Ooops! Harmonics in my spell…

So I borked the Deck of Fate probabilities last night in my Fate of Bayern post, at least in terms of assigning thaumic energy types and harmonics. The way I wrote it, you would have much higher chances of some types of harmonics than others.

My bad: I couldn’t remember where I had read the number of each combination of sun and moon symbols (it was in this post from Fred Hicks) and I was too intent on writing to actually count them myself. But today I did count them (it’s much easier using the PDF than the deck for this).

Based on this, I assigned the thaumic energy flavours so they would all have the same probability: one sun = Material, multiple suns = Elemental, one moon = Spiritual/Dimensional, and multiple moons = Emotional/Mental. In addition one moon and one sun are at the GM’s discretion based on the fiction, and an eclipse means a wild spell.

That also means I have to change the final part of the example in the earlier post (see after the table).

No. Cards	Motif	Assigned Thaumic Type
18	Single sun	Material
6	Two suns	Elemental
6	Three suns
6	One moon, two suns
6	Two moons, one sun	Emotional/Mental
6	Three moons
6	Two moons
18	Single moon	Spiritual/Dimensional
6	One moon, one sun	GM’s choice
3	Eclipse	Wild
81	TOTAL

So the earlier example would produce the following harmonics:

• Turn 1: O (Material)—properly aligned.
• Turn 2: C (Spiritual/Dimensional).
• Turn 3: O (Material)—properly aligned.
• Turn 4: CCO (Emotional/Mental).
• Turn 5: COO (Elemental).
• Turn 6: OOO (Elemental), then CCO (Emotional/Mental).
• Turn 7: O (Material)—properly aligned.
• Turn 8: C (Spiritual/Dimensional).
• Turn 9: O (Material)—properly aligned.
• Turn 10: C (Spiritual/Dimensional).

For a total of 4 cards properly aligned with Material energy, 3 aligned with Spiritual/Dimensional, 2 with Emotional/Mental, and 2 with Elemental. Coincidentally, I don’t actually have to change my description!

Fate of Bayern: Castle Falkenstein for Fate Core

A bit over two months ago, I was struck with the idea of converting  one of my favourite role-playing games of old, Castle Falkenstein (R.Talsorian Games) to Fate Core (Evil Hat Productions) and using the Deck of Fate. This is particularly apt because the original game used ordinary playing cards instead of dice.

And now it’s the holidays, so I’m taking time for frivolous pursuits! I spent some time this week thinking about how to do this conversion. The skills are easy, and the character creation packages too. The biggest challenge is Sorcery, so I cooked up a draft. You can read the entire Fate_of_Bayern-v2.1 (it looks scary long, but it’s mostly because of the list of skills); but I’ll paste the sorcery discussion and example here.

Edit: Ignore this link, there is a more recent, complete, and corrected version here.

I’ll appreciate useful feedback on all sections, not just sorcery, since I still have some work to do on the draft; when it’s complete, I’ll post it in PDF, ePub and mobi ebook formats, as usual. For people who are local to the San Francisco Bay Area: I’ll be testing these rules at EndGame in Oakland some time in January.

One A.M. Ideas: Fate of Bayern

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.