Fate Core: building Eternia pt 1

I would like to try my hand at setting building for Fate Core. I will be working on my corellian Knights campaign on the side. In this series of posts I will be designing a setting just for fun. I will probably build a bunch of premade characters at the end. we'll have to see how it goes.

OK, so now it comes down to high concept. What is the basic game I want to run? I was digging through my DVDs looking for the Princess Bride when I ran across my He-man DVD sets. I realized that I loved He-man when I was a kid. It had this amazing blend of everything that I thought was great. Also it had the best toy sets(well third best, GI Joes and transformers were awesome).

So that will be my basic setting idea, a re-imagining of He-man.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilaxESf20RdDNQjNk4nV3ZzcHGmXfL0r09lLBNBCO27CNCSfWDS7bzHsnml-2Id64nrOtLafq0I9vWw12LvVpX8qwY8WaKuQwXrkvKWFwhi8T3KIHYIBBjmyC6nQOjCeTcjshxvA7XvPA/s1600/he_man_teaser_style_by_nebezial.jpg

At the center of the universe sits a small planet. A planet of Light and of Dark. A planet of Power. Eternia, the pivot point of all the universe. For untold eons the Star Seed has sat at the center of the world. The center of the center of the universe. The Masters of the Universe protect it and the whole of the Light Hemisphere from the depredations of the Dark Hemisphere.

Basically it is about being a master of the universe. And how awesome that is. The scale of the game will be pretty damned epic. It deals with huge issues of light and dark, and the fate of the world and all worlds. Although it is still personal, in a way. Every story is sort of about a very personal issue, but generally it is attached to one of these grand events. So it is epic more than personal, also I think that models the aspect system so well that it borders on creepy.

Now I got to dig into the settings big issues, This is where I tend to have problems. how vague should it be? how specified? I will go with what I think should go there, and then if people disagree with me then we can go from there.

First trouble of the setting should be the Dark Hemisphere. I think I will go with something like the 2002 He-Man show's explanation. that there was a mystical barrier that separated the two and the barrier has just recently fallen. Allowing Skeletor and his minions through.

Current Issue: Masters of Evil

another issue I would like to explore would be the Snake men and Hordak, so I think that would be the coming trouble would be some sort of prison that holds them. we will call it The Void. it is sort of like the phantom zone in superman.

Impending Issue: Rising from The Void

That is a good start for the game. Tomorrow I will begin putting up a location or a face per day until I have something approaching a game setting.

Corellian Knights Episode 1

I just ran my first game of Fate Core. Check it out. We had quite a lot of fun.

Fate Core: An issue...perhaps

Just last night I ran the first session of a Fate Core campaign. The first session involves deciding what your game will be, what it will be about and the setting it will be in. It is also when the players make characters. It worked very well over all. It was a very organic game experience where we reached a game I am fairly convinced will work for us all.

My issue came during the character creation part of the evening. Most of the character creation worked for me. it was during the three phases of Aspect building that I ran into my difficulty. Basically a character comes up with their first adventure, and an aspect for it. Then they go t the first adventure of another player and they either help solve it or complicate it, then they write an aspect for that. So far, so good. It is phase three where the problem manifested.

In phase three of this Aspect building process you go to another players sheet, to the first adventure there and basically do the same thing that you did in phase two. the problem I am having is that their is already another PC in the mix. There is a good chance that the adventure is already complete. It just feels very tightly bound.

I guess that this is not a game issue I am having so much as a Me issue. I just find that this situation feels too coincidental...though to be fair a lot of fiction gets the group together in just such a coincidence. I don't know. I just found that part of character creation to not work for me.

Fate Core: Corellian Knights

I had a good game creation session last night with my crew. today I drew a couple of the set pieces for the game, the Jedi Temple on Corellia and the YT-80 That the PCs Pilot. Here they are:

YT-80 Light Freighter

Jedi Temple on Corellia

YT-80 Floorplan(rough draft)

Fate Core: GM thoughts

Tonight I will be running a first session of Fate Core via Google Hangouts. As the GM I am thinking about campaigns and settings. However, comma, I wll be using the setting creation ruleset. Well, ruleset is the wrong word, they are more like guidelines. Anyway as I won't be the only one developing the game most of my ideas won't be showing up in the game. Since tat is the case, I thought, "why not share them here?" I rarely ignore myself, so here goes.

The Force Wars
I love the force in Star Wars, but the Jedi were always a bit of a oddity. How did they come about, how did they form up? My idea is this, the formation of the Jedi order and the expulsion of the dark side users. There are many different philosophies of force use and schools of training. Each think that THEY have the right and best way to share the force. Last week one of the force schools, the Jedi, invited the leaders of all the other schools to a meeting of the minds. Do the leaders trust this invitation? Is unification even possible? What of the Dark Side? It is a game of politics and force powers at the dawn of the republic.

Age Of Stone
Long ago there was a shining city. A city of god-men. They had tools and magics far beyond stone and fire. They were prideful, thought themselves greater than the spirits of earth and sky. Then came the fall. the skies opened up and storms came. The ocean rose up to swallow the shining city. In this game you play the heirs of Atlantis in the stone age world. you have technologies and skills beyond anything the world around you understands. however with that come hubris. It becomes all too easy to forget the lessons of Atlantis. The great spirits of sky and stone do not allow for man to hold himself above the others.

Those are just a couple of the ideas that are flowing through my noggin. We'll see if anything comes of it tonight.

Fate Core First Blush

I got to play in a game of Fate Core last night. It worked pretty well. I played a dwarf in an Eberron hack. Check it out.

A couple of funny(to me) Poems

As I watched a recent dance concert a few funny ideas struck me. I wrote a couple of poems to express those thoughts. Poetry was chosen because it plays with words and grammar structure. As I was playing with Physics ideas and the structure thereof I thought it was a good fit. Without further ado I give you two funny poems(funny to me any way):

Thirteen
by: The Jake

They tell me that space and time are curved
They say space is infinite and time is not
Time is not
If space is infinite
If space curves
It is an infinite curve
An infinite curve
Is a ring
A ring
A ring of emptiness
Space
Emptiness and matter
Curved
You can go in a straight line in space
I can go in a straight line too
Space is curved
A ring
A ring of space with matter
Sprinkles of matter in space
Sprinkles
 A ring
Sprinkles
Welcome to the donut
Infinite donut

Objects in motion
By: The Jake

Movement is limited
Limited by light
like driving in the dark
We can't go faster than we can see
Light is the limit
The faster you go, the bigger you are
The bigger you are, the slower time moves
For light time stands still
Unmoving
Uncurling
Winding spirals of time
Held together by fast, heavy, objects
Mass holds time hostage
The ransom is movement

Those two thoughts just made me laugh and I thought I would share them. Let me know what you think.