The three glyphs that the party finds after defeating the Necromancer prove to fit depressions in a rock wall in a narrow cleft canyon at the far edge of the Mud Flats; clearing the cliff face reveals a wide sheet of dull stone embedded in the rough cliff, untouched save for the mineral accumulation from years of sea-spray. Slotting the glyphs into place causes the ground to tremble underfoot, with the nearby pool draining to reveal a passage into unrelenting darkness.
Exploration of these passages reveals numerous dangerous creatures - more of the Drowned Dead, these so soaked as to have an additional Aspect of Too Wet To Burn, as well as crablike creatures that spit gravel with Shoot (+2), Stealth (+1), two stress boxes, and Living Rocks as an Aspect, and horrible squid-like monsters with a vaguely human aspect that hurl seem highly agitated by the draining of their home. These last have Virtue (+2), Fight (+1), Notice (+1), two stress boxes, and Swarm Predator and Shaken Dry as Aspects.
The passages themselves are long, Dark, Cold, and Dripping Wet. As such, much of this section is more of an investigation interspersed with bursts of struggle as the players try to find their way from the Lower Passages to the Upper Passages - with a detour to the Flooded Depths along the way, as the massive Old Crab comes scuttling up to attack before retreating back into the dim glow of the luminescent-slime-strung Flooded Depths.
The Old Crab is a monstrously large example of the gravel-spraying crablike creatures. With Shoot (+3), Notice (+2), Physique (+2), Provoke (+1), Will (+1), three stress boxes, a mild consequence, As Hard As Bedrock, Born From The Dark And Damp, and a Stunt that permits it to spend a Fate point for a Physique roll against a Difficulty of (+4), with success spawning a smaller crab-creature with only one stress box but otherwise identical to the others in the caves, with an additional spawn for each shift of success. When first encountered, it should be in the Lower Passages, attacking what looks like an unfamiliar but easy meal. Obviously leaving a threat like that on the loose where it can crawl out isn't in the cards, so the second encounter in the Flooded Depths is to the death. (Players who shrug and let it go can be asked to go off it after it attacks the Fort during the dark a few days later.)
The Upper Passages are drier than the Lower, but still full of the same nasty creatures; up here, though, Investigation checks can find etchings under the mineral accumulation on the walls, revealing this to be a passage created by the lost Empire; it was designed to be flooded to keep any invaders out while Gemling warriors could be called up from the reserves or sent straight to the Mud Flats wayshrine. It seems that the system still works, but whatever threat caused them to flood it the last time didn't leave anyone to come drain it again.
The Upper Passages open out on a winding cliffside path - to be detailed the next time, along with the segments after as the exiles continue to look for a better way to survive than huddling in the decrepit ruins of a fort.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Fate of Exiles: The Templar
The Templar is an unexpected individual in the cursed lands of Wraeclast; a truly faithful person dedicated to their holy order, firm in their conviction and devotion to God - or at least they were firm in that conviction. While most such exiles will remain secure in their faith, certain that this is, perhaps, a test of their faith, or a task given from on high, some will stumble and find their faith shaken.
Standing between the Marauder and the Witch, a Templar is a warrior with a flair for mystic power, although most will tell those who ask that their magic is holy, granted by God to fight the dark magic of the wicked. That the outcome looks identical means nothing; a Templar knows the truth. Of course, a fallen Templar may recognize that despite their ruined faith, their power remains, and question the true source of it.
The sample Templar here will include the Questor, a Templar who feels that they have been given a trial from God to prove their devotion; the Crusader, who sees Wraeclast as a land in need of a sacred warrior to cleanse it; and the Fallen, who has seen the face of the enemy closely enough to recognize it as their own. Others certainly exist - the number of things a Templar can find as a sacred charge or a way to prove the absence of God are as limitless as the threats of the land itself.
High Aspects will tend to echo what the Templar feels their mission to be; even Fallen Templar have a difficult time not placing what they believe at the center of their being. A Questor might have Warrior On A Holy Mission or Penitent Soldier as High Aspects; a Crusader might have Champion Of The Righteous or Holy Knight; and a Fallen Templar might have Hero Without A Cause or Rebel Against The Angels as theirs.
Troubles will tend to directly echo what the Templar's personal mission is. A Questor may have On A Mission From God, while a Crusader may have The Only Champion In The Land and a Fallen Templar may have Under Siege By My Own Doubts as theirs. Given their nature as (possibly former) holy champions, Dreaming Of The Darkness is certainly a fitting trouble for any Templar.
Questors will like have additional Aspects such as As Steady As The Rising Sun, I've Seen Hell And Fought On, and I Hold My Faith Close. Crusaders may have ones like My Strength Is The Might Of The Righteous, Armored By Faith, and Driven By Zeal as Aspects, although they may also trend toward a somewhat more bloodthirsty angle depending on the Crusader in question. Fallen Templar will tend toward Aspects such as My Faith Is Broken But My Will Is Strong, I Answer To None Save Myself, and I Believe In My Own Strength, echoing their fall from grace and newly discovered self-reliance.
Skill for all Templar will tend to include Virtue, Physique, Will, and Fight as primary skills; Lore and Rapport will tend to be high for those who wish to spout about their faith or who want to use their knowledge to tear down the walls of faith around them. Notice is always useful, and those who want to build a new bastion of faith in this land - or simply to prepare their defenses against the darkness they know is out there - wouldn't be amiss to take Craft. Some rare Templar who feel that preemptive strikes are justified may find value in Shoot or Throw, as well.
Stunts will echo the divine nature of the Templar's beliefs, even for the Fallen. Aegis Of Faith grants a +2 on Physique checks to resist zone-wide attacks that include them, Divine Fire allows a Fate Point to be spent to inflict Fire damage across an entire zone as holy fire rains from the skies, and Unstoppable Force allows the Templar to spend a Fate Point to move across up to two zones, attacking a single enemy at the end with a +2 bonus without having to worry about anyone in the way.
Templar are warriors with a powerful will, and even the fallen among them remain a force to be reckoned with - perhaps even moreso without their beliefs keeping them in check. Those who wish to play someone with strong personal conviction and a powerful force of will could do worse than trying out a Templar as a model for the creation of their character.
Next character conversion will be the Duelist, a nimble warrior who combines personal strength and dazzling agility with charm and charisma.
Standing between the Marauder and the Witch, a Templar is a warrior with a flair for mystic power, although most will tell those who ask that their magic is holy, granted by God to fight the dark magic of the wicked. That the outcome looks identical means nothing; a Templar knows the truth. Of course, a fallen Templar may recognize that despite their ruined faith, their power remains, and question the true source of it.
The sample Templar here will include the Questor, a Templar who feels that they have been given a trial from God to prove their devotion; the Crusader, who sees Wraeclast as a land in need of a sacred warrior to cleanse it; and the Fallen, who has seen the face of the enemy closely enough to recognize it as their own. Others certainly exist - the number of things a Templar can find as a sacred charge or a way to prove the absence of God are as limitless as the threats of the land itself.
High Aspects will tend to echo what the Templar feels their mission to be; even Fallen Templar have a difficult time not placing what they believe at the center of their being. A Questor might have Warrior On A Holy Mission or Penitent Soldier as High Aspects; a Crusader might have Champion Of The Righteous or Holy Knight; and a Fallen Templar might have Hero Without A Cause or Rebel Against The Angels as theirs.
Troubles will tend to directly echo what the Templar's personal mission is. A Questor may have On A Mission From God, while a Crusader may have The Only Champion In The Land and a Fallen Templar may have Under Siege By My Own Doubts as theirs. Given their nature as (possibly former) holy champions, Dreaming Of The Darkness is certainly a fitting trouble for any Templar.
Questors will like have additional Aspects such as As Steady As The Rising Sun, I've Seen Hell And Fought On, and I Hold My Faith Close. Crusaders may have ones like My Strength Is The Might Of The Righteous, Armored By Faith, and Driven By Zeal as Aspects, although they may also trend toward a somewhat more bloodthirsty angle depending on the Crusader in question. Fallen Templar will tend toward Aspects such as My Faith Is Broken But My Will Is Strong, I Answer To None Save Myself, and I Believe In My Own Strength, echoing their fall from grace and newly discovered self-reliance.
Skill for all Templar will tend to include Virtue, Physique, Will, and Fight as primary skills; Lore and Rapport will tend to be high for those who wish to spout about their faith or who want to use their knowledge to tear down the walls of faith around them. Notice is always useful, and those who want to build a new bastion of faith in this land - or simply to prepare their defenses against the darkness they know is out there - wouldn't be amiss to take Craft. Some rare Templar who feel that preemptive strikes are justified may find value in Shoot or Throw, as well.
Stunts will echo the divine nature of the Templar's beliefs, even for the Fallen. Aegis Of Faith grants a +2 on Physique checks to resist zone-wide attacks that include them, Divine Fire allows a Fate Point to be spent to inflict Fire damage across an entire zone as holy fire rains from the skies, and Unstoppable Force allows the Templar to spend a Fate Point to move across up to two zones, attacking a single enemy at the end with a +2 bonus without having to worry about anyone in the way.
Templar are warriors with a powerful will, and even the fallen among them remain a force to be reckoned with - perhaps even moreso without their beliefs keeping them in check. Those who wish to play someone with strong personal conviction and a powerful force of will could do worse than trying out a Templar as a model for the creation of their character.
Next character conversion will be the Duelist, a nimble warrior who combines personal strength and dazzling agility with charm and charisma.
Friday, July 24, 2015
System Design: Motivations
Alignment is a common system in many games, thanks to the design of the first RPGs; the idea of codifying a handful of concepts into a matrix to codify your actions and present an objective moral-ethical framework for the purposes of the game works well enough, as long as no one pushes on it too hard. Naturally, there's usually someone who wants to push on it too hard - most often the person trying to claim a Chaotic Neutral alignment while following any whim in their head, but sometimes the person who tries to claim a Good alignment and pass it off with subjective morality to justify whatever functionally evil act they perpetrate. Most of us are familiar with arguments about things like the question of whether or not paladins can be assassins, I think, and how ridiculous those arguments get.
Later systems either tried to simplify things - distilling alignment down to a single continuum of a character's humanity, for example, or just getting rid of the concept entirely - or tried replacing alignment with the idea of allegiances. Rather than being a Lawful Good paladin or a corrupt Lawful Evil customs official or whatever, characters were devoted to specific things. A paladin had an allegiance to his faith, a corrupt official to wealth, a vigilante to justice. The more complex versions usually had players pick one to three of these allegiances, ranked in order of importance in case of conflicts. It's a fairly good system for the most part, but it tends to remain ultimately simplistic.
Then there's my favorite system answer to the question of how to show what drives a character's ethics and morals while providing hooks for game mechanics, the Motivations from Eclipse Phase. In it, players choose three motivations that drive their character - but those motivations come in positive and negative formats. A character who has a positive motivation toward Personal Freedom is going to see their interactions with a controlling corporate organization in the light of what advances those freedoms best, while one who has a negative motivation toward Authority will interact with them with an eye toward harming the organization without worrying if it hurts others.
It works perfectly well for any game genre and provides a significant level of complexity, where players who agree one one motivation - like a positive toward a shared faith - being at odds on some other concept. One might be positive toward wealth, another positive toward asceticism, and a third negative toward the wealthy, creating a case where all of them have strong and opposed views on a single subject without any of them being able to claim that they're being 'good' or 'evil'.
This system works fairly well in almost any framework - in traditional D20-derived fantasy games, references to good, evil, law, and/or chaos simplify down to 'detect aligned/opposed motivation' - a group of goblin warriors who have a negative motivation against humans and other typical allied races would show up as 'evil' in the context of a human priest or holy warrior to detect it - but the same would be true for a goblin priest casting it in respect to humans. Holy weapons would work equally well for either side - or you could treat the weapons as having a special purpose, as per intelligent weapons, dedicated to specific motivations.
Even outside of that framework, the motivation system works magnificently, as you can hook any in-game rewards you want to players striving to fulfill their character's motivations; Eclipse Phase rewards players by letting them regain Moxie, which essentially serves as a kind of luck, and there's no reason similar ideas can't be tied elsewhere. In games with Hero Points or Action Points or the like, fulfilling a Motivation can award one or more points; in games that simply have XP, the motivations can be worth XP if actively pursued.
Combined with the depth the system encourages players to give their characters, the benefits of using motivations instead of alignment or allegiance is fairly significant. I encourage you to give it a try the next time you have a downtime game between longer campaigns to see how it works and decide if it works for you and your group.
