Nova Praxis Review

I’m going to kick off a new cycle of reviews with a game that I finally finished reading (it’s only be the better part of a year): Nova Praxis. With that, I’m also trying to get a rhythm and structure down to how I approach reviews so they’re informative without just rattling off a bunch of facts about the product (like how many pages are devoted to this or that, or dry chapter breakdowns). Most importantly, I’m eschewing any kind of rating scale at all.

Overview

Nova Praxis is the latest game from Voidstar Studios. It features a transhumanist-style, post-cyberpunk setting. Earth was pretty much rendered uninhabitable by a grey-goo type scenario, and mankind has since populated the stars. Society has changed, ideologies have changed, but ultimately people remain the same. The player characters are presumed to be edgerunner/troubleshooter types, either living on the edges of or beholden to a tarnished utopia. There are cybernetics, sleeves (the ability to download a consciousness into a new body), virtual reality, drones, and minds that exist only as software.

Nova Praxis’ Fate Pedigree

Before going any further, some comment on Nova Praxis’ flavor of Fate is probably useful. Nova Praxis uses a variant of Strands of Fate, which is itself a Fate variant. The game was apparently developed somewhat before and concurrently with Fate Core, but it sits firmly on the Strands side of the divide. Mostly this means the system tends to be a little more “crunchy” than Fate Core in terms of modifiers and extra systems...yet at its heart it’s still Fate (4DF, aspects, stress tracks, etc.). Overall, Nova Praxis is not as dense with subsystems as, say, Starblazer Adventures but still features a number of them. There are some departures from Strands that slide Nova Praxis a little closer to Fate Core. It eschews abilities for skills, and goes back to using stunts instead of advantages. It also reduces the number of character aspects to start with to 5. These changes bode well for Fate Core fans wanting a science fiction game, as it makes adapting it all the easier, but the game is solid on its own.

The Book

Well, in this case, the "enhanced PDF". Hands down this is one of the best looking and most feature-packed PDFs of any game I’ve read. The experience on a tablet is likely even better, but I only have a PC. Every page has a side menu on the left for accessing chapters and buttons on the right for moving from page to page. Chapter headers have menu buttons to go to specific subjects that seamlessly take you to the text. Every other PDF I have looks primitive in comparison. Plus, it’s fully bookmarked. There’s an appendix with a variety of NPC templates, glossary and the aforementioned character sheet. The artwork, as seen in the screen captures scattered throughout this review, is full-color, evocative and very high quality.

My copy has a slight problem with the back and forth arrows turning weird colors when I click on them. I may have an outdated PDF, or it could be my version of Acrobat or even my PC. If the case it is an outdated PDF that’s no fault of Voidstar’s, who have been on-the-ball with updating the PDF and getting it out to customers. I probably just haven’t downloaded an up-to-date version. My only real complaint is that the borders seem kind of busy, but not in a “ZOMG, why’d they layer the text over an image of Donald Rumsfeld?!” way. They don’t really detract from reading.

The Setting

The first few chapters of the book are dedicated to the setting’s history, locations, culture and politics. The setting is compelling, given that the Singularity kind of came and went with the birth and unexplained shutdown of the first true AI, named Mimir. Prior to shutting down it essentially spit out a ton of technological advancements (called Mimir-tech) - so many, and so advanced, that there are entire disciplines dedicated to decoding its archives. This technology is where pretty much everything comes from in Nova Praxis. This leads to humanity taking to the stars, but even in the wake of the end of scarcity and unparalleled technological advancement, doesn’t do anything to end conflict - it just makes it worse.

The end of a bitter war between two superpowers results in one side releasing the technophage - nanites that reconstruct matter into war machines. The technophage spirals out of control, and mankind is forced to try to fight it, then try to stop it, and eventually run from it. Earth is abandoned, leaving billions to die. The governments of the two superpowers become all but insolvent, forcing the largest corporations to have to step up and take charge. This leads to the formation of the Coalition, and the establishment of the current house system.

