Yeah, like I need more ideas. As I was trying to get back to sleep last night, I was thinking about things I like and didn’t like about R. Talsorian’s game Castle Falkenstein (1994). It provided inspiration for a lot of other games and I loved it from day one, but it always suffered from a problem I’ve encountered in, I think, all the RTG games: the skills’ magnitude was overwhelmed by the randomizing element. In this case, randomizing was provided by playing cards rather than dice since, of course, genteel society would not stoop to dice!
Because Castle Falkenstein used the narrative descriptors that would later inspire Fudge, Fate, PDQ, and similar systems, it ought to be an easy match for a Fate conversion. But what of the use of Fate dice? Wouldn’t it go against the setting?
Of course it would. Fortunately, as of this week Evil Hat Productions has us covered: the lovely Fate Deck has been released. Instead of dice, you can use the Fate Deck to provide the random element, as well as a slew of other narrative uses! So hey, this is one of my games for next year’s Big Bad Con.
Matt Gandy, the editor of the Fate Toolkit, did an adaptation of Castle Falkenstein to FATE with Rob Donoghue on the way to GenCon in 2008. I’m not sure if they wrote it down, but might be worth asking. Matt’s a good guy.
http://semioticity.livejournal.com/109286.html