asahandra’s place of power, and the whole place is
just flooded with those things—it’d take days to dismantle an
enchantment this strong. You might, however, be able to use your magic
to keep them at bay as you look for Asahandra herself.”
Lily says, “I’m willing to go for it. Let’s do this.”
Amanda decides that even though she could put them into a straight-
up conflict, it’d be easier and quicker to deal with it as a challenge. She
tells them that to get past the shadow summoning, each of them needs
Will to resist the shadows’ potent magical aura and Stealth to move
past. Zird can roll Lore to try and thin the herd with magic. In addition,
she says that the spirits can provide active opposition against each
attempt, and that failing the Will roll will be treated like an attack. The
three grit their teeth and start to make their way through the cave....

Dealing with Aspects

As with skills and stunts, the entire Aspects and Fate Points chapter is
designed to help you judge the use of aspects in the game. As the GM, you
have a very important job in managing the flow of fate points to and from
the players, giving them opportunities to spend freely in order to succeed
and look awesome, and bringing in potential complications to help keep
them stocked up on points.
Invocations
Because of that, we recommend that you don’t apply extremely exacting
standards when the PC wants to invoke an aspect—you want them to spend
in order to keep the flow going, and if you’re too stringent on your
requirements, it’s going to discourage them from that free spending.
On the other hand, feel free to ask for more clarification if you don’t get
what a player is implying, in terms of how the aspect relates to what’s
happening in play. Sometimes, what seems obvious to one person isn’t to
another, and you shouldn’t let the desire to toss fate points lead to
overlooking the narration. If a player is having a hard time justifying the
invocation, ask them to elaborate on their action more or unpack their
thoughts.
You might also have the problem of players who get lost in the open-ended
nature of aspects—they don’t invoke because they aren’t sure if it’s too
much of a stretch to apply an aspect in a certain way. The more work you do
beforehand making sure that everyone’s clear on what an aspect means, the
less you’ll run into this. To get the player talking about invoking aspects,
always ask them whether or not they’re satisfied with a skill roll result (“So,
that’s a Great. You want to leave it at that? Or do you want to be even more
awesome?”). Make it clear that invoking an aspect is almost always an
option on any roll, in order to try and get them talking about the
possibilities. Eventually, once you get a consistent dialogue going, things
should smooth out.
Compels
During the game, you should look for opportunities to compel the PCs’
aspects at the following times:

Whenever simply succeeding at a skill roll would be bland

Whenever any player has one or no fate points
Whenever someone tries to do something, and you immediately think
of some aspect-related way it could go wrong
 Remember that there are essentially two types of compels in the
game: decision-based, where something complicated occurs as a result of
something a character does; and event-based, where something complicated
occurs simply as a result of the character being in the wrong situation at the
wrong time.
Of the two, you’re going to get the most mileage out of event-based
compels—it’s already your job to decide how the world responds to the
PCs, so you have a lot of leeway to bring unfortunate coincidence into their
lives. Most of the time, players are just going to accept you doing this
without any problems or minimal negotiation.
Decision-based compels are a little trickier. Try to refrain from suggesting
decisions to the players, and focus on responding to their decisions with
potential complications. It’s important that the players retain their sense of
autonomy over what their PCs say and do, so you don’t want to dictate that
to them. If the players are roleplaying their characters according to their
aspects, it shouldn’t be hard to connect the complications you propose to
one of them.
During play, you’ll also need to make clear when a particular compel is
“set”, meaning that there’s no backing out without paying a fate point.
When players propose their own compels, this won’t come up, because
they’re fishing for the point to begin with. When you propose them, you
need to give the players room to negotiate with you over what the
complication is, before you make a final decision. Be transparent about this
—let them know when the negotiation phase has ended.
Weaksauce Compels

In order for the compel mechanic to be effective, you have to take care that
you’re proposing complications of sufficient dramatic weight. Stay away
from superficial consequences that don’t really affect the character except to
provide color for the scene. If you can’t think of an immediate, tangible way
that the complication changes what’s going on in the game, you probably
need to turn up the heat. If someone doesn’t go “oh crap” or give a similar
visceral reaction, you probably need to turn up the heat. It’s not good
enough for someone to be angry at the PC—they get angry and they’re
willing to do something about it in front of everyone. It’s not good enough
for a business partner to cut them off—he cuts them off and tells the rest of
his associates to blacklist them.
Also, keep in mind that some players may tend to offer weak compels
when they’re fishing for fate points, because they don’t really want to hose
their character that badly. Feel free to push for something harder if their
initial proposal doesn’t actually make the situation that much more
dramatic.
Encouraging the Players to Compel

With five aspects per PC, it’s prohibitively difficult for you to take the sole
responsibility for compels at the table, because that’s a lot of stuff to
remember and keep track of. You need the players to be invested in looking
for moments to compel their own characters.
Open-ended prompting can go a long way to create this habit in your
players. If you see an opportunity for a potential compel, instead of
proposing it directly, ask a leading question instead. “So, you’re at the royal
ball and you have The Manners of a Goat. Lenny, do you think this is
going to go smoothly for your character?” Let the player do the work of
coming up with the complication and then pass the fate point along.
Also remind the players that they can compel your NPCs, if they happen to
know one of that NPC’s aspects. Do the same open-ended prompting when
you’re about to have an NPC make a decision, and ask the players to fill in
the blanks. “So, you know that Duke Orsin is Woefully
Overconfident....You think he’s going to get out of the jousting tournament
unscathed? How might that go wrong? You willing to pay a fate point to say
it does?”
Your main goal should be to enlist the players as partners in bringing the
drama, rather than being the sole provider.

CREATING THE OPPOSITION

One of your most important jobs as a GM is creating the NPCs who will
oppose the PCs and try to keep them from their goals during your scenarios.
The real story comes from what the PCs do when worthy adversaries stand
between them and their objectives—how far they’re willing to go, what
price they’re willing to pay, and how they change as a result of the
experience.
As a GM, you want to shoot for a balancing act with the opposing NPCs—
you want the players to experience tension and uncertainty, but you don’t
want their defeat to be a foregone conclusion. You want them to work for it,
but you don’t want them to lose hope.
Here’s how.
Take Only What You Need to Survive
First of all, keep in mind that you’re never obligated to give any NPC a full
sheet like the ones the PCs have. Most of the time, you’re not going to need
to know that much information, because the NPCs aren’t going to be the
center of attention like the PCs are. It’s better to focus on writing down
exactly what you need for that NPC’s encounter with the PCs, and then fill
in the blanks on the fly (just like PCs can) if that NPC ends up becoming
more important in the campaign.
The NPC Types
NPCs come in three different flavors: nameless NPCs, supporting NPCs,
and main NPCs.
Nameless NPCs
The majority of the NPCs in your campaign world are nameless—people
who are so insignificant to the story that the PCs interactions with them
don’t even require them to learn a name. The random shopkeeper they pass
on the street, the archivist at the library, the third patron from the left at the
bar, the guards at the gate. Their role in the story is temporary and fleeting
—the PCs will probably encounter them once and never see them again. In
fact, most of the time, you’ll create them simply out of reflex when you
describe an environment. “The plaza is beautiful at midday, and full of
shoppers milling about. There’s a town crier with an extremely shrill, high-
pitched voice barking out the local news.”
On their own, nameless NPCs usually aren’t meant to provide much of a
challenge to the PCs. You use them like you use a low-difficulty skill roll,
mainly as an opportunity to showcase the PCs’ competence. In conflicts,
they serve as a distraction or a delay, forcing the PCs to work a little harder
to get what they want. Action-adventure stories often feature master villains
with an army of mooks. These are the mooks.
For a nameless NPC, all you really need is two or three skills based on
their role in the scene. Your average security guard might have Fight and
Shoot, while your average clerk might only have Lore. They never get more
than one or two aspects, because they just aren’t important enough. They
only have one or two stress boxes, if any, to absorb both physical and
mental hits. In other words, they’re no match for a typical PC.
Nameless NPCs come in three varieties: Average, Fair, and Good.
Average

Competence: Rank-and-file order-takers, local conscripts, and the

like. When in doubt, a nameless NPC is Average.
Purpose: Mostly there to make the PCs look more awesome.
Aspects: One or two.
Skills: One or two Average (+1).
Stress: No stress boxes—a one shift hit is enough to take them out.
Fair

Competence: Trained professionals, like soldiers and elite guards, or

others whose role in the scene speaks to their experience, such as a
sharp-tongued courtier or talented thief.
Purpose: Drain a few of the players’ resources (one or two fate points,
stress boxes, possibly a mild consequence).
Aspects: One or two.
Skills: One Fair (+2), and one or two Average (+1).
Stress: One stress box—a two shift hit is enough to take them out.
Good

Competence: Tough opposition, especially in numbers.

Purpose: Drain the players’ resources—as Fair, but more so. Provide a
decent stumbling block (in numbers) on the way to a more significant
 encounter.
Aspects: One or two.
Skills: One Good (+3), one Fair (+2), and one or two Average (+1).
Stress: Two stress boxes—a three shift hit is enough to take them out.
Mobs

Whenever possible, identical nameless NPCs like to form groups, or mobs.

Not only does this better ensure their survival, it reduces the workload on
the GM. For all intents and purposes, you can treat a mob as a single unit—
instead of rolling dice individually for each of three thugs, just roll once for
the whole mob.
See the Teamwork section in the previous chapter to see how mobs can
concentrate their efforts to be more effective.
Hits and Overflow

When a mob takes a hit, shifts in excess of what’s needed to take out one
NPC are applied to the next NPCs in the mob, one at a time. In this way, it’s
entirely possible for a PC to take out a mob of four or five nameless NPCs
(or more!) in a single exchange.
When a mob takes enough stress to reduce it to a single NPC, try to have
that orphaned NPC join up with another mob in the scene, if it makes sense.
(If it doesn’t, just have them flee. Nameless NPCs are good at that.)

Landon and Cynere are set upon by a half-dozen ill-informed street-

gang toughs just for walking down the wrong alleyway.
These thugs are nameless NPCs with Notice and Fight skills of
Average (+1).
Normally Cynere’s Good (+3) Notice would allow her to act first, but
Amanda reasons that the thugs’ ability to surround the PCs gives them
the drop. In a big group of six, their Average (+1) Notice is increased
by +5 to a Fantastic (+6).
 As they make their assault, Amanda splits them into two mobs of three:
one for Landon and one for Cynere. Both attack with Good (+3) ratings
(Average Fight skill with +2 for the helpers), but neither mob hits.
Cynere goes next. Lily says, “In a flash, Cynere’s sword is in hand and
slicing through these punks!” She gets a Great (+4) result with her
Fight. Amanda’s first thug mob defends with a Good (+3) (+0 on the
dice, Average skill, with +2 for the helpers), so Cynere deals one shift
to the mob—enough to take one of them out. There are still two in the
mob, though, so they only get +1 for the helper when they attack next.
On Lenny’s turn, Landon deals two shifts to the mob he’s facing,
enough to take out two thugs and reducing it from a mob of three to a
single nameless NPC.

Nameless NPCs as Obstacles:

An even easier way to handle nameless NPCs is simply to treat them as

obstacles: Give a difficulty for the PC to overcome whatever threat the NPC
presents, and just do it in one roll. You don’t even have to write anything
down, just set a difficulty according to the guidelines in this chapter
and Actions and Outcomes, and assume that the PC gets past on a successful
roll.
If the situation is more complicated than that, make it a challenge instead.
This trick is useful when you want a group of nameless NPCs more as a
feature of the scene than as individuals.

Zird wants to convince a group of mages that continuing their research

into the Dark Void will doom them all, and possibly the world. Amanda
doesn’t want to deal with him needing to convince each mage
individually, so she makes a challenge out of them.
The steps of the challenge are: establish your bona fides (Lore), turn
them against each other (Deceive), and cow them into submission by
 preaching doom and gloom (Provoke). She chooses a passive
opposition of Great (+4) for the challenge.

NPC First, Name Later

Nameless NPCs don’t have to remain nameless. If the players decide to get
to know that barkeep or town crier or security chief or whatever, go ahead
and make a real person out of them—but that doesn’t mean that you need to
make them any more mechanically complex. If you want to, of course, go
ahead and promote them to a supporting NPC. But otherwise, simply giving
that courtier a name and a motivation doesn’t mean he can’t go down in one
punch.

Supporting NPCs
Supporting NPCs have proper names and are a little more detailed than
nameless NPCs, playing a supporting role in your scenarios (hence the
name). They often display some kind of strong distinguishing trait that sets
them apart from the crowd, because of their relationship to a PC or NPC, a
particular competence or unique ability, or simply the fact that they tend to
appear in the game a great deal. Many action-adventure stories feature a
“lieutenant” character who is the right-hand man of the lead villain; that’s a
supporting NPC in game terms. The faces that you assign to the
locations you make during game creation are supporting NPCs, as are any
characters who are named in one of the PCs’ aspects.
Supporting NPCs are a great source of interpersonal drama, because
they’re usually the people that the PCs have a relationship with, such as
friends, sidekicks, family, contacts, and noteworthy opponents. While they
may never be central to resolving the main dilemma of a scenario, they’re a
significant part of the journey, either because they provide aid, present a
problem, or figure into a subplot.
Supporting NPCs are made much like nameless NPCs, except they get to
have a few more of the standard character elements. These include a high
concept, a trouble, one or more additional aspects, one stunt, and the
standard two stress tracks with two boxes each. They should have a handful
of skills (say four or five). If they have a skill that entitles them to bonus
stress boxes, award those as well. They have one mild consequence and, if
you want them to be especially tough, one moderate consequence.
Skills for a supporting NPC should follow a column distribution. Because
you’re only going to define four or five skills, just treat it as one column. If
your NPC has a skill at Great, fill in one skill at each positive step below it
—so one Good, one Fair, and one Average skill.

Skill Levels: A supporting NPC’s top skill can exceed your best PC’s
by one or two levels, but only if their role in the game is to provide
serious opposition—supporting NPCs who are allied with the PCs
should be their rough peers in skill level. (Another action-adventure
trope is to make the “lieutenant” character better than the main villain
at combat, contrasting brawn to the villain’s brain.)
Concessions: Supporting NPCs should not fight to the bitter end,
given the option. Instead, have them concede conflicts often, especially
early in a story, and especially if the concession is something like
“They get away.” Conceding like this serves a few purposes. For one, it
foreshadows a future, more significant encounter with the NPC.
 Because conceding comes with a reward of one or more fate points, it
also makes them more of a threat the next time they show up. What’s
more, it’s virtually guaranteed to pay off for the players in a satisfying
way the next time the NPC makes an appearance. “So, Landon, we
meet again! But this time it shall not go so easily for you.”