Later systems either tried to simplify things - distilling alignment down to a single continuum of a character's humanity, for example, or just getting rid of the concept entirely - or tried replacing alignment with the idea of allegiances. Rather than being a Lawful Good paladin or a corrupt Lawful Evil customs official or whatever, characters were devoted to specific things. A paladin had an allegiance to his faith, a corrupt official to wealth, a vigilante to justice. The more complex versions usually had players pick one to three of these allegiances, ranked in order of importance in case of conflicts. It's a fairly good system for the most part, but it tends to remain ultimately simplistic.
Then there's my favorite system answer to the question of how to show what drives a character's ethics and morals while providing hooks for game mechanics, the Motivations from Eclipse Phase. In it, players choose three motivations that drive their character - but those motivations come in positive and negative formats. A character who has a positive motivation toward Personal Freedom is going to see their interactions with a controlling corporate organization in the light of what advances those freedoms best, while one who has a negative motivation toward Authority will interact with them with an eye toward harming the organization without worrying if it hurts others.
It works perfectly well for any game genre and provides a significant level of complexity, where players who agree one one motivation - like a positive toward a shared faith - being at odds on some other concept. One might be positive toward wealth, another positive toward asceticism, and a third negative toward the wealthy, creating a case where all of them have strong and opposed views on a single subject without any of them being able to claim that they're being 'good' or 'evil'.
This system works fairly well in almost any framework - in traditional D20-derived fantasy games, references to good, evil, law, and/or chaos simplify down to 'detect aligned/opposed motivation' - a group of goblin warriors who have a negative motivation against humans and other typical allied races would show up as 'evil' in the context of a human priest or holy warrior to detect it - but the same would be true for a goblin priest casting it in respect to humans. Holy weapons would work equally well for either side - or you could treat the weapons as having a special purpose, as per intelligent weapons, dedicated to specific motivations.
Even outside of that framework, the motivation system works magnificently, as you can hook any in-game rewards you want to players striving to fulfill their character's motivations; Eclipse Phase rewards players by letting them regain Moxie, which essentially serves as a kind of luck, and there's no reason similar ideas can't be tied elsewhere. In games with Hero Points or Action Points or the like, fulfilling a Motivation can award one or more points; in games that simply have XP, the motivations can be worth XP if actively pursued.
Combined with the depth the system encourages players to give their characters, the benefits of using motivations instead of alignment or allegiance is fairly significant. I encourage you to give it a try the next time you have a downtime game between longer campaigns to see how it works and decide if it works for you and your group.
Thursday, July 23, 2015
Fate of Exiles: Shoreline Tasks - The Necromancer's Bane
The Mud Flats and Fetid Pool are locations where the second quest offered in Lioneye's Fort will lead people; the former is infested with the living dead and a large number of aggressive flightless and armored birds. The latter is filled with nothing but the dead, save for a single living being – the Necromancer that Tarkleigh is concerned will come for the fort if not dealt with soon.
The Mud Flats is an area with a pair of Aspects; first and most importantly, it has Ancient Waygate, an Aspect that indicates the presence of the first activated waypoint device crafted by the people who lived in the now-lost Empire as a method of swift travel. The most obvious use of this is to allow people to travel quickly back to the fort if they need to do so, but it could be used for any number of clever tricks and boosts. The other is Sucking Mud, which will most often be compelled by the GM to make life harder for players as the soggy mess of the flats drags at anyone moving across the slick, soft surface.
Rhoas - the aggressive birds that live in the Mud Flats - have two stress boxes, Fight (+2), Notice (+1), and Object In Aggressive Motion as an Aspect. They're fond of charging targets, relying on their sharp beaks and armored skull and shoulders to let them run things over. They often come as a mob of three to five, fighting until at least half have been downed before fleeing.
The Drowned Dead will drag themselves out of the ground when they sense living creatures near; they have one stress box, Fight (+1) and Slow And Steady as an Aspect. They tend to exist in mob-like numbers and serve mainly to harass and slow down players save for the occasional lucky effort.
The Fetid Pool has Foul Fumes, Rushing Water, and Pervasive Gloom as Aspects, each one masking a different sense and making it hard for people to find things in what appears to be a large cavern chewed out of the rock by the waterfall that spills down the wall at the back. Numerous bones litter the floor - some truly dead, some merely waiting until someone comes close enough for them to be able to strike before revealing their animate status. The Necromancer itself - a figure wrapped in rags and twisted by the dark arts it practices until it barely resembles a human at all.
The Restless Dead have a single stress box, Fight (+1), Stealth (+1), and the Nothing But Air And Bones Aspect, as well as a stunt that grants them a +2 on Stealth as long as they're laying still on the ground. They'll lay harmlessly until someone enters the same zone as them, after which they'll move - often in a large swarm - to attack anyone unfortunate enough to be in reach of their jagged, broken fingertips. Killing them near the Necromancer is a somewhat futile task, given its primary strength, but they all collapse like abandoned puppets when it dies.
The Necromancer has three stress boxes and a mild consequence slot, Virtue (+3), Lore (+2), Notice (+2), Fight (+1), Acrobatics (+1), and Throw (+1). It has One Foot In The Grave, The Might Of The Damned, and Wracked By Cannibal Hunger as Aspects, as well as a stunt that allows a Virtue roll against a +4 Difficulty to return a single dead body in the same zone to a semblance of life, essentially creating another Restless Dead. Each shift it achieves above this allows it to bring another body to unlife.
The Necromancer isn't afraid to try to run, but it has positioned itself unwisely, with the only way out being the one the players enter through. As such, it isn't likely to escape - but if it does, it may return at a later date with more power and an army of the undead to try to conquer Lioneye's Fort. Regardless, taking it down means the small cache of gathered treasure is left to be found, which contains a few Virtue Gems (left to the GM to determine as suits the players) and a trio of strangely-shaped gylphs.
Defeating the Necromancer earns Tarkleigh's respect, and he can identify the glyphs as matching impressions in a small cleft in the cliffs that surround the Mud Flats - but he cautions that going there may be too dangerous, as a monster of a spitter-crab lives in the flooded passages of the area, and it's grabbed more than a few exiles in the past.
With this quest complete, Lioneye's Fort gains a new Aspect for players looking to improve their new home: The Seeds Of Hope Are Sown, representing how the other exiles are looking up to the example of the players and starting to feel that there might be a future for them in this place. It's a small change, but the effect will reverberate through the rest of the campaign conversion.
The Mud Flats is an area with a pair of Aspects; first and most importantly, it has Ancient Waygate, an Aspect that indicates the presence of the first activated waypoint device crafted by the people who lived in the now-lost Empire as a method of swift travel. The most obvious use of this is to allow people to travel quickly back to the fort if they need to do so, but it could be used for any number of clever tricks and boosts. The other is Sucking Mud, which will most often be compelled by the GM to make life harder for players as the soggy mess of the flats drags at anyone moving across the slick, soft surface.
Rhoas - the aggressive birds that live in the Mud Flats - have two stress boxes, Fight (+2), Notice (+1), and Object In Aggressive Motion as an Aspect. They're fond of charging targets, relying on their sharp beaks and armored skull and shoulders to let them run things over. They often come as a mob of three to five, fighting until at least half have been downed before fleeing.
The Drowned Dead will drag themselves out of the ground when they sense living creatures near; they have one stress box, Fight (+1) and Slow And Steady as an Aspect. They tend to exist in mob-like numbers and serve mainly to harass and slow down players save for the occasional lucky effort.
The Fetid Pool has Foul Fumes, Rushing Water, and Pervasive Gloom as Aspects, each one masking a different sense and making it hard for people to find things in what appears to be a large cavern chewed out of the rock by the waterfall that spills down the wall at the back. Numerous bones litter the floor - some truly dead, some merely waiting until someone comes close enough for them to be able to strike before revealing their animate status. The Necromancer itself - a figure wrapped in rags and twisted by the dark arts it practices until it barely resembles a human at all.
The Restless Dead have a single stress box, Fight (+1), Stealth (+1), and the Nothing But Air And Bones Aspect, as well as a stunt that grants them a +2 on Stealth as long as they're laying still on the ground. They'll lay harmlessly until someone enters the same zone as them, after which they'll move - often in a large swarm - to attack anyone unfortunate enough to be in reach of their jagged, broken fingertips. Killing them near the Necromancer is a somewhat futile task, given its primary strength, but they all collapse like abandoned puppets when it dies.
The Necromancer has three stress boxes and a mild consequence slot, Virtue (+3), Lore (+2), Notice (+2), Fight (+1), Acrobatics (+1), and Throw (+1). It has One Foot In The Grave, The Might Of The Damned, and Wracked By Cannibal Hunger as Aspects, as well as a stunt that allows a Virtue roll against a +4 Difficulty to return a single dead body in the same zone to a semblance of life, essentially creating another Restless Dead. Each shift it achieves above this allows it to bring another body to unlife.
The Necromancer isn't afraid to try to run, but it has positioned itself unwisely, with the only way out being the one the players enter through. As such, it isn't likely to escape - but if it does, it may return at a later date with more power and an army of the undead to try to conquer Lioneye's Fort. Regardless, taking it down means the small cache of gathered treasure is left to be found, which contains a few Virtue Gems (left to the GM to determine as suits the players) and a trio of strangely-shaped gylphs.
Defeating the Necromancer earns Tarkleigh's respect, and he can identify the glyphs as matching impressions in a small cleft in the cliffs that surround the Mud Flats - but he cautions that going there may be too dangerous, as a monster of a spitter-crab lives in the flooded passages of the area, and it's grabbed more than a few exiles in the past.
With this quest complete, Lioneye's Fort gains a new Aspect for players looking to improve their new home: The Seeds Of Hope Are Sown, representing how the other exiles are looking up to the example of the players and starting to feel that there might be a future for them in this place. It's a small change, but the effect will reverberate through the rest of the campaign conversion.
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
Fate of Exiles: Shoreline Tasks - The Medicine Chest
For exiles who reach Lioneye's Watch, there are more than enough tasks that need strong arms, quick wits, and nimble feet to achieve. This post will detail one of the options available to people looking for something to do other that gives Wraeclast a more complete, living feel.
Lioneye's Watch is a place in poor repair, with filth and sickness running rampant. Nessa has medical skills, but she can only do so much with what little the other exiles have managed to bring in - brackish water boiled over a smoky fire and handfuls of half-rotted plants that might or might not retain some medicinal value, plus whatever rags they can clean and dry out for bandages. Bestel has a solution, but he's in no shape to do it, and the only other exile who might stand a chance - Tarkleigh - has enough on his plate just keeping the place safe from nearby trouble. Bestel happily tells the party of the medicine chest that was in the ship he was on - he'll claim it was his ship, the Merry Gull, while the others will tell the group that he scooped the captain's hat off the corpse when it shipwrecked.
The medicine chest not only has supplies that would let Nessa treat the sick in the fort, it has tools to prepare more ingredients from raw materials; collecting it would make life in the ruined fort far safer. There's a catch, of course - two feral, cannibalistic Karui have amassed small tribes that control the shoreline between the fort and the wreck. Fire Fury is a Karui shaman corrupted by Wraeclast who controls the shoreline itself, his tribe consisting of people he's terrorized into serving and feeding him in exchange for him using his fiery magic to defend them from the wild beasts and living dead, while Hailrake is a castaway turned cannibal who has taken ownership of the wreck, fancying it a throne as his tribe of violent cannibals raid the fort and the other tribe in equal measure, relying on his command of cold and wind to keep retaliation at bay. As it happens, Hailrake has found the medicine chest, but lacking the education to recognize the value of it, he simply uses it as a footrest.
Many of the tribefolk under Fire Fury are little more than one-hit minions who might form up into mobs against players, but the majority can be talked or threatened into not interfering with the PCs. Fire Fury is a coward at heart, and more than willing to flee if a fight is going against him. He tends to be over-reliant on his two Virtue Gems - one of which can call down a rain of fire across an entire zone, the other letting him hurl blasts of fire at individuals. Defeating him will caused the rest of the tribe to scatter, with some showing up at the door to the fort, pretending to be freshly lost exiles in hopes of avoiding reprisal for their part in the raid on the fort. Fire Fury has Bonded By Fire, Soul-Eating Glutton, and Burning Up Inside as Aspects, and Virtue (+2), Notice (+1), and Acrobatics (+1) as skills.
The tribe under Hailrake is a tribe of unrepentant cannibals who view the murderous man as their kind, happily attacking anyone who tries to get close. Most are one-stress minions, easily taken out, but a few lieutenants might have two stress boxes, Fight (+2), and Notice (+1). Winning past them with diplomacy can be tricky, but doable for sufficiently clever players. Of course, Hailrake is a great deal harder to fool and quite willing to resort to violence to get a bite to eat. His Aspects are Cold King Of The Wreck, Cold-Blooded Beast, and Frozen Heart And Soul, while his skills are Virtue (+3), Notice (+2), Physique (+1), and Fight (+1), with Virtue Gems that let him produce a blast of icy spikes that attack everyone in the zone with him and a multi-target cone of biting wind and icy shards.. He has one mild consequence and two stress boxes, making it possible for him to become a recurrent foe if players don't take him down quickly enough. If pressed, he'll leap into the sea, using his cold and wind magic to create an icy raft that carries him away.