Coalition society is post-scarcity, at least in terms of ensuring that what is left of humanity has a baseline standard of living. The result is a society where the citizens have all of their basic needs provided for and have the freedom to do absolutely nothing - in exchange for near constant monitoring of every aspect of their lives. The Coalition economy runs almost solely on reputation, with those who contribute the most having access to more wealth. Predictably, there are those who who are unwilling or unable to live under the aegis of the Coalition and the Houses - they are called Apostates. Some hold-outs even try to continue a guerrilla war against the Coalition. Obviously, the Apostates, Houses and others exploit as many loopholes in the system that they can - otherwise it would be a pretty boring place to tell stories in.

Overall, I find the setting to be perfectly serviceable but not “Wow, that’s really awesome!” inspired. The aesthetics are good, and there are good justifications for why there would be groups of troublemakers running around stirring shit up. The structure of the Coalition with the Houses falls a little flat for me, but that’s mostly a taste preference. What the setting has in spades is a good mix of general tropes, ranging from a cyberpunk dystopia to Mass Effect-style space opera. It’s easy to drop things in that match any number of themes. I could see doing something in the vein of the Unincorporated Man, or even Blindsight, just as easily as a simple cyberpunk-style run with a Mr. Johnston and a double-cross and everything.

The Rules

Nova Praxis is basically Fate with a few differences. In case you’re not familiar with Fate, here’s the general rundown I included in my Fate Core review:

• Uses Fate (or Fudge, same thing) dice, specifically four (notated as 4DF). Two sides are marked with a +, two sides with a -, and two sides are blank. They are read by adding up the results, so ++ - is a +1.
• Skills are rated from 0 to 6 or higher. They add to the die roll. There are no attributes.
• Most importantly, uses descriptive "tags" called aspects. Aspects represent things that are important - to the character, to the scene, even to the campaign - and can be used to justify influencing the story or results such as getting bonuses to die rolls, rerolling bad rolls, creating a special effect or merely being used as a justification for an action. Aspects can be used by (called invoking) and against (called compelling) characters, and characters can take actions that will add new aspects into play.
• It uses a currency called Fate Points that players spend to use their character's aspects (called invoking). Players receive Fate Points when their aspects are used against them (called a compel).

The differences in Strands of Fate mostly revolve around nomenclature, the use of aspects and some specific cases regarding die rolls. Rolls that succeed over the difficulty can generate Spin, which follows the standard pattern of allowing the player to create a short-lived aspect. Rolls that fail to generate enough shifts generate Stall, which can result in a negative penalty or just something bad happening - a short-lived, negative aspect. Likewise, situational modifiers can be positive or negative, and compels can be used to impose a penalty on rolls. The game also multiple scopes for aspects, and doesn't allow more than one aspect from any one scope to be used on rolls. The system also keeps the concept of Persistent Aspects from Strands of Fate.

Since the game sits on a balance (and a rather nice one) between more traditional role-playing systems and Fate Core (which I’m taking as the “standard” to compare it to), there are a number of subsystems and specialized rules. For example, there are rules for sweeping beam weapons, falling, poisons and diseases, etc. Personally I’ve kind of moved away from needing or wanting these types of rules, but they are definitely useful as baseline examples for how to handle various situations that can come up in play.

There are two subsystems stand out: Rep-Ratings and Sleeves. Both of them are tied intrinsically to the transhuman nature of the setting, and so are totally appropriate to be given focus with their own rules.

The character’s Rep-Rating is an abstraction of the complex system that exists in the setting for tracking a person’s contributions to culture and society. Rep-Ratings are used in place of money, as well as calling in favors. They can also be used to limit membership or acceptance into various social institutions, schools, etc. People can give one another bumps or hits to their rep ratings pretty much at will, although it affects their own Rep-Rating when they do so.

