FATE

The Fate system is an off-shoot of the Fudge system. It is a universal system that favors story-telling over mechanics. I looked at the Fudge system years ago, but without a solid start of a fantasy system development of such would fall 100% unto me and I just did not have that time commitment. As far as mechanics go I still favor the building-block system of HERO an not the “descriptive” skill structure of Fudge (Fair vs. Average vs. Mediocre). Along came the FATE system bye Evil Hat through the Dresden Files RPG. I enjoyed running the game and so I have decided to provide a FATE version of my Miranda game world.

Main Article: Character

Building a character is fairly simple as there is no attributes, only skills, stunts, aspects, and equipment.

Skills and stunts work together to define what your character can do in any given situation. Each skill is rated on The Ladder and determines how good you are at that skill. Each skill has a list of trappings that tell you how that skill can be used. For example the Life skill allows you to perform minor healing by removing stress boxes. A stunt allows a character to do something that they would normally not be able to do. From the previous example buying the stunt Remove Curse allows the character to use their life skill to remove a curse.

While skills represent things that all characters can do, i.e. anyone can have the Physique skill and use it to break things, aspects describe that character in their own unique way. There is no limited list of aspects although the aspect page does have examples listed. Instead an aspect is freely named by the player and work best when they are both descriptive and flavorful. For example the aspect Strong is not very interesting, while the aspects Strongest man in my village or No Man is Stronger than Me have more flavor. The best aspects are those that have both a positive and negative twists so that they can be tagged for benefit or compelled to hinder.

I am pulling in several different FATE sources to build how my game works. The core reference guide I use to settle differences is the Dresden Files RPG. The reason being is that this was the first FATE game system ran at my table and thus it is easier to adapt to a model that everyone already knows.

The Dresden Files RPG (DFRPG) is a build of FATE that is built around the Dresden Files universe written by Jim Butcher. The books are an urban fantasy where all of the legends and tall stories do exist, but is generally not believed. Generally I have used the DFRPG as the core of the Fate system for my adaptation to Miranda.

Using the Starblazer Adventures comic from the UK, this the fantasy system designed using FATE by the people at Cubicle 7. I picked this up after already having DFRPG, but this is the second rock upon which Miranda FATE is built upon. The core book contains a wealth of information and does a very strong bridge between traditional fantasy system rules and FATE.