FATE Episode 2: Revenge of the Tutorial

Two new players joined the game, and made two new characters:

- Kalameet, a demonic dragon in a human host, obsessed with making deals

- Voyjek the Soldier Bear, a 10-foot, yellow, were-bear in a highly elastic red shirt.

Suddenly the double doors Ace and Racharzan had used to enter burst open again. Through the doors came Kalameet and Voyjek. With a squeak and a quack, The Boss called for reinforcements from not-so-secret passages on either side of the hole.

Why always red?
Is there a discount red barrel store?

Racharzan struggled to his feet despite the impedance of the soapy water, and pushed the lone swordsman down onto the ground, so that he fell on other butt. while Ace completely failed his Athletics roll in running towards the wizard, and ended in the adjacent zone with the red drums. The wizard gripped the staff in his hands, pointing the end at Ace and shouted "I am Ivan the Pyromancer! You will not defeat Me!" as the flames around him rose up and surged forward onto both Ace and the red oil drums. The On Fire zone aspect left Ivan Slightly Singed, but in return he invoked it to power his spell. He also tagged the Bright Red Barrels to cause a reaction when exposed to his flames. The explosion left Ace Extra Crispy.

Voyjek moved into the fray himself, easily tearing the head from one of the newly-appearing mook's head, and leaving the mook next to the first blood soaked and with years of potential therapy. Kalameet on the other hand, simply strode confidently and causally around the gaping hole and the segmented bodies Ace had left behind him. "Ivan" he called with his hand out stretched. "I've come for you". The badass boast however was undermined when two newly-appeared mooks unloaded their guns around Kalameet's feet, forcing him to stand on the edge of the large hole.

Racharzan finally overwhelmed her enemy, summoning a spiritual sword, slicing into him and forcing him backwards into the bottemless pit. One of The Bosses bodyguards suddenly ran forward towards the pit. "JULIAN!", she screamed, "You KILLED my HUSBAND!". Everyone at the table laughed. Seriously, that's plain evil.

Ace charged out of the soot and smoke at Ivan, swinging his Kawaii-Desu-Neko-Blade an inch away from Ivan and he answered by calling up a half-dome of solid fire, showing off the block action of the magic system. Ace, however, was stronger than the wizards magic and cut though the flames like a cold knife through butter, dispersing the energy. 

Kalameet was rammed by two mooks with swords as they attempted to push him into the bottemless pit, and with Kalameet being on the edge already, were successful. He began to fall just as The Boss let loose a cloud of bullets from the turret, and with it being on the raised platform was able to target a large section of the map. Voyjek shrugged off the hits as flesh wounds, but the two mooks pushing Kalameet were torn to shreds by the flying lead. Kalameet was already falling so the bullets missed him, but Rac wasn't so he decided the best place to go was in the hole too, invoking his main aspect and used unique biology to craft a web to pull himself into the hole and catch Kalameet. From within the hole, Kalameet sent began a physic conversation with the woman who had just lost her husband, quickly learning her name was Julia, and making her a deal to kill someone on her own side, and Kalameet would bring back Julian. They did have a necromancer after all.

Ivan tried to escape Ace by running towards where Julia and The Boss were, but Ace followed close behind. Julia ran back up the stairs of the raised platform and took the controls of the turret from The Boss, aiming it downwards towards Ivan and Ace. A storm of bullets ripped into them, tearing most of Ivan's legs off. Ace, on the other hand, just ripped his shirt off and reflected the bullets off his amazing pecs. Yes, really, that happened, he has the aspect built for perfection. 

How can something be both
bottemless and be 65 feet deep?

Julia grabbed The Boss and bounded down the stairs, opening an actually secret passageway. Ivan crawled forward and Julia pulled him in. Ace tried to catch them but the strain of the explosion and gunfire caused him to malfunction halfway. Screaming how the party hadn't seen the last of him, Ivan reached to a lever and pulled it shutting the passage down. The two remaining mooks in the warehouse, the two who had shot at Kalameet, fled back into the not-so-secret passageways they had come from. It was then discovered that the bottemless pit wasn't actually bottemless, and Julian was still alive, but badly broken. The party took Julian when they climbed out and left the warehouse.