Sleeves are new bodies that a mind can be downloaded into. They come in two types: biosleeves and cybersleeves. In order to utilize them, a character needs to undergo Apotheosis - effectively digitizing their mind. There are a number of stock sleeves available for characters, each with a cost, aspects, physical skills, built in augmentations, points for customization and any special rules. Not all characters are Apotheosized, although many augmentations can be purchased without the need for a sleeve.

Character Creation

As part of this review I’ve created a character, straight out of the rules and following the steps listed in the book. Nova Praxis comes with a form-fillable character sheet at the end of the PDF, and the same sheet is available as a stand-alone PDF. You can see the completed character here.

One thing I like about character creation in Nova Praxis is that various components - such as skills - are listed right there in the appropriate step. There’s lot a not of flipping between sections. The only exception is stunts, which makes sense. If they were listed with the stunt selection step, you’d just have to flip past all of them to get to the next section.

Unlike Fate Core, Nova Praxis does not include the character concept as one of its aspects. What it does with aspects though is something I’ve always liked: the aspect alphabet. While not hard rules on what the aspects have to be, they provide a nice guideline for the kinds of aspects that make well-rounded characters. The aspect alphabet goes in a bucket list of cool things to do for any Fate game, along with the mad-libs style template for phrasing invokes and compels from Fate Core.

Beyond aspects, characters have a starting state: Pure, Sleeved or as a SIM (basically software). The inclusion of an option and support for playing a character that is basically pure software is really interesting, as SIMs can control surveillance systems, download themselves into sleeves, and control drones. Each state has it’s own benefits in terms of bonus skill ratings, refresh and free stunts. After the state is determined, the player chooses skills. There are 20 skills total, plus three physical skills. The separation of the physical skills seems like it was a good way of dealing with characters that can have a wide-range of physical abilities (or, in the case of SIMs, none at all). Likewise, sleeves and drones have at the very least their own allocations of physical skill ranks.

To make it easier to distribute skill ranks, there are three skill sets (Specialist, Expert, and Generalist). The skill ranks between the sets are not the same - Specialist grants 22 ranks, with the highest skill rank at 5. Expert grants 30 with a max rank of 4, while Generalist gives 38 and a max rank of 3.

Finally you choose stunts, determine your character’s allegiance, choose gear and calculate starting Rep-Rating and stress boxes.

When creating a character I ran into an annoyance and a couple of issues. The annoyance was the character sheet - while it covers all the basics, it could have really used dedicated spaces for the character’s current state and allegiance. As it stands I jammed them under Notes. That’s relatively minor.

One of the issues was when calculating Physical stress. The first time that it's explicitly stated that humans are Size 0 is on page 151, under "Lifting Things" and there is no size chart in the game aside from vehicles (which starts at Size 1). It took some searching to find this out, and only after that I remembered that humans are Size 0 in Strands of Fate. Again, this may be changed in any revised PDF that may exist, and it's far from a showstopper. Still the character creation process is fairly straightforward, and the layout and writing make it relatively painless (aside from the dilemma I face any time I create a character in a vacuum).

Finally, there’s choosing starting gear. The method used to determine how much gear the character has is to determine the highest cost that the character can purchase and then choose one piece of gear for each step down to 0. So if, like my character, the starting value was 7 I would choose one piece of gear that costs 7, then 6, then 5, etc. I was barely able to squeeze in the types of items I thought this character would have, and had to do a lot of rearranging to fit in with the n = n - 1 pattern. The personal computer had to go in a slot one higher than it should have (so I added an aspect modification, which increased the cost by 1), and I left the 1 and 0 slots empty. To be fair, I restricted gear purchases only to what was actually listed without making anything up, which might be an unrealistic situation (more on the gear selection below).

Gear

There is a whole chapter devoted to gear, and it gives some decent guidelines on restricted items, modifying gear, augmentations, as well as building sleeves, drones, and vehicles. The examples are rather sparse for weapons and equipment (one of the reasons that I struggled with equipping my character - I wanted to do it straight out of the book without adding anything). Strands of Fate actually has a slightly more varied equipment list, with a few items that would definitely have been useful in Nova Praxis (such as equipment kits).

