JADE's FATE RPG Campaign: Lost in a Familiar Realm


Late last November, Elijah introduced JADE to an RPG system that he learned about on the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me. It was called FATE and was an open-source collaborative story telling tabeltop RPG. Elijah was very excited to try it out and at JADE we never say no to a new system! So he began prepare his campaign, and we looked up the rules... As best we could.

For the first game, Elijah brought his campaign to the table. Adam, Dave, and Myself would play as ourselves, having been accidentally teleported into a universe that seemed like a traditional D&D setting: magic, dragons and all.


We are Not in Kansas any More

We began our adventure in the small village of Darbysford. We don't know exactly where that is in relation to say a country or something similar, but it is labeled at "18" on our map above to signify that we spent 18 days there.

In this village we learned a little about how this world works, and how important wizards are to this world. Effectively the ruling class, Wizards combine spell words to create magical effects. This process is as much semantic as it is a matter of will power. After becoming a wizard's apprentice, Dave learned that the portals that brought us to this world could be opened by the very magic he had been taught. You just had to know the right words.

And so our quest began, but not before we were captured for being "other worlders" by an organization known as the Watchers of the Abyss.



On the Road

We were marched for about a day and a half outside Darbysford in a magical trance until we came to. the three of us were chained to a tree along with a fourth: a strange fighter/thief, who promised to help us escape, as long as we took her with us.

When one of those horrible beasts in the image above attacked our camp it was time to escape, and we fled amidst the chaos.

Along the road we encountered a wizard who gave us our first quest in exchange for more spell words (a common practice). Our job to recover a glass bead from a giant was a rousing success! We returned to be given more spell words, and access to our next destination and contact the Wizard Horace in Shepsford


A City on the River

As we made our way into town, we discovered a sign post, and that despite being able to read the magical language, the standard written language was completely illegible to us. For example, we later learned that the symbol above is the number "2". Thankfully we encountered a friendly farmer named Oscar who lent us some money in exchange for a days labour beginning the following morning.

After enthusiastically helping Oscar sell his vegetables, the parry found out that the Wizard Horace worked for the gang the Midtown Drakes.  To do business with them was to throw our hat in with some pretty shady folk, but we all agreed we had little choice, and accepted their mission to rob a secret vault of the Watchers of the Abyss.

Again this went off perfectly, and we returned to gain more spell words, and were told to seek out the Academy to become proper wizards. After deciding to leave Shepsford we left off, and decided to do some work on the FATE system itself.


Wait... How Does This System Work?

FATE was unlike any RPG we had ever played as a group, and for the first... Honestly three to four  out of the five games we have played, the majority of us did not understand the system. FATE is not D&D. The GM needs to do less prep work, the players have more control over the events of each scene in the story, and this relationship is very difficult to get used to. But once you get going, modifying each scene and playing with the "Aspects" of the scenario and characters involved makes for a really interesting experience. 

Our last session of FATE was workshop game where Elijah laid out his grand plans for the campaign, how the universe works, as well as listened to our input and ideas. With this information, As a player I feel much more informed and capable of helping to tell this story and fell that this sort of openness is necessary to play FATE, whether you do the co-operative world building step or not.

In the end, Elijah thinks that FATE wasn't the best system to host this campaign in. The Systems strength is in the over the top abilities and actions of each player character, and so to make it more interesting we modified our characters to be more of a caricature of ourselves, or even replaced our character's entirely. 

With these changes, and our new found confidence in the world and system I am sure that during the next five games we will be playing FATE as it was intended. 


Written by: Andrew Gregory

JADE's FATE RPG Campaign: Lost in a Familiar Realm JADE's FATE RPG Campaign: Lost in a Familiar Realm Reviewed by JADE Gaming on 3/02/2018 02:10:00 pm Rating: 5

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