I liked how Ace's character let The Boss, Julia and Ivan escape, even though he had enough points to have easily bought off the compel. Voyjek didn't get much action story-wise, spending the whole game smashing mooks. Kalameet's player quite enjoyed roleplaying, and we took that in stride. Racharzan's player was good at thinking of different ways to test the rules, and she grabbed some of the magic rules well. Ace's player enjoyed developing on the go, and he seemed to enjoyed the 'Success with Style' rule.

FATE Episode 1: Tutorial

I recently DMed (or GMed, or Refereed, or whatever) a variation of FATE, with many rules from the Dresden Files RPG. It was a campaign spread over a number of weeks held at a local hobby store with only a few regular players. I've decided to write this play-report from a gaming point of view, including some dice rolls and aspects, instead of just a narrative point of view. Any aspects will be in italic type, and skill rolls will be Proper Nouns.

Two Player Characters were created for this game, with both being made on the spot while the rules were being explained during World-building:
Racharzan - An Aracnoid necromancer, a spider-like person from the dangerous wilds of Australia.
A.C.E. - An Automated Centenarian Entity robot from Japan, with a oversized Kawaii-Desu-Neko-Blade.

Episode 1: Tutorial

Mobster Penguin
cmalidore.deviantart.com

The party started by barging through the large double doors of a mafia safehouse in order to capture a penguin crime boss with a wizard assistant and a small army of tuxedoed mooks. Because that all makes perfect sense.

The fox-hole was based underground and long fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead revealing what appeared to be a storage room, with crates and barrels against the walls. A seemingly bottomless pit was in the centre of the room. men and women stood either side of the hole, dressed in suits and ties. They carried a combination of shortswords and automatic pistols. A large puddle of soapy water was in front of the hole, like it was being cleaned and then abandoned in a hurry. A pile of bright red barrels sat to the back of the room, each labelled with a hazardous flame symbol and was leaking oily, black liquid. Red barrels. Every gamer knows what that means. Next to the pile stood another man, this one with a burnt staff of twisted oak and wearing tattered and red-trimmed robes over his suit. Finally, in the corner of the room was a raised platform. Here stood The Boss, Don Pancake McQuack, the leader of the penguin mafia in the city, with two bodyguards and a machine-gun turret.

Determined on their apparent mission to capture the penguin for reasons unknown, they charged forward with no hesitation. The mooks moved forward, a few drawing their swords. One in particular edged precariously around the puddle of soapy water. Ace got his first trial of combat when he jumped forward and completely separated the top half of a mook from the bottom. Others opened fire with their machine pistols, but many bullets only grazed Ace or bounced off his metallic armour.

A swordsman that was planning on rushing against Racharzan was interrupted when ectoplasic, skeletal hands appeared to claw out of the ground, grabbing on to him and brought him down, tearing him apart. It seems Racharzan had gotten the hang of some of the magic rules.

Seeing that the mooks were falling rapidly, The Boss sent his bodyguards down to the fight as well. The man in the robes raised his staff and a took aim at Ace. The power he brought up scorched the area around him setting it on fire, and the rest soared forward in a lance of solid fire. It dug into Ace's defences and pushed him to the edge of his stress, and he retaliated by slashing in a wide arc around him, managing to cut through not only one, but two mooks. The third in the area was temporarily blinded by a rainbow of light released from his Kawaii-Desu-Neko-Blade.

Rac moved forward into the puddle to attack the lone swordsman, but crossing the soapy water was more difficult that expected when he failed his Athletics roll and he fell on butt, not getting the chance to bite him. Now that Rac was on the ground, the gunners took their shots at Racharzan. He took advantage of the fact he was on the ground, using a fate point to take advantage of the otherwise disadvantageous 'fell on butt' aspect, only getting shot in the shoulder as a minor consequence. With Ace heading towards the wizard, Racharzan struggling in a puddle and with The Boss slowly edging towards the machine-gun turret, the session came to an end.