Returning the medicine chest to the fort produces a rise in spirits that soon sees the fort getting scrubbed clean of grime as best the exiles can manage, as Nessa turns the healthy to the task of preparing an area to treat the ill. She'll happily help any players recover from injuries suffered in the effort to claim the medicine chest, while Bestel starts composing a song in their honor.
Of course, the biggest 'reward' is that Tarkleigh seeing that they're capable will lead him to come to them with another urgent task, one too far out for him to deal with it while continuing to defend the fort - a necromancer has been sighted in the mud flats, raising the bones of dead beasts to fight for him.
That quest will be the next installment in the line of quest conversions, serving to lay the thread deeper into Wraeclast for players to follow.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Eclipse Phase: Before The Fall Setup, Part One
The initial setup for the Before the Fall mini-campaign is going to comprise defining the characters and their construction, the state of the world relative to the session itself, and the fiddly details of both soft storytelling components and crunchier mechanical aspects. The two most important goals are to introduce the players to the way the game works and to make sure that they enjoy it.
To this end, the characters I'll be creating for this will fall into some relatively easily defined roles, even though even the simplest one is a step outside the roles outlined by class-based games. Each character, while being a specialist in their role, will still have points in 'fluff' skills that may turn out to be handy to have over the course of the games.
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The neo-gorilla is obviously a tough - a large, powerful brick of a character that, if this were D20, one might expect to be a fighter or a barbarian. This isn't that bad of a strategy in Eclipse Phase - monofilament weapons can be deadly when used skillfully, and they have the advantage of not being that likely to accidentally puncture pressurized structures like high-power firearms, energy weapons, grenades, and the like. That isn't the case here, however - this character was uplifted as part of a series that enhanced the strength and durability of the baseline creature in addition to human-like intelligence. As such, they can serve as a heavy weapons specialist, carrying the kind of firepower that can stop a tank cold.
The role of the character as a heavy weapons specialist is augmented by their size and obvious strength, making them the impressive-looking stick to the polite and friendly carrot of the more socially-oriented characters. When someone needs intimidated or frightened, they're the one the team can most easily turn to, not the least because uplifts are still relatively uncommon, giving the added factor of seeming like a barely civilized animal to those unfamiliar with uplifts.
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The next character is a socialite, born into the kind of fluid social environment that most people have trouble keeping track of, with a morph modified to provide every edge possible and a visible personality pretty much designed to be as charming as possible. Persuasion is second nature for them, and the blandly pleasant features of their morph let them get away with being memorable only as a nice and friendly sort, someone who remains fondly remembered even if they've just taken a person's wallet and wandered off to empty it out.
Behind that friendly personality is a different animal; a mind of crystalline logic and precision calculations keeps track of every detail with a memory designed to be eiditic and their brain fine-tuned to perform at maximum speed. Augmented with multi-tasking systems built into their nervous system, they're essentially an entire team of social engineers in a single body, ready to handle any social situation they get dropped into. They're the usual carrot to the neo-gorilla's stick, and they relish every chance to dazzle, baffle, and charm those they have to deal with, keeping their actual feelings well-hidden behind a smiling face and cloud of pheromones.
---
The infosec specialist was born human, but due to events in their life, they ended up becoming infolife - a mind whose embodiment is purely in a digital format. With access to a much higher speed of thought, no need to actually sleep, and a carefully cultivated talent for both research and security systems, they completed their post-primary education in record time and managed to get accepted to work for the UN Peacekeepers with the belief that it wouldn't be much more than a glorified desk job leaving them ample time to do their own research and pursue their ongoing education.
They were a bit surprised when their qualifications landed them a job as an actual Peacekeeper; few enough infolife exist at the time that the minicampaign begins that the phenomenal multitasking ability of an infomorph can't be overlooked, and their skills line up to put them in the role of a coordinator, managing team communication, directing the others with oversight, and jamming the team's bots when the situation calls for it. Of course, there are perks - like essentially having a fancy Nova-class VTOL gunship as a body when needed. They could get used to that perk.
---
The recon specialist is old enough to have known the world before ubiquitous surveillance became a thing, and they're justifiably smug about having not only been skilled enough to survive the job back then, but to successfully transfer to the modern world with eyes and ears everywhere. They've lost track of their original body a long time ago, hopping into newer bodies as they became useful; today they live in a body designed with durability and stealth in mind, giving them an edge that they exploit to the best of their ability.
Ideas like modesty and shame also got left behind a long time ago, and with the drastic rebuild of their body for their current morphs they tend to regard clothing as a quaint affectation that has nothing to do with them. If pressed on the subject, they'll adjust their scaly skin to provide a rough illusion of clothing, abandoning it as soon as they can; the only time they feel any concern about the subject is when they have to face someone with direct authority over them, when their nudity leaves them feeling conspicuous, unlike their usual condition of blending in as perfectly as possible.
---
The combat-oriented AGI was built as a weapons system of surpassing complexity, bordering on the verge of spontaneous uplift; with enough system resources, they might even have become a nascent seed AI. They were uplifted and put through a socialization program in order to prevent a combat-hungry superintelligence from developing with no attachment to transhumanity, and were passed to the UN as part of a demonstration by their creators of the company's support for the UN Peacekeepers.
They still think foremost in combat terms, assessing everything they encounter in terms of combat priority. Their heavy armor and mechanical power has led to them developing a preference for melee combat, shrugging off anything short of anti-tank ordnance and closing on their targets in a showing that certainly gives new life to the concept of shock and awe tactics. Somewhere in their past, someone thought it would be funny to show them recordings of fictional combat robots, and they picked up some trace of speech patterns from HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic video game, giving them a perpetually sinister vibe.
---
The research scientist is an eccentric, at best; a researcher of cognition, psychology, and other fields of the mind, they were early adopters of cortical stack technology - a fact that saved them, as a colleague's lab experiments went badly and the ensuing fire killed them. When they were revived in a modest synth, the trauma of their death both left them with a case of modest pyrophobia and a fascination with the experience of dying. More than once they've loaded forks of themself into cheap case morphs to go experience a particular kind of death, followed by reintegrating the fork afterward.
The resulting lack of fear toward death was what ultimately brought them to the Peacekeepers; able to be trusted to do the most suicidal tasks that might be required, they're given tasks that can't be handled by jamming a bot, or which require direct intervention by transhuman minds. They're more than willing, as their experiments and research have been steadily leading them toward the idea that they may eventually want to ditch transhumanity entirely and head off on their own into the dark between the stars - and both the pay and the additional training by the Peacekeepers will be handy in that task.
To this end, the characters I'll be creating for this will fall into some relatively easily defined roles, even though even the simplest one is a step outside the roles outlined by class-based games. Each character, while being a specialist in their role, will still have points in 'fluff' skills that may turn out to be handy to have over the course of the games.
---
The neo-gorilla is obviously a tough - a large, powerful brick of a character that, if this were D20, one might expect to be a fighter or a barbarian. This isn't that bad of a strategy in Eclipse Phase - monofilament weapons can be deadly when used skillfully, and they have the advantage of not being that likely to accidentally puncture pressurized structures like high-power firearms, energy weapons, grenades, and the like. That isn't the case here, however - this character was uplifted as part of a series that enhanced the strength and durability of the baseline creature in addition to human-like intelligence. As such, they can serve as a heavy weapons specialist, carrying the kind of firepower that can stop a tank cold.
The role of the character as a heavy weapons specialist is augmented by their size and obvious strength, making them the impressive-looking stick to the polite and friendly carrot of the more socially-oriented characters. When someone needs intimidated or frightened, they're the one the team can most easily turn to, not the least because uplifts are still relatively uncommon, giving the added factor of seeming like a barely civilized animal to those unfamiliar with uplifts.
---
The next character is a socialite, born into the kind of fluid social environment that most people have trouble keeping track of, with a morph modified to provide every edge possible and a visible personality pretty much designed to be as charming as possible. Persuasion is second nature for them, and the blandly pleasant features of their morph let them get away with being memorable only as a nice and friendly sort, someone who remains fondly remembered even if they've just taken a person's wallet and wandered off to empty it out.
Behind that friendly personality is a different animal; a mind of crystalline logic and precision calculations keeps track of every detail with a memory designed to be eiditic and their brain fine-tuned to perform at maximum speed. Augmented with multi-tasking systems built into their nervous system, they're essentially an entire team of social engineers in a single body, ready to handle any social situation they get dropped into. They're the usual carrot to the neo-gorilla's stick, and they relish every chance to dazzle, baffle, and charm those they have to deal with, keeping their actual feelings well-hidden behind a smiling face and cloud of pheromones.
---
The infosec specialist was born human, but due to events in their life, they ended up becoming infolife - a mind whose embodiment is purely in a digital format. With access to a much higher speed of thought, no need to actually sleep, and a carefully cultivated talent for both research and security systems, they completed their post-primary education in record time and managed to get accepted to work for the UN Peacekeepers with the belief that it wouldn't be much more than a glorified desk job leaving them ample time to do their own research and pursue their ongoing education.
They were a bit surprised when their qualifications landed them a job as an actual Peacekeeper; few enough infolife exist at the time that the minicampaign begins that the phenomenal multitasking ability of an infomorph can't be overlooked, and their skills line up to put them in the role of a coordinator, managing team communication, directing the others with oversight, and jamming the team's bots when the situation calls for it. Of course, there are perks - like essentially having a fancy Nova-class VTOL gunship as a body when needed. They could get used to that perk.
---
The recon specialist is old enough to have known the world before ubiquitous surveillance became a thing, and they're justifiably smug about having not only been skilled enough to survive the job back then, but to successfully transfer to the modern world with eyes and ears everywhere. They've lost track of their original body a long time ago, hopping into newer bodies as they became useful; today they live in a body designed with durability and stealth in mind, giving them an edge that they exploit to the best of their ability.
Ideas like modesty and shame also got left behind a long time ago, and with the drastic rebuild of their body for their current morphs they tend to regard clothing as a quaint affectation that has nothing to do with them. If pressed on the subject, they'll adjust their scaly skin to provide a rough illusion of clothing, abandoning it as soon as they can; the only time they feel any concern about the subject is when they have to face someone with direct authority over them, when their nudity leaves them feeling conspicuous, unlike their usual condition of blending in as perfectly as possible.
---
The combat-oriented AGI was built as a weapons system of surpassing complexity, bordering on the verge of spontaneous uplift; with enough system resources, they might even have become a nascent seed AI. They were uplifted and put through a socialization program in order to prevent a combat-hungry superintelligence from developing with no attachment to transhumanity, and were passed to the UN as part of a demonstration by their creators of the company's support for the UN Peacekeepers.
They still think foremost in combat terms, assessing everything they encounter in terms of combat priority. Their heavy armor and mechanical power has led to them developing a preference for melee combat, shrugging off anything short of anti-tank ordnance and closing on their targets in a showing that certainly gives new life to the concept of shock and awe tactics. Somewhere in their past, someone thought it would be funny to show them recordings of fictional combat robots, and they picked up some trace of speech patterns from HK-47 from the Knights of the Old Republic video game, giving them a perpetually sinister vibe.
---
The research scientist is an eccentric, at best; a researcher of cognition, psychology, and other fields of the mind, they were early adopters of cortical stack technology - a fact that saved them, as a colleague's lab experiments went badly and the ensuing fire killed them. When they were revived in a modest synth, the trauma of their death both left them with a case of modest pyrophobia and a fascination with the experience of dying. More than once they've loaded forks of themself into cheap case morphs to go experience a particular kind of death, followed by reintegrating the fork afterward.
The resulting lack of fear toward death was what ultimately brought them to the Peacekeepers; able to be trusted to do the most suicidal tasks that might be required, they're given tasks that can't be handled by jamming a bot, or which require direct intervention by transhuman minds. They're more than willing, as their experiments and research have been steadily leading them toward the idea that they may eventually want to ditch transhumanity entirely and head off on their own into the dark between the stars - and both the pay and the additional training by the Peacekeepers will be handy in that task.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Fate of Exiles: The Witch
The witch is perhaps the darkest figure in all of Path of Exile's lore; blessed or cursed with magic even without the power of the Virtue Gems and exiled for the simple fact of her power being frightening. Able to bend the elements to their will, raise the dead into servitude, and inflict debilitating curses, witches are powerful - but fragile, relying on the arcane for their defenses, as the need to focus on their intellectual strength rarely leaves them time to hone their physique.