Now I’m not a gearophile, but when there is an equipment list I like to see a good mix of generalized gear and special, setting-specific items. For a game like Nova Praxis, this would have been especially helpful. Personally, I would just wind up filling in the blanks with items from Strands of Fate, or other games such as Blue Planet, Jovian Chronicles, etc. Similarly, there are only a handful of sample drones and vehicles given. While the rules are there to build your own, it would be nice to see at least a small variety of stock vehicles for immediate use, as well as to get a feel for how “canon” vehicles and starships are statted out.

Some Room For Improvement

There are a few things I would have liked with a little more meat in Nova Praxis. First, some more utilitarian illustrations or description to give a better feel for the setting. One thing that I find with some settings is the zoom level is far enough out that there’s no real impression of how things are “day to day”. In contrast, Blue Planet does a good job of conveying what life on Poseidon is like in just the Player's Guide. The same goes for Jovian Chronicles in terms of living in various installations, what shipboard life is like etc. I suppose the difference is that both of those game lines are well developed with multiple books, while Nova Praxis packs everything into one. Still Voidstar might have included a few zone maps or illustrations of locations, vessels, stations, etc. The same goes for more example vehicles. Similarly, while each House has it's specialties listed there's little indication if there's any overlap. Is House Dalianis the only starship manufacturer? Does House Jinzhan manufacture them and, if so, how are they different? Likewise, I thought that the information on compilers was a bit on the skeletal side - enough to grok how they affect the setting and are used, but still leaving me with a couple of questions (particularly regarding PCs purchasing them).

tl;dr

Nova Praxis is a solid post-cyberpunk, transhumanist style roleplaying game. For anyone familiar with the genre it doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but it does offer a good foundation for nearly any style of game that a group might want to run. While the setting could definitely work with nearly any system with minimum fuss, the tailored version of Strands of Fate that it is built on serves the game very well. The PDF is extremely well designed and organized, even if the links are a little on the busy side - just not enough to be a true distraction.

Nova Praxis is available from DriveThruRPG for $14.99, as well as in digital and hard copy from the Void Star store.

Cara Gray'on (sample character)

Cara Gray'on is a Joanite Templar from a minor offshoot of the Uhan'on clan. She was a Blade for number of years, serving along the Seven Fingers. While leading a raid on a Serf settlement in the No Man's Land between Vimary and Hl'kar, Cara and her fellow Blades were attacked by Z'bri defending the village. Many of the Joanites died in the first few minutes of the battle, and the survivors sought refuge in a mostly collapsed ruin. Cara defeated a monstrosity made up of the corpses of her Joanite sisters in single combat and,  unlocking an unknown potential for powerful Synthesis, successfully drove back the Melanis Iv'chet leading the defenders. For her devotion and bravery, Joan made Cara a Templar on the spot - an unusual, but not unheard of, move on the Fatima's part. For Cara it was a bittersweet triumph, as her longtime companion Selia was killed in the battle.

Since becoming a Templar, Cara has joined the small number of voices speaking out against Judge Cylix Seth'on and the burgeoning Watch. She believes the creation of the Watch was misguided at best and a blatant power grab at worst. She sees what happened to her in Hl'kar as a symptom of a Nation that is becoming complacent and opening itself up to a large-scale incursion by the Z'bri. Her opposition to the Watch has made her a small number of influential allies in the Grand Council, but also attracted the attention of much more powerful political adversaries in the form of both Cylix Seth'on and Shaman Storm Cry. Of late Cara has noticed that Joanites Blades are disappearing in small numbers - not enough to raise suspicion that it is nothing other than the normal risks Blades take, but still enough to worry her. All of these factors are making it harder and harder for her to ignore her principles when she sees abuse by the Watch or remain silent while Joanite battle readiness deteriorates.

