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Fate Worlds Volume One: Worlds on Fire
Settings for the Fate Core role-playing system: Tower of Serpents, White Picket Witches, Fight Fire, Kriegszeppelin Valkyrie, Burn Shift, and Wild Blue.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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September 7, 2019
As a general note, this book contains many typos: it looks like someone decided to reword sentences but also kept the original wording by accident. This does not generally interfere with understanding.
“Tower of Serpents”:
This is a fun expansion on the example game from FATE Core. The adventure seems hard: even having read it I don’t know if I could make choices to an optimal ending. In running a one shot, I might cut out one of the factions to simplify things. On the whole, a serviceable supplement.
“White Picket Witches”:
In concept, I like places of power, though I’m unconvinced about the execution. Instead of the standard High Concept, Trouble, and 3 Phase Aspects, WPW has Canon, Tragic Flaw, Casting, Childhood, and Heritage. Casting is the weak point in terms of aspects, but it is a fun detail to include. This supplement uses Assets in place of Skills from FATE Core and Approaches from FAE. It works, though it’s possibly overkill to make every approach work for both attack and defense. WPW repeatedly uses “characters” when it should say “PCs” or “Player Characters,” resulting in confusion.
“Fight Fire”:
6 pages of in-character introductory material droning on before the actual supplement begins. Skills are streamlined: notice is absorbed into other skills, but this fact is buried several skills deep. It’s a good idea with poor presentation. It is unclear but interesting how they’ve worked out healing from consequences creating new aspects. I totally understand their decision to treat Fire as an NPC. It fits with the way Firefighters talk about it and cooperated with the FATE Fractal. But it doesn’t work for me at all. Fire rules are poorly expressed as skills. The types of fires are written in poor order for transformation sequence. Example Incidents are dry and unpleasant to read for several pages. The Hellshow toolkits are both well-written.
Appendix A is helpful, but dry and possibly over-written. It would have been fine to only define words used in the supplement. Special tools section is totally unhelpful. It’s weird that example quotations don’t always use the glossary word itself.
Appendix B: Tables require 2d6, not FATE Dice. Table A lacks a result for 7, the most common result.
“Kriegzeppelin Valkyrie”:
The introductory material was wonderful, thoughtful, and sensitive. The use of “he—or she—“ is obnoxious. While I personally prefer the common gender aka “assuming the masculine” rule, even the singular they is better than this snide tone. It says “oh yeah, you thought all the flying aces were men, huh? Well guess what?” Without the emdashes it’s still overly clunky, but at least it wouldn’t be condescending. The rules for Aerial Combat seem solid: imitating reality without getting bogged down in particulars. I would prefer to have had the PC pregens listed before the GM section. I really like the randomized relationship system. It doesn’t work for every game, but it’s much better than sitting around a table waiting for someone to be inspired. This is a really good setting. Just the right balance of history and pulp. Although I get the value of giving every PCs the same Trouble (“I Will Prove I’m the Best”), several pilots have more legitimate Troubles as other aspects (“Bum Leg” comes to mind). “I Will Prove I’m the Best” can also more frequently be invoked to a player’s benefit, making it more legitimate as a minor aspect than a Trouble.
“Burn Shift”:
Billed as aPost-Apocalyptic setting, this leans toward Post-Post-Apocalyptic. The author brings up tones and themes, then lists several good Campaign seeds as themes, followed by discussion of tone. Periodic Insanity is a bad flaw: too real for fun, not real enough to be sensitive. Rules for the Community extras are complicated/confusing. Rules for community size and improvements are quite good.
“Wild Blue”:
My 2-second elevator pitch: Wild West Superheroes if America were Faerie. A much better case of using a narrator for setting information, and the game rules are presented “out of character.” This supplement keeps things simply by only introducing 2 new skills, both very sensible, and Ride basically replaces Drive. ”Wild Blue” has arguably the best rpg handling of superpowers I’ve encountered: you can have any power you want, but only one and with a sufficiently powerful drawback; if you’re fighting mooks your power reliably solves the problem you want it to, but if you’re up against a real threat it has a quantifiable bonus. The NPC write ups are good. The only thing I’m not a fan of is the art style; I expected to hate this supplement based on looks and it’s my favorite part of the book.
“Tower of Serpents”:
This is a fun expansion on the example game from FATE Core. The adventure seems hard: even having read it I don’t know if I could make choices to an optimal ending. In running a one shot, I might cut out one of the factions to simplify things. On the whole, a serviceable supplement.
“White Picket Witches”:
In concept, I like places of power, though I’m unconvinced about the execution. Instead of the standard High Concept, Trouble, and 3 Phase Aspects, WPW has Canon, Tragic Flaw, Casting, Childhood, and Heritage. Casting is the weak point in terms of aspects, but it is a fun detail to include. This supplement uses Assets in place of Skills from FATE Core and Approaches from FAE. It works, though it’s possibly overkill to make every approach work for both attack and defense. WPW repeatedly uses “characters” when it should say “PCs” or “Player Characters,” resulting in confusion.
“Fight Fire”:
6 pages of in-character introductory material droning on before the actual supplement begins. Skills are streamlined: notice is absorbed into other skills, but this fact is buried several skills deep. It’s a good idea with poor presentation. It is unclear but interesting how they’ve worked out healing from consequences creating new aspects. I totally understand their decision to treat Fire as an NPC. It fits with the way Firefighters talk about it and cooperated with the FATE Fractal. But it doesn’t work for me at all. Fire rules are poorly expressed as skills. The types of fires are written in poor order for transformation sequence. Example Incidents are dry and unpleasant to read for several pages. The Hellshow toolkits are both well-written.
Appendix A is helpful, but dry and possibly over-written. It would have been fine to only define words used in the supplement. Special tools section is totally unhelpful. It’s weird that example quotations don’t always use the glossary word itself.
Appendix B: Tables require 2d6, not FATE Dice. Table A lacks a result for 7, the most common result.
“Kriegzeppelin Valkyrie”:
The introductory material was wonderful, thoughtful, and sensitive. The use of “he—or she—“ is obnoxious. While I personally prefer the common gender aka “assuming the masculine” rule, even the singular they is better than this snide tone. It says “oh yeah, you thought all the flying aces were men, huh? Well guess what?” Without the emdashes it’s still overly clunky, but at least it wouldn’t be condescending. The rules for Aerial Combat seem solid: imitating reality without getting bogged down in particulars. I would prefer to have had the PC pregens listed before the GM section. I really like the randomized relationship system. It doesn’t work for every game, but it’s much better than sitting around a table waiting for someone to be inspired. This is a really good setting. Just the right balance of history and pulp. Although I get the value of giving every PCs the same Trouble (“I Will Prove I’m the Best”), several pilots have more legitimate Troubles as other aspects (“Bum Leg” comes to mind). “I Will Prove I’m the Best” can also more frequently be invoked to a player’s benefit, making it more legitimate as a minor aspect than a Trouble.
“Burn Shift”:
Billed as aPost-Apocalyptic setting, this leans toward Post-Post-Apocalyptic. The author brings up tones