Finally, it implicitly demonstrates to the players that, when things are

desperate, conceding a conflict is a viable course of action. A PC
concession here and there can raise the stakes and introduce new
complications organically, both of which make for a more dramatic,
engaging story.
Main NPCs
Main NPCs are the closest you’re ever going to get to playing a PC
yourself. They have full character sheets just like a PC does, with five
aspects, a full distribution of skills, and a selection of stunts. They are the
most significant characters in your PCs’ lives, because they represent
pivotal forces of opposition or allies of crucial importance. Because they
have a full spread of aspects, they also offer the most nuanced options for
interaction, and they have the most options to invoke and be compelled.
Your primary “bad guys” in a scenario or arc should always be main NPCs,
as should any NPCs who are the most vital pieces of your stories.
Because they have all the same things on their sheet as PCs do, main NPCs
will require a lot more of your time and attention than other characters. How
you create one really depends on how much time you have—if you want,
you can go through the whole character creation process and work out their
whole backstory through phases, leaving only those slots for “guest
starring” open.

Of course, if you want, you can also upgrade one of your current supporting NPCs to a main using
this method. This is great for when a supporting NPC has suddenly or gradually become—usually
because of the players—a major fixture in the story, despite your original plans for them.

You could also do things more on the fly if you need to, creating a partial
sheet of the aspects you know for sure, those skills you definitely need them
to have, and any stunts you want. Then fill in the rest as you go. This is
almost like making a supporting NPC, except you can add to the sheet
during play.
Main NPCs will fight to the bitter end if need be, making the PCs work for
every step.
Regarding skill levels, your main NPCs will come in one of two flavors—
exact peers of the PCs who grow with them as the campaign progresses, or
superiors to the PCs who remain static while the PCs grow to sufficient
strength to oppose them. If it’s the former, just give them the exact same
skill distribution the PCs currently have. If it’s the latter, give them enough
skills to go at least two higher than whatever the current skill cap is for the
game.
So, if the PCs are currently capped at Great (+4), your main NPC badass
should be able to afford a couple of Fantastic (+6) columns or a pyramid
that peaks at Fantastic.
 Likewise, a particularly significant NPC might have more than five aspects
to highlight their importance to the story.

PLAYING THE OPPOSITION

Here are some tips for using the opposition characters you create in play.
Right-sizing
Remember, you want a balancing act between obliterating the PCs and
letting them walk all over your opposition (unless it’s a mook horde, in
which case that’s pretty much what they’re there for). It’s important to keep
in mind not just the skill levels of the NPCs in your scenes, but their number
and importance.
Right-sizing the opposition is more of an art than a science, but here are
some strategies to help.
 Don’t outnumber the PCs unless your NPCs have comparatively lower
skills.
If they’re going to team up against one big opponent, make sure that
opponent has a peak skill two levels higher than whatever the best PC
can bring in that conflict.
Limit yourself to one main NPC per scene, unless it’s a big climactic
conflict at the end of an arc. Remember, supporting NPCs can have
skills as high as you want.
Most of the opposition the PCs encounter in a session should be
nameless NPCs, with one or two supporting NPCs and main NPCs
along the way.
Nameless and supporting NPCs means shorter conflicts because they
give up or lose sooner; main NPCs mean longer conflicts.

Creating Advantages for NPCs

It’s easy to fall into the default mode of using the opposition as a direct
means to get in the PCs’ way, drawing them into a series of conflict scenes
until someone is defeated.
However, keep in mind that the NPCs can create advantages just like the
PCs can. Feel free to use opposition characters to create scenes that aren’t
necessarily about stopping the PCs from achieving a goal, but scouting out
information about them and stacking up free invocations. Let your bad guys
and the PCs have tea together and then bring out the Empathy rolls. Or
instead of having that fight scene take place in the dark alley, let your NPCs
show up, gauge the PCs’ abilities, and then flee.
Likewise, keep in mind that your NPCs have a home turf advantage in
conflicts if the PCs go to them in order to resolve something. So, when
you’re setting up situation aspects, you can pre-load the NPC with some
free invocations if it’s reasonable that they’ve had time to place those
aspects. Use this trick in good faith, though—two or three such aspects is
probably pushing the limit.
Change Venues of Conflict
Your opposition will be way more interesting if they try to get at the PCs in
multiple venues of conflict, rather than just going for the most direct route.
Remember that there are a lot of ways to get at someone, and that mental
conflict is just as valid as physical conflict as a means of doing so. If the
opposition has a vastly different skill set than one or more of your PCs,
leverage their strengths and choose a conflict strategy that gives them the
best advantage.
For example, someone going after Landon probably doesn’t want to
confront him physically, because Fight and Athletics are his highest skills.
He’s not as well equipped to see through a clever deception, however, or
handle a magical assault on his mind. Zird, on the other hand, is best
threatened by the biggest, nastiest bruiser possible, someone who can strike
at him before he has a chance to bring his magic to bear.
9
SCENES, SESSIONS, AND
SCENARIOS
SO, NOW WHAT?
By now, you and your group have created the PCs, established the world
they inhabit, and set all the basic assumptions for the game you’re going to
play. Now you have a pile of aspects and NPCs, brimming with dramatic
potential and waiting to come to life.
What do you do with them?
It’s time to get into the real meat of the game: creating and playing through
scenarios.

DEFINING SCENARIOS
As mentioned in Running the Game, a scenario is a unit of game time
usually lasting from one to four sessions, and made up of a number of
discrete scenes. The end of a scenario should trigger a significant milestone,
allowing your PCs to get better at what they do.
In a scenario, the PCs are going to face and try to resolve some kind of
big, urgent, open-ended problem (or problems). The GM will typically open
a scenario by presenting this problem to the players, with subsequent scenes
revolving around what the PCs do to deal with it, whether that’s researching
information, gathering resources, or striking directly at the problem’s
source.
Along the way, you’ll also have some NPCs who are opposed to the PCs’
goals interfere with their attempts to solve the problem. These could be
your Raymond Chandler-esque “two guys with guns” bursting through the
door to kill them, or simply someone with different interests who wants to
negotiate with the PCs in order to get them to deal with the problem in a
different way.
 The best scenarios don’t have one particular “right” ending. Maybe the
PCs don’t resolve the problem, or resolve it in such a way that it has bad
repercussions. Maybe they succeed with flying colors. Maybe they
circumvent the problem, or change the situation in order to minimize the
impact of the problem. You won’t know until you play.
Once the problem is resolved (or it can no longer be resolved), the
scenario is over. The following session, you’ll start a new scenario, which
can either relate directly to the previous scenario or present a whole new
problem.

CREATING A SCENARIO: STEP BY STEP

Find Problems
Ask Story Questions
Establish the Opposition
Set the First Scene

FIND PROBLEMS
Creating a scenario begins with finding a problem for the PCs to deal with.
A good problem is relevant to the PCs, cannot be resolved without their
involvement, and cannot be ignored without dire consequences.
That may seem like a tall order. Fortunately, you have a great storytelling
tool to help you figure out appropriate problems for your game: aspects.
Your PCs’ aspects have a lot of story built into them—they’re an
indication of what’s important about (and to) each character, they indicate
what things in the game world the PCs are connected to, and they describe
the unique facets of each character’s identity.
You also have the aspects that are attached to your game—all your current
and impending issues, location aspects, and any aspects you’ve put on any
of your campaign’s faces. Riffing off of those helps to reinforce the sense of
a consistent, dynamic world, and keep your game’s central premise in the
forefront of play.
 Because of all these aspects, you already have a ton of story potential
sitting right in front of you—now, you just have to unlock it.
You can look at an aspect-related problem as a very large-scale kind
of event compel. The setup is a little more work, but the structure is similar
—having an aspect suggests or implies something problematic for the PC or
multiple PCs, but unlike a compel, it’s something they can’t easily resolve
or deal with in the moment.

YOU DON’T ALWAYS HAVE TO DESTROY THE WORLD

As you will see from the examples, not all of our urgent, consequential
problems necessarily involve the fate of the world or even a large portion of
the setting. Interpersonal problems can have just as much of an impact on a
group of PCs as stopping this week’s bad guy—winning someone’s respect
or resolving an ongoing dispute between two characters can just as easily
take the focus for a scenario as whatever grand scheme your badass villain
is cooking up.
If you want a classic action-adventure story setup, see if you can come up
with two main problems for your scenario—one that focuses on something
external to the characters (like the villain’s scheme), and one that deals with
interpersonal issues. The latter will serve as a subplot in your scenario and
give the characters some development time while they’re in the midst of
dealing with other problems.

Problems and Character Aspects

When you’re trying to get a problem from a character aspect, try fitting it
into this sentence:

You have ____ aspect, which implies ____ (and this may be a list of
things, by the way). Because of that, ____ would probably be a big
problem for you.
 The second blank is what makes this a little harder than an event compel—
you have to think about all the different potential implications of an aspect.
Here are some questions to help with that.

Who might have a problem with the character because of this aspect?
Does the aspect point to a potential threat to that character?
Does the aspect describe a connection or relationship that could cause
trouble for the character?
Does the aspect speak to a backstory element that could come back to
haunt the character?
Does the aspect describe something or someone important to the
character that you can threaten?

As long as whatever you put in the third blank fits the criteria at the
beginning of this section, you’re good to go.

Cynere has Infamous Girl With Sword, which implies that her
reputation precedes her across the countryside. Because of that, a
copycat committing crimes in her name and getting the inhabitants of
the next city she visits angry and murderous would probably be a big
problem for her.
Landon has an aspect of I Owe Old Finn Everything, which implies
that he’d feel obligated to help Finn out with any personal problems.
Because of that, having to bail Finn’s son out of a gambling debt he
owes to some very nasty people would probably be a big problem for
him.
Zird has Rivals in the Collegia Arcana, which implies that some or
many of them are scheming against him constantly. Because of that, a
series of concentrated assassination attempts from someone or several
people who know how to get past all his magical defenses would
probably be a big problem for him.
Problems and Game Aspects
Problems you get from a game’s current and impending issues will be a
little wider in scope than character-driven problems, affecting all your PCs
and possibly a significant number of NPCs as well. They’re less personal,
but that doesn’t mean they have to be less compelling (pardon the pun).

Because ____ is an issue, it implies ____. Therefore, ____ would

probably create a big problem for the PCs.

Ask yourself:

What threats does the issue present to the PCs?

Who are the driving forces behind the issue, and what messed up thing
might they be willing to do to advance their agenda?
Who else cares about dealing with the issue, and how might their
“solution” be bad for the PCs?
What’s a good next step for resolving the issue, and what makes
accomplishing that step hard?

PUT A FACE ON IT
While not all of your scenario problems have to be directly caused by an
NPC who serves as a “master villain” for the PCs to take down, it’s often
easier if they are. At the very least, you should be able to point directly to
an NPC who benefits a great deal from the scenario problem not going the
way the PCs want it to go.

Because The Scar Triad is an issue, it implies that the Triad is making
a serious power play across the land. Therefore, a complete
government takeover by Triad members in the city they’re sent to on
their next job would probably create a big problem for the PCs.
Because The Doom that Is to Come is an issue, it implies that agents
of the Cult of Tranquility are constantly trying to fulfill parts of the
 ancient prophecies that foretell the doom. Therefore, a series of ritual
murders in the next town meant to awaken an ancient demon that
sleeps under the town would probably create a big problem for the
PCs.
Because the Cult of Tranquility’s Two Conflicting Prophecies is an
issue, it implies that there’s an internal Cult struggle to validate one
prophecy as being definitive. Therefore, an all-out war between rival
factions in the next town that brings innocents into the crossfire would
probably create a big problem for the PCs.

Problems and Aspect Pairs

This is where you really start cooking with gas. You can also create
problems from the relationship between two aspects instead of relying on
just one. That lets you keep things personal, but broaden the scope of your
problem to impact multiple characters, or thread a particular PC’s story into
the story of the game.
There are two main forms of aspect pairing: connecting two character
aspects, and connecting a character aspect to an issue.
Two Character Aspects

Because ____ has ____ aspect and ____ has ____ aspect, it implies
that ____. Therefore, ____ would probably be a big problem for them.

Ask yourself:

Do the two aspects put those characters at odds or suggest a point of

tension between them?
Is there a particular kind of problem or trouble that both would be
likely to get into because of the aspects?
Does one character have a relationship or a connection that could
become problematic for the other?
 Do the aspects point to backstory elements that can intersect in the
present?
Is there a way for one PC’s fortune to become another’s misfortune,
because of the aspects?

Because Landon is a Disciple of the Ivory Shroud, and Zird

has Rivals in the Collegia Arcana, it implies that both factions could
occasionally cross paths and have incompatible agendas. Therefore, a
mandate from the monks of a local Shroud monastery to capture or kill
the members of a local Collegia chapterhouse for an unknown slight
would probably be a big problem for them.
Because Cynere is Tempted by Shiny Things, and Landon has The
Manners of a Goat, it implies that they’re probably the worst partners
for any kind of undercover heist. Therefore, a contract to infiltrate the
Royal Ball of Ictherya with no backup and walk out with the Crown
Jewels on behalf of a neighboring kingdom would probably be a big
problem for them.
Because Zird has If I Haven’t Been There, I’ve Read About It, and
Cynere is the Secret Sister of Barathar, it implies that proof of
Cynere’s true heritage could one day fall into Zird’s hands. Therefore,
the unexpected arrival of a genealogical document in code that
Barathar and her henchies seek to recover at all costs would probably
be a big problem for them.

Character Aspect and Issue

Because you have ____ aspect and ____ is an issue, it implies that
____. Therefore, ____ would probably be a big problem for you.

Ask yourself:
 Does the issue suggest a threat to any of the PC’s relationships?
Is the next step to dealing with the issue something that impacts a
particular character personally because of their aspects?
Does someone connected to the issue have a particular reason to target
the PC because of an aspect?

HOW MANY PROBLEMS DO I NEED?

For a single scenario, one or two is sufficient, trust us. You’ll see below that
even one problem can create enough material for two or three sessions.
Don’t feel like you have to engage every PC with every scenario—rotate
the spotlight around a little so that they each get some spotlight time, and
then throw in an issue-related scenario when you want to concentrate on the
larger “plot” of the game.

Because Cynere is the Secret Sister of Barathar and The Scar

Triad is an issue, it implies that the Triad could have leverage over
Cynere for blackmail. Therefore, the Triad hiring her for an extremely
dangerous and morally reprehensible job on the threat of revealing her
secret to the world and making her a public enemy across the land
would probably be a big problem for her.
Because Zird has If I Haven’t Been There, I’ve Read About It, and
the Cult of Tranquility’s Two Conflicting Prophecies are an issue, it
implies that Zird could be the key to figuring out which of the
prophecies is legitimate. Therefore, getting approached by the
Primarch to learn the Rites of Tranquility and figure out the truth of the
prophecy, and thus becoming a target for manipulation from both
major factions, would probably be a big problem for him.
Because Landon has An Eye for an Eye, and The Doom that Is to
Come is an issue, it implies that anything the Cult does to Landon’s
 loved ones would be met with a desire for vengeance. Therefore, an
attack on his hometown by Cult agents on the prowl for more
indoctrinated servants as preparation for the End Times would
probably be a big problem for him.

