Fate Core

Early last month, Evil Hat Productions, opened up a Kickstarter project for their newest revision of the Fate roleplaying system. I'd originally been intrigued by the last version of the rule set sometime last year, but while it was an interesting take on story-oriented roleplaying, it just wasn't clicking for me. I couldn't quite suss out how I would use something like that to play the games that I was looking to at the time. So when Fate Core popped up on my radar, I immediately jumped at the chance to help kickstart the endeavor.

For those of you who don't follow projects on Kickstarter, let me just tell you that Fate Core ended up being one of the most popular RPG projects the site has seen since it first opened its virtual doors to the public. The initial goal was low (three thousand measly dollars), but when the project closed last Tuesday, there were over 10,000 backers pledging upwards of $430,000. Calling this thing "successful" would be a vast understatement.

The enthusiastic outpouring of support from the "Fate Corps" was well deserved, however. Fate Core is a solid, streamlined game that keeps the focus on the characters and their actions rather than letting things get bogged down in multitudinous rules. I haven't had the opportunity to do much more than partial character creation in it yet, but I'm slotted to run a demo session at an upcoming convention and I couldn't be more excited to be using Fate there.

Not only are the rules solid, but the team behind them are an amazing group, as well. Headed by the likes of Fred Hicks, Leonard Balsera, and Rob Donoghue, Evil Hat has provided a community inclusion model that I think most publishing companies (and most companies, in general) could stand to take a lesson from. They kept every public comment positive and answered our every minute question promptly and with great detail. There was no NDA to keep the backers from talking about their experience with the draft rules, and the 10,000+ strong Fate Corps were enlisted to playtest the game and help in the revision process. (When's the last time you saw WotC or any of the other big publishers setting up a GoogleDocs survey to collect errata?) Even if I weren't interested in the game, I probably would have ended up backing the Kickstarter just so Fred, et. al., could have a little more money to feed their families and keep their company going with.

Since the Kickstarter ended, there's been a bit of a hole in my life. I can't go running to the project's page to see how much more money was raised or how many more backers decided to join our rowdy throng. So, I decided to start churning out materials that I could use in my convention game, just to keep myself busy (and also because I'm a closet document design enthusiast and love aligning baselines). The setting is called "CAMELOT Trigger," and was produced by Rob Wieland. Essentially, the setting is a retelling of Arthurian legend in a far future version of our solar system. And there are mecha. Lots and lots of mecha. (You can find out more about CAMELOT Trigger by visiting Rob's blog here.)

CAMELOT Trigger
Character Sheet

The first side project on my to-do list was a character sheet, since I'll be putting together the player characters for my session myself. I didn't want to have a bunch of paper lying around uselessly on the table, so I decided to go with a half-sheet document instead of a full, letter-sized one. Since this also kept with the design of the generic Fate Core character sheets provided in the Kickstarter draft, I figured it was a good way to go. My first effort was in landscape, rather than the portrait orientation you can see to the right. While I liked the overall style of the landscape version, there ended up being a lot of wasted space on the sheet. Plus, there was no room for the coat of arms drawing that several people in the Fate Core Google+ community had requested. After rethinking my design strategy, I came up with what you see here. I really like how it turned out. Having more vertical space allowed me to stack more elements on top of one another, and it also gave me a good reason to shrink the title by quite a bit, which also saved me a lot on my white space budget. I also decided to keep with the space-adventure feel of the setting by lopping off a couple of the heading box corners. Because let's face it, nothing says "science fiction" like irregularly shaped hexagons.

CAMELOT Trigger
Cheat Sheet

Once that was out of the way, I started in on another crucial piece of my convention prep: the rules cheat sheet. Fate Core is not a small document. Even without the cover, the draft PDF was over 300 6"x9" pages. A little dense for players experiencing a game for the first time, don't you think? With that in mind, I slapped together a quick reference guide to the pieces of the system I thought most in need of hurried explanation. I'm also working on a lesson plan to help explain some of the broader concepts of the system to the players before we start, but I figured a little reminder card wouldn't go amiss. I'm still waiting on feedback to this, so who knows how it might change between now and the convention. As it stands, though, I thought it was a pretty good little design. As you can see, I decided to keep the half-letter portrait size I used for the character sheet. One of the best things about making both the character sheet and the cheat sheet a half-page is that I can print both of them onto a single letter-sized sheet of paper, so we don't have to have a reference sheet or two flying around the table during the game. The players can just look to the side of their sheet to remind themselves of what they need to know, which should be very nice.

So that's my little jaunt into document design for today. If you would like, you can download these documents here. You'll notice that there are both PDFs and JPEGs in that folder. Due to some embedding problems in my layout program, I had to export to an image file and print that to a PDF rather than converting straight to a PDF. The joys of technology, eh? :) Feel free to use, copy, and modify these sheets to your heart's content. I just made them for my own personal use, and to keep myself busy during some downtime at work.

And if anyone's looking for a few hours of Arthurian legend in big, stompy robots at this year's Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium, I should be opening up shop there in the afternoon or evening on Friday, Februrary 15th. Feel free to drop in for a game.