Play Report: Fate of the Inquisitor

Inquisitors are a dour lot.

After a delay of over two years, I finally ran Fate of the Inquisitor for the first time yesterday at KublaCon.  It was a moral victory to finally be able to do this!

This game is my hack using:

• the rules of War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus I wrote for Evil Hat Productions (PDF available on a pay-what-you-want basis on DriveThruRPG, and Open Content rules on Fate SRD);
• the Warhammer 40,000 (WH40K) setting,
• particularly  as  presented in the Dark Heresy role-playing game from Fantasy Flight Games/Ulisses Spiele, and
• borrowing the random tables from my husband’s Fiasco 40K playset for, well, Fiasco.

Why? Because on the one hand I don’t enjoy the native system for Dark Heresy, it’s just not my cup of tea; and on the other, we have a bazillion WH40K miniatures which were handy to demonstrate the miniatures rules for Fate from War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus. 

I had four players, including my husband Edmund. The other three players (the very nice Gregg, Thomas, and Jon) were new faces to us and to each other. Edmund is well-versed in both the WH40K universe and in the Fate rules I was using, of course. However, the other players had minimal knowledge of either setting or mechanics. Their role-playing background was primarily from games like D&D or GURPS, and were there to learn about the Fate system. 

My New Development

The news I alluded to in a recent post have been officially announced: in addition to acting as project manager for new books in the Fate line, I am now also stepping in to replace Leonard Balsera as Fate Line Developer for Evil Hat Productions.

Lenny is stepping down to be able to keep up with his own increased responsibilities as COO and Creative Director of John Wick Presents. He has been with Evil Hat and working on Fate in its various forms for nearly 15 years. He is instrumental in creating some of the features I like best in Fate Core, the current version of the system. He is savvy, personable, knowledgeable, creative, and who knows how I will be able to follow such an act!

It’s tremendously flattering to have been invited to fill in the role of line developer for Evil Hat’s flagship line, and even more so when picking up the mantle after someone like Lenny. And it’s wonderful to be associated more closely with Evil Hat, since they have been such great people to work with and for.

One of my official mandates will be to bring even more diversity to the talent pool in all roles (writers, system developers, editors, artists, and so forth.) I will redouble my efforts to attract to our projects skilled people who are as diverse as the world I see around me.

Finally, I will also be scouting for new third-party games based on Fate for which the creators would like printing, distribution, and marketing support. Of course such games need to fit in with Evil Hat’s release windows, quality standards, etc.

So yeah, just call me Doctor Fate…

#AprilTTRPGMaker: Questions 25 through 30

Final round of Kira Magrann’s cool challenge for April, the 30-day tabletop role-playing game maker or #AprilTTRPGMaker challenge.

Day 25: Being a tabletop role-playing game designer means…

Argh! This kind of question makes me worry about gate-keeping. I feared at the beginning of this challenge that many people would self-select out because of impostor syndrome.

I think of the definition as flexible and inclusive: if you create games, supplements, scenarios, settings, rules, playbooks, worksheets, and other tools to share with the world, if you listen to constructive critique and try to improve, if you keep polishing your work, then I’d say you are a game designer.

I’m not saying that keeping your meticulous DM campaign notes since the first game of D&D you ran in 1979 and trying to run games in that compendium at every convention makes you a game designer. Based on my training as an engineer, I think that in order to qualify as a designer:

• You need to articulate what it is you are trying to create.
• You need to separate the product of your work from your own identity, enough to listen to reasonable criticism.
• You need to want to improve the product of your work even if the improvement goes in a new direction.
• You need to keep informed about approaches other designers have used to solve similar problems so you don’t try to reinvent the wheel or publish fantasy heartbreakers.
• You need to think of several different solutions to every problems rather than pre-select based on bias.
• You need to try, evaluate, reject or refine, and try again until your design can be pronounced good by comparing to your objectives.

These are features of design, any kind of design. It’s not about how many copies you sold, or how long you have been working on an idea.

#AprilTTRPGMaker: Questions 19 through 24

Part 4 of Kira Magrann’s cool challenge for April, the 30-day tabletop role-playing game maker or #AprilTTRPGMaker challenge.

Day 19: Game that’s most essential to your design?

These days it would be Fate Core, since a lot of the projects I’m writing for are Fate games: Fate Infiltration Toolkit, Tianxia Rules Companion, Uprising: The Dystopian Universe RPG. I’ve also got a small item for Monster of the Week. 

#AprilTTRPGMaker: Questions 13 through 18

Part 3 of Kira Magrann’s cool challenge for April, the 30-day tabletop role-playing game maker or #AprilTTRPGMaker challenge.