Their powers - or perhaps the fearful reactions to those powers - tends to leave them somewhat strange and grim, more comfortable among the dead than the living. The descriptive speech from the online game indicates that the Witch was exiled when, after fearful villages tried to kill her by burning her home, she retaliated by burning them. As such, even the most heroic Witch is likely to have a dark theme running through their Aspects.
The themes of the Witches tend to be tied to the kind of power they choose to focus on; on Wraeclast, this divides up into curses that debilitate the weak and boons that augment themselves and allies nearby, necromantic powers that raise the dead to create minions in the form of zombies, skeletons, and ghosts, and the ability to call on the three raw elemental forces of the world - fire, ice and lightning.
Witches thus will tend to have High Aspects like Banecrafter, Corpse Singer, or Weather Witch. Their Troubles will likely reflect that, as far as everyone else is concerned, even the most virtuous of them draw their power from dark and terrible sources. Weighted By An Albatross, Alone Among The Damned, and Tongue Of The Elements are all flavorful and thematic Troubles that can cause no small amount of grief for any Witch.
Other Aspects may include things such as I Am The Judge And Jury, I Craft Shackles From Words, and The Blessings Of The Damned for a Witch who uses Curses and Boons; Just Another Bag Of Bones, I Walk The Valley Of Death, and Shunned By The Light for a necromantic Witch; and Fingers Blackened By Fire, I See The Truth Frozen In The Ice, and Swift As The Thunder for an elemental Witch.
Virtue, Lore, Notice, and Will are all skills of import to any Witch; Virtue moreso to those who intend to do Stunts that have dramatic effects like creating reliable minions or devastating entire zones with fire or lightning. Witches used to looking after themselves might find Acrobatics useful for Defense purposes, but otherwise the field of skills depends entirely on what flavor a player wishes to impart to their character.
Stunts built of Virtue can include things like Call Forth the Dead, letting a Witch spend a Fate point to call forth a number of one-stress undead servants equal to her Virtue skill once per scene to Fight for her, Fire Nova allowing her to strike everyone in her zone and adjacent zones with a storm of raging flames using her Virtue skill, or Curse of Brittle Bones to place a Brittle Bones Aspect on any given target for a time, making them easier to deal with in a fight.
All in all, a Witch is a power in their own right, haunted by the source of their powers but determined to harvest the corrupt might of Wraeclast so that they can't be threatened by those who fail to understand them ever again. No matter the form of their powers, they wield them with the precision of long practice and have no pity for those between them and their goals.
Next class: The Templar, a mixture of warrior and spellcaster soaked in a devotion to the divine.
Their powers - or perhaps the fearful reactions to those powers - tends to leave them somewhat strange and grim, more comfortable among the dead than the living. The descriptive speech from the online game indicates that the Witch was exiled when, after fearful villages tried to kill her by burning her home, she retaliated by burning them. As such, even the most heroic Witch is likely to have a dark theme running through their Aspects.
The themes of the Witches tend to be tied to the kind of power they choose to focus on; on Wraeclast, this divides up into curses that debilitate the weak and boons that augment themselves and allies nearby, necromantic powers that raise the dead to create minions in the form of zombies, skeletons, and ghosts, and the ability to call on the three raw elemental forces of the world - fire, ice and lightning.
Witches thus will tend to have High Aspects like Banecrafter, Corpse Singer, or Weather Witch. Their Troubles will likely reflect that, as far as everyone else is concerned, even the most virtuous of them draw their power from dark and terrible sources. Weighted By An Albatross, Alone Among The Damned, and Tongue Of The Elements are all flavorful and thematic Troubles that can cause no small amount of grief for any Witch.
Other Aspects may include things such as I Am The Judge And Jury, I Craft Shackles From Words, and The Blessings Of The Damned for a Witch who uses Curses and Boons; Just Another Bag Of Bones, I Walk The Valley Of Death, and Shunned By The Light for a necromantic Witch; and Fingers Blackened By Fire, I See The Truth Frozen In The Ice, and Swift As The Thunder for an elemental Witch.
Virtue, Lore, Notice, and Will are all skills of import to any Witch; Virtue moreso to those who intend to do Stunts that have dramatic effects like creating reliable minions or devastating entire zones with fire or lightning. Witches used to looking after themselves might find Acrobatics useful for Defense purposes, but otherwise the field of skills depends entirely on what flavor a player wishes to impart to their character.
Stunts built of Virtue can include things like Call Forth the Dead, letting a Witch spend a Fate point to call forth a number of one-stress undead servants equal to her Virtue skill once per scene to Fight for her, Fire Nova allowing her to strike everyone in her zone and adjacent zones with a storm of raging flames using her Virtue skill, or Curse of Brittle Bones to place a Brittle Bones Aspect on any given target for a time, making them easier to deal with in a fight.
All in all, a Witch is a power in their own right, haunted by the source of their powers but determined to harvest the corrupt might of Wraeclast so that they can't be threatened by those who fail to understand them ever again. No matter the form of their powers, they wield them with the precision of long practice and have no pity for those between them and their goals.
Next class: The Templar, a mixture of warrior and spellcaster soaked in a devotion to the divine.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Fate of Exiles: Lioneye's Watch
The first hub area - a place without combat, where players can meet up, sell off their loot, and stash their belongings - in Path of Exiles is a place called Lioneye's Watch, the ruins of a fortress where a man called Lioneye commanded a legion of the Empire to defend the Outer Empire and the coastland. He was destroyed by the Karui when they invaded, and the fortress fell into ruin over the passing years.
When Oriath started casting exiles onto the shores of Wraeclast, many of them found the ruins of the old fortress to be the safest and most defensible place against the horrors of the wild lands. It didn't take long before a rough society formed, with a few key individuals holding things together against the odds. Some have come and gone; others still linger, determined to make the best of the fate they've been given.
Lioneye's Watch is a decrepit ruin patched up with driftwood and salvaged debris, safe enough against the monsters that lurk along the shores but no match for anything stronger. Only one person in the place isn't either an exile or stark mad - Nessa, a woman who survived a shipwreck. She looks after the others here with an almost motherly air, doing what she can to tend to the sick and injured and keeps spirits up. The others will do almost anything to keep her safe. The others also look up to Tarkleigh, a man who seems to know a little of all trades - including fighting and making weapons. The last notable soul is Bestel, the maddest madman in Lioneye's Watch, rescued from a shipwreck and prone to random poetry. Where the others revere Nessa and admire Tarkleigh, most of them hold a grudging pity for Bestel - even when the madman's rambling sometimes proves prophetic.
The Aspects on the area speak to the desperate nature of this supposed safe haven. The first is A Filthy Cesspit of Exiles - the fort could do with repairs well beyond anything the new inhabitants can hope to accomplish, with the dangers that lurk on the coastline, and so it remains cold, unpleasant, and filthy on the good days, riddled with disease and despair. Still, exiles tend to be ingenious, and everyone here has the cleverness of the desperate and the damned; players can tap the Aspect if they need a little help from a friendly local, in some form or another, while the GM can compel it to make things harder by having the living dead break a flimsy barricade, threatening the players with diseases, or even just having the cleverness of the locals turn against them in a moment of need.
The fort is also Built From The Ruins Of Empire - even if the walls are shot, the foundation remains, and the debris that shores up much of it is scavenged from other ruined areas. The stonework of the old Empire is still strong, even if the mortar has long since given way, and anyone with a need for solid stone or looking for a hidden secret from the past could do worse than to search in the rubble to see what they can turn up. Of course, where there's hidden treasure, there may well be hidden threats, and it would certainly be within the GM's purview to invoke such threats.
Finally, the ruins are a source of Safety In Numbers, which works to the advantage of players in ensuring they have a safe place to fall back on when threats prove too much for them. Extra hands, even if they're only armed with the rude patchwork of scraps and wreckage that Tarkleigh can assemble, are the biggest advantage the place has in keeping the ruins safe. Of course, the same safety in numbers means that everyone is loathe to leave the safety of the fort, and they'll often try to coax others into staying behind unless the situation gets too desperate and it starts to look like cannibalism might be in the near future.
Over time, if the players remain here long enough, these Aspects can be adjusted; players willing to give up a milestone can redefine one of the existing Aspects, or add an additional one to add a new theme. Undertaking missions for the other inhabitants, scavenging better materials, and thinning out the threats to the fort can improve the mood, allow the locals to clean things up, and reduce the pressure that makes it so easy for disease to spread. Given enough effort, the old fort might even be rebuilt, gaining an Aspect like Hope Of The Exiled in recognition of what the players accomplish.
Of course, to do that, both Hillock and the siren Merveil would need properly dealt with - and there are plenty of dangers for anyone seeking to deal with the latter threat.
When Oriath started casting exiles onto the shores of Wraeclast, many of them found the ruins of the old fortress to be the safest and most defensible place against the horrors of the wild lands. It didn't take long before a rough society formed, with a few key individuals holding things together against the odds. Some have come and gone; others still linger, determined to make the best of the fate they've been given.
Lioneye's Watch is a decrepit ruin patched up with driftwood and salvaged debris, safe enough against the monsters that lurk along the shores but no match for anything stronger. Only one person in the place isn't either an exile or stark mad - Nessa, a woman who survived a shipwreck. She looks after the others here with an almost motherly air, doing what she can to tend to the sick and injured and keeps spirits up. The others will do almost anything to keep her safe. The others also look up to Tarkleigh, a man who seems to know a little of all trades - including fighting and making weapons. The last notable soul is Bestel, the maddest madman in Lioneye's Watch, rescued from a shipwreck and prone to random poetry. Where the others revere Nessa and admire Tarkleigh, most of them hold a grudging pity for Bestel - even when the madman's rambling sometimes proves prophetic.
The Aspects on the area speak to the desperate nature of this supposed safe haven. The first is A Filthy Cesspit of Exiles - the fort could do with repairs well beyond anything the new inhabitants can hope to accomplish, with the dangers that lurk on the coastline, and so it remains cold, unpleasant, and filthy on the good days, riddled with disease and despair. Still, exiles tend to be ingenious, and everyone here has the cleverness of the desperate and the damned; players can tap the Aspect if they need a little help from a friendly local, in some form or another, while the GM can compel it to make things harder by having the living dead break a flimsy barricade, threatening the players with diseases, or even just having the cleverness of the locals turn against them in a moment of need.
The fort is also Built From The Ruins Of Empire - even if the walls are shot, the foundation remains, and the debris that shores up much of it is scavenged from other ruined areas. The stonework of the old Empire is still strong, even if the mortar has long since given way, and anyone with a need for solid stone or looking for a hidden secret from the past could do worse than to search in the rubble to see what they can turn up. Of course, where there's hidden treasure, there may well be hidden threats, and it would certainly be within the GM's purview to invoke such threats.
Finally, the ruins are a source of Safety In Numbers, which works to the advantage of players in ensuring they have a safe place to fall back on when threats prove too much for them. Extra hands, even if they're only armed with the rude patchwork of scraps and wreckage that Tarkleigh can assemble, are the biggest advantage the place has in keeping the ruins safe. Of course, the same safety in numbers means that everyone is loathe to leave the safety of the fort, and they'll often try to coax others into staying behind unless the situation gets too desperate and it starts to look like cannibalism might be in the near future.
Over time, if the players remain here long enough, these Aspects can be adjusted; players willing to give up a milestone can redefine one of the existing Aspects, or add an additional one to add a new theme. Undertaking missions for the other inhabitants, scavenging better materials, and thinning out the threats to the fort can improve the mood, allow the locals to clean things up, and reduce the pressure that makes it so easy for disease to spread. Given enough effort, the old fort might even be rebuilt, gaining an Aspect like Hope Of The Exiled in recognition of what the players accomplish.
Of course, to do that, both Hillock and the siren Merveil would need properly dealt with - and there are plenty of dangers for anyone seeking to deal with the latter threat.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Eclipse Phase - Before The Fall
(Originally intended to be the only Monday post this week, I present the first post in the Before the Fall campaign design sequence.)
Eclipse Phase is a fantastic science fiction game; it's about transhumanism, horror, and conspiracy at the base level, published by the fine folks at Posthuman Studios and made available via Creative Commons so that if you can't afford to buy the game, you can still legally acquire copies to play. That said, if you can afford it, buy at least the PDFs. The Posthumans need funding to make more books, after all.
The default timeline of EP is set several years after the events of the Fall, with humanity seemingly stable in the aftermath of what amounted to the apocalypse. 99% of the world was wiped out, the remainder are smeared across the solar system in a thin film of life, and Earth is essentially uninhabitable.
