StrangeThing

The epic battle between light and darkness! So many fantasy stories have revolved around this idea it hardly needs explanation. Light has the traditional aesthetics of the good guys. White and gold are the symbolic colors. It's the side that feels like home.  The Dark side is all black and red. The rituals of the dark gods are carried out in the dead of night, out of sight of decent people.  Sometimes the two sides are called Order and Chaos, or Good and Evil. Is Light always Good, and Dark always Evil? That's up to the table to decide. Mortals can always be  It may be that even the gods are capable of error. This is a style of Quick and Dirty magic. A tweak to default options of that magic system, to represent a character whose power comes from the Divine Light.  The table can decide what styles of magic are available in your game. A game world can have one or more styles of magic. The secular magic described in the original Q&D article can exist alongside th...

The Gift is my game in progress about superheroes, powered by Fate Accelerated Edition . I have two main design goals: Simple character creation, and giving players a real sense of power. Most supers games have complex character creation to accommodate the weirdness of comic book characters. The inevitable result is a complex system that requires a great deal of system mastery. Rather than grapple with that complexity, Fate Supers uses templates called Mantles of Power . A term I swear I did not steal from Dresden Files Accelerated. A mantle gives you a well-rounded package of powers. You can add more powers and stunts to customize your character to your liking. It seems almost blasphemous to make a supers game that isn't designed to give the players maximum flexibility for building their characters. But why? Are weird characters really essential to the genre? Why not sacrifice flexibility for clarity? As for the sense of power, that's pretty straightforward. There are onl...

  Shadow of the Century introduced the idea of roles as a way to make characters. I was ambivalent about the system when I read it, but then I tried implementing it in my eternally incomplete Fate Fantasy game. Looking at the role system from a designer's perspective was a revelation. It's such a great way to show your players what types of characters you can play. And since you choose three roles for your character, it's so much more flexible than a template system. (To say nothing of a class system.) So here is my Fate Fantasy character creation system. I'm eager to hear people's opinions.  This is designed to work with Quick & Dirty Magic . Magic Finesse is the same as Spell Casting. I took a stab at doing the same thing for Star Wars . It's not as well made, but there's no magic system to muddy the waters.

Fate Core's Resources skill doesn't feel right for adventurers. I want to create the feeling of limited supplies slowly depleting over time. The wealth track from the Fate SRD is a good start, but still didn't fit quite right.  Here's my alternate wealth system for the ever-fluctuating wealth of adventuring characters.  

I made the Quick and Dirty Magic system, and realized that it needs a lot of examples to really work.  So here we have the Quick and Dirty Spellbook, a selection of excellent spells for you to tweak and customize for your own use. Then I got a little carried away, so now I have to split it into two parts. 

This is the magic system I invented for my perpetually-in-progress fantasy RPG. My goal was a system that could roughly approximate the feel of D&D magic, but with no bookkeeping. I also wanted to stick closely to established elements of Fate Core. So no spell points or other innovations.

Here’s a Fate rule to make Physique more important in combat, and encourage fighting types to be brawny, iron-clad behemoths. I made it for my D&D inspired fantasy game, but it could easily be adapted for a sci-fi setting featuring steroidal space marines.