Character Aspects

• Templar of Joan
• Tribal
• Opposes the Watch
• Handpicked by Joan
• "The Z'bri cannot be ignored"
• Blames Herself For Selia's Death

Specialty Aspects

• Joanite (Strength)
• Devotion (Dream)
• Fury (Dream)
• Exceptionally Strong Dreamer (Willpower)
• Blade Blessed By Joan (Resources)
• Many Sisters Within the Blades (Resources)
• Blinded By Principles (Persuasion)

Abilities
Physical: Agility: 2; Endurance: 2; Perception: 2; Strength 3
Mental: Craft: 1; Knowledge: 2; Reasoning: 2; Willpower: 2
Social: Deception: 1; Empathy: 2; Persuasion: 2; Resources: 1
Affinity: Dream: 3

Advantages
Dreamer

Power Advantages:
Synthesis
Rotes:
Battle
Force

Sneaksy

I was finally able to start Dishonored last night. Mental note: when trying to configure a hard drive and a little voice keeps telling me "You've done this before" don't answer, "Yeah, so why isn't this working?" and keep bashing my head against a wall for over an hour. It means you've done this before and there's a drive with Windows installed on it in the desk drawer, already configured, from the last time the SSD died.

Dishonored so far is very much in the same vein as Thief, which makes me pretty happy. Stealth games are typically so much better than regular old FPS frag-fests, and the Thief series is one of my all-time favorites .I would go further and say Dishonored is a perfect bookend for the Thief series (at least until a new one comes out, hopefully next year). I was able to slip right in to Garrett mode, and the guards seemed like old friends, just with different slang and new tunes to whistle. It was liking putting on a nicely worn-in pair of old boots.

One of the things I miss about Thief is the light gem. This one little UI element, indicating how illuminated your character is, helped immensely in remaining stealthy. A few times it even reminded me I still had a weapon drawn ("I'm totally in the dark, why isn't the gem black? Oh, I still have my sword out."). Deus Ex: Human Revolution was able to make up for the lack of a light gem by having augmentations for displaying what direction the enemy is looking and their alertness level. Dishonored has a similar power, called Dark Vision.

Playing video games - especially good ones - makes me think about roleplaying games and how their concepts and subsystems might work in a roleplaying environment. When well done, video games excel at setting tone and mood. I've wanted to run a Thief-like game for a very long time, borrowing stylistic elements and tone, but it's always seemed hard to get the feel right. One concern is the genre wouldn't seem to lend itself well to multiple characters, since they are almost always very solitary. This is hardly a huge deal, and I might tackle it in a later post. But the most important thing is stealth has to be done right - possibly even as a mini-game.

Stress Tracks...Again?

Coming at it from a FATE perspective (specifically, Strands of Fate), my first instinct is, "Stress track!" Our sneaksy characters would have a Stealth custom stress track. I'm thinking it would have stress boxes equal to something like: (Deception + Agility + Other Modifiers) - Size. The character's own actions and movements mark off stress boxes, with Consequences representing miscalculations or other events ranging from "Stepped on a stick" to "Knocked over a box" to "Caught in the open". Stealth stress boxes clear at the end of the scene, but there might be actions which could clear some as well.

As an alternative, or even a counterpart, guards and other characters may have an Alertness stress track to represent how alert they are. An Alertness track is a little trickier, because it runs "backwards". More alert characters would have a smaller track, while distracted or less alert characters would have a larger one. One solution would be to have the track start at a fixed value - let's say 6, but it could possibly vary by the quality of the guard - and subtract Perception plus any other modifiers. Consequences would reflect increased levels of alertness, from "I think I heard something" to "I should check that out" to "Raise the alarm!". Like the Stealth track, Alertness Consequences would clear over time or after performing specific actions. For both Stealth and Alertness, various Edges and Determinations can be set to represent specialized equipment or the mental state of the stealth character or the guards (setting up the classic situation where the guard is always trying to catch the thief).

These ideas, or something similar, combined together could create a mini-game where stealth is the focus of the action, almost like "stealth combat".