Day 13: Biggest influence?

In roughly chronological order:

Over The Edge by Jonathan Tweet (Atlas Games); Robin’s Laws of Good Game-mastering by Robin Laws (Steve Jackson Games); Truth & Justice and The Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo by Chad Underkoffler (Atomic Sock Monkey Press); Fate Accelerated by Clark Valentine, Leonard Balsera, Fred Hick, Mike Olson, and Amanda Valentine (Evil Hat Productions).

 

Over the Edge

Robin’s Laws

Truth & Justice

The Zorcerer of Zo

Fate Accelerated

But the funny thing is that I also got influences from games I thought were deeply flawed such as:

Primetime Adventures, The Esoterrorists, Burning Empires, Apocalypse World,

#AprilTTRPGMaker: Questions 7 through 12

Continuing with Kira Magrann’s cool challenge for April, the 30-day tabletop role-playing game maker or #AprilTTRPGMaker challenge.

Day 7: Your workspace.

The important thing about my workspace is that it includes cats. At least one, usually two, even three when the afternoon sun shines on my desk.

Also includes: an antique mahogany roll-top desk, bookcases mostly filled with RPGs (but only a fraction of the ones we own!), a worktable opposite the desk, and my computer (running on Ubuntu 16.04, with Wacom Intuos 5×9 tablet.) 

#AprilTTRPGMaker: Questions 1 through 6

Kira Magrann started a cool challenge for April, the 30-day tabletop role-playing game maker or #AprilTTRPGMaker challenge. Everyone who participates in creating RPGs is invited to chime in! Kira’s list of daily questions is included at the bottom of this post. They’re mostly short answers on Twitter and other social media, but I thought I would re-post them here in small groups, with better grammar and a few more characters.

Day 1: Who are you?

I’m Sophie Lagacé, a Canadian expatriate living in the San Francisco Bay, avid gamer, convention organizer, blogger, and game writer. I write and manage projects for Evil Hat Productions, and write freelance for Vigilance Press, Atlas Games, Generic Games, ZombieSmith, etc.

My career outside games has been as a civil and environmental engineer. 

My Welcome Back

I did not have a good weekend. On Friday night after eating lightly, I started feeling the same abdominal pain I had felt in November from appendicitis. At the time, I was treated with antibiotics but warned that in 40% of cases treated this way, patients eventually still have to have an appendectomy. Hey, people buy lottery tickets for much worse odds! But this time, it had to go. I didn’t wait, I asked Edmund to take me to the Emergency Room where I was admitted, prepped (I’m currently on blood thinners so that means bringing my coagulation rate down), and operated on. Hurray for laparoscopy and highly skilled medical teams!

I was discharged today (Tuesday) and I had a collection of Kickstarter deliveries waiting for me:

KS loot!

RPG a Day: Anticipation

31. What’s an awesome thing you anticipate for gaming in 2018?

I usually have no idea what’s going to be most amazing in gaming that year until I stumble on it. That’s OK, I enjoy the surprise. But even as I realize that the best part of my gaming experiences will continue to surprise me, there are a few things I look forward to.

First, a passel of projects I’m managing for Evil Hat Productions will likely hit the shelves in 2018 (fingers crossed.) I have high hopes for several of the new Fate Toolkits, and a few gems I can’t wait for you to see.

Second, I really look forward to Cam Banks’ Cortex Prime (Magic Vacuum Design Studio). I especially hope that it will have tools to lighten the game-master’s load and make it easier to improvise in response to players’ actions.

Finally, I have been keeping an eye on Nahual, Miguel Angel Espinoza and Edgar Clément’s upcoming game Powered by the Apocalypse. Nahual is a Mexican role-playing game set on the universe created by comic book artist Clément, started in the graphic novel Operación Bolivar. I really hope we can see its release in 2018.

#RPGaDay2017

RPG a Day: Mashups

30. What is an RPG genre-mashup you really enjoyed?

Today’s question was “What is an RPG genre-mashup you would most like to see?” but I rephrased it to my liking so I would have an excuse to mention a few of my favourites.

• Godlike (Hobgoblynn Press): World War II + gritty superheroes.
• Motobushido (Alliterated Games): Post-apocalyptic biker gangs + ronin code of honour.
• Roma Imperious (HinterWelt Enterprises): Victorious Roman Empire + magic.
• Threadbare RPG (Stephanie Bryant): Toys + punk aesthetics + brokenness.
• TORG: All the genres, colliding.
• X-Crawl (Pandahead Publishing/Goodman Games): Dungeon-crawling as a televised extreme sporting event.

#RPGaDay2017

Threadbare RPG