ASK STORY QUESTIONS

Now that you have a really grabby problem, you can flesh the situation out
a little and figure out precisely what your scenario is intended to resolve—
in other words, what are the really grabby questions at the heart of this
problem?
That’s what you’ll do in this step: create a series of questions that you
want your scenario to answer. We call these story questions, because the
story will emerge naturally from the process of answering them.
The more story questions you have, the longer your scenario’s going to be.
One to three story questions will probably wrap up in a session. Four to
eight might take you two or even three sessions. More than eight or nine,
and you might have to save some of those questions for the next scenario,
but that’s not a bad thing at all.
We recommend asking story questions as yes/no questions, in the general
format of, “Can/Will (character) accomplish (goal)?” You don’t have to
follow that phrasing exactly, and you can embellish on the basic question
format in a number of ways, which we’ll show you in a moment.
Every problem you come up with is going to have one very obvious story
question: “Can the PC(s) resolve the problem?” You do need to know that
eventually, but you don’t want to skip straight to that—it’s your finale for
the scenario, after all. Put other questions before that one to add nuance and
complexity to the scenario and build up to that final question. Figure out
what makes the problem difficult to solve.
To come up with story questions, you’re probably going to have to
embellish on the problem that you came up with just a bit, and figure out
some of the W-How (who, what, when, where, why, how) details. That’s
also fine, and part of what the process is for.
An Arcane Conspiracy: Problem and Story Questions
Cynere is Tempted by Shiny Things, and Zird has Rivals in the
Collegia Arcana, which implies that the Collegia’s wealth might end
up on Cynere’s radar at an inconvenient time for Zird. Therefore,
Cynere getting a lucrative contract to steal one of the Collegia’s sacred
treasures at the same time that Zird’s rivals try to put him on trial for
crimes against creation would probably be a big problem for both of
them.
Two obvious story questions spring to mind already: Will Cynere get
the treasure? Will Zird win his trial? But Amanda wants to save those
answers for the end, so she brainstorms some other questions.
First of all, she doesn’t know if they’re even going to go willingly into
this situation, so she starts there: Will Cynere take the contract? Will
Zird allow the Collegia to arrest him, or will he resist?
Then, she needs to figure out why they can’t just go straight to the
problem. She decides Cynere has an anonymous rival for the treasure
(let’s call it the Jewel of Aetheria, that sounds nice), and her mysterious
employer would be most displeased if the rival beat her to the punch.
Zird, in the meantime, has to secure a legal defense that isn’t a part of
the conspiracy against him, and will probably want to find out
precisely who has it in for him this time.
So, that gives her three more questions: Can Cynere sniff out her
competitor before her competitor does the same to her? Can Zird find
an ally to defend him among the Collegia’s ranks? Can Zird discover
the architects of the conspiracy without suffering further
consequences?
Then, because she wants some tension between these two, one that
relates to their relationship: Will Cynere turn her back on Zird for the
 sake of her own goals?

Notice that each of these questions has the potential to significantly shape
the scenario’s plot. Right off the bat, if Zird decides not to go quietly, you
have a very different situation than if he chooses to submit to custody. If
Zird’s investigations get him arrested, then the trial might end up being a
moot point. If Cynere decides to help Zird rather than pursuing the Jewel,
then they’re going to have another source of trouble in the form of Cynere’s
employer.
Also notice that a few of the story questions have something else that
modifies the basic “Can X accomplish Y?” format. The reason why you
want to do this is the same reason you want to avoid rolling dice sometimes
—black and white success/failure isn’t always interesting, especially on the
failure side.
Look at one of the questions for Cynere: “Will Cynere discover the
identity of her chief competitor for the Jewel before the competitor
discovers hers?” Without the emphasized part, it’d be kind of boring—if
she fails to discover her opponent’s identity, then we’ve pretty much
dropped that plot thread, and part of the game stalls out. No good.
The way we’ve phrased it, though, we have somewhere to go if she
doesn’t do well in this part of the scenario—she may not know who her
rival is, but her rival knows her now. Whatever happens with the Jewel, that
rival can come back to haunt her in a future scenario. Or, we take it as a
given that we’re going to reveal the rival’s identity to Cynere eventually,
but we can still have a tense set of conflicts or contests leading up to that
reveal as they suss out each other’s abilities.
There’s also some room to extend material from this scenario into the
future. Maybe the identity of Cynere’s opponent doesn’t get answered this
session at all—that’s okay, because it’s a detail Amanda can always bring
back in a later session.

If you end up with a really large number of story questions (like eight or more), keep in mind that
you don’t necessarily have to answer them all in one scenario—you can bring up the questions you
don’t answer, either as foreshadowing or to set up stuff you’re going to do in the following scenario.
In fact, that’s exactly how you make strong arcs—you have a pile of related story questions, and
you take two or three scenarios to answer them all.

ESTABLISH THE OPPOSITION

You might have already come up with an NPC or group of NPCs who is/are
responsible for what’s going on when you made up your problem, but if you
haven’t, you need to start putting together the cast of characters who are the
key to answering your story questions. You also need to nail down their
motivations and goals, why they’re standing in opposition to the PCs’ goals,
and what they’re after.
At the very least, you should be able to answer the following questions for
each named NPC in your scenario:

What does that NPC need? How can the PCs help her get that, or how
are the PCs in the way?
Why can’t the NPC get what she needs through legitimate means? (In
other words, why is this need contributing to a problem?)
Why can’t she be ignored?

Wherever you can, try and consolidate NPCs so that you don’t have too
many characters to keep track of. If one of your opposition NPCs is serving
only one purpose in your scenario, consider getting rid of him and folding
his role together with another NPC. This not only reduces your workload,
but it also allows you to develop each NPC’s personality a bit more, making
him more multi-dimensional as you reconcile his whole set of motives.
For each NPC that you have, decide whether you need to make them a
supporting or main. Stat them up according to the guidelines given
in Running the Game.

An Arcane Conspiracy: Opposition

Amanda looks over the story questions and thinks of NPCs she’ll need
in order to answer them. She makes a list of the obvious suspects.

Cynere’s mysterious employer (not appearing)

 The chief arbiter for the Collegia Arcana (supporting)
Cynere’s competitor for the Jewel (supporting)
A barrister who isn’t part of the conspiracy (supporting)
A corrupt barrister, and the one that Zird’s rivals want to set him up
with (supporting)
The Collegia wizard who engineered the conspiracy to bring Zird
down (main)

That’s six NPCs, four supporting, one main, and one that isn’t going
to be in the scenario—she really doesn’t want to drop any details on
who’s hiring Cynere yet. She also doesn’t really want to keep track of
five NPCs, so she starts looking for opportunities to consolidate.
One pairing that immediately strikes her is making Cynere’s
competitor and the neutral barrister into the same person, whom she
names Anna. Anna might not be involved in this conspiracy, but clearly,
there’s a more complicated motive at work. What’s going on with her?
Amanda ultimately decides that Anna’s motives are beneficent; she’s
secreting the Jewel away to keep it out of the hands of more corrupt
elements in the Collegia’s infrastructure. She doesn’t know anything
about Cynere and will mistake her for an agent of those corrupt
elements until they clear the air.
Then she decides that the chief arbiter and the architect of the
conspiracy are the same—he didn’t trust anyone else to stick the final
nail in Zird’s coffin, so he made sure he’d be appointed arbiter over the
trial. Amanda likes this because his political power makes him a
formidable opponent to investigate and gives him a powerful lackey in
the form of the corrupt barrister. But why does he have it in for Zird in
the first place?
 She further decides that his motives aren’t personal, but he’s getting
ready to do some stuff that will rock the foundations of the Collegia,
and he knows that as a misfit in that organization, Zird is one of the
most likely candidates to resist him. So it’s basically a preemptive
strike.
As for the corrupt barrister, the first thing that comes to mind is a
pathetic, sniveling toady who is totally in the arbiter’s pocket. But she
wants to add a measure of depth to him, so she also decides that the
arbiter has blackmail material on him, which helps to ensure his
loyalty. She doesn’t know what that info is yet, but she’s hoping that
nosy PCs will help her figure it out through a story detail later.
She names the arbiter Lanthus, and the corrupt barrister Pight. Now
she has her NPCs, and she goes about making their sheets.

ADVANTAGES CAN SAVE YOU WORK

When you’re establishing your NPCs for your scenario, you don’t have to
have everything set in stone when you get to the table—whatever you don’t
know, you can always establish by letting the advantages the players create
become the NPCs’ aspects. Also see below, for advice about winging it
during play.

SET UP THE FIRST SCENE

Start things off by being as unsubtle as possible—take one of your story
questions, come up with something that will bring the question into sharp
relief, and hit your players over the head with it as hard as you can. You
don’t have to answer it right off the bat (though there’s nothing wrong with
that, either), but you should show the players that the question demands an
answer.
That way, you’re setting an example for the rest of the session and getting
the momentum going, ensuring the players won’t dither around. Remember,
they’re supposed to be proactive, competent people—give them something
to be proactive and competent about right from the get-go.
If you’re in an ongoing campaign, you might need the first scenes of a
session to resolve loose ends that were left hanging from a previous session.
It’s okay to spend time on that, because it helps keep the sense of continuity
going from session to session. As soon as there’s a lull in momentum,
though, hit them with your opening scene fast and hard.

An Arcane Conspiracy: The Opening Scene

Amanda mulls over her questions and thinks about what she wants as
her opening scene. A couple of obvious suggestions come to mind:

Enforcers from the Collegia show up at Zird’s door and serve him
papers, demanding he come with them.
Cynere receives the contract and job details from a mysterious
employer, and must decide whether or not to sign.

She decides to go with the latter scene, because she figures that if
Cynere rebuffs the contract and then finds out that Zird’s going to the
Collegia anyway, it might create a fun scene where she tries to get the
mysterious employer to reconsider. And even if she sticks to her guns,
it’ll establish whether or not they’ll have to deal with any drama on the
way there, as the mysterious employer’s lackeys harass them on the
way.
That doesn’t mean she’s going to just toss the scene with Zird aside—
she’s just going to save it for a follow-up to the first scene.

Powerful Session-Starting Ninja GM Trick

Asking the players to contribute something to the beginning of your first
scene is a great way to help get them invested in what’s going on right off
the bat. If there’s anything that’s flexible about your opening prompt, ask
your players to fill in the blanks for you when you start the scene. Clever
players may try to use it as an opportunity to push for a compel and get
extra fate points right off the bat—we like to call this sort of play
“awesome.”

Let’s look at our example scenes above. The prompts don’t specify
where the PCs are when they get confronted with their first choices. So,
Amanda might start the session by asking Ryan, “Where exactly isZird
when the brute squad from the Collegia comes looking for him?”
Now, even if Ryan just replies with “in his sanctuary,” you’ve solicited
his participation and helped him set the scene. But Ryan is awesome,
so what he says instead is, “Oh, probably at the public baths, soaking
after a long day of research.”
“Perfect!” says Amanda, and holds out a fate point. “So, it’d make
sense that your Rivals in the Collegia Arcana would have divined
precisely the right time to catch you away from all your magical
implements and gear, right?”
Ryan grins and takes the fate point. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Of course, you can also just have your opening scenario hooks count as
“pre-loaded” compels, and hand out some fate points at the start of a
session to start the PCs off with a spot of trouble they have to deal with
immediately. This helps low-refresh players out and can kickstart the
spending of fate points right off the bat. Make sure your group is okay with
giving you carte blanche authority to narrate them into a situation, though—
some players find the loss of control problematic.

Amanda wants to start the players off with a number of fate points off
the bat, so at the beginning of the session, she says to the players:
“Zird, it’s bad enough when your Rivals in the Collegia Arcana give
you trouble, but when they pretend to be peasants in the local watering
hole, get you drunk, and start a bar fight so they can haul you
 somewhere secluded, it’s even worse. You wake up with a five-alarm
hangover and a black eye—someone punched you in the face!” (2 fate
points, for Rivals and Not the Face!)
“Landon, I know Smashing is Always an Option, but how are you
going to explain what happened when you tried to fix the wagon while
everyone else was away?” (1 fate point for Smashing.)
“Cynere, whoever decided to make you this contract offer knows you
pretty well. They’ve included several large gems along with the
contract. Problem is, you also know what noble house they were stolen
from, and there’s no doubt you’ll be a wanted woman if you don’t sign
—and you’re infamous enough that you know no one’s going to believe
how you came by them.” (2 fate points for Infamous Girl with
Sword and Tempted by Shiny Things.)

DEFINING SCENES
A scene is a unit of game time lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a
half hour or more, during which the players try to achieve a goal or
otherwise accomplish something significant in a scenario. Taken together,
the collection of scenes you play through make up a whole session of play,
and by extension, also make up your scenarios, arcs, and campaigns.
So you can look at it as the foundational unit of game time, and you
probably already have a good idea of what one looks like. It’s not all that
different from a scene in a movie, a television show, or a novel—the main
characters are doing stuff in continuous time, usually all in the same space.
Once the action shifts to a new goal, moves to a new place related to that
goal, or jumps in time, you’re in the next scene.
As a GM, one of your most important jobs is to manage the starting and
ending of scenes. The best way to control the pacing of what happens in
your session is to keep a tight rein on when scenes start and end—let things
continue as long as the players are all invested and enjoying themselves, but
as soon as the momentum starts to flag, move on to the next thing. In that
sense, you can look at it as being similar to what a good film editor does—
you “cut” a scene and start a new one to make sure the story continues to
flow smoothly.
Starting Scenes
When you’re starting a scene, establish the following two things as clearly
as you can:

What’s the purpose of the scene?

What interesting thing is just about to happen?

Answering the first question is super-important, because the more specific

your scene’s purpose, the easier it is to know when the scene’s over. A good
scene revolves around resolving a specific conflict or achieving a specific
goal—once the PCs have succeeded or failed at doing whatever they are
trying to do, the scene’s over. If your scene doesn’t have a clear purpose,
you run the risk of letting it drag on longer than you intended and slow the
pace of your session down.
Most of the time, the players are going to tell you what the purpose of the
scene is, because they’re always going to be telling you what they want to
do next as a matter of course. So if they say, “Well, we’re going to the
thief’s safehouse to see if we can get some dirt on him,” then you know the
purpose of the scene—it’s over when the PCs either get the dirt, or get into
a situation where it’s impossible to get the dirt.
Sometimes, though, they’re going to be pretty vague about it. If you don’t
have an intuitive understanding of their goals in context, ask questions until
they state things directly. So if a player says, “Okay, I’m going to the tavern
to meet with my contact,” that might be a little vague—you know there’s a
meeting, but you don’t know what it’s for. You might ask, “What are you
interested in finding out? Have you negotiated a price for the information
yet?” or another question that’ll help get the player to nail down what he’s
after.
Also, sometimes you’ll have to come up with a scene’s purpose all on your
own, such as the beginning of a new scenario, or the next scene following a
cliffhanger. Whenever you have to do that, try going back to the story
questions you came up with earlier and introducing a situation that’s going
to directly contribute to answering them. That way, whenever it’s your job
to start a scene, you’re always moving the story along.

