The Expanse in Fate: Ships Happen (Interlude)

In case you’re wondering about the next installment in our series, I’ve been musing about ships and space combat. I have one way of doing things based on staying as close as possible to the write-ups in The Expanse RPG, and another based on the ship rules from Tachyon Squadron and its supplements.

It’s going to come down to what my players want for a series framework: if they’re going to go have a lot of ship-to-ship battles where their PCs are in charge of the action, then I want solid rules – meaning derived from Tachyon Squadron. But if they are going to be mostly bystanders like the captured crew of the Knight aboard the Donnager, then just lightly adapting the AGE System rules and using them in broad strokes suffices.

Both approaches can be used in parallel. I can write up both sets of rules and make them available for fellow fans; however, as GM I want to start with what’s immediately useful to me and will not confuse my players. That said, I promise you I will give you both, in time.

Finally, if you do not care about staying close to the published game The Expanse RPG but only about the books or television series (e.g., if you don’t already own the RPG nor plan to), and want a Fate solution, you might want to take a look at Evil Hat’s Fate Space Toolkit. It contains a handful of ready-to-go campaign settings and one of them, called Mass Drivers, would be a good fit for The Expanse and particularly for a Belter campaign If you’re starting from scratch, it’s an excellent choice.

That said, I love the amount of useful material in The Expanse RPG and its supplements so I will continue to use it a lot in my Fate version.

The Expanse in Fate: NPCs

Continuing from my previous post: let’s look at creating some GM characters. This is a spot where Fate really shines for me, making my life easy as the game moderator. You see, while it’s true of any role-playing game, Fate is one of the few that openly acknowledges that adversaries don’t need to be statted the same way as player characters. At all. They don’t even need to use the same skill list. For example, here is a way to make very minor antagonists, a.k.a. mooks:

1. Make a list of what this mook is skilled at. They get a +2 to all rolls dealing with these things.
2. Make a list of what this mook is bad at. They get a −2 to all rolls dealing with these things.
3. Everything else gets a +0 when rolled.
4. Give the mook an aspect or two to reinforce what they’re good and bad at, or if they have a particular strength or vulnerability. It’s okay if a mook’s aspects are really simple.
5. Mooks have zero, one, or two boxes in their stress track, depending on how tough you imagine them to be.
6. Mooks can’t take consequences. If they run out of stress boxes (or don’t have any), the next hit takes them down.

This method is found in the Fate Accelerated Edition but used widely throughout the Fate range of implementations. It works very well for the lowest category of speedbump adversaries, dangerous mostly when in numbers or as impediments to slow the PCs down and let the real target escape. For example, I give you the hooligan:

The Expanse: Ariadne’s Spindle

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently, I have put in a lot of work in creating modules for Evil Hat Productions on the Roll20 virtual tabletop (VTT). Of the 36 modules I have worked on, 29 have been Fate modules, 21 of which have been released on Roll20 already. And this really drove home the point that circumstances have driven me to a Fate-less gaming schedule right now: none of the games I have played this year are powered by Fate. This is unacceptable and there was only one thing to do: start a Fate game.

Setting-wise, I have been itching for a long while to play hard science fiction. Rather than going for a ready-statted Fate setting, I decided to adapt The Expanse. It’s funny, of course, because the book series and later television series have their origin in a role-playing campaign led by one of the authors (GURPS, I believe). A couple of years ago Green Ronin Publishing picked up the license and published The Expanse Roleplaying Game based on their AGE system, which I had played in Dragon Age and run in Blue Rose 2nd edition.

I feel that Fate is a great system to run and play exciting adventures in this setting, and it certainly makes preparation easy for me as GM. On the other hand, The Expanse RPG is crammed full of information and I want to get as much of this goodness as I can, not reinvent the wheel. This led me to hew as close as possible to the original character stat profiles.

• Player character creation (below)
• NPC creation
• Interlude: Thoughts about spaceship rules
• Spaceship construction and combat rules
• Session 0
• The Playmat

Player Character Creation

Here is how I paralleled the AGE character creation in my Fate version. The steps listed are those from The Expanse RPG and the notes describe how I adapted them.