Travel, Fate Core Style - Part 2

In Part I, I covered a few of the basic ways that travel can be handled. In this second installment I'll give some examples of slightly specific Extras that can be used to add more detail to or just spice it up a little bit. These can either be used by themselves or possibly combined together, depending on the game's exat needs.

Aspects

Aspects are the easiest and most obvious additions to any scene involving travel, from Impassible Mountains to Plentiful Game to Trade Winds. Since the scale is much larger than most scenes, it's also possible for specific locations to be their own aspects. These location aspects can be used much like situation aspects. For example, a player can invoke the Greenbriar Village aspect to get a Lore bonus on finding the ruined tower or for a hot meal to help make a recovery roll.

Zones

Zones are another relatively simple addition to travel. Geographic areas tend to have natural barriers or boundaries - rivers, mountains, forests, marshes, etc. These boundaries can provide passive resistance to moving between zones, prompting appropriate rolls if one or more zones need to be crossed within the same scene. Similarly, they can be used to keep track of the pace of travel. Zones will likely have their own aspects. Locations can also be smaller zones with aspects of their own.

Distance Stress Track

Speaking of pacing, using a distance stress track is one technique for keeping track of how far the characters get and how fast.The stress track has a number of boxes each representing some unit of distance. As the group travels, they make appropriate rolls (Drive, Physique, Athletics, whatever). Each roll takes place at a specific time increment - the more shifts the characters accumulate, the faster they travel. Most of the time the resistance to the roll will be passive, but it might be active under the right circumstances (which we'll get into more in a bit). This stress track would likely be one that is "attacked" with straight shifts - two shifts means mark off two boxes. When the track is filled, the characters reach their destination.

An enhancement to this idea is to have specific boxes on the stress track represent locations that can be reached. In order to reach the location, the characters need to mark off stress equal to or greater than the location's box. If a location is very difficult to find, unknown to the characters, or hidden, you can require that the characters have to land on that exact box.

Consequences

It's also possible to the distance stress track one or more Consequence slots. These Consequences should be predefined, and are there for the GM to "absorb" shifts and thus slow down or complicate the journey. Good examples are Bridge Out, Roadblock, or even Flight Delayed.

Skills

Once you get to this level, you're pretty much going full Fate Fractal. The most obvious choice for a skill would be any situation where the environment can actively take action against the characters. A Winter Storm might be a skill used to attack characters travelling through a mountainous region. A more abstract skill could be Treacherous Terrain that can interfere with how far the characters travel in a scene - effectively meaning that the terrain is offering active resistance to the characters trying to mark off distance stress, if it's being used. Aspects can still be used to for specific threats - like Wolf Packs or Bandits.

Combining multiple Extras together can result in what amounts to a write-up of a campaign region. Each Zone would have aspects, a distance stress track with defined Consequences, and a skill or two (for generic zones Terrain or Weather and Threat are good choices for skills). Over time, the aspects and skill ranks for the zone can even change as campaign milestones are reached.

Example

Here is an example "campaign scale" zone from Tribe 8. The options in use are:

• Zones
• High concept, trouble and several other aspects Distance stress track with Consequences.
• Two skills: Toxic Environment and Terrain. 

Each box on the distance stress track represents 1 mile travelled (Vimary is a pretty small place), and rolls are made every hour of game time. Characters roll Physique to mark off distance stress, opposed by the Terrain skill. Consequences are used to absorb shifts the characters generate, slowing them down and placing

The Rust Wastes

Aspects:

Disintegrating Industrial Area
Deadly Rust Storms
Artifacts of the World Before
Olympus
Access to Subterra
Skills:
Toxic Environment +4
Terrain +4
Distance:

OOOOOOOO
Consequences:
Keeper Pitfalls (-2)
Collapsing Ruins (-4)

Fate of Vimary character sheet

After a lot of tweaking, I finally got my character sheet done for Fate of Vimary. It's interesting how just having the character sheet done makes things seem more concrete, more of a thing. The other awesome thing is while I've always created custom character sheets for various games, the tools available now totally beat using Publisher and Word to try to do it. Between Inkscape and GIMP, it's very easy to create a character sheet and with a lot less time and effort.

Without further ado, I give you three versions of the sheet in PDF format as well as the .SVG file (for anyone who wants to tinker with it themselves).

• Tribe 8 Fate of Vimary PDF Character Sheet (with background)
• Tribe 8 Fate of Vimary PDF Character Sheet (without background)
• Tribe 8 Fate of Vimary PDF Character Sheet (without background and using Cambria instead of Adler for the font)
• Tribe 8 Fate of Vimary Character Sheet SVG

Fate of Vimary Gear and Weapons Draft

This took a while to figure out. There are numerous ways of handling weapons and armor in Fate Core. Balancing out the costs and how they work as extras is a pretty big deal, and is something there aren't a huge number of guidelines for. Fortunately there are a lot of ideas out there. The one that I went with was from this post on EldritchFire Press which synced up with some other suggestions I'd seen. I think the end result has a good amount of abstraction without making the weapons and armor entirely too fiddly (and, having looked through some GURPS and Hero books lately, I definitely know fiddly).