Amanda ended the previous session of the group’s story with a

cliffhanger: the revelation that Cynere’s mysterious employer is an
agent of the Cult of Tranquility, and that the Jewel is an important
component in a mysterious ritual. On top of that, Zird’s in the middle of
the most important trial of his life, and the Collegia’s discovered that
the Jewel is missing
Now Amanda’s thinking about how to start things off next time. The
whole situation seems to have really freaked the players out, so she
definitely wants to capitalize on that. She figures Anna should return,
initially confused about Cynere’s role in the theft and ready to fight.
The scene will be about coming to an accord with Anna and realizing
that they’re both on the same side, as it were.

The second question is just as important—you want to start a scene just

before something interesting is going to take place. TV and movies are
especially good at this—usually, you’re not watching a particular scene for
more than thirty seconds before something happens to change the situation
or shake things up.
“Cutting in” just before some new action starts helps keep the pace of your
session brisk and helps hold the players’ attention. You don’t want to
chronicle every moment of the PCs leaving their room at the inn to take a
twenty-minute walk across town to the thief’s safehouse—that’s a lot of
play time where nothing interesting happens. Instead, you want to start the
scene when they’re at the safehouse and staring at the horrifically intricate
series of locks he’s set up on his door, cursing their luck.
If you get stumped by this question, just think of something that might
complicate whatever the purpose is or make it problematic. You can also
use the ninja trick mentioned earlier and ask the players leading questions
to help you figure out the interesting thing that’s about to happen.
 Amanda starts the scene with Cynere and Landon walking back to their
lodgings late at night, engrossed in conversation about recent events.
Lenny suggests they’re not staying at an inn anymore—not after the
theft. He figures everyone from the Collegia wizards to the Cult of
Tranquility will be looking for Cynere, so they’re holed up somewhere
safe.
So they’re understandably surprised by the three armed strangers who
ambush them as soon as they walk in the door.
“Whoa!” Lily says. “How’d they know we were going to be here?”
“Tough to say,” Amanda counters, and tosses her and Lenny each a
fate point. “But this is a Hub of Trade, Hive of Villainy.”
“Fair enough,” Lenny says, and they both accept the compel.
“Cynere, no sooner have you entered your safehouse than a hooded
figure has a sword at your throat. The hood comes off—it’s Anna! And
she’s pissed. ‘Where’s the Jewel, you cultist scum?’”

If you have a clear purpose going into every scene and you start just before
some significant piece of action, it’s hard to go wrong.
Ending Scenes
You can end scenes the way you start them, but in reverse: as soon as
you’ve wrapped up whatever your scene’s purpose was, move on, and shoot
for ending the scene immediately after the interesting action concludes.
This is an effective approach mainly because it helps you sustain interest
for the next scene. Again, you see this all the time in good movies—a scene
will usually end with a certain piece of action resolved, but also with a
lingering bit of business that’s left unresolved, and that’s where they cut to
next.
A lot of your scenes are going to end up the same way. The PCs might win
a conflict or achieve a goal, but there’s likely something else they’re going
to want to do after—talk about the outcome, figure out what they’re going
to do next, etc.
Instead of lingering at that scene, though, suggest that they move on to a
new one, which helps answer one of the unresolved questions from the
current scene. Try to get them to state what they want to do next, and then
go back to the two questions for starting scenes above—what’s the purpose
of the next scene, and what’s the next bit of interesting action to come?
Then dive right into that.
The one time you should exhibit restraint is if it’s clear that the players are
really, really enjoying their interactions. Sometimes people just want to
yammer and jaw in character, and that’s okay as long as they’re really into
it. If you see interest starting to flag, though, take that opportunity to insert
yourself and ask about the next scene.
Using the Pillars (Competence, Proactivity, Drama)
Whenever you’re trying to come up with ideas for what should happen in a
scene, you should think about the basic ideas of Fate that we talked about
in The Basics—competence, proactivity, and drama.
In other words, ask yourself if your scene is doing at least one of the
following things:

Giving your PCs the chance to show off what they’re good at, whether
by going up against people who don’t hold a candle to them or by
holding their own against worthy opponents.
Giving your PCs the chance to do something you can describe with a
simple action verb. “Trying to find out information” is too muddy, for
example. “Breaking into the mayor’s office” is actionable and specific.
Not that it has to be physical—“convince the snitch to talk” is also a
clear action.
Creating some kind of difficult choice or complication for the PCs.
Your best tool to do this with is a compel, but if the situation is
problematic enough, you might not need one.
 Cynere’s first impulse is to find out what Anna’s talking about—but
Amanda knows Landon’s impulses are... a little more violent.
“Enough talk!” Lenny shouts.
“But... we just started talking,” Lily says.
“Even still! Why talk when Smashing Is Always an Option?” Lenny
holds out his hand, and Amanda hands him a fate point for the compel.

Hit Their Aspects

Another good way to figure out the interesting action for a scene is to turn
to the PCs’ aspects, and create a complication or an event-based compel
based on them. This is especially good to do for those PCs whose aspects
did not come into play when you made up your scenario problem, because
it allows them to have some of the spotlight despite the fact that the overall
story does not focus on them as much.

The scene opens on the big trial. Zird stands before a panel of wizards
in the Great Hall of the Collegia Arcana. While they pepper him with
questions, every now and then a wizard in the gallery throws out a
follow-up, an insult, or a word of discouragement. The whole thing’s
like a lively session of the British Parliament. Cynere and Landon
stand in the gallery, following the proceedings as best they can.
Amanda turns to Lily. “You going to let them get away with treating
your friend that?”
“You’re right! I can’t take it anymore!” Lily says. “I’ve Got Zird’s
Back!”
Cynere stands up and shouts at the Arbiter, “Hey, you want to put
someone on trial for crimes against creation? How about we start with
your mom, ugly!”
Amanda tosses Lily a fate point. “Nice.”
THE SCENARIO IN PLAY
So, now you should be ready to begin: you have a problem that can’t be
ignored, a variety of story questions that will lead to resolving that problem
one way or another, a core group of NPCs and their motivations, and a
really dynamic first scene that will get things cooking.
Everything should be smooth sailing from here, right? You present the
questions, the players gradually answer them, and your story rolls into a
nice, neat conclusion.
Yeah... trust us, it’ll never happen that way.
The most important thing to remember when you actually get the scenario
off the ground is this: whatever happens will always be different from what
you expect. The PCs will hate an NPC you intended them to befriend, have
wild successes that give away a bad guy’s secrets very early, suffer
unexpected setbacks that change the course of their actions, or any one of
another hundred different things that just don’t end up the way you think
they should.
Notice that we don’t recommend predetermining what scenes and
locations are going to be involved in your scenario—that’s because we find
that most of the time, you’re going to throw out most of that material
anyway, in the face of a dynamic group of players and their choices.
Not all is lost, however—the stuff you have prepared should help you
tremendously when players do something unexpected. Your story questions
are vague enough that there are going to be multiple ways to answer each
one, and you can very quickly axe one that isn’t going to be relevant and
replace it with something else on the fly without having to toss the rest of
your work.

Amanda had expected that the scene with Landon, Cynere, and Anna
would result in a briefly violent reaction, thanks to Landon, followed by
the PCs explaining that they’re not with the Cult of Tranquility and
everyone realizing that they’re all on the same side.
Right? No.
 The first swing of Landon’s sword fells Anna where she stands, killing
what would’ve been their first contact with the Sun and Moon Society,
an important secret organization opposing the cult. Plus, Anna’s
companions are now convinced that he and Cynere are indeed cultists.
So...slight detour. Amanda sees a few ways to go from here:

The warriors throw caution to the wind, cry “Revenge!” and fight to
the death.
One of the warriors assumes Anna’s role in the scene and continues the
conversation.
The warriors flee (making a concession) and report the killing to their
superiors in the secret society, leaving Anna’s body behind.

She decides to go with the third option. These two may be good guys,
but they’re not heroes, and neither one of them is up for taking on
Landon after that opener. And the odds of them wanting to have a little
chat with Anna’s corpse at their feet are, at best, slim.
Plus, Amanda figures Lily and Lenny will want to search the body,
which would present a good opportunity to feed them information
about the Sun and Moon Society. It’s also a way to bring Zird in on the
action—maybe he knows something about the Sun and Moon Society
already, and can make contact with them.

Also, knowing your NPCs’ motivations and goals allows you to adjust
their behavior more easily than if you’d just placed them in a static scene
waiting for the PCs to show up. When the players throw you a curveball,
make the NPCs as dynamic and reactive as they are, by having them take
sudden, surprising action in pursuit of their goals.

Amanda’s still stuck on Anna’s unexpected demise. She’d planned on

making her an entry point for a whole story arc—maybe not a powerful
 NPC, but a pretty important one nonetheless. So if Anna’s not going to
be around anymore, Amanda at least wants to make something out of
her death.
She decides that, while the death of a member of the Sun and Moon
Society would go unnoticed by most of Riverton, a guy like Hugo the
Charitable would certainly hear about it. He’d already taken notice of
Landon after he fought off a few Scar Triad goons. And now this. This
newcomer is clearly dangerous, potentially a threat. Worst, he doesn’t
seem to be working for anyone.
Given Hugo’s high concept aspect of Everyone in Riverton Fears
Me, he sees Landon as a potential asset for the Scar Triad. If you can’t
beat ‘em, recruit ‘em.

RESOLVING THE SCENARIO

A scenario ends when you’ve run enough scenes to definitively answer
most of the story questions you came up with when you were preparing
your scenario. Sometimes you’ll be able to do that in a single session if you
have a lot of time or only a few questions. If you have a lot of questions,
it’ll probably take you two or three sessions to get through them all.
Don’t feel the need to answer every story question if you’ve brought things
to a satisfying conclusion—you can either use unresolved story questions
for future scenarios or let them lie if they didn’t get a whole lot of traction
with the players.
The end of a scenario usually triggers a significant milestone. When this
happens, you should also see if the game world needs advancing too.
10
THE LONG GAME
DEFINING ARCS
When you sit down to play Fate, you might just play a single session. That’s
a viable way to play the game, but let’s assume that you want it to go a bit
longer. What you need, then, is an arc.
An arc is a complete storyline with its own themes, situations, antagonists,
innocent bystanders, and endgame, told in the span of a few sessions
(somewhere between two and five, usually). You don’t need to have
everything planned out (in fact, you probably shouldn’t, given that no
meticulously planned story ever survives contact with the players), but you
need to have an idea of where things begin and end, and what might happen
in the middle.
To make a fictional analogy, an arc is a lot like a single book. It tells its
own story and ends when it’s done; you provide some form of closure and
move on. Sometimes you move on to another story, and sometimes your
book is just the first in a series of books. That’s when you have a campaign.

DEFINING CAMPAIGNS
When you have multiple arcs that are connected and told in a sequence, and
that have an overarching story or theme that runs through all of them, you
have a campaign. Campaigns are long, taking months or even years to
complete (if you ever do).
Of course, that doesn’t need to be as scary as it might sound. Yes, a
campaign is long and large and complex. You don’t, however, need to come
up with the whole thing at once. As with an arc, you may have an idea where
it begins and ends (and that can be helpful), but you really only need to plan
an arc at a time.
See, the players are so prone to shaking things up and changing things on
you that planning more than one arc at a time is often frustrating and futile.
Planning the second arc of a campaign based on the events of the first arc,
how it turned out, and what your players did, though...well, that can make
for very satisfying play.

BUILDING AN ARC
The easiest way to build an arc is not to build one, we suggested that if you
have a lot of story questions in one of your scenarios, you can reserve some
of them for the next scenario. Then, in your next scenario, add some new
questions to go with the unanswered ones. Lather, rinse, repeat, and you’ll
have material for three or four scenarios without doing that much additional
work. In addition, that lets you incorporate changes to the characters’ aspects
organically, rather than making a plan and having it disrupted.
That said, we know some GMs want to have a greater sense of structure for
the long run. We recommend using the same method for building scenarios
in the previous chapter to build arcs, but changing the scope of the story
questions you come up with. Instead of focusing on immediate problems for
the PCs to solve, come up with a more general problem, where the PCs are
going to have to solve smaller problems first in order to have a chance at
resolving the larger one.
The best places to look for arc-sized problems are the current or impending
issues of places or organizations that you came up with during game
creation. If you haven’t made any up yet for a particular place or group, now
might be a good time to do that, so you have material for the arc.

Amanda decides she wants to do one major arc for each PC.
For Zird, his Rivals in the Collegia Arcana makes it pretty easy—she
decides that perhaps there’s something more sinister behind these
rivalries, such as an attempt by a dark cult operating from within to take
over the Collegia and turn it to nefarious purposes.
She needs to focus on story questions that are more general and will
take some time to resolve. After thinking about it for a while, she
chooses:
 Can Zird uncover the identity of the cult’s leader before the takeover
occurs? (This lets her do individual scenarios about the attempted
takeover.)
Will Zird’s rivals ally with the cult? (This lets her do individual
scenarios about each of Zird’s key rivals.)
Can Zird reconcile, at long last, with his rivals?
Will the cult succeed and transform the Collegia forever? (Answering
this question ends the arc.)

Then go through the same process of picking opposing NPCs, keeping in

mind that their influence is supposed to be more far-reaching in an arc than
in a single scenario.

BUILDING A CAMPAIGN
Again, the easiest way to do this is not to bother—just let your scenarios and
arcs emergently create a story for the campaign. Human beings are pattern-
making machines, and it’s very likely that you’ll naturally pick up on what
the long-term plot devices of your campaign need to be by keying into
unanswered questions from the arcs and scenarios.
However, if you want to do a little bit of focused planning, the advice is the
same as for arcs, except you’re generalizing even more. Pick one story
question to answer, which the PCs will spend their scenarios and arcs
building to. Then, jot down some notes on what steps will lead to answering
that question, so you have material for arcs and scenarios.
The very best aspects to look at for a campaign-level problem are your
setting’s current or impending issues, because of their scope.

Amanda knows that her campaign will hinge on resolving The Doom
that Is to Come. So the story question following from that is pretty
obvious. “Can the PCs avert, prevent, or mitigate the prophesied
doom?”
She knows that to do that, they’re first going to need to figure out
which of the Cult of Tranquility’s factions is right about the prophecy (if
 either). They’ll also need to make sure that none of their personal
enemies or The Scar Triad can interfere with whatever they need to do
in order to stop the doom. That gives her a good idea of what arcs are
going to make up the campaign.