I'm presently designing a short campaign set to take place during the Fall itself, with prebuilt characters to enable everyone to sit down and get used to playing without having to worry about any of the mechanical components of character creation before they're used to the way the game plays. Posts in this series will be about the premade characters, the situation the PCs begin in, the circumstances of the pre-Fall world, and - when my group eventually plays this - the scenarios that I use and a review of how things go.
Cast
An uplifted gorilla who specializes in heavy weaponry; grumpy, grudging, proud, and very defnitely with a mercurial attitude. Not overly fond of the nickname 'Tarzan' that has been applied, but accepts it as better than HU-LS-66903.
A splicer with significant body modification and a winning personality in spite of singularity seeker philosophies; the face for the team, able to schmooze with diplomats and hypercorp execs as easily as with old-world royalty and rank-and-file grunts in any line of work.
An infolife who resides primarily on the primary computer systems of the team's transport; serves as the infosec specialist and the researcher for the team, and sees no reason to be embodied when they can easily jam a drone to do whatever physical work needs doing.
An old-world recon specialist whose moderate biochauvanist streak doesn't keep them from being instantiated in a ghost morph. Chameleon skin and integrated biological armor work well with their lack of any sense of modesty, letting them hide in places that more modest individuals wouldn't be able to handle.
An AGI in a combat-rated synth morph designed as a smart weapon system that was so complex that it was uplifted and hastily indoctrinated to ensure it would at least recognize the value of transhuman life. The AGI's personality may have some similarities to HK-47, alongside a willingness to cheerily assess and classify anything that moves via combat priority.
A research scientist in a synth morph, working to pay for their education and body after an unfortunately lab accident killed their birth body. They've become fascinated with consciousness, sapience, and the process of death and continuity of self in the aftermath of their own first death. A little morbid, but not nihilistic by any stretch.
Rough Synopsis
The PCs are a group working for the United Nations in a future where the UN has manage to achieve some greater level of power simple because the traditional nation-states have begun to fall apart, rent by various disasters and struggles and split open by the behemoth megacorps; hypercorps have begun to take off, capitalizing on openings the emgacorps are too sluggish to really do anything about. Ego backups, cortical stacks, and resleeving are all relatively new, with the team being one of the first groups all outfitted with this kind of technology.
The initial scenario is that of a diplomatic mission, with the group being sent there to look into claims that assassins are stalking a would-be corporate dictator who happens to be wealthy enough to be of value and generous enough to the UN to be a priority. No one seriously expects assassins, but field testing the latest technology is a good enough reason to dispatch them to the site. Of course, hoping for a peaceful situation on a world teetering on the brink of global war, famine, and ecosystem collapse is just too much to hope for...
Restrictions
No character will be an async.
No character will have high-end nanotechnology.
The world is still in a scarcity-based monetary economy.
Firewall and other x-threat-related groups do not yet exist.
The TITANs aren't a thing as yet.
Stay tuned if you're interested!
Next Entry: Setup, Part One
Eclipse Phase is a fantastic science fiction game; it's about transhumanism, horror, and conspiracy at the base level, published by the fine folks at Posthuman Studios and made available via Creative Commons so that if you can't afford to buy the game, you can still legally acquire copies to play. That said, if you can afford it, buy at least the PDFs. The Posthumans need funding to make more books, after all.
The default timeline of EP is set several years after the events of the Fall, with humanity seemingly stable in the aftermath of what amounted to the apocalypse. 99% of the world was wiped out, the remainder are smeared across the solar system in a thin film of life, and Earth is essentially uninhabitable.
I'm presently designing a short campaign set to take place during the Fall itself, with prebuilt characters to enable everyone to sit down and get used to playing without having to worry about any of the mechanical components of character creation before they're used to the way the game plays. Posts in this series will be about the premade characters, the situation the PCs begin in, the circumstances of the pre-Fall world, and - when my group eventually plays this - the scenarios that I use and a review of how things go.
Cast
An uplifted gorilla who specializes in heavy weaponry; grumpy, grudging, proud, and very defnitely with a mercurial attitude. Not overly fond of the nickname 'Tarzan' that has been applied, but accepts it as better than HU-LS-66903.
A splicer with significant body modification and a winning personality in spite of singularity seeker philosophies; the face for the team, able to schmooze with diplomats and hypercorp execs as easily as with old-world royalty and rank-and-file grunts in any line of work.
An infolife who resides primarily on the primary computer systems of the team's transport; serves as the infosec specialist and the researcher for the team, and sees no reason to be embodied when they can easily jam a drone to do whatever physical work needs doing.
An old-world recon specialist whose moderate biochauvanist streak doesn't keep them from being instantiated in a ghost morph. Chameleon skin and integrated biological armor work well with their lack of any sense of modesty, letting them hide in places that more modest individuals wouldn't be able to handle.
An AGI in a combat-rated synth morph designed as a smart weapon system that was so complex that it was uplifted and hastily indoctrinated to ensure it would at least recognize the value of transhuman life. The AGI's personality may have some similarities to HK-47, alongside a willingness to cheerily assess and classify anything that moves via combat priority.
A research scientist in a synth morph, working to pay for their education and body after an unfortunately lab accident killed their birth body. They've become fascinated with consciousness, sapience, and the process of death and continuity of self in the aftermath of their own first death. A little morbid, but not nihilistic by any stretch.
Rough Synopsis
The PCs are a group working for the United Nations in a future where the UN has manage to achieve some greater level of power simple because the traditional nation-states have begun to fall apart, rent by various disasters and struggles and split open by the behemoth megacorps; hypercorps have begun to take off, capitalizing on openings the emgacorps are too sluggish to really do anything about. Ego backups, cortical stacks, and resleeving are all relatively new, with the team being one of the first groups all outfitted with this kind of technology.
The initial scenario is that of a diplomatic mission, with the group being sent there to look into claims that assassins are stalking a would-be corporate dictator who happens to be wealthy enough to be of value and generous enough to the UN to be a priority. No one seriously expects assassins, but field testing the latest technology is a good enough reason to dispatch them to the site. Of course, hoping for a peaceful situation on a world teetering on the brink of global war, famine, and ecosystem collapse is just too much to hope for...
Restrictions
No character will be an async.
No character will have high-end nanotechnology.
The world is still in a scarcity-based monetary economy.
Firewall and other x-threat-related groups do not yet exist.
The TITANs aren't a thing as yet.
Stay tuned if you're interested!
Next Entry: Setup, Part One
Game Seeds: Celestial Events
(This post should have been posted on Friday, but extreme exhaustion delayed it until today.)
In a fantasy world with active gods, celestial events can have tremendous impact; the amount of story that can be dragged out of a simple event like a stellar conjunction or eclipse is large for a relatively small amount of effort on the part of the GM. Some are harder than others, depending on the shape of the world in your setting. Worlds where celestial bodies literally represent the gods make it easy, but even in ones that mimic the familiar solar system can have important results for interventionist deities.
A simple stellar conjunction is most typical of interest for gods of the night, the stars, or for the things that lurk in the darkness between the stars. Cultists will mark the progression of the stars and events related to whatever comparatively minor forces they serve. Sacrifices to demons or forgotten outer gods can take place when certain conjunctions occur, and that sort of thing is most likely of interest to heroic adventurers looking for a reason to save people from a terrible fate.
Stellar conjunctions can also mark esoteric events like planar conjunctions and gateways to strange places opening. Creatures from other worlds might sneak into the mortal world on such nights, terrain from other lands might overlay the regular terrain, and taking the wrong turn might lead the unwary to places unknown. They can make a great way to inject some strangeness into your game, either temporarily (ending as the conjunction closes) or permanently (the group finds themselves transposed to a new world when they take a wrong turn or have their home territory transposed forever with some other world).
Eclipses are more dramatic and powerful events; a lunar eclipse can be an omen from the gods, a sign of some great celestial struggle, or an intrusion by some outside force as the moons darkens and turns a bloody shade of red. Lunar gods and their priesthoods are the most likely to be involved; seeking omens and casting divinations to seek knowledge during the event, attempting great sacrifices to strengthen their god against the devouring dark, or undertaking a mission to a sacred place where the eclipse will open a way to the god's domain - or to the domain that the god otherwise keeps sealed and warded away, to keep the world safe.
Solar eclipses, brief and dramatic like nothing else, are the star of the show for celestial fireworks. Sun gods and their dark and jealous siblings go to war briefly, the righteous sun god always winning - until they don't, and the eclipse lingers as the sibling takes over, forcing heroes into action to save the world from eternal twilight gloom. Eclipses can also be times when creatures of the night become active for a short while - vampires grabbing victims in the gloom , shapeshifters like werewolves unexpectedly forced to transform by the power of the eclipse, and so on. Omens, portents, prophecies, and childrens with dramatic destinies can also result from solar eclipses, some with a stronger impact than others on a campaign world.
Other events - supernova explosions in the sky that leave a remnant bright enough to see in the day, comets, and shooting stars - can all also have an impact on the world while they linger. Falling stars are often seen as a source of exotic metals like mithral and adamantine, comets are seen as harbingers of disaster, and the flash of a supernova can mean many things - the death or birth of a god, the end of an age, the shift of the balance of the world, or the escape of an ancient evil.
GMs looking to inject a little awesome wonder into their game could certainly do worse than using a few of these in their games to signify events to come.
In a fantasy world with active gods, celestial events can have tremendous impact; the amount of story that can be dragged out of a simple event like a stellar conjunction or eclipse is large for a relatively small amount of effort on the part of the GM. Some are harder than others, depending on the shape of the world in your setting. Worlds where celestial bodies literally represent the gods make it easy, but even in ones that mimic the familiar solar system can have important results for interventionist deities.
A simple stellar conjunction is most typical of interest for gods of the night, the stars, or for the things that lurk in the darkness between the stars. Cultists will mark the progression of the stars and events related to whatever comparatively minor forces they serve. Sacrifices to demons or forgotten outer gods can take place when certain conjunctions occur, and that sort of thing is most likely of interest to heroic adventurers looking for a reason to save people from a terrible fate.
Stellar conjunctions can also mark esoteric events like planar conjunctions and gateways to strange places opening. Creatures from other worlds might sneak into the mortal world on such nights, terrain from other lands might overlay the regular terrain, and taking the wrong turn might lead the unwary to places unknown. They can make a great way to inject some strangeness into your game, either temporarily (ending as the conjunction closes) or permanently (the group finds themselves transposed to a new world when they take a wrong turn or have their home territory transposed forever with some other world).
Eclipses are more dramatic and powerful events; a lunar eclipse can be an omen from the gods, a sign of some great celestial struggle, or an intrusion by some outside force as the moons darkens and turns a bloody shade of red. Lunar gods and their priesthoods are the most likely to be involved; seeking omens and casting divinations to seek knowledge during the event, attempting great sacrifices to strengthen their god against the devouring dark, or undertaking a mission to a sacred place where the eclipse will open a way to the god's domain - or to the domain that the god otherwise keeps sealed and warded away, to keep the world safe.
Solar eclipses, brief and dramatic like nothing else, are the star of the show for celestial fireworks. Sun gods and their dark and jealous siblings go to war briefly, the righteous sun god always winning - until they don't, and the eclipse lingers as the sibling takes over, forcing heroes into action to save the world from eternal twilight gloom. Eclipses can also be times when creatures of the night become active for a short while - vampires grabbing victims in the gloom , shapeshifters like werewolves unexpectedly forced to transform by the power of the eclipse, and so on. Omens, portents, prophecies, and childrens with dramatic destinies can also result from solar eclipses, some with a stronger impact than others on a campaign world.
Other events - supernova explosions in the sky that leave a remnant bright enough to see in the day, comets, and shooting stars - can all also have an impact on the world while they linger. Falling stars are often seen as a source of exotic metals like mithral and adamantine, comets are seen as harbingers of disaster, and the flash of a supernova can mean many things - the death or birth of a god, the end of an age, the shift of the balance of the world, or the escape of an ancient evil.
GMs looking to inject a little awesome wonder into their game could certainly do worse than using a few of these in their games to signify events to come.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Fate of Exiles: The Ranger
Previously: The Marauder
The Ranger is the pure Dexterity class of Path of Exile; they excel at ranged combat and emphasize getting out of the way of danger, rather than simply soaking it up or blocking it with a mystical shield. In terms of lore, Rangers are poachers, thieves who steal from the nobility, and have little care for the proper way of civilized society. Exiled to Wraeclast when captured by those offended by having their excess trimmed for the survival of others, a ranger is well-suited to the dangerous wilderness to be found here.
Crafting a Ranger in Fate Core is simple, on the surface of things. Stealth, speed, and guile are fundamental to their nature; a familiarity with the wilderness and skill with traps is always helpful, as is a certain ruthlessness that softer hearts might find troubling. While the Karui Marauders are furious and loud, a Ranger is silent and often patient, well aware that many battles are won by controlling the field rather than by raw force. Atlhetics and Acrobatics are both central skills for any Ranger, as is Shooting. Beyond this, ranger diverge on their personal sense of how to do things.