You can grab the draft document here. It still needs some details regarding "enchanted" artifacts and whatnot, which I'll be filling in later.

Draft Contacts/Social Stress write-up

This was the result of a lot of tinkering. It looks pretty solid without playtesting, but I think it will capture the feel I'm going for. There are a lot great thinkers on the Fate Core Google+ group who helped bounce ideas around, particularly +Jack Gulick. I'm also considering moving over to Andrew Jensen's ideas on using Stress as a Positive Currency because they look like they go a ways toward alleviating some of the problems I can see with stress only being the result of "attacks". Other tweaks I'm considering are adding at least one extra consequence to the mild or moderate consequence tiers to accommodate that there's one more way to inflict stress. Those decisions might have to wait until I actually run this thing.

Without further ado, you can download it here.

Tribe 8 Extras (and thoughts on a project name)

Tribe 8 in Fate Core is coming along nicely. It's gotten to the point where I have to plan what portions I  need to draft out in terms of Extras. Tribe 8 is a rich and well-developed setting, and there's temptation to assign aspects and stress tracks to everything, which goes against what I'm trying to accomplish. Here is that preliminary list of Extras I think are absolutely necessary.  

1. Locations. Tribe 8 has a number of locations that deserve to be Extras because they have a distinct character and theme. Some, like Hom or Bazaar, play integral parts to Tribe 8's story. These places will get the "Extra" treatment, but I won't do it for all of them as I did for Strands of Flesh and Spirit.
2. The River of Dream. The need for this can't be overstated. There's a reason the River of Dream has a whole sourcebook devoted to it.
3. Armor and weapons. I'm not wanting to make them too detailed or fiddly, but there is a difference between a flint knife, an artifact sword made from Joan Herself, and a Keeper rifle. However, there's not much difference between the flint knife, a length of pipe, and a makeshift spear. The same goes for armor. The idea will be to paint them in broad strokes and not sweat the unimportant things.
4. Survival. The Tribes have it pretty good, but it still isn't easy. The Fallen have it a lot worse and the Squats aren't much better off than the Fallen. Food, fresh water, clothing, shelter and other necessities are constant needs that drain time and resources for everyone. It's just a matter of striking a balance between a dull subsystem or an entertaining one.
5. Status/Reputation. This is something that was lacking from Tribe 8, but in a post-apocalyptic tribal setting reputation is pretty much the only currency you have. I've become convinced the designers missed the boat on dropping barter in as a simple substitute for a typical game economy, and doing retcons in later books to create a monetary system was a step in the wrong direction. It's not about what you have to barter or what you're bartering for - it's all about your standing in the social group. Hunter Gatherer Games has some fantastic things to say on the matter. Tangentially, through them I found a link to a continuation of The Fifth World, which I discovered a few years ago and thought was an interesting project.
6. Spirits. Tribe 8 gives Spirits the "just give them some stats" treatment, so I'd like to expand on  their capabilities quite a bit.

As for what to call this project...there's a long tradition of incorporating system name for Fate-based games:  Spirit of Vimary, Strands of Flesh and Spirit. Each one fits quite well. This time around I want to incorporate Fate into the name. Some possibilities include Fate of Flesh and Spirit, Fate of Vimary, or Tribe Fate. I've also considered naming it Rusted Sky in tribute to a website run by one of the Tribe 8 authors, or just falling back on my signature name, Dreams of Flesh and Spirit.

Fate Core Synthesis Draft

Working on the Sigils extra was like clearing a logjam: I was able to get a strong start on adapting Synthesis to Fate Core. I realize the common wisdom with creating Fate Core settings is "start with the skill list!", but in this case I felt starting from the other end was better. By working my way through the other Tribe 8 specific skills (Dreaming, Ritual, Sundering, Technosmithing) I'll have a much clearer vision of how to prune and shape the default skill list.
The direction I am going with Synthesis was something that the way Fate Core is written, and how various things are categorized, really brought into focus. The four actions provide a good framework for taming a freeform beast like Synthesis without having to delve into a lot of niggling little rules and modifiers. It helped me realize (for example) that bonuses for trances, extra time, ritual implements, etc. weren't a static thing but should be the result of the character doing something to create an advantage for themselves. The same thing will go for resisting effects; it's not automatic, the character needs to actually do something to get the bonus. Once again, Rob Donoghue's channeling "hack" helped tremendously in helping the rest of the pieces fall into place. You can get the draft from Google Docs, and I will post regular updates as I tweak and refine it. 

Dixton Extra: Sigils

Got the draft (hit the link for the Google doc) completed for the Sigils in the Dixton setting. They are probably going to need some tweaking, but overall I'm pleased with how they turned out. Many thanks go to +Rob Donoghue for his channeling "hack" that helped set the mechanics up in my mind and +Cameron Corniuk, +Andy Hauge, +Jack Stephenson-Carr and +Mike Thompson for their great suggestions that helped break me out of a bit of writer's block in coming up with an implementation.