ADVANCEMENT AND CHANGE

Your characters aren’t going to remain static through the entire campaign. As
their stories play out, they’ll have the chance to grow and change in response
to the events that happen in play. The conflicts they face and the
complications they overcome will alter your sense of who they are and push
them toward new challenges.
In addition to your characters, the game world will change also. You’ll
resolve threats as you play, or change the face of a location, or make such an
impact on the world that one of the issues may need to change. We’ll get
more into world advancement later.
Character advancement in Fate comes in one of two flavors: either you can
change something on your sheet to something else that’s equivalent, or you
can add new things to your sheet. The opportunities you get to do this are
collectively called milestones.

DEFINING MILESTONES
A milestone is a moment during the game where you have the chance to
change or advance your character. We call them milestones because they
usually happen at significant “break points” in the action of a game—the end
of a session, the end of a scenario, and the end of a story arc, respectively.
Usually, those break points immediately follow some significant event in
the story that justifies your character changing in response to events. You
might reveal a significant plot detail or have a cliffhanger at the end of a
session. You might defeat a major villain or resolve a plotline at the end of a
scenario. You might resolve a major storyline that shakes up the campaign
world at the end of an arc.
Obviously, things won’t always line up that nicely, so GMs, you have some
discretion in deciding when a certain level of milestone occurs. If it seems
satisfying to give out a milestone in the middle of a session, go ahead, but
stick to the guidelines here to keep from handing out too many advancement
opportunities too often.
Milestones come in three levels of importance: minor, significant, and
major.
Minor Milestones
Minor milestones usually occur at the end of a session of play, or when one
piece of a story has been resolved. These kinds of milestones are more about
changing your character rather than making him or her more powerful, about
adjusting in response to whatever’s going on in the story if you need to.
Sometimes it won’t really make sense to take advantage of a minor
milestone, but you always have the opportunity if you should need to.
During a minor milestone, you can choose to do one (and only one) of the
following:

Switch the rank values of any two skills, or replace one Average (+1)
skill with one that isn’t on your sheet.
Change any single stunt for another stunt.
Purchase a new stunt, provided you have the refresh to do so.
(Remember, you can’t go below 1 refresh.)
Rename one character aspect that isn’t your high concept.

In addition, you can also rename any moderate consequences you have, so
that you can start them on the road to recovery, presuming you have not
already done so.
This is a good way to make slight character adjustments, if it seems like
something on your character isn’t quite right—you don’t end up using that
stunt as often as you thought, or you resolved the Blood Feud with
Edmund that you had and thus it’s no longer appropriate, or any of those
changes that keep your character consistent with the events of play.
In fact, you should almost always be able to justify the change you’re
making in terms of the game’s story. You shouldn’t be able to change Hot
Temper to Staunch Pacifist, for example, unless something happened in the
story to inspire a serious change of heart—you met a holy man, or had a
traumatic experience that made you want to give up the sword, or whatever.
GMs, you’re the final arbiter on this, but don’t be so much of a stickler that
you sacrifice a player’s fun for consistency.

Cynere gets a minor milestone. Lily looks over her character sheet, to
see if there’s anything she wants to change. One thing that sticks out to
her is that during the last session, Zird has been scheming behind her
back a lot and putting her in a bad position.
She looks over at Ryan and says, “You know what? I have this
aspect, I’ve Got Zird’s Back. I think I need to change that in light of
current circumstances, and call it, I Know Zird is Up to Something.”
Ryan says, “Seriously? I mean, it’s not like he does it all the time.”
Lily grins. “Well, when he stops, I can change it back.”
Amanda approves the change, and Lily rewrites one of Cynere’s
aspects.
Meanwhile, Landon also gets a minor milestone. Lenny looks over his
sheet, and notices that he spends a lot more time lying to people than he
does trying to make friends with them. He asks Amanda if he can swap
the ranks of his Deceive and his Rapport skill, giving him Good (+3)
Deceive and Fair (+2) Rapport. She agrees, and he notes the new skill
totals on his character sheet.

Significant Milestones
Significant milestones usually occur at the end of a scenario or the
conclusion of a big plot event (or, when in doubt, at the end of every two or
three sessions). Unlike minor milestones, which are primarily about change,
significant milestones are about learning new things—dealing with problems
and challenges has made your character generally more capable at what they
do.
In addition to the benefit of a minor milestone, you also gain both of the
following:
 One additional skill point, which you can spend to buy a new skill at
Average (+1) or increase an existing skill by one rank.
If you have any severe consequences, you can rename them to begin the
recovery process, if you haven’t already.

When you spend your skill point, it’s worth one step on the ladder. You can
use it to buy a new skill at Average (+1), or you can use it to increase an
existing skill by one step on the ladder—say, from Good (+3) to Great (+4).
Skill Columns
During character creation, you organized your skills into a pyramid. You
don’t have to stick to that for character advancement.
However, there’s still a limitation you have to deal with, skill
columns. This means you can’t have more skills at a certain rank than
you have at the rank below it. So if you have three Good columns, you
have at least three Average (+1) skills and at least three Fair (+2) skills to
support your three Good (+3) skills.
The pyramid follows this rule already, but when you’re adding skills, you
need to make sure you don’t violate that limit. It’s easy to forget that if you
use a skill point to upgrade one of your own skills, you might suddenly not
have enough skills to “support” it at the new rank.
So, let’s say you have one Good (+3), two Fair (+2), and three Average (+1)
skills. Your skill distribution looks roughly like this:

At a milestone, you want to upgrade a Fair (+2) skill to Good (+3). That’d
give you two Good (+3), one Fair (+2), and three Average (+1):
 You see how that doesn’t work? You’re now missing the second Fair skill
you’d need to be square with the rules.
When this happens, you have one of two options. You can buy a new skill
at the lowest possible rank—in this case, Average (+1)—and then upgrade it
in subsequent milestones until you’re in a position to bump the skill you
want to the appropriate level. Or you can “bank” the skill point, not spend it
now, and wait until you’ve accumulated enough to buy a skill at whatever
rank you need to support the move.
So in the case above, you could buy an Average (+1) skill, promote one of
your Average skills to a Fair (+2), then bump the original skill up to
Good (+3). That would take three significant or major milestones to do. Or,
you could wait, bank up three skill points, buy a new skill at Fair (+2), then
bump the original skill up to Good (+3). It just depends on whether you want
to put new stuff on your sheet or not in the interim.

Zird gets a significant milestone after the end of a scenario. He gains an

additional skill point.
Ryan looks at his character sheet, and decides he wants to take his
Notice up from Fair (+2) to Good (+3). He knows that’s going to screw
him up with the rules, though, so instead, he decides to take Resources
at Average (+1)—the PCs have been on a few lucrative adventures
lately, and he figures that’s his opportunity to create a sense of stable
wealth.
If he waits two more milestones, he’ll be able to put one of his Average
skills at Fair (+2), and then bump his Notice up to Good (+3) like he
originally wanted.
 He also has the opportunity to take one of the benefits from a minor
milestone. He has been in a lot of fights this game so far, and feels like
his Not the Face! is getting old, considering the number of times his
character has been hit in the face. He replaces it with Hit Me, and
There Will Be Consequences, to reflect his changing attitude about the
violence he encounters.

GMs, strictly enforcing how the skills work can be a pain in the ass sometimes. If you and the players
really want to be able to upgrade a certain skill in a way that breaks the rules now, simply ask that the
player spend the next few milestones “correcting” their skill spread, rather than making them wait. It’s
okay. We won’t come after you.

You might notice that this means that the further you get up the ladder, the
harder it is to quickly advance your skills. This is intentional—no one is
going to be able to get to the point where they’re awesome at everything, all
the time. That’s boring.
Major Milestones
A major milestone should only occur when something happens in the
campaign that shakes it up a lot—the end of a story arc (or around three
scenarios), the death of a main NPC villain, or any other large-scale change
that reverberates around your game world.
These milestones are about gaining more power. The challenges of
yesterday simply aren’t sufficient to threaten these characters anymore, and
the threats of tomorrow will need to be more adept, organized, and
determined to stand against them in the future.
Achieving a major milestone confers the benefits of a significant milestone
and a minor milestone, and all of the following additional options:

If you have an extreme consequence, rename it to reflect that you’ve

moved past its most debilitating effects. This allows you to take another
extreme consequence in the future, if you desire.
Take an additional point of refresh, which allows you to immediately
buy a new stunt or keep it in order to give yourself more fate points at
 the beginning of a session.
Advance a skill beyond the campaign’s current skill cap, if you’re able
to, thus increasing the skill cap.
Rename your character’s high concept if you desire.

Reaching a major milestone is a pretty big deal. Characters with more

stunts are going to have a diverse range of bonuses, making their skills much
more effective by default. Characters with higher refresh will have a much
larger fountain of fate points to work with when sessions begin, which
means they’ll be less reliant on compels for a while.
GMs, when the player characters go past the skill cap, it will necessarily
change the way you make opposition NPCs, because you’re going to need
foes who can match the PCs in terms of base competence so as to provide a
worthy challenge. It won’t happen all at once, which will give you the
chance to introduce more powerful enemies gradually, but if you play long
enough, eventually you’re going to have PCs who have Epic and Legendary
skill ratings—that alone should give you a sense of what kind of villains
you’ll need to bring to get in their way.
Most of all, a major milestone should signal that lots of things in the world
of your game have changed. Some of that will probably be reflected in world
advancement, but given the number of chances the PCs have had to revise
their aspects in response to the story, you could be looking at a group with a
much different set of priorities and concerns than they had when they
started.

Cynere reaches the end of a long story arc and is awarded a major
milestone. In the game, the PCs have just accomplished the overthrow
of Barathar, Smuggler Queen of the Sindral Reach, which leaves an
enormous power vacuum in the game world.
Lily looks at her character sheet. She took an extreme consequence in
the past arc of scenarios, and allowed one of her aspects to get replaced
with the aspect Soul-Burned by the Demon Arc’yeth. She now has the
opportunity to rename that aspect again, and she decides to call it I
Must Kill Arc’yeth’s Kind—she hasn’t quite escaped the scars of the
experience, but it’s better than where she was, given that her aims are
now proactive.
She also gets an additional point of refresh. She asks Amanda whether
or not she can turn her experience with Arc’yeth into something that
will allow her to fight demons in the future. Amanda sees no reason to
object, and Lily decides to buy a stunt on the spot.
“Demon-Slayer: +2 to the use of the Warmaster stunt, when she
chooses to use it against any demon or any demonic servitor.”
Lily records the new stunt on Cynere’s character sheet, and rewrites
the appropriate aspect.
Zird the Arcane also gets a major milestone. Ryan looks over his
character sheet, and realizes that he’s in a position to advance his peak
skill, Lore, to Superb (+5). He does so, and Amanda makes a note that
she needs to make any wizardly enemies Zird might encounter that much
more powerful, just to get his attention.
Finally, Landon also reaches a major milestone. Recently in the plot,
Landon discovered that the Ivory Shroud was much more than a martial
arts society—they’ve been secret political movers and shakers for a long
time, and recently supported Barathar in her efforts to control the
Reach.
In response to this, Lenny decides to alter his high concept slightly
to Former Ivory Shroud Disciple, indicating his desire to distance
himself from the order. Amanda tells him that the Shroud isn’t going to
take his defection well.
So we have Cynere with a new appetite for killing demons, Zird
reaching a heretofore unseen level of power, and Landon questioning his
loyalty to his only real source of discipline. Amanda makes a lot of notes
about what this means for the next few scenarios.
 BACK TO CHARACTER CREATION
One way of looking at a major milestone is that it’s the equivalent of a
season finale in a television show. Once you start the next session, a lot of
things have the potential to be fundamentally different about your game—
you might be focused on new problems, several characters will have aspects
changed, there will be new threats in the setting, and so on.
When that happens, you might decide that it’s a worthwhile endeavor to
take a session to sit down like you did at character creation and review all
the PCs again, altering or adjusting anything that seems like it might need
revision—new skill configurations, a new set of stunts, more changes to
aspects, etc. You may also want to examine the issues in your game and
make sure they’re still appropriate, revise location aspects, or anything else
that seems necessary to move your game forward.
So long as you keep them at the same level of refresh and skill points they
had, reconvening like this might be exactly what you need to make sure
everyone’s still on the same page about the game. And GMs, remember—the
more you give the players a chance to actively invest in the game world, the
more it’ll pay off for you when you’re running the game.

WORLD ADVANCEMENT
The characters are not the only ones who change in response to events in the
game. Player characters leave their mark on locations (and their faces) with
their passing. Things that were crises and major issues at the start of a game
get addressed, resolved, or changed. Things that weren’t major problems
before suddenly blossom with new severity and life. Old adversaries fall to
the wayside and new ones rise.
GMs, when the players are changing their characters through milestones,
you should also be looking at whether or not the aspects you originally
placed on the game during game creation need to change in response to what
they’ve done, or simply because of lack of use.
Here are some guidelines regarding each milestone.
For Minor Milestones
Do you need to add a new location to the game, based on what the PCs
have done? If so, come up with some NPCs to help give more
personality to the location and add an issue to the place.
Have the PCs resolved an issue in a location? Get rid of the aspect, or
maybe change it to represent how the issue was resolved (In the
Shadow of the Necromancer becomes Memories of Tyranny, for
example).

The group reaches a minor milestone because they rescued the Lord of
Varendep’s son from some of the Smuggler Queen Barathar’s minions. It
was a small victory that could pay some pretty nice dividends because
they now have an ally in Lord Bornhold of Varendep.
Amanda thinks about what might change as a result of the group’s
victory. She doesn’t need to add a new location, but she thinks that
Barathar might have a grudge against Varendep for getting out from
under her thumb now that their Lord’s son has been rescued. She
decides to change Varendep’s issue of Secret Fealty to the Smuggler
Queen to At War with Barathar to represent the shifting power
dynamic, as well as Lord Bornhold’s willingness to stand up to her now.

For Significant Milestones

Did the PCs resolve an issue that was on the whole game world? If so,
remove (or alter) the aspect.
Did the PCs create permanent change in a location? If so, create a new
issue to reflect this, for better or for worse.
 Later, the group drives Barathar’s lieutenant, Hollister, back out of the
Sindral Reach. Barathar is still a threat, but her power is significantly
diminished; this is a major victory for the party. Cynere skewered
Hollister in single combat, so he’s no longer a threat at all; this resolves
a world-wide issue, Everybody Fears Hollister, so Amanda crosses it
off. She’s not quite sure what to replace it with yet, so she’ll think about
it for a bit.
They also created permanent change in the Sindral Reach; that area of
the world is no longer under Barathar’s sway. Most of the people are
grateful, but a few of Barathar’s thugs remain to make trouble for the
party. Amanda replaces the issue Seat of Barathar’s Power with a
different one, Smiles in the Open, Knives in the Dark to represent how
things have changed.

For Major Milestones

Did the PCs create permanent change in the game world? If so, give it a
new issue to reflect this, for better or for worse.

Finally, the heroes confront and defeat Barathar in an epic

confrontation. Barathar held a lot of power in the underground
throughout the world and her defeat will cause ripples. Someone’s going
to want to step in and take her place (probably a lot of someones), so
Amanda creates the issue Underworld Power Vacuum to reflect this.