Zones

The final consideration for a stealth-centered game is how zones are set up. By necessity the map would look a lot different than one set up for a swashbuckling fight or a shoot out. It would probably outline zones of various light levels, little or lots of cover, or alternate routes such as overhead or underneath an area, etc. Aspects like Intermittent Light or Hard Metal Floor or Soft Carpeting would round out a good stealth zone map. Combined with some stealth track and some alert guards, this looks like a promising framework for all of the sneaksy stuff I'd need in an rpg.

Vimary Zones and Locations

Finally, I completed my write-up of various zones and locations from Vimary. More accurately, I decided to not include Distance stress tracks for the locations. My intention is still to use them, but they a) were a pain to write up and b) I'm actually thinking they shouldn't be set in stone. It's probably a lot better to set Distance stress tracks depending on the journey, time of year, and other circumstances so that they can be varied for each trip (or ignored completely if need be). Anyway, without further ado you can grab the document below. An updated Vimary zone map will soon follow.

Vimary Zones and Locations

Updated Conversion Doc

I've updated the conversion doc with some clarifications on Supplies and Barter. I've also revised the travel rules to include the Distance stress track and some clarifications, and included a method for exploration to use the new random exploration tables.

New shiny random exploration tables!

I have completed completely revising and rethinking the random exploration tables, and this is the result. I like them so much better than the previous ones. They may actually be suitable for random generation of modern cities with some modifications. These are going to be really awesome to use once I start a game (which is hopefully going to be shortly).

I just can't leave well enough alone (Exploration, part 2)

So I've been chewing and chewing on my tables, trying to reduce the number of tables and make things flow the way I want them to. I crunched a whole bunch of data on land use from various cities to come up with something that looks and feels about right. It led me to scrap the tables I had previously and come up with a single table subtypes.

The new table uses 5DF instead of 4DF because it's more granular and breaks down easily into the blocks that I need. I wanted to stay with 4DF as a nod to staying "standardized" but the dice for the tables aren't read in the standard fashion so I figured it isn't that bad.

Here's what the first table looks like so far:

There will be sub tables for each to get the specific building type. The table structure sacrifices leanness of the types of areas for having to roll on fewer tables (2 instead of 3 or more) and gives more freedom from the setup I had before.

EDIT: Here's the first of the subtables. Took me 20 minutes to throw together. I've decided to color code the areas so that it's easier to tell which labels belongs to which

Bartering and Resources

Resources

Resources in Tribe 8, because of Vimary’s barter economy, don’t represent abstract wealth such as investments, trust funds, savings etc. They represent physical things the character has, or can reasonably get access to, and by extensive an abstract measurement of the character’s ability to trade for goods they need or want. Specialty Aspects for Resources are likely to be relic items, Fatimal artifacts, or flocks of sheep or herds of cattle.

Supplies

Every character has a renewable stress track called Supplies, which represents the total of the character’s physical means such as food, clothing, and goods that the character can trade for other goods. The stress boxes for each Consequence on the Supplies stress track is equal to:

Resources + Craft + Other Modifiers = Number of Supplies Stress boxes (Minimum 1)

Supplies is a “hybrid” Mental/Social stress track, meaning that there are instances where either Mental or Social attacks can be made it against it or Social or Mental Abilities may affect it.

“Attacking” The Supplies Stress Track

Bartering (see below) inflicts Stress on the Supplies Stress Track, as does anything that might consume Supplies.

Daily Survival

Once a month, each character must roll their Resources versus a standard roll. Depending on the conditions, the GM may add an Intensity modifier to the standard roll. The difference is stress taken on the Supplies stress track.

Environmental Factors

Finally, the environment itself  can cause stress on Supplies. Being in a desert, surviving a severe winter storm, or journeying through Hl’Kar or the Rust Wastes will cause additional attacks on the Stress track at regular intervals (typically every day).

Surplus and Rewards

Surplus are items and supplies that are beyond what the character immediately needs. They serve as “armor” against stress to Supplies. Rewards are valuable items that the character recovers or receives, and can be used to add to barter rolls. Once a reward point is used, it is gone.

