We Steal Work - A FATE Persona System

Please note, this is extremely work in progress and intended for a single campaign, it is very much geared towards the tastes of my players

The Premise

Each member of the party works on the 1st floor of The Steelworks, a shared office space and the largest of its kind in Central London. They know each other, mostly in passing, and may have interacted or shared projects/problems depending on their work. They have varying levels of seniority, and have never had any reason to visit any floor of the building other than the 1st. Come to think of it, they’re not sure they’ve ever even used the lift…

As it turns out, the rest of the shared office building is home to some of the most evil, despicable practices known to man. No, not just “typical business stuff”, the kind of things that will bring an end to the world as we know it! Again no, not just because they’ll trash the economy! Death! Demons! The harbingers of the apocalypse! An infernal bureaucracy is playing out its twisted games above their heads while the protagonists twiddle with spreadsheets to look busy. The halls of demonic power bend and weave between the cubicles of The Steelworks, distorting space to meet their needs, while our heroes ponder if they should use the on-premises cafeteria or head out for a salad box - after all, the coffee here is diabolical.

Clocks

Clocks are a system of timekeeping originating in Blades in the Dark. In this System, they will be used extensively to represent progress, danger, and value.

On the most basic level, a Clock might represent the process of solving a multi-part problem - 4 segments requiring 4 actions to resolve. At a higher level, a battle may move between different phases represented by the 8 segments of a clock, while a secondary 6-segment clock might track the integrity of the battlefield and a 4-segment clock shows an encroaching security force which can be delayed through active interference.

In practice, any time a clock is in use its purpose and means of progress will be explained, unless figuring that out is the purpose of the event.

In the system, the primary uses of clocks be: Days - Each day is a 4-segment Clock, split into Pre-Work, Lunch, After Work, and Late Night. Weeks - Each week is a 4-segment Clock, 1 segment per day, and on Fridays it is full - then Something happens. Social Links - Explained later, but each Social Link is an 8-segment Clock.

Skills

Same as default FATE, from fate-srd.com, you can use a Skill to:

Overcome: True to its name, you tackle some kind of challenge, engaging task, or hindrance related to your skill.

Create an Advantage: Whether you’re discovering something that already exists about an opponent or creating a situation that helps you succeed, creating advantages allows you to discover and create aspects, and lets you get free invocations of them.

Attack: You try to harm someone in a conflict. That harm may be physical, mental, emotional, or social in nature.

Defend: You try to keep someone from harming you, getting past you, or creating an advantage to use against you.

The default skills and their uses are:

To begin with, a character will have the following distribution of Skills in a Skill Pyramid:

This ensures characters aren’t excessively strong and have a range of abilities to lean on. We’ll also allow any character that meets the Skills Column requirement that no Level of skill has more skills than the one below it, if the total value of the skills equals 20, i.e.:

These distributions will give less opportunity for different approaches though, so are advised against.

Stunts

Stunts relate directly to the player’s Skills and can be used to use Skills in unusual ways, add bonuses to normal actions, or exceptions to standard rules. Typically a Stunt with no cost will give a +1 value to a roll, or allow a character to rely more heavily on their strengths - i.e. using Stealth to attack should a situation allow it. These are intentionally vague, and this page gives some great ideas for where we might go with it, and this one gives a more general approach that I’m happy to work with. Stunts are where the rules go to die, so creativity is the idea!

Aspects

We’ll be using the following Aspects at character creation:

• High Concept - Who are you and what do you do?
• Trouble - What complicates your life?
• First Adventure - An event that made you who you are, relatively recent.
• Crossed Path 1 - A relationship to another party member, related to First Adventure
• Crossed Path 2 - A relationship to another party member, related to First Adventure

The plan is to play out a Session 0.5 to establish FA, CP1, CP2.

Stress

There will be 3 Primary Stress Tracks in this game - Physical, Mental, and Financial

Stress Tracks start at 2 boxes per Track, with an additional box when the relevant skill is at +1, and a 2nd additional box at +3.

Consequences

Each player starts with 3 Consequence slots - Mild, Moderate, Severe. Consequences are not restricted to a particular stress track - you only have these 3 across all types of Stress.

In order to remove a consequence an action must be taken to stabilise it at the difficulty Shift in the table (+2 if performed on self), then given the Recovery Time specified. For particularly strong successes (+2 additional shifts or more) this recovery time may be reduced at GM discretion. Stabilisation requires an opportunity, and may not be possible in a crisis or combat situation.

The exception is Extreme consequences - these can only be cleared with time, and in resolving them the character must replace an Aspect with its resolution. You may not take more than 1 Extreme consequence on a single character.

An additional consequence slot is made available with Superb (+5) Physique, Will, or Resources - this consequence is restricted to a particular Stress Track.

Social Links

Social Links represent the way those we know influence our ability to function, and mechanically serve as a way to further goals beyond the Dungeon.