You don’t need to make these changes as precisely or as regularly as the

players do—if anything, you should be as reactive as you can. In other
words, focus on changing those aspects that the player characters have
directly interacted with and caused the most change to.
If you have aspects you haven’t really explored yet, keep them around if
you think they’re just waiting their turn. However, you can also change them
in order to make them more relevant to what’s going on in the moment, or
simply to give the PCs more of a sense of being in an evolving world.

Barathar wasn’t the only game in town. The Skull-King lurks in the
north, and Lord Wynthrep is stirring up war in the east. Amanda likes
the idea of the PCs facing down a powerful necromancer in the near
future, so she decides to keep the issue Darkness Creeps from the
North in place.
The other issue, Saber-Rattling in the East is also interesting, but she
thinks that all this confrontation with the Smuggler Queen probably
gave Lord Wynthrep the opportunity he needed to escalate things. She
changes Saber-Rattling in the East to The East at War!. That should
give the PCs an interesting decision to make.

Also, keep in mind that if the PCs remove an impending issue, another one
must arise to take its place. Don’t worry about this immediately—you need
to give your players a sense of enacting permanent change in the game
world. But after a while, if you notice that you’re low on impending issues,
it’s probably a good time to introduce a new one, whether on the game world
as a whole or on a specific location.
Dealing with NPCs
Remember, GMs, when you add a new location to the game world, you want
to add at least one new NPC to go with it. Sometimes, that might mean
moving a person from a location you’re not going to use anymore.
Likewise, when there’s a significant change in an issue for a location or the
game world, you need to evaluate if the current NPCs are sufficient to
express that change. If not, you might need to add one, or alter an NPC you
have in a significant way—add more aspects or revise existing aspects to
keep that character relevant to the issue at hand.
Most of the time, it should be pretty obvious when you need a new face for
a location—when the old one dies or is somehow permanently removed
from the game, or is boring now, it’s probably time to change things up.
 When the heroes rescued Lord Bornhold’s son, Carris, from the
Smuggler Queen, Lord Bornhold became indebted to them. To reflect
this, Amanda changed a few of his aspects to make him more friendly to
the PCs and less subservient to Barathar.
When Barathar was defeated, Amanda figured she needed someone to
step in and take over the underworld. Carris and Barathar had become
lovers during Carris’s captivity, and he’s not happy about her death.
He’s so unhappy, in fact, that he decides to take her place and become
the Smuggler King of the Sindral Reach. Because he’s vowed to
retake the underworld in Barathar’s name (and because Amanda didn’t
have any stats prepared for Carris), Amanda writes up new NPC stats
for Carris and turns him into a brand new villain for the PCs to
confront. This one could get a bit sticky!

Recurring NPCs
There are essentially two ways to reuse NPCs. You can either use them
to show how the PCs have grown since they started, or use them to
show how the world is responding to their growth.
With the former, you don’t change the NPC, because that’s the point—the
next time the PCs meet them, they’ve outclassed them, or they have new
worries, or they’ve somehow grown past that NPC, who remains static.
Maybe you even change the category they’re in—where they were once a
main NPC, now they’re a supporting NPC because of how the PCs have
grown.
With the latter, you allow the NPC to advance like the PCs have—you add
new skills, change their aspects around, give them a stunt or two, and
otherwise do whatever is necessary to keep them relevant to the PCs’
endeavors. This kind of NPC might be able to hang around as a nemesis for
several story arcs, or at least provide some sense of continuity as the PCs
become more powerful and influential.
Barathar advanced right along with the PCs. She was a main villain
and Amanda wanted to keep her relevant and challenging right up until
they defeated her, so every time the PCs got a milestone, she applied the
same effects to Barathar. She also made minor tweaks here and there
(changing aspects, swapping skills) to react to what the PCs did in the
world throughout their adventures.
Sir Hanley, the knight who tried to prevent them from entering
Varendep when they first got there, was pretty challenging when they
first confronted him. He was a major NPC, and the fight was meant to
be the culmination of an entire session. They got past him, convincing
him to let them in, so he became less relevant after that. He was
resentful and got in their way a few times, but he didn’t advance as they
did so the PCs quickly outclassed him. The last time they had a run-in
with Sir Hanley, they spanked him pretty hard and sent him running off
to lick his wounds.
11
EXTRAS
DEFINING EXTRAS
An extra in Fate is a pretty broad term. We use it to describe anything that’s
technically part of a character or controlled by a character, but gets special
treatment in the rules. If your Fate game were a movie, this is where the
special effects budget would go.
Some examples of extras include:

Magic and supernatural powers

Specialized gear or equipment, like enchanted arms and armor in a
fantasy game or hyper-tech in a sci-fi game
Vehicles owned by the characters
Organizations or locations that the characters rule or have a lot of
influence over

The tools in here will let you tailor extras to fit your game or provide
material to steal right off the page. It’s okay. We don’t mind.
We consider extras to be an extension of the character sheet, so whoever
controls the character to whom the extra belongs also controls that extra.
Most of the time, that’ll be the players, but NPCs may also have extras
controlled by the GM.
Extras require a permission or cost to own.

THE BRONZE RULE, AKA THE FATE

FRACTAL
Before we go any further, here’s something important:
In Fate, you can treat anything in the game world like it’s a character.
Anything can have aspects, skills, stunts, stress tracks, and
consequences if you need it to.
 We call this the Bronze Rule, but you may also have heard of it as the Fate
Fractal if you pay attention to the Internet. We’ve already seen some
examples of this earlier in the book; you give your game its own aspects
during creation, you place situation aspects on the environment as well as
on characters, and the GM can let environmental hazards attack as if they
had skills.
In this chapter, we’re going to extend that notion even further.

CREATING AN EXTRA
Making an extra starts with a conversation. This should happen during
game creation or character creation.
Your group needs to decide on the following:

What elements of your setting are appropriate for extras?

What do you want the extra to do?
What character elements do you need to fully express the extra’s
capabilities?
What are the costs or permissions to have extras?

Once you’ve figured all that out, look to the examples in this book to help
you nail down the specifics and create a writeup similar to what we have
here. Then you’re done!
Setting Elements
Chances are that you already have some ideas for extras in mind after your
work in game creation; pretty much every fantasy game has some kind of
magic system in it while a game about superheroes needs powers. If the
action revolves around some important location—like the characters’
starship, a home base, or a favorite tavern—consider defining that as an
extra.
By nature, extras tend to steal a lot of focus when they’re introduced—
gamers have an inveterate attraction to whiz-bang cool options, so you
should expect them to get a lot of attention by default. When you’re talking
out options for extras, make sure you’re prepared for the elements you
choose to become a major focus in your game.

Amanda and company talk about extras for Hearts of Steel.

Zird’s magic (and the magic of the Collegia Arcana) comes up as an
obvious first choice, as do Landon’s martial arts. Lenny and Ryan both
note that they’re not interested in lengthy lists of spells or combat
moves. Also, because it’s a fantasy game and magic exists, they agree
that enchanted items need consideration.
Going over the game’s issues and locations, they decide not to worry
about making any of those into extras—they’re supposed to be
traveling from place to place anyway, and the characters don’t have
enough of a stake in any of the organizations to make it worthwhile.

What Extras Do
In broad terms, sketch out what you want the extras to be able to do,
compared to what your skills, stunts, and aspects can already do by default.
Also, think about what the extra looks like “on camera.” What do people
see when you use it? What’s the look and feel of it?
In particular, consider these points:

Does the extra influence the story, and if so, how?

Does the extra let you do things that no other skill lets you do?
Does the extra make your existing skills more useful or powerful?
How would you describe the use of the extra?

This is an important step because it may reveal that the proposed extra
doesn’t actually contribute as much as you thought, which allows you to
either add more stuff or remove it from consideration.
 For Zird’s magic, the group decides that they want to keep things pretty
low-key and abstract—it’s just another method of solving problems, like
Landon’s martial arts or Cynere’s swordthiefery (which Lily insists is a
technical term)—a highly trained wizard is to be feared as much as a
highly trained swordsman, but no more.
They agree that it influences the story for several reasons. They
imagine vistas full of unknowable magical effects and plot devices for
Zird to stick his nose in, as well as the Collegia’s territorial desire over
the lore.
They decide that Zird’s magic will let someone interact with the
supernatural in a way that other people simply can’t do, and can affect
and harm people, but again, they stress that it shouldn’t be more
powerful than other skills. Basic effects would just use the normal four
actions, and rituals will use challenges, contests, or conflicts as
appropriate.
Specifically, they rule out the presence of world-altering “high”
magic, creating things out of thin air, firebombing whole cities, and so
forth. If those things exist, it’s a thread for a scenario, and the product
of several people making huge sacrifices.
The group doesn’t see magic influencing other skills much, which
helps it keep its compartmentalized nature.
Using Zird’s magic is all about the weird. Ryan imagines making up
odd lists of requirements and ingredients that don’t really follow a
consistent pattern—some things he can do quickly, others he can’t, and
it’s all about dramatic interest in the moment to determine which is
when. The group is comfortable with this looseness, so they assent.

Assigning Character Elements

Once you have the general idea down, figure out what parts of a character
you need to make up the extra.

If the extra influences the story, then it should use aspects.

If the extra creates a new context for action, then it should use skills.
If the extra makes skills more awesome, then it should use stunts.
If the extra can suffer harm or be used up somehow, then it should take
stress and consequences.

An extra might use an aspect as a permission—requiring a certain

character aspect in order to use the other abilities of the aspect. Your
character might need to be born with some trait or have obtained some level
of status to make use of the aspect. Or the extra might provide a new aspect
that the character has access to, if it’s the extra itself that is important to the
story.
There are a few ways an extra can use skills. The extra might be a new
skill, not on the default skill list. It could re-write an existing skill, adding
new functions to the skill’s four actions. The extra might cost a skill slot
during character creation or advancement in order to be obtained. It’s
possible that an extra might include one or more existing skills that the
character has access to while controlling the extra.
Writing up an extra as a stunt works just like building a new stunt. One
extra could have a few stunts attached to it—it may even include the skills
those stunt modify. Extras that include stunts often cost refresh points, just
as stunts do.
An extra that describes some integral ability of a character might grant a
new stress track—beyond physical and mental stress—directly to that
character. An extra that is a separate entity from the character—such as a
location or a vehicle—might have a physical stress track of its own. You
might also designate a skill that influences that stress track—just
as Physique provides extra stress boxes and consequence slots for physical
stress.
With a firm grasp of what the extra does, you’ll choose which character
elements best reinforce those ideas in play and how you’ll use them.
 For Zird’s magic, the group decides that it should use aspects and skills
for sure—there’s a clear story influence, and magic creates a new
avenue of dealing with problems. They don’t want it to enhance other
skills, but rather stand alone, so it doesn’t use stunts. They don’t
envision any kind of “mana pool” or other resource associated with it,
so it doesn’t use stress or consequences.

Permissions and Costs

A permission is the narrative justification that allows you to take an extra
in the first place. For the most part, you establish permission to take an
extra with one of your character’s aspects, which describes what makes
your character qualified or able to have it. You can also just agree it makes
sense for someone to have an extra and call it good.
A cost is how you pay for the extra, and it comes out of the resources
available on your character sheet, whether that’s a skill point, a refresh
point, a stunt slot, or an aspect slot.
Fortunately, because extras use character elements that are already familiar
to you, dealing with costs is fairly simple—you just pay what you’d
normally pay from the slots available to you at character creation. If the
extra is a new skill, you just put it into your pyramid like normal. If it’s an
aspect, you choose one of your five aspects as the one you need. If it’s a
stunt, you pay a refresh point (or more) to have it.
GMs, if you don’t want players to choose between having extras and
having the normal stuff available to a starting character, feel free to raise the
number of slots all PCs get at character creation to accommodate extras—
just make sure that each PC gets the same amount of additional slots.

Amanda establishes that Zird should have an aspect reflecting that he’s
been trained in the Collegia’s magic, as a permission. Zird already
does, so that’s a non-issue.
As for cost, because his magic is going to be primarily skill-based,
she’s just going to make him take the magic-using skill and put it in his
 skill pyramid. Further, in order to save effort, she decides that the skill
in question is going to be just plain old Lore, and suggests that anyone
with the appropriate training and a high Lore skill could call on magic,
rather than it being an issue of genetics or birthright. Ryan likes this,
because it’s simple and down to earth, and agrees.

The Writeup
Once you’ve got all the elements together, you can make a writeup for your
extra. Congrats!

Extra: Collegia Arcana Magic

Permissions: One aspect reflecting that you’ve been trained by the Collegia
Costs: Skill ranks, specifically those invested in the Lore skill (Normally,
you’d probably also charge points of refresh, because you’re adding
new actions to a skill, but Amanda’s group is lazy and is handwaving
it in favor of group consensus.)
People who are trained in Collegia magic are able to use their knowledge to
perform supernatural effects, adding the following actions to the Lore skill:

Overcome: Use Lore to prepare and perform magical rituals

successfully, or to answer questions about arcane phenomena.

Create an Advantage: Use Lore to alter the environment with magic

or place mental and physical impediments on a target, such as Slowed
Movement or A Foggy Head. Characters can defend against this with Will.

Attack: Use Lore to directly harm someone with magic, whether

through conjuring of elements or mental assault. Targets can defend against
this with Athletics or Will depending on the nature of the attack, or Lore if
the target also has magical training.
 Defend: Use Lore to defend against hostile magics or other
supernatural effects.

EXTRAS AND ADVANCEMENT

Extras advance a lot like their base elements do, according to
the milestones in The Long Game. That gives us a set of base guidelines:

An extra’s aspect can change at any minor milestone, or at a major

milestone if it’s tied into your high concept.
An extra’s skill may advance at any significant or major milestone,
provided the move is legal, and you can get new ones at those
milestones as well. You can also swap skill ranks between another skill
and your extra at a minor milestone, like any other skill.
An extra’s stunt may advance at a major milestone when you get a
refresh point. This might mean you add a new stunt effect to an
existing extra or buy a new stunt-based extra. You can also change out
a stunt-based extra at a minor milestone, like you can with any other
stunt.

Of course many extras use more than one element. We recommend that
you allow the players in your game to develop the separate pieces of such
an extra at different milestones, in order to minimize confusion during play.

MORE EXAMPLES OF EXTRAS

Here are some more pre-configured extras, at different levels of detail, to
address some of the most common RPG tropes.
Weapon and Armor Ratings
Several of the entries in this section refer to Weapon and Armor ratings.
You can use them in grittier games as a blanket assumption rather than
relegating them to extras, if it’s appropriate—getting hit by a weapon will
damage you more, and having armor keeps that from happening.
A Weapon value adds to the shift value of a successful hit. So, if you have
Weapon:2, it means that any hit is worth 2 more shifts than it would
normally be. This counts for ties, so when you’re using a weapon, you
inflict stress on a tie instead of getting a boost. That makes weapons very
dangerous.
An Armor value reduces the shifts of a successful hit. So, Armor:2 makes
any hit worth 2 less than usual. If you hit, but the target’s Armor reduces
the shift value to 0 or below, you get a boost to use on your target but
don’t do any harm.
We recommend setting a scale for Weapon damage from 1 to 4, keeping in
mind that on a tie, a Weapon:4 hit will take out four Average nameless
NPCs. Then set your Armor ratings based on what you think you’d need to
fully protect against the weapons on each level.