Consquences

The exact nature of Consequences depend on the source. Consequences from attrition of supplies will reflect a scarcity of some kind. Consequences resulting from Barter may either represent a scarcity, or a debt owed or some other more social concession.

Replenishing Supplies

Supply stress boxes clear at the end of the Session. Consequences clear over time, with a Crafting roll versus a difficulty set by the severity of the Consequence.

Consequence	Time Required	Difficulty
Minor	A day	No roll required
Major	A week	2
Severe (P)	A month	4
Extreme (P)	Three months	6
Defeated	A year	8

In addition, characters can try to actively replenish Supplies through scavenging. Scavenging in this manner is an extended Perception contest versus a base difficulty equal to the difficulty above, plus further modifiers based on the environment. Each roll takes one day, which is completely dedicated to the scavenging effort. Spin on any one roll not only clears the Consequence, but grants the player either a +1 Surplus or +1 Reward (player’s choice).

Barter

Dealing with a barter economy like Vimary’s can be tedious and bland. Most people don’t want to keep track of every trade-worthy item that they have, nor do they usually want to roleplay every haggling transaction.

Bartering for basic food, clothing and supplies is assumed to happen on a regular basis and there is no need to roll. The ebb and flow of these transactions is represented by the regular attrition that the Supplies stress track takes every month. Once a character needs or wants a specific item, the Barter for it needs to be resolved.

First, the character must locate someone who has the item that they need. This is an extended Persuasion roll versus a difficulty equal to the Cost Rating of the item that is being sought, plus any additional modifiers the GM wishes to impose (for example, trying to find a very specific version of an item will increase the difficulty). Each roll takes one day, and Spin on the roll reduces the time spent searching for one day.

Once a source for the item has been located, actual bartering can begin. Unlike economies with currency, bartering is very subjective. Having too much of one thing can decrease its value, and only having items the other party isn’t interested in can break the deal. Barter is resolved as a Mental attack on the Supplies stress track, with the goal being to acquire the desired or needed item while simultaneously giving the other party something that is deemed to be of equivalent value in return.  All rolls are done using Persuasion, limited by Resources. Rewards (see above) can be used to add bonuses to the Barter roll. The GM may assign additional Edge bonuses if the situation warrants it, or Determination if the other party is sufficiently stubborn, there is nothing that they want or need, or are just  disinclined to barter.

Since bartering is social as well as economic, the end result is always that both parties get something that they want - or are convinced is of equal value. A barter, however, can be discontinued before the final exchange of goods takes place. When this is done, any Consequences that have already been suffered are automatically changed to Consequences more fitting for two parties that have had a bad interaction. For example, if during a barter one character decides to break off negotiations before a trade is made and has suffered a Minor Consequence, the Consequence might be changed to, “A Little Less Respected” or “Inconsiderate”. It may make others less inclined to Barter with them.

Deceptive Bartering

It is possible to use Deception instead of Persuasion for Barter. This is a risky proposition, since it usually does not take long for the other party to realize that they have been had - and might result in the stiffed party taking further action, including Social or even Physical attacks against the deceiver.

Tribe 8 and Strands of Fate

Probably a year and a half ago, I discovered the FATE rpg through discussions onRPG.NET and thought that it would a great system to adapt Tribe 8 to. I love the Silhouette system, but it always seemed like an afterthought, tacked on to the Tribe setting and hammered to fit.

I worked on a document for a while but because of SoTC's structure I lost interest. It seemed like a lot more work than it should be for what would ultimately be a much lighter game than Silhouette.

Then I found Strands of Fate - and it looks like a perfect fit. It's a bit more "traditional" than SoTC but retains all of the things I loved about FATE. A lot of the elements in place work really well. So I've started working on my adaptation, this time renamed from Spirit of Vimary to Dreams of Flesh and Spirit (hence the name of this blog, and coincidentally was the name of my Tribe 8 website that recently went defunct). I'm really digging what I'm coming up with so far, and will be sharing the pieces with the world as I hammer them out.