Where Marauders simply fail to feel fear, secure in the knowledge that Death walks with them and that their ancestors shield them, Rangers are creatures of the wild; fear is part of what makes them who they are, and what guides their actions. Even the Rangers who carve out a place in Wraeclast are cautious and wary, more than willing to give up ground to a foe when it means they can leave traps behind them that make the next encounter lean in their favor. Rangers know Death, and regard him as the most cunning of foes, to be fought and tricked at every turn. Every day survived is a day where the Ranger has beaten Death at its game.
Stalker-style Rangers will benefit from skills like Stealth and Notice, with lesser slots perhaps going to things like Provoke, Physique, and Will. They'll also likely rely on Shoot and Stealth for their stunts, with trick shots and ambushes to ensure that they control the field of battle even as they bring the fight to their enemies. Less aggressive rangers may benefit from Notice and Crafts over other skills, with a lesser emphasis toward Stealth and other complementary skills. Crafts-based stunts to produce traps on the fly to ensure they remain in control when others are surprised by the horrors that lurk in Wraeclast's corners. Last, there may be some who, by use of the Virtue Gems, become a kind of arcane archer, using their Physique and Will to ensure their survival while their Virtue stunts allow them to do otherwise impossible tricks, like firing a single arrow into the sky and having a zone-wide rain of arrows fall to the earth.
Aspects for Rangers will tend to reflect the way that Rangers are wary survivalists at heart. High Aspects might be things such as Canny Hunter Of The Wilds, Trapsmith of the Webbed Woods, or Unseen Archer-Mage. Troubles will tend to reflect the paranoid and withdrawn behavior Rangers tend to have, with things like Words Can't Be Trusted, Think Thrice Before Acting, or Wild Magic In A Wild Spirit.
Other Aspects will round out the nature of the specific Ranger; the aggressive hunter might have I Can Smell You Coming, Ally Is Just A Nice Word For Bait, and My Law Is The Law Of The Wild. A trapsmith might round out with Ruler Of My Domain, I Live Behind The Shadows, and As Patient As The Trees. The arcane archer might use Aspects like My Will Is A Piercing Arrow, I Hear The Words Of The Wind, and I Can Track The Spirits.
Aggressive Rangers will want to favor Stunts that make the most of their Shoot and Stealth skills, letting them get the drop on others, slink between areas without being observed, and make the most of each shot they get. A trapsmith might favor Crafts stunts that permit them to sow the area with traps they fashion on the fly, forcing those who face them to advance through zones altered to the Ranger's advantage to get near or delaying them while the Ranger escapes to fight another day. An arcane archer will tend to favor Virtue stunts that grant them uncanny skills with their bows, making it rain arrows, making single shots split into multiple shots, or causing shots to be wrapped in lightning or fire.
Ultimately, the Ranger is a class that can be used as a model for anyone who wants to play a world-wise hunter, cautious and careful as they traverse the cursed lands of Wraeclast. They let others take the lead to play the hero while ensuring that their tracks are covered and anything foolish enough to hunt the hunter will find nasty surprises that leave them too hurt to be a threat. Rangers know fear quite well, but they aren't ruled by it - it's just one more tool in their fight to keep Death hungry for another day.
Next conversion post: The Witch, the pure-Intelligence class that commands the dead, the elements, and holds dominion over terrible curses.
The Ranger is the pure Dexterity class of Path of Exile; they excel at ranged combat and emphasize getting out of the way of danger, rather than simply soaking it up or blocking it with a mystical shield. In terms of lore, Rangers are poachers, thieves who steal from the nobility, and have little care for the proper way of civilized society. Exiled to Wraeclast when captured by those offended by having their excess trimmed for the survival of others, a ranger is well-suited to the dangerous wilderness to be found here.
Crafting a Ranger in Fate Core is simple, on the surface of things. Stealth, speed, and guile are fundamental to their nature; a familiarity with the wilderness and skill with traps is always helpful, as is a certain ruthlessness that softer hearts might find troubling. While the Karui Marauders are furious and loud, a Ranger is silent and often patient, well aware that many battles are won by controlling the field rather than by raw force. Atlhetics and Acrobatics are both central skills for any Ranger, as is Shooting. Beyond this, ranger diverge on their personal sense of how to do things.
Where Marauders simply fail to feel fear, secure in the knowledge that Death walks with them and that their ancestors shield them, Rangers are creatures of the wild; fear is part of what makes them who they are, and what guides their actions. Even the Rangers who carve out a place in Wraeclast are cautious and wary, more than willing to give up ground to a foe when it means they can leave traps behind them that make the next encounter lean in their favor. Rangers know Death, and regard him as the most cunning of foes, to be fought and tricked at every turn. Every day survived is a day where the Ranger has beaten Death at its game.
Stalker-style Rangers will benefit from skills like Stealth and Notice, with lesser slots perhaps going to things like Provoke, Physique, and Will. They'll also likely rely on Shoot and Stealth for their stunts, with trick shots and ambushes to ensure that they control the field of battle even as they bring the fight to their enemies. Less aggressive rangers may benefit from Notice and Crafts over other skills, with a lesser emphasis toward Stealth and other complementary skills. Crafts-based stunts to produce traps on the fly to ensure they remain in control when others are surprised by the horrors that lurk in Wraeclast's corners. Last, there may be some who, by use of the Virtue Gems, become a kind of arcane archer, using their Physique and Will to ensure their survival while their Virtue stunts allow them to do otherwise impossible tricks, like firing a single arrow into the sky and having a zone-wide rain of arrows fall to the earth.
Aspects for Rangers will tend to reflect the way that Rangers are wary survivalists at heart. High Aspects might be things such as Canny Hunter Of The Wilds, Trapsmith of the Webbed Woods, or Unseen Archer-Mage. Troubles will tend to reflect the paranoid and withdrawn behavior Rangers tend to have, with things like Words Can't Be Trusted, Think Thrice Before Acting, or Wild Magic In A Wild Spirit.
Other Aspects will round out the nature of the specific Ranger; the aggressive hunter might have I Can Smell You Coming, Ally Is Just A Nice Word For Bait, and My Law Is The Law Of The Wild. A trapsmith might round out with Ruler Of My Domain, I Live Behind The Shadows, and As Patient As The Trees. The arcane archer might use Aspects like My Will Is A Piercing Arrow, I Hear The Words Of The Wind, and I Can Track The Spirits.
Aggressive Rangers will want to favor Stunts that make the most of their Shoot and Stealth skills, letting them get the drop on others, slink between areas without being observed, and make the most of each shot they get. A trapsmith might favor Crafts stunts that permit them to sow the area with traps they fashion on the fly, forcing those who face them to advance through zones altered to the Ranger's advantage to get near or delaying them while the Ranger escapes to fight another day. An arcane archer will tend to favor Virtue stunts that grant them uncanny skills with their bows, making it rain arrows, making single shots split into multiple shots, or causing shots to be wrapped in lightning or fire.
Ultimately, the Ranger is a class that can be used as a model for anyone who wants to play a world-wise hunter, cautious and careful as they traverse the cursed lands of Wraeclast. They let others take the lead to play the hero while ensuring that their tracks are covered and anything foolish enough to hunt the hunter will find nasty surprises that leave them too hurt to be a threat. Rangers know fear quite well, but they aren't ruled by it - it's just one more tool in their fight to keep Death hungry for another day.
Next conversion post: The Witch, the pure-Intelligence class that commands the dead, the elements, and holds dominion over terrible curses.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Fate of Exiles: The Marauder
The Marauder, in Path of Exile, is a strength-oriented class. In terms of the game lore, a Marauder is a warrior from the barbarian Karui tribes, captured by the people of Oriath to be enslaved and then sent into exile, fetching up on the coast of Wraeclast. Tempering raw physical power with magic of the blood and ancestral power, there's little more directly fearsome among mortals than one of these warriors rushing at a person, bellowing a war cry.
In order to create a Marauder using the Fate Core system, we have to look at what makes the Karui barbarian differ from a simple sellsword. People with a deeply spiritual core, the Karui engage in worship of their ancestors, relying on the blessings and power of those who came before them to augment their formidable strength and stamina. Most Marauder character concepts will fall in one of three formats - a raw physical warrior, blessed with incredible strength (Physique), combat prowess (Fighting), and mental fortitude (Will); a shamanistic warrior-priest of the ancestors, whose strength and combat ability are augmented by wisdom from the ancestors (Lore) and the ability to call upon their power (Virtue-based stunts); and a berserk warrior who draws upon their own lifeblood to drive them beyond simple mortal capabilities (reflected best by Aspects and Stunts).
A Marauder knows death intimately; raised from a young age to be a warrior, they've fought wild beasts, hostile tribes, and the soldiers of the civilized parts of Oriath to hone their skills. They know that death always walks at their side, and they're not afraid to feed it the lives of others if the situation makes it necessary. Many refer to death as their dark brother, who will one day take them to meet the ancestors.
Most Marauders will tend to specialize in a particular kind of weapon, focusing on perfecting their ability to fight and kill with that implement, but some take a more general approach, preferring to rely on raw strength and speed to turn whatever they hold into a deadly implement. A few - mostly the most shamanistic of them - might even turn to the more magical forms of weaponry like wands to help augment the powers given to them by the ancestors.
Priority skills if building a Marauder will always be Physique and Fighting; the Karui have had a long time to get good at warfare and killing, after all. Most will also have a good Will, representative of the mental fortitude and personal discipline they have. The shamanistic type of Marauder who relies on the blessings of the ancestors will tend to be good with Lore, Virtue, and Notice. Those who rely heavily on the powers they can wield will need a high Virtue, as well.
Aspects will tend to reflect the savage nature of the Marauder; high concepts might include things such as Death's Dark Brother, Herald of the Ancestors, or Outcast Champion, depending on what flavor you want to give the character. Troubles can include things like Ruin Follows In My Footsteps, I Hear the Whispers Of The Dead, or Fire Fills My Blood.
Other Aspects should be shaped to fit what you want the Marauder to be. A savage berserker who has Death's Dark Brother and Ruin Follows In My Footsteps might also have Doors Or Bones All Break, I'll Rest When I'm Dead, and Even The Dead Fear Me as additional Aspects. A shamanistic Marauder whose High Concept is Herald of the Ancestors and whose Trouble is I Hear The Whispers Of The Dead might have Descendant of Kaom the Lost, Guide of Lost Souls, and I Bear the Burden of the Forgotten as added Aspects.
Some sample stunts might include things built off of Fighting or Physique for any Marauder; other stunts might be built off of Lore (for shamanistic Stunts that call upon ancestral totems) or Virtue. The Outcast Champion might have a Virtue stunt that permits them to create an Aspect of Burning on opponents they strike in melee combat, or Death's Dark Brother might have one for raising the dead as temporary allies.
Ultimately, Marauders should be physical powerhouses who know little of the meaning of fear, at least when they first wash up on Wraeclast's cursed shores. Whether empowered by brute fury, ancestral blessings, or the dark power of the Virtue Gems, they're a force to be reckoned with, able to bring the fight to almost anyone.
Next class conversion: The Ranger, a class built around agility, ranged combat, and animal cunning.
In order to create a Marauder using the Fate Core system, we have to look at what makes the Karui barbarian differ from a simple sellsword. People with a deeply spiritual core, the Karui engage in worship of their ancestors, relying on the blessings and power of those who came before them to augment their formidable strength and stamina. Most Marauder character concepts will fall in one of three formats - a raw physical warrior, blessed with incredible strength (Physique), combat prowess (Fighting), and mental fortitude (Will); a shamanistic warrior-priest of the ancestors, whose strength and combat ability are augmented by wisdom from the ancestors (Lore) and the ability to call upon their power (Virtue-based stunts); and a berserk warrior who draws upon their own lifeblood to drive them beyond simple mortal capabilities (reflected best by Aspects and Stunts).
A Marauder knows death intimately; raised from a young age to be a warrior, they've fought wild beasts, hostile tribes, and the soldiers of the civilized parts of Oriath to hone their skills. They know that death always walks at their side, and they're not afraid to feed it the lives of others if the situation makes it necessary. Many refer to death as their dark brother, who will one day take them to meet the ancestors.
Most Marauders will tend to specialize in a particular kind of weapon, focusing on perfecting their ability to fight and kill with that implement, but some take a more general approach, preferring to rely on raw strength and speed to turn whatever they hold into a deadly implement. A few - mostly the most shamanistic of them - might even turn to the more magical forms of weaponry like wands to help augment the powers given to them by the ancestors.
Priority skills if building a Marauder will always be Physique and Fighting; the Karui have had a long time to get good at warfare and killing, after all. Most will also have a good Will, representative of the mental fortitude and personal discipline they have. The shamanistic type of Marauder who relies on the blessings of the ancestors will tend to be good with Lore, Virtue, and Notice. Those who rely heavily on the powers they can wield will need a high Virtue, as well.
Aspects will tend to reflect the savage nature of the Marauder; high concepts might include things such as Death's Dark Brother, Herald of the Ancestors, or Outcast Champion, depending on what flavor you want to give the character. Troubles can include things like Ruin Follows In My Footsteps, I Hear the Whispers Of The Dead, or Fire Fills My Blood.
Other Aspects should be shaped to fit what you want the Marauder to be. A savage berserker who has Death's Dark Brother and Ruin Follows In My Footsteps might also have Doors Or Bones All Break, I'll Rest When I'm Dead, and Even The Dead Fear Me as additional Aspects. A shamanistic Marauder whose High Concept is Herald of the Ancestors and whose Trouble is I Hear The Whispers Of The Dead might have Descendant of Kaom the Lost, Guide of Lost Souls, and I Bear the Burden of the Forgotten as added Aspects.
Some sample stunts might include things built off of Fighting or Physique for any Marauder; other stunts might be built off of Lore (for shamanistic Stunts that call upon ancestral totems) or Virtue. The Outcast Champion might have a Virtue stunt that permits them to create an Aspect of Burning on opponents they strike in melee combat, or Death's Dark Brother might have one for raising the dead as temporary allies.
Ultimately, Marauders should be physical powerhouses who know little of the meaning of fear, at least when they first wash up on Wraeclast's cursed shores. Whether empowered by brute fury, ancestral blessings, or the dark power of the Virtue Gems, they're a force to be reckoned with, able to bring the fight to almost anyone.
Next class conversion: The Ranger, a class built around agility, ranged combat, and animal cunning.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Into the Concrete Jungle
Urban fantasy is a weird genre. In fiction, it's handy because it gives the author shorthand for things in a way that allows them to focus on the strange and unusual aspects of their stories. No need to describe the police officer and his uniform the way they might describe a king's royal guards; everyone knows what the police look like. Likewise they don't have to worry about describing common items, and it gets easy to describe people who are Important because we're all familiar with it.
It's trickier to do urban fantasy in a tabletop game; people tend to come to the table to escape the stress of reality, not to venture back into it. Much of the time it can be a fast trip into what amounts to a superhero game without the spandex or - if your group is inclined to melodrama - it can head into the well-trod road of angst that serves as the cliche form of a Vampire game. Still, it's worth considering urban fantasy once in a while if your group is tired of the routine settings. Here are a few reasons you might want to consider such a campaign.
Urban fantasy is all about home ground
Most of the hardest parts of running an urban fantasy game are already done for you. Ever struggle with maps for a game session? Just go look up blueprints for modern buildings and, if you use miniatures or play online, slap a grid overlay on them via your image editor of choice. Speaking of online play, or minis if you have a bit of time to cut out printed images and stick them on a base, you'll have no trouble finding icons to use simply by googling the jobs of the NPCs. Most common supernatural creatures can be found, too, either as handy art or as costumes for cosplay or LARPing. It leaves you, as GM, free to focus on the story and the unusual stuff that adds the fantasy to the urban part.
The familiar looks different when you change the lighting
In the same vein as the first reason, you can get a great deal of use out of taking completely mundane locations, people, and objects and brushing a little weirdness, mystery, and magic on them. The old theater that somehow stays open even though no one seems to watch the movies it shows can become the front for some supernatural faction. The person who always sits in the park all day becomes an observer for some outside group with an interest in the area - or a hapless bystander whose unwitting presence deters certain creatures from causing trouble. Museums, full of old objects, hold all kinds of oddities just waiting to be given some unexpected and unanticipated importance in some terrifying ritual. Anything unusual that you see around you can be made into something new just by adding an extra, unexpected layer to it.
Stories on demand by the power of the internet
It is absolutely amazing what you can find as story seeds for an urban fantasy campaign by using Google. Just do a search for Weird News and you can find entire websites - some more reputable than others - laden with news reports about strange and unusual events. Checking it for my region, one that leaps right out is a man crashing his car into a church, supposedly because he was angry with the pastor. But, in an urban fantasy game, that's clearly just an excuse. The man was a thrall to a ampire who had been driven off by the priest. The church was disrupting the flow of ley lines in the area and needed damaged to remove the influence. The man made a pact with a demon, and part of the cost was him desecrating the church. All these and more come to mind simply from one headline. It's an excellent resource.
Conspiracy Theory Central Exchange
Likewise, conspiracy theories - something almost as common on the internet as cat pictures and pornography - can serve as a fantastic resource for urban fantasy games. Most of them require more tweaking than the Weird News offerings, but they can suggest entire campaigns in and of themselves. Look up the conspiracy theories around the Denver Airport sometime and just see how many bizarre things there are that have been woven into a baffling tapestry by conspiracy theorists. If anything, your main work in dealing with these will be trimming them down and adjusting them to be less outlandish, over-the-top, and unrealistic.
It's a change of pace from slaying dragons and rescuing princesses
Not to say all high fantasy games revolve around that, or that sci-fi games tend to mimic Star Wars or Starship Troopers,, but if you play a particular type of game for long enough you can easily find yourself in a rut, getting bored doing something you theoretically enjoy. Urban fantasy can be a great breath of fresh air, letting you get out of old ruts and explore new ideas, with even the worn-in tropes being fairly fresh and interesting.
The greatest urban fantasy heroes come with a shotgun and baseball bat
Ordinarily, people rush to make a vampire, werewolf, wizard, or some other supernatural powerhouse when it comes to playing urban fantasy games. While this can be fun - particularly if you're doing a shot game - some of the greatest stories are going to come from the games where everyone is, at first, just a perfectly normal person who suddenly stumbles onto a whole new layer of the world that they never even imagined before. When a group comprised of an off-duty copy, a muscular construction worker, a nerdy university librarian, and the owner of a local coffee shop find that they have to face down an angry werewolf before it goes from picking off vagrants to slaughtering families in their sleep, it gets far more heroic than when a pair of vampires, a wizard, and a werewolf face off against a dragon. It's the story of the underdog - and pretty much everyone loves an underdog.
The world is full of wonders that we don't see because we're around them
Look at any city with a modern tower. The Space Needle, the Stratosphere, the Sears Tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, they're all things that are both visually impressive and generally unusual enough to be a notable landmark in their respective city. People who live around them hardly notice them, because they're normal. They're a perfect illustration of how we ignore things around us from simple familiarity, leaving architectural wonders in the background. Tap any of these - any city you pick to play almost certainly has things that are ignored and amazing - and transform them into an important place for your game world. Any of those towers I mentioned are perfect for ritual events (to be thwarted), climactic showdowns (with optional plunge from the peak for recurring villains of supernatural longevity), and even as a base of operations for both opponents and lucky heroes.
Old monsters become frightening again when cast in a new light
Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, trickster fae, and so on are old, familiar, and worn into such a rut they're forming their own canyons by now. Urban fantasy games can give them all a measure of new life, free to twist the boundaries popular culture has written for them. A vampire, far from being a dried-up and antiquated old lord from some ancient land, could easily become a CEO of a major corporation, the entire board of directors in the creature's thrall, keeping a ruthless grip on wealth and power that puts them beyond any reprisal by mundane means. A werewolf lives among the homeless vagrants, carefully selecting among them to form a pack of hungry predators; far from looking like wolves, they look like hungry alley dogs until they attack.
A ghost who can only be put to rest by having their remains buried in the cemetery from their days of life is forced to remain because a corporation bought the land with the church and cemetery and put a strip mall up over it; and the longer they go without being put to rest, the more violent the manifestations become. A gremlin, once a petty nuisance to mechanics, gets loose in a web cafe and soon the internet manifests a terrifyingly sapient worm infection that attacks whatever will cause the most havoc.
A demon turns up, having spent time studying psychology and the tricks of modern charlatans, and now runs a nascent megachurch dedicated to finding ways to explain every act of wickedness and depravity as sanctified and holy. The possibilities to augment and update classic creatures of horror and supernatural legend to the modern world border on the endless, and can easily create much deeper and more involved plots than any Monster of the Week escapade.
The new shape of the world can breed new monsters just as terrible as the old ones
As we advance as a society, and technology finds new methods to accomplish things, it brings with it the potential to create niches for new predators and new nightmares. No one could have predicted the damage humanity has wrought ecologically - but you can be sure there are, in an urban fantasy, nature spirits harmed and enraged by the damage. Elementals befouled with pollution, fae contaminated and twisted by the artifacts and debris of humanity, and even entirely new creatures spun from ruin and raw energy can come about. What will your players do when, while investigating missing people in a wetlands area, they come across an animate slick of oil and sewage that erupts into a tentacled thing reaching out to drown them, or when they find a nature spirit whose home has become contaminated with toxic metals to where they have jagged spurs of lead jutting from their fingertips and they weep tears of mercury?
The worst monster of all is still the closest to home, and everywhere
Really, this one should be a given, but it bears mentioning. The world is full of "But for the grace of (deity), there go I" stories of people who have fallen to miserable ends. In a world of urban fantasy, you can use this to full advantage - after being confronted by all manner of things like corrupt spirits and infestations of fae that feed on misery, after cleansing accidental manifestations of demons and putting down supernatural scavengers, the group finds their ultimate villain - and it's the middle manager from the local strip mall who found a grimoire and uses it without caring who it hurts, because they figure the world owes them some comfort and reward after whatever wrongs they feel the world has dealt them. They're not evil in any grand sense. They're the worst kind of evil - the petty kind that causes misery out of proportion simply because they perpetrator doesn't know or care about the results of their actions.
Do it right, and your players may look at one another and wonder if one of them has caused unwitting harm like that.
It's trickier to do urban fantasy in a tabletop game; people tend to come to the table to escape the stress of reality, not to venture back into it. Much of the time it can be a fast trip into what amounts to a superhero game without the spandex or - if your group is inclined to melodrama - it can head into the well-trod road of angst that serves as the cliche form of a Vampire game. Still, it's worth considering urban fantasy once in a while if your group is tired of the routine settings. Here are a few reasons you might want to consider such a campaign.
Urban fantasy is all about home ground
Most of the hardest parts of running an urban fantasy game are already done for you. Ever struggle with maps for a game session? Just go look up blueprints for modern buildings and, if you use miniatures or play online, slap a grid overlay on them via your image editor of choice. Speaking of online play, or minis if you have a bit of time to cut out printed images and stick them on a base, you'll have no trouble finding icons to use simply by googling the jobs of the NPCs. Most common supernatural creatures can be found, too, either as handy art or as costumes for cosplay or LARPing. It leaves you, as GM, free to focus on the story and the unusual stuff that adds the fantasy to the urban part.
The familiar looks different when you change the lighting
In the same vein as the first reason, you can get a great deal of use out of taking completely mundane locations, people, and objects and brushing a little weirdness, mystery, and magic on them. The old theater that somehow stays open even though no one seems to watch the movies it shows can become the front for some supernatural faction. The person who always sits in the park all day becomes an observer for some outside group with an interest in the area - or a hapless bystander whose unwitting presence deters certain creatures from causing trouble. Museums, full of old objects, hold all kinds of oddities just waiting to be given some unexpected and unanticipated importance in some terrifying ritual. Anything unusual that you see around you can be made into something new just by adding an extra, unexpected layer to it.
Stories on demand by the power of the internet
It is absolutely amazing what you can find as story seeds for an urban fantasy campaign by using Google. Just do a search for Weird News and you can find entire websites - some more reputable than others - laden with news reports about strange and unusual events. Checking it for my region, one that leaps right out is a man crashing his car into a church, supposedly because he was angry with the pastor. But, in an urban fantasy game, that's clearly just an excuse. The man was a thrall to a ampire who had been driven off by the priest. The church was disrupting the flow of ley lines in the area and needed damaged to remove the influence. The man made a pact with a demon, and part of the cost was him desecrating the church. All these and more come to mind simply from one headline. It's an excellent resource.
Conspiracy Theory Central Exchange
Likewise, conspiracy theories - something almost as common on the internet as cat pictures and pornography - can serve as a fantastic resource for urban fantasy games. Most of them require more tweaking than the Weird News offerings, but they can suggest entire campaigns in and of themselves. Look up the conspiracy theories around the Denver Airport sometime and just see how many bizarre things there are that have been woven into a baffling tapestry by conspiracy theorists. If anything, your main work in dealing with these will be trimming them down and adjusting them to be less outlandish, over-the-top, and unrealistic.
