Fate Core Hack - Shadowrun 2050

Here's a link to the archetypes I used for an upcoming Fate core game set in the classic Shadowrun time period of 2050.  One of the important revelations: Adapting up from Fate Core is easier than adapting down from Shadowrun.

Clock Blockers - Actual Play

DC Comics (and Paranoia XP) writer Dan Curtis Johnson ran a session of Fiasco using my Clock Blockers playset. It involves the Time Museum, historical artifacts, Leonardo DaVinci and his Jersey Shore-addled descendant. Check it over on his blog.

Fate Patreon - Save Game

Part of knowing evil geniuses is being asked to participate in their experiments from time to time. When Fred Hicks sent me an email asking for some more pitches, I was just glad he wasn't asking me to watch cheesy movies in outer space. (I prefer the comfort of my couch) The company had a lot of success with Kickstarter last year, to which I was excited to contribute CAMELOT Trigger. If you're a fan of CAMELOT Trigger, and are already saying "Shut Up And Take My Money", bless your crooked little heart, and head on over to the Patreon page. Otherwise, let me bend your ear eyes for a moment and tell you about the project.

This year Evil Hat wanted to try out a new crowdfunding website called Patreon. Rather than release another big book of Fate Worlds, they want to try out a periodical model, for which Patreon is a better fit. You pledge a small amount and, when the producer is ready to put out the periodical, they send it out to you and you get charged. You only get charged when an issue is ready to go. So rather than get 6 awesome Fate settings at once, you get a regular deposit throughout the year. Brian Engard's superpunk Venture City Stories is the first out of the gate and the only one currently guaranteed to release right now. Fred's tapped some great folks in addition to myself should the project be successful, like Pete Woodworth, Shoshana Kessock and Quinn Murphy, all of whom have much prettier websites than mine.

Like Kickstarter, there are different levels of patronage, with early access and backer feedback accompanying a bigger buy in. Backer feedback was invaluable to the success of CAMELOT Trigger, and I'm looking forward to that feedback for Save Game.

For those of you who haven't looked at the page yet, here's the pitch for Save Game:

"A vicious computer virus threatens to corrupt the entire internet. The only thing standing in its way are the characters from your video games. 8-bit heroes battle monsters and corrupted files. It's Wreck-It Ralph meets Lord of the Rings. This will feature randomized character creation and other new-player-friendly features, as well as rules for playing in a digital world."

There's some ReBoot and Tron in there, too. Part of the fun will be rolling random powers and figuring out why your character jumps high, shoots fire and occasionally dresses up as a raccoon to fly. We've had some interesting discussions about characters having Lives instead of consequences and a couple of different ways to randomize power generation. Even if you don't like the idea of old-school video game heroes, you could use it to make a slightly meta game about your favorite MMO characters teaming up to beat back the forces of the Glitch.

An example of a character mutated by the Glitch?

"Corrupted pac-man sits, sarlacc/azathoth like, hungering for data in the center of a twisting turning maze, with his ghosts bringing him morefoodmorefoodmorefood"

Should the pitch get the green light, I will post development blogs again. One of the most common bits of feedback I got from CAMELOT Trigger were people who were lukewarm on the initial pitch but then came around after they read my development blogs or saw the backers draft. If that sounds like fun, and I hope it does, you can make it happen.

As long as we're talking about Fate-related Patreons, I'd like to mention Mark Diaz Truman's Fate Codex is doing well. We discussed some article ideas over the past few days, and the essay I'll be working on will be a great short project in between larger Fate gigs.

Wait. Gigs? Was that plural? Stay tuned, Fate fans...

Fate Core - The Fate Codex

I owe many of my projects over the last couple of years to the Kickstarter crowdsourcing platform. Crowdsourcing is still a young concept and watching its growth and evolution is fascinating. Another style of crowdsourcing I've seen more of is the site Patreon, where you sign up to back a person, rather than a project. One of these persons is Mark Diaz Truman and first project is The Fate Codex.

The Fate Codex will be a small electronic magazine featuring rules, hacks, fiction and settings from Fate creators across the board.  It's no coincidence that Mark's talked to several of the folks who worked on the Fate Worlds books, since almost all of us have been hounding Fred about when the next ones should come out. I don't think Mark will have much trouble getting some awesome designers to put out some neat ideas for the game.

The hacks I post here are a good way for me to stretch my legs as a designer and not get wrapped up in my pro work all the time. Fate is a flexible and durable system and I'm very happy with the response I've gotten for my work here. I hope that similar work shows up in The Fate Codex, since working with Mark is a great pleasure.

Fate Accelerated - Shadowrun 2070

My Fate Core hack for 2050 could probably use some polish, but until I get a chance to get back to it, I decided to put together a hack to run Shadowrun's modern version using Fate Accelerated.  The goal here is to let folks who love the setting but are less enamored of the system still shoot elves in the face for money. The hack is after the jump, chummer!

This also works for other cyberpunk settings, like Deux Ex or Android.

Fate Core/Fate Accelerated Hack - Crimson Skies

This hack is likely pretty obscure, but it's been a Great White Whale for a while. I love the Crimson Skies universe. It's a settign where the US broke up shortly after the Great War, and, because of it, air shipping has come into vogue. Which means air pirates, cocky pilots and zeppelins full of loot.

Crimson Skies has been a board game, a Clix game, a computer game, and Xbox game and now it's compatible with both Fate Core and Fate Accelerated.



This is about designing the planes as Extras. Everyone should have one, since they are as common as cars in the setting. The only difference is splitting up stress between the separate tracks in Fate Core. 

This hack could also be used for any setting where vehicles play a big part in the action like Car Wars or Battletech. 

Fiasco - Clock Blockers

It's been a crazy, crazy year for me. I've worked with amazing people, had a hand in designing some awesome games and been part of hard charging Kickstarters that are changing the face of the industry. Everything awesome that happened this year got started right around this time in 2012, so I wanted to commemorate a great year with something fun.

I present my very own Fiasco playset entitled Clock Blockers. It's about time travelers using their machine for their own fun and profit rather than worrying about stepping on butterflies. Maybe you put right what once went wrong. Or you decide to sink Noah's Ark and corner the market on giraffes.

Special thanks to BVB Design for taking time out of their busy schedule to make this playset look awesome. I love the cover so much.

Praise for Clock Blockers:

"It's a great playset, right in the zone!" - Dan Curtis Johnson