Amanda talks to the group about adding Weapon and Armor ratings.
They agree, so now she’ll set up examples of weapons and their
corresponding ratings. It’s a fantasy world, and fairly gritty, so she
thinks about the “Weapon:4” guideline above and decides that any
large, two-handed weapon (like a polearm or claymore-like sword)
would spell doom for a nameless NPC group, even on a clumsy hit.
Extrapolating from there, she ends up with the following:
Weapon:1 corresponds to items like brass knuckles and small saps, or
most improvised weapons. Armor:1 is padded clothes.
Weapon:2 corresponds to short blades or clubs, such as a dagger or a
truncheon. Armor:2 is padding and mail.
Weapon:3 covers most swords, maces, and anything you use one-
handed. Armor:3 is mail and plate.
Weapon:4 is reserved for large, two-handed melee weapons. Armor:4
is full-plate.

ZERO-SUM IS BORING
Before you go crazy making weapons and armor charts for your campaign,
you should stop and think about whether their inclusion is really going to
make that much of a difference in your conflict scenes.
The reason we say this is because the first thing your players will want to
do is eliminate the effectiveness of whatever their opponents have by
armoring up. And unless you want your NPCs to get slaughtered, eventually
you’re going to have to do the same. If everyone tends to be the equal of
everyone else in terms of weapons and armor, you have a zero-sum game,
and you might as well just go back to making everyone roll their default
skills.
One way to handle this is to create a deliberate disparity between Weapon
and Armor ratings, allowing one to go higher than the other. History is on
your side here—most armor couldn’t completely protect against the
weapons they went up against. Chain mail might keep a blade slash away,
but it’s not going to do much about the blunt force trauma of a mace hit.
Likewise, a set of plate might deflect a mace away, but a spear or a thrust
sword that can slip between the plates ruins its day.
Another one is to make really good armor unusually scarce, the province
of the extremely privileged, rich, or otherwise elite. So while it might be
really easy to find a Weapon:3 sword, only the Royal Guard of Carmelion
has the master blacksmiths necessary to make armor that’s its equal. Players
might spend a lot of time trying to buy, cheat, conquer, or steal their way
into such a set of armor, but at least you’ve squeezed some drama out of the
attempt.
Just keep in mind that if you’re going to set armor and weapons up to be
complete equals, you run the risk of wasted effort when their presence
doesn’t actually matter.

Superpowers
Most game settings that have superpowers have the following in common:
the purpose of a superpower is to make the stuff you do (your skills) more
awesome, and the fact that everyone has superpowers is accepted as a
conceit of the game.
That makes a build that’s appropriate for multiple settings really easy to
do. No permissions, because everyone can have them (or maybe one “origin
story” aspect). Take whatever power you want and make it into a stunt. If
you need to go over the usual limits of a stunt to fully encompass the power,
add one more point of refresh for every two shifts (or one added action, or
one rule breakage) of effect you add. If you want multiple “levels” of a
power, make the number of refresh you can spend on it variable.
Then give every PC a number of additional refresh to buy powers with.
Here are a bunch of powers! (This also works if you want a setting with
magic where everyone knows a small selection of rigid spells, or very
simple cybernetic enhancements.)
These are all taken from a game called Chrome City, home of Simon the
Cyber-Ape. It’s basically four-color supers with a cyberpunk veneer thrown
on it, and he comes from a society of intelligent, cybernetically enhanced
apes who practice kung-fu.

Extra: Energy Blast

Costs: 2 points of refresh
You can use Shoot to blast other people with energy, without needing a gun
or other implement. You have free rein to decide what your blast is like,
whether it’s some elemental force or just undefined bolts of light. (This
doesn’t cost refresh, because you can already use Shoot for attacks.)
You get +2 when using your energy blasts to make attacks or create
advantages, and they hit for Weapon:2. If your setting has mundane
weapons, this power has a Weapon value that’s 2 higher than the strongest
mundane weapons available.

Extra: Super-Strength
Costs: 2–6 points of refresh
Your Fight attacks are Weapon:2, and nearly all “raw strength” applications
of Physique are at +2. Every additional 2 points of refresh you spend adds a
+2 to all bonuses.

Extra: Super-Speed
Costs: 3 points of refresh
You always go first in a conflict exchange. If someone else in the conflict
has Super-Speed, compare skills as normal.
You take a +2 on all defense rolls with Athletics, or in contests relying
purely on speed.
Except for absolute barriers like solid walls, you ignore all situation
aspects that impede movement, and can place yourself in any zone you
want at the start of every conflict exchange, because you had enough time
to get there.

Extra: Super-Resilience
Costs: 1–3 refresh
You have Armor:2 vs. any defense roll against physical damage. Each
additional point of refresh adds 2 to that total.

Extra: X-Ray Vision

Costs: 2 refresh
You don’t roll Notice or Investigate actions if the object of your search is
hidden behind an opaque object—just assume you automatically succeed.
This also helps you stay hidden, because you can see when people are
looking for you and where they are. +2 to Stealth to avoid detection.

POWERS AND SCALING

As you can see, “balancing” powers in Fate is more a matter of art than
science. There are some rough equivalencies you can rely on, like 1 fate
point = 1 invoke-equivalent or 1 stunt-equivalent, but when you get into
writing rules exceptions like the one for X-Ray Vision, there’s no hard or
fast rule for what’s too powerful. Everything is relative to your tastes, and
Fate is hard to break.
So don’t sweat it too much when you’re making these up—go with what
sounds cool, and if you break something, just change it later. Players, don’t
be jerks about this if one of your powers gets a little nerfed.
More precise guidance is in the Fate System Toolkit.

Special Gear
As with powers, gear usually enhances what your character does, so a stunt-
based approach seems the most reasonable at first blush. (Spirit of the
Century vets will remember the Personal Gadget stunt.)
However, gear can also have a lot of story value. An enchanted sword may
have its own legend and personality, or a cursed heirloom might reflect the
family that’s been forced to keep it for centuries. Use aspects to describe
these, and remember that the aspects should provide opportunities for
invocations and compels. If you want, you can give the invocations
themselves some special flavor, giving them a one-time, stunt-like bonus.
An aspect on gear might also suggest the best situation in which to use it
or delineate what makes it different from others of its kind (like a sniper
rifle being ideally suited For Long-Range Work or a particular model
that Never, Ever Jams).
We recommend against going overboard with this and giving every single
item your PC owns an aspect or stunt. This is a game about your character,
not about his or her stuff. For the most part, you should assume that if your
character has a particular skill, that includes the appropriate stuff to use that
skill effectively. Reserve extras for items that have unique or personal
value, something that you’re not going to be changing constantly through
the course of the campaign.

QUICK AND DIRTY STORY-BASED GEAR

If you don’t want to deal with extras, there’s a way to do gear that doesn’t
require too much rigmarole: think of them as auto-created advantages that
you bring into a scene. GMs, you already get to put stuff likeNarrow
Alleys and Rough Terrain out there—you can also apply this to describe
the situational advantages that characters get from gear.
So, if your PC has a full-auto rifle and is taking on someone with a pistol,
add a Better Firepower aspect to your character with a free invoke at the
start of a scene, just like you would if you’d created that advantage with a
roll. That way, you can tune the benefits to narrative circumstances—if
you’re fighting in a really narrow alley, your sword might be a poorer tool
than your opponent’s knife, so they’d get a free invoke on a Poor Choice of
Weapon aspect attached to you.
In those rare situations where you have the absolutely ideal tool for a job,
the aspect you get might count as being “with style”, and come with two
free invokes.

Extra: Demonbane, The Enchanted Sword

Permissions: Finding the sword during the game
Costs: None
The sword Demonbane has an aspect called Slayer of Demon-Kind. If you
are the sword’s bearer, you can invoke this aspect when fighting or
opposing demons. You may also be subject to a compel due to the sword’s
enchantment; it continually pushes its bearers to destroy demons with total
abandon, and may cause you to lose sight of other objectives, prevent you
from escaping a demon’s notice, or other complications.
In addition, invoking the sword’s aspect has another pair of special effects:
it can banish any nameless NPC demon instantly, with no conflict or
contest, and it can reveal the presence of a concealed demon under any
circumstances.

Extra: Brace Jovannich’s Dueling Pistol

Permissions: Possessing the aspect The Legacy of Brace
Costs: One aspect slot (for the permission aspect) and one point of refresh
Brace Jovannich is the most feared, most respected gunfighter the world of
Aedeann has ever known. His gun, known worldwide for the slaying and
maiming of hundreds, is yours now. Only you know why you don’t just
throw it in a canal and save yourself the trouble of its reputation.
Prepare for compels on that aspect when people recognize the gun and
require proof that you’re worthy of it, vengeance for the wrongs it’s been a
part of, or other kinds of unwanted attention. On the other hand, besides the
obvious combat benefits, you can invoke the aspect when you’re using
Brace’s fearsome reputation to your advantage.
The pistol gives you a +2 bonus to any Shoot attack made in a one-on-one
duel. We’re talking formal duels here, not just singling someone out in a
normal gunfight—you challenge or get challenged by someone, there are
seconds, etc., etc. If you’re using Weapon values in your game, it also has a
rating similar to other pistols.

Cybertech and Super-Skills

For the most part, you can run cyberwear a lot like our superpowers
example above: “mega”-stunts with multiple refresh values based on how
much cool stuff they do.
In some settings, though, there’s another role for cybertech that borders on
the magical: it allows people to do things in cyberspace, creating a new
context for action related to tech itself.
For that, you need a custom skill, describing the new arena for doing stuff
and what happens in it.
Another potential use for custom skills is to set up really specific niches
for characters in your game, so that you only have one person who gets
called upon in a specific situation. Instead of having a Fight skill that
everyone can take, for instance, you may have a Warrior skill, and only the
Warrior PC gets it. Caper stories work well for this, because the niches are
already defined in the fiction (the planner, the wheelman, the con artist).
Just make sure everyone understands that in a setup like this, trying to act
outside your niche will probably go really bad for you.

Extra: Interface
Permissions: Possession of an interface package (assumed if you take the
skill)
Costs: Skill ranks
The Interface skill allows you interact with computers and teched-up
objects in a way that most people can’t. You can get inside the machine’s
head, talk to it like most people would chat to a friend, and fight it like
you’re in a bar brawl. Of course, that means the machine can also do that
stuff to you.

Overcome: Use Interface to fix a malfunctioning computer system,

bypass security lockdowns and other obstacles by hacking your way
through, force a piece of tech to trigger a programmed response, and keep a
piece of tech from triggering a response.

Create an Advantage: Use Interface to learn about the properties of

a particular piece of tech (i.e. learn its aspects), to diagnose malfunctions in
a computer system, to plant fake signals or false information in a computer
system, and to create disruptions.

Attack: Use Interface to break down a computer system directly.

Defend: Use Interface to defend against attacks from computer

systems. Failed defense rolls will result in physical stress and consequences
—a cyber-interface means your actual, physical brain is at stake.

Extra: Media
Permissions: Choosing “The Media” archetype at character creation
Costs: Skill ranks and refresh, for associated stunts
Others can spread gossip and rumors, but you have your finger on the pulse
of broadcast media. At your word, the events of the day become news,
whether it’s on television, radio, or the Internet.
 Overcome: Use Media to disseminate information to the public, with
whatever spin you want to put on it. More obscure or local incidents will be
harder to spread, and it’ll be harder to make your own spin prevalent if the
story’s already been picked up by other outlets. Success means that
generally, the public believes what you want them to believe about the
incident, though named NPCs may have more complex opinions.

Create an Advantage: Use Media to place aspects on an event or an

individual reflecting the reputation they gain from your stories.

Attack: If you have sufficient leverage to psychologically harm

someone through a smear campaign and/or media bullying, use this for
attacks.

Defend: Use Media to prevent damage to your own reputation or

peace of mind from someone else using the Media skill.
Stunts: Want Ads. You may use Media for the same kind of Overcome
rolls you’d use Contacts for, by summoning services you need through
classifieds.
Mob Justice. You can incite people in public to physical violence with
Media, and gain the use of two Average (+1) nameless NPCs for that scene,
who will attack people at your direction.

Wealth
In some games, it’s important to track how much wealth your character has
—feudal lords in competition for power, CEOs using their money to strike
at their foes, or even gamblers in Gangsterland. Fate is pretty handwavey
with numbers in general, and we generally recommend against keeping
precise track of how many gold pieces are in your character’s pocket.
When you want a character resource to be finite like wealth is, a good
option is to use a custom stress track to represent the exhaustion of that
resource. You’re creating a new context for conflict when you do this,
allowing the new stress track to be attacked and harmed like mental and
physical stress.
You can also use something like this to model honor or reputation in a
setting where that matters, like feudal Japan.

Extra: Resources, Revisited

Permissions: None, anyone can take the skill
Costs: Skill ranks
At creation, all characters get a special mild (A 20-spot From a Friend),
moderate (Payday Loan), and severe (They Want To Break My
Kneecaps) consequence that they can take in wealth-related conflicts.
Add the following actions to the Resources skill:

Attack: You can make financial moves to destroy someone else’s

resources or force them to overspend to deal with you, and thus inflict
wealth stress and consequences. If you take someone out this way, it means
some kind of permanent shift in their finances for the worse.

Defend: Use Resources to maintain your status in the face of

attempts to destroy your capital.

As an interesting advancement option, you might consider allowing permanent downgrades of the
Resources skill as a tradeoff for upgrading certain extras, if that extra is something money can buy.

Vehicles, Locations, and Organizations

These are all lumped together in one category because if you want them to
be important, their impact is usually significant enough to justify giving
them their own character sheet.
It doesn’t always have to be that complicated, especially if you’re going
for something more subtle—for example, if you want to tie up some cool
stunts into a vehicle and use the superpower or special gear rules above,
that’s perfectly valid. This is for when you want a vehicle to be a real
personality and cornerstone of your game, as iconic as the Enterprise or
the Millennium Falcon.
If you assign an extra its own skills, you’re suggesting that the extra has
the capability to act independently of you, and you need to justify why that
is. Depending on the extra, you may also need to recontextualize what the
skills mean or make up a new list more appropriate for the ways in which
the extra acts.
In this game, the characters are given a handful of extra refresh, skill
ranks, and aspect slots to invest into sailing ships. The group decided to
invest collectively in one awesome ship.

Extra: The Galerider

Permissions: None; understood as part of the game’s conceit
Costs: Skill ranks, refresh, and aspect slots, invested by several characters
Aspects: Fastest Ship in the Fleet, Hidden Cargo Compartments, Lord
Tamarin Wants To Sink Her
Skills: (representing the ship’s crew; PCs can use their own skills if higher)
Good (+3) Notice
Fair (+2) Shoot, Sail (equivalent to Drive)
Stunts: Pour On The Speed. The Galerider gives +2 on any Sail rolls to
win a contest of speed.
Boobytrapped: For a fate point, any PC can have Weapon:2 on an
attack or add 2 to the Weapon value of any Fight attack that happens
on board, by triggering any of the nasty traps scattered across the deck
and interiors as part of their action.

This is for a game where every PC is the ruler of a separate nation state on
a fantasy world, and the action deals a lot with international politics. The
PCs get to build a separate character sheet for their nation state.

Extra: The Plenary of Ghiraul

Permissions: None; assumed as part of the game’s premise
Costs: A special pool of aspects, skill ranks, and stunts
 This small nation-state is known for its vast spy network and laws which
protect the rich and powerful, usually at the expense of the peasantry. You
rule it; congrats. When acting against other nations, use the skills here
rather than the ones on your character sheet. In this case, your skills
represent the efforts of your spies, nobles, artisans, and armies, respectively.
Aspects: We’re Watching You; The Rich Eat the Poor; Sharp Minds,
Dull Blades
Skills: Great (+4) Investigate
Good (+3) Resources
Fair (+2) Crafts
Average (+1) Fight
Stunts: Counter-Intelligence. The Plenary can use Investigate to defend
against other nations’ attempts to learn its aspects. Succeeding with
style on this defense allows the Plenary to feed the nation an aspect
that contains false information instead.

Magic
When you’re making a magic system, the preliminary discussion is
extremely important, because you need to establish some firm expectations
for what is and isn’t possible, and how far-reaching the effects can be. No
two fantasy worlds in popular media have similar properties for their magic,
and often, defining the arcane also defines a vital facet of how the world
operates. Therefore, these examples are pretty detailed, using the full range
of character elements.
Lucas the Magic Cop is a PC in the Fate game Ancestral Affairs, inspired
by Hong Kong gunplay movies, where the characters are a special
supernatural crimes task force operating in the fictional city of San Jian,
California. In the setting, you have to channel magical power from
ancestral, semi-divine spirits. Powers are specific and portfolio-based, so a
spirit of water will confer different benefits than a spirit of luck. Also,
people have karmic stress tracks, reflecting the resilience of their soul.

Extra: Lucas’s Arts

Permissions: None, anyone can commune with a spirit for power
Costs: Aspect slots, skill ranks, stress/consequences
At creation, characters get an extra three slots for aspects that they can
assign to describe their relationship with an ancestor spirit. The aspect
should include context, so something like Sujan Has It In For
Meor Dammar and I Share Respect is appropriate.

To use ancestral powers, you must take a new skill called Commune.

Commune
This is the skill for becoming one with and manipulating the energy of
ancestral spirits.

Overcome: Use Commune to negate the energy of unformed, minor

spirits (read: unnamed NPCs) or to impose your will on an ancestral spirit
with whom you are not currently bound. Failing one of these rolls is likely
to cause you karmic stress or consequences.

Create an Advantage: Use Commune to stack free invokes on your

spirit aspects, or to retune the spiritual energy in an area to your favor.

Attack: Use Commune to temporarily dispel hostile spirits and

demons. (Note: You cannot attack humans or other corporeal entities
directly with this action.)

Defend: Use Commune to defend against hostile supernatural

influences. Failing to defend from these attacks deals karmic stress. (Note:
You cannot defend against supernaturally enhanced attacks from humans or
other corporeal entities directly with this action.)
Special: Commune adds stress and consequence slots to your karmic stress
track, using the same rules for Physique and Will. Consequences from a
karmic attack literally retune the universe around your character, so things
like Poor Luck or Surrounded by Sadness are good candidates.
 Each of the ancestral spirits also gets a writeup, which describes their
portfolio, general philosophy, and the benefits they can confer. You gain
these benefits by expending a free invoke gained with the Commune skill
(as in, only the Commune skill), or by spending two of your fate points.
One benefit should always allow you to simply say that something happens
in the story without a roll.

Sujan, the Spirit of Warding

Portfolio: Defense and protection
Philosophy: All life is worth guarding and preserving, even in the face of
great adversity
Benefits:

You may prevent any mundane calamity of fate once per scene—avert
that car accident, stop someone just short of going over the cliff, or put
someone just out of the reach of that explosion. There is no roll for
this; it just happens. You can’t use this to retcon an action, only change
its outcome.
You can raise a Great (+4) shield of energy to protect you and anyone
you name. This can stack with any other active opposition you or your
chosen target can bring forth. As soon as someone bypasses the
opposition, your shield goes away and you must re-establish it. (Yes,
you can stack your free invokes for this and make titanic shields.
Presumably, there are other spirits whose powers can rip your shield
down.)

Here’s a build for a fantasy game with rigid schools of magic.

Extra: Schools of Power

Permissions: One aspect that names which order you belong to
Costs: Aspect slot (for the permission), skill ranks (kind of), refresh
Your aspect allows you to take membership in one of several arcane orders.
Those orders have a mini-sheet of their own, with aspects, skills, and stunts.
Having a membership in an order lets you “adopt” part of the order’s
character sheet as your own.
You can only belong to one order at a time, and leaving an order to join
another is practically unheard of (read: interesting option for PCs to pursue
over the course of a campaign).

The Black League

Aspects: Deception Is The Only Truth, The Dead Heed Us, Kill Your
Betters Before They Kill You
Skills: Great (+4) Learn
Good (+3) Create
Fair (+2) Destroy
Average (+1) Change
Stunts: Necromancy. +2 to any use of the Black League’s skills to affect
corpses.
Keeping Secrets. Once per scene, you may reroll any Deceive skill
roll and keep the best result.
Shadow Play. When using the Create skill, add an additional free
invoke to any situation aspects you make involving darkness.

The magical skills are Create, Destroy, Learn, and Change. Each order
prioritizes them from Great to Average. Use the lower of the order’s skill
rank or your Lore skill rank when you’re performing magical actions.
You get one free stunt from among those possessed by your order, and you
can get more by spending refresh. You can invoke or be compelled by the
order’s aspects as though they were your own.
You call on your magical skills when something makes the use of your
mundane skills impossible. For example, if you can no longer interrogate a
suspect because the torture has killed him, you’d make an overcome roll
with Learn to discover what you need to know through magic. If someone
is suffering a deep, dark depression that no normal care can address, create
an advantage with Change to alter their mood.
 CHEAT SHEET
The Ladder

Game Time

Exchange: time for everyone to get a turn

Scene: time to resolve a situation
Session: a single sitting
Scenario: an episode
Arc: a season
Campaign: the entire game in a particular setting

Skill Roll
Roll four Fate dice and add to skill rating. Compare to opposition. For each
step on the ladder greater than your opposition, you earn a shift.
Opposition Types
 Active: another character rolls against you
Passive: a static rating on the ladder

Four Outcomes

Fail: fail your action or succeed at major cost

Tie (0 shifts): succeed at minor cost
Succeed (1–2 shifts): succeed with no cost
Succeed with style (3+ shifts): succeed with additional benefit

Four Actions

Overcome: get past an obstacle

Create an Advantage: invoke an aspect for free

Attack: harm another character

Defend: prevent attacks or advantages on you

Mitigating damage
Fill in one stress box greater than or equal to the value of an attack, take one
or more consequence, or fill in one stress box and take consequences—if
you can’t do one of these three things, you’re taken out.
Consequences

Mild: –2 to attack value

Moderate: –4 to attack value
Severe: –6 to attack value
Extreme: –8 to attack and permanent character aspect

Recovery
 Mild: overcome Fair (+2), one whole scene
Moderate: overcome Great (+4), one whole session
Severe: overcome Fantastic (+6), one whole scenario

Aspect Types

Game aspects: permanent, made during game creation

Character aspects: permanent, made during character creation
Situation aspects: last for a scene, until overcome, or until irrelevant
Boosts: last until invoked one time
Consequences: last until recovered

Invoking Aspects
Spend a fate point or free invoke. Choose one:

+2 to your skill roll

Reroll all your dice
Teamwork: +2 to another character’s roll versus relevant passive
opposition
Obstacle: +2 to the passive opposition

Free invokes stack with a paid one and each other.

Compelling Aspects
Accept a complication for a fate point.

Event-based: You have ____ aspect and are in ____ situation, so it

makes sense that, unfortunately, ____ would happen to you. Damn
your luck.
Decision-based: You have ____ aspect in ____ situation, so it makes
sense that you’d decide to ____. This goes wrong when ____ happens.

Refresh
At the start of a new session, you reset your fate points to your refresh rate.
If you ended the last session with more points, you keep the extra. At the
end of a scenario, you reset to your refresh rate no matter what.
Spending Fate Points
Spend fate points to:

Invoke an aspect
Power a stunt
Refuse a compel
Declare a story detail

Challenges

Each obstacle or goal that requires a different skill gets an overcome

roll.
Interpret failure, costs, and success of each roll together to determine
final outcome.

Contests

Contesting characters roll appropriate skills.

If you got the highest result, you score a victory.
If you succeed with style and no one else does, then you get two
victories.
If there’s a tie for the highest result, no one gets a victory, and an
unexpected twist occurs.
The first participant to achieve three victories wins the contest.

Conflicts

Set the scene, describing the environment the conflict takes place in,
creating situation aspects and zones, and establishing who’s
participating and what side they’re on.
 Determine the turn order.
Start the first exchange:
On your turn, take an action and then resolve it.
On other people’s turns, defend or respond to their actions as
necessary.
At the end of everyone’s turn, start again with a new exchange.
Conflict is over when everyone on one side has conceded or been
taken out.

Earning Fate Points

Earn fate points when you:

Accept a compel
Have your aspects invoked against you
Concede a conflict
 VETERANS’ GUIDE
This is a new version of Fate, which we developed to update and streamline
the system. Here’s a guide to the major changes to the system from previous
versions like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files Roleplaying
Game.

Game and Character Creation

Game creation is a variant of Dresden’s city creation, but very pared
down. At minimum, you only make two aspects called issues to define
your game, with the option to drill down if you want to add aspects to
faces and locations.
There are fewer aspects in this edition than other Fate games. We cut
down the number of phases to three—a significant adventure, and two
guest appearances. We found that it’s easier to come up with five good
aspects than seven or ten. And because there are game aspects and you
can make situation aspects, you shouldn’t be short of things to invoke
or compel!
If your game is going to use a lot of extras, or you have specific
elements in your game that you want every character to describe with
aspects (such as species or nationality), you can raise the number of
aspect slots. We don’t recommend going higher than seven character
aspects—after that, we’ve noticed that many of them don’t tend to pull
their weight in play.
If you’ve played The Dresden Files RPG, you know that we use skill
columns for that instead of the pyramid. In this build of Fate, we
wanted character creation to be as quick and accessible as possible, so
we went with a Great (+4) pyramid as standard. If you want to use the
columns, go ahead—you get 20 skill points. The skill column didn’t
completely go away. It’s just reserved for advancement.
3 refresh, and 3 free stunts. Stress boxes work exactly like The
Dresden Files RPG.

Aspects
 In other Fate games, free invocations were called “tagging.” We
thought this was one bit of jargon too many. You can still call it that if
you want—whatever helps you and your table understand the rule.
You might have seen player-driven compels referred to as “invoking
for effect.” We thought it was clearer to just call it a compel, no matter
who initiates it.
Free invocations now stack with a regular one or stack together with
other free invocations on the same aspect. Further, an aspect can hold
more than one free invoke at a time.
Invoking an aspect attached to another character gives them a fate
point at the end of the scene.
Compels are subdivided into two specific types: decisions and events.
This isn’t a change in how compels work, so much as a clarification,
but it’s worth noting.
Scene aspects have been renamed to situation aspects, to clear up some
confusion over how flexibly they can be applied.

Actions and Stuff

The list of actions has been greatly reduced from previous Fate games
down to four: overcome, create an advantage, attack, and defend.
Movement is now a function of the overcome action, create an
advantage subsumes assess/declare/maneuver from previous games
under one banner, and blocks can be handled a number of different
ways.
The game is no longer based on a binary pass/fail. Now there are four
outcomes: fail or succeed at cost, tie (succeed at minor cost), succeed,
and succeed with style. Each outcome now has a mechanical or story-
driven effect, based on what action it’s attached to. Succeeding with
style is basically taking spin from previous versions of Fate and
applying it across the board.
Challenges and contests have been greatly simplified and redesigned.
Zone borders have been replaced by the use of situation aspects to
determine if it’s even worth rolling for movement. Moving one zone
 with an action is always free if there’s nothing in the way.
On that note, supplemental actions and skill modifiers are completely
removed from the system. Either something is interesting enough to
roll for, or it isn’t.
Teaming up is greatly simplified from previous games—everyone who
has at least an Average (+1) at the same skill adds +1 to the person
with the highest skill level.

Scenario Creation
The advice is way better.

Extras
These exist. Whereas each previous Fate game had a specific way of
dealing with powers and gadgets and stuff, now there are a variety of
options for you to choose from (as befits the toolkit nature of the
system).
CHARACTER CREATION
WORKSHEET
GAME CREATION
WORKSHEET
LANDON’S CHARACTER
SHEET
CYNERE’S CHARACTER
SHEET
ZIRD THE ARCANE’S
CHARACTER SHEET
CHARACTER SHEET
 An Evil Hat Productions Publication
www.evilhat.com • [email protected]
@EvilHatOfficial on Twitter
facebook.com/EvilHatProductions
Fate Core System
Copyright © 2013 Evil Hat Productions, LLC.
All rights reserved.
The text of Fate Core System will be available under the Open Gaming
License and a Creative Commons Attribution license. For more details
about the terms and requirements of these licenses, please visit
www.evilhat.com or www.faterpg.com.
First published in 2013 by Evil Hat Productions, LLC.
10125 Colesville Rd #318, Silver Spring, MD 20901.
Evil Hat Productions and the Evil Hat and Fate logos are
trademarks owned by Evil Hat Productions, LLC. All rights reserved.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61317-029-8
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-61317-058-8
ePub ISBN: 978-1-61317-057-1
Printed in the USA.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior express permission
of the publisher.
That said, if you’re doing it for personal use, knock yourself out.
That’s not only allowed, we encourage you to do it.
For those working at a copy shop and not at all sure if this means the person
standing at your counter can make copies of this thing, they can. This is
“express permission.” Carry on.
This is a game where people make up stories about wonderful, terrible,
impossible, glorious things. All the characters and events portrayed in this
work are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, fantasy adventurers,
wizards of the arcane, supernatural cops in a China-colonized Hong
Kong/America that never was, cybernetic super-intelligent apes, or squirrel
mechanics is purely coincidental, but kinda hilarious.
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