It's a change of pace from slaying dragons and rescuing princesses
Not to say all high fantasy games revolve around that, or that sci-fi games tend to mimic Star Wars or Starship Troopers,, but if you play a particular type of game for long enough you can easily find yourself in a rut, getting bored doing something you theoretically enjoy. Urban fantasy can be a great breath of fresh air, letting you get out of old ruts and explore new ideas, with even the worn-in tropes being fairly fresh and interesting.
The greatest urban fantasy heroes come with a shotgun and baseball bat
Ordinarily, people rush to make a vampire, werewolf, wizard, or some other supernatural powerhouse when it comes to playing urban fantasy games. While this can be fun - particularly if you're doing a shot game - some of the greatest stories are going to come from the games where everyone is, at first, just a perfectly normal person who suddenly stumbles onto a whole new layer of the world that they never even imagined before. When a group comprised of an off-duty copy, a muscular construction worker, a nerdy university librarian, and the owner of a local coffee shop find that they have to face down an angry werewolf before it goes from picking off vagrants to slaughtering families in their sleep, it gets far more heroic than when a pair of vampires, a wizard, and a werewolf face off against a dragon. It's the story of the underdog - and pretty much everyone loves an underdog.
The world is full of wonders that we don't see because we're around them
Look at any city with a modern tower. The Space Needle, the Stratosphere, the Sears Tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, they're all things that are both visually impressive and generally unusual enough to be a notable landmark in their respective city. People who live around them hardly notice them, because they're normal. They're a perfect illustration of how we ignore things around us from simple familiarity, leaving architectural wonders in the background. Tap any of these - any city you pick to play almost certainly has things that are ignored and amazing - and transform them into an important place for your game world. Any of those towers I mentioned are perfect for ritual events (to be thwarted), climactic showdowns (with optional plunge from the peak for recurring villains of supernatural longevity), and even as a base of operations for both opponents and lucky heroes.
Old monsters become frightening again when cast in a new light
Werewolves, vampires, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, trickster fae, and so on are old, familiar, and worn into such a rut they're forming their own canyons by now. Urban fantasy games can give them all a measure of new life, free to twist the boundaries popular culture has written for them. A vampire, far from being a dried-up and antiquated old lord from some ancient land, could easily become a CEO of a major corporation, the entire board of directors in the creature's thrall, keeping a ruthless grip on wealth and power that puts them beyond any reprisal by mundane means. A werewolf lives among the homeless vagrants, carefully selecting among them to form a pack of hungry predators; far from looking like wolves, they look like hungry alley dogs until they attack.
A ghost who can only be put to rest by having their remains buried in the cemetery from their days of life is forced to remain because a corporation bought the land with the church and cemetery and put a strip mall up over it; and the longer they go without being put to rest, the more violent the manifestations become. A gremlin, once a petty nuisance to mechanics, gets loose in a web cafe and soon the internet manifests a terrifyingly sapient worm infection that attacks whatever will cause the most havoc.
A demon turns up, having spent time studying psychology and the tricks of modern charlatans, and now runs a nascent megachurch dedicated to finding ways to explain every act of wickedness and depravity as sanctified and holy. The possibilities to augment and update classic creatures of horror and supernatural legend to the modern world border on the endless, and can easily create much deeper and more involved plots than any Monster of the Week escapade.
The new shape of the world can breed new monsters just as terrible as the old ones
As we advance as a society, and technology finds new methods to accomplish things, it brings with it the potential to create niches for new predators and new nightmares. No one could have predicted the damage humanity has wrought ecologically - but you can be sure there are, in an urban fantasy, nature spirits harmed and enraged by the damage. Elementals befouled with pollution, fae contaminated and twisted by the artifacts and debris of humanity, and even entirely new creatures spun from ruin and raw energy can come about. What will your players do when, while investigating missing people in a wetlands area, they come across an animate slick of oil and sewage that erupts into a tentacled thing reaching out to drown them, or when they find a nature spirit whose home has become contaminated with toxic metals to where they have jagged spurs of lead jutting from their fingertips and they weep tears of mercury?
The worst monster of all is still the closest to home, and everywhere
Really, this one should be a given, but it bears mentioning. The world is full of "But for the grace of (deity), there go I" stories of people who have fallen to miserable ends. In a world of urban fantasy, you can use this to full advantage - after being confronted by all manner of things like corrupt spirits and infestations of fae that feed on misery, after cleansing accidental manifestations of demons and putting down supernatural scavengers, the group finds their ultimate villain - and it's the middle manager from the local strip mall who found a grimoire and uses it without caring who it hurts, because they figure the world owes them some comfort and reward after whatever wrongs they feel the world has dealt them. They're not evil in any grand sense. They're the worst kind of evil - the petty kind that causes misery out of proportion simply because they perpetrator doesn't know or care about the results of their actions.
Do it right, and your players may look at one another and wonder if one of them has caused unwitting harm like that.
Friday, July 3, 2015
Seeds - Eclipse Phase: The Mime Cult
The setting of Eclipse Phase is full of all kinds of things, both wondrous and horrible. Earth is essentially gone, the old way of doing things is collapsing, and humanity, despite being 99% wiped out, is still fighting with one another over the Right Way of doing things. Small surprise that some people turn their backs on being human - or transhuman - entirely, then. The Mime Cult is one such group, a small collection of exhumans who use high-bandwidth mesh links, tactical network software, and some rather hazardous psychosurgery to remove their need to communicate.
Operating in Venusian space, the Mime Cult appears, on the surface, to be an old-fashioned group of entertainers who get by on a mix of credits and rep score, performing skits in public without ever saying a word. On all public-access feeds, the members - each one with their skin pigmented to perfectly match mime face paint - appear to stay in character as harmless performers who simply want to bring some levity into the world.
In the hidden spaces of the habitats where they're active, the Mime Cult carries out the other part of their plans. Darkcasting rigs and desktop cornucopia machines crammed into disused maintenance areas where only service bots go allow the members of the group to ply their trade and add to their ranks - invisibility cloaks and cheaply made synths with chameleon skin allow them to abduct the poor, the destitute, and the unwanted from areas with spotty coverage, dragging them to the darkcasting rigs to send their minds to a small tin can hab swinging at the very edge of Venusian space.
This habitat, which appears derelict from the outside, is crammed with simulspace servers. New arrivals are quickly fed into extreme psychosurgical modification programs, carving and molding the original ego into a twisted mockery of itself. For most, it takes only a few days of real time before they emerge with their minds radically altered to accept the dictates of the Mime Cult; by the time they're sent back to the original habitat to be loaded into their newly-pigmented old morph, little remains of the original ego.
Other than the kidnapping, the group might be only a modest threat were it not for the fact that the original Mime Cultists are a trio of exsurgents, their minds spliced by the TITANs to unify them. In constant contact via their mesh inserts, they're a three-faced god to the cult, and they include a subtle strain of the exsurgent virus in the indoctrination procedure. Mime Cultists are driven to spread like a slow cancer, disguising their predations behind a facade of harmless entertainment, until they reach a critical mass in a given habitat.
At that point, the Mime Cult metastasizes, going from a benign-seeming intrusion to a nightmarish vector of destruction. A memetic trigger sweeps through the group, causing them to trigger dormant nanite hives installed while the egos were being modified; in a matter of hours, the modified morphs grow heavy armor, still pigmented to look like mimes. Their fingers give way to lengthy claws, reinforced to let them tear through body armor, while their muscles and nerves are rebuilt to make them stronger and faster.
Once a Mime Cult cell metastasizes, the members sweep through the population of a habitat, slaughtering anyone they encounter and harvesting their cortical stacks to be sent for modification. Once a habitat has been emptied of inhabitants, the cultists upload themselves, leaving delta forks behind that quickly compromise the habitat and upset its orbit to send it tumbling into the atmosphere of Venus, hiding their tracks with distress calls and emergency messages about system failures.
The Mime Cult so far has evaded notice by Firewall, but the destruction of three habitats has started to draw attention; the group is the only thing that the three events have in common, and sentinel teams have been tasked with researching the situation.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Fate of Exiles: Skills
Skills are at the heart of Fate Core; the default list often needs tweaked a bit to fit a given setting, so we'll be going through the list and modifying them to fit the cursed land of Wraeclast. Some may also get a tweak to how they function in terms of the four actions, and we'll be calling back to this list when looking at the various classes and how they could be rendered for Fate of Exiles.
Athletics - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Burglary Theft - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Contacts - Overcome, Create an Advantage,Defend
Crafts - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Deceive - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Drive - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Empathy - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Fight - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, Defend
Investigate - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Lore - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Notice - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Physique - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Provoke - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Rapport - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Resources - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Shoot - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Stealth - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Will - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
One skill's name changed, one skill altered in function, one skill removed. Why? Because Theft makes more sense as a skill concept here - you're not going to be burgling in this game, you're going to be doing snatch-and-dash, opening old chests, and trying to palm things; behavior of a sneak-thief in an alley, not a burglar.
Contacts loses Defend as an action because in this setting, your contacts aren't allies our a social network; they're the other exiles, the ones who are scared to leave the dubious protection of the hiding-holes they've found. They can get you supplies and information, letting you overcome and create advantages, but they're not going to be there to watch your back against anyone else.
Drive is just gone; the only way from A to B is by foot. Getting from B back to A can be easier - portals and the ancient wayshrines provide methods of getting back to what passes for civilization that are a great deal easier than slogging along back through miles of mud and rotting corpses.
In addition, we'll be adding a few skills.
Acrobatics - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Throw - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Virtue - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Acrobatics is a skill intended to be complementary to Athletics; where Athletics read as a skill of strength, stamina, and speed, Acrobatics becomes a skill of raw agility, dexterity, and physical grace. It can be used to dodge hazards, set the character up in strange and advantageous locations, and enable them to bob, weave, and dive out of harm's way.
Throw is meant to complement Shoot, the latter being a skill of bows and crossbows while the former speaks of throwing knives, hand axes, javelins, and the like. Simple uses of throwing might include hurling knives to make handholds, which could either Overcome an obstacle or Create an Advantage; create an Aspect like Sliced Across the Hamstring on an opponent; or simply be used to hit people in other zones.
Virtue is a skill that serves as a base for the effects of the active skills of Path of Exile, the Virtue Gems. Ranks in this skill indicate the character is an accomplished user of the Virtue Gems, with a wider range of unusual options than someone who simply relies on their skill at arms or their quick wits to get them out of trouble.
Other than these changes, the skill tree from Fate Core remains intact; the specific effects of the Virtue skill will come in a later post talking about the Gems, their use, and how to mimic those effects in Fate with extras and stunts.
Athletics - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Contacts - Overcome, Create an Advantage,
Crafts - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Deceive - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Empathy - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Fight - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, Defend
Investigate - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Lore - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Notice - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Physique - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Provoke - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Rapport - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Resources - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Shoot - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Stealth - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Will - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
One skill's name changed, one skill altered in function, one skill removed. Why? Because Theft makes more sense as a skill concept here - you're not going to be burgling in this game, you're going to be doing snatch-and-dash, opening old chests, and trying to palm things; behavior of a sneak-thief in an alley, not a burglar.
Contacts loses Defend as an action because in this setting, your contacts aren't allies our a social network; they're the other exiles, the ones who are scared to leave the dubious protection of the hiding-holes they've found. They can get you supplies and information, letting you overcome and create advantages, but they're not going to be there to watch your back against anyone else.
Drive is just gone; the only way from A to B is by foot. Getting from B back to A can be easier - portals and the ancient wayshrines provide methods of getting back to what passes for civilization that are a great deal easier than slogging along back through miles of mud and rotting corpses.
In addition, we'll be adding a few skills.
Acrobatics - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Defend
Throw - Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack
Virtue - Overcome, Create an Advantage
Acrobatics is a skill intended to be complementary to Athletics; where Athletics read as a skill of strength, stamina, and speed, Acrobatics becomes a skill of raw agility, dexterity, and physical grace. It can be used to dodge hazards, set the character up in strange and advantageous locations, and enable them to bob, weave, and dive out of harm's way.
Throw is meant to complement Shoot, the latter being a skill of bows and crossbows while the former speaks of throwing knives, hand axes, javelins, and the like. Simple uses of throwing might include hurling knives to make handholds, which could either Overcome an obstacle or Create an Advantage; create an Aspect like Sliced Across the Hamstring on an opponent; or simply be used to hit people in other zones.
Virtue is a skill that serves as a base for the effects of the active skills of Path of Exile, the Virtue Gems. Ranks in this skill indicate the character is an accomplished user of the Virtue Gems, with a wider range of unusual options than someone who simply relies on their skill at arms or their quick wits to get them out of trouble.
Other than these changes, the skill tree from Fate Core remains intact; the specific effects of the Virtue skill will come in a later post talking about the Gems, their use, and how to mimic those effects in Fate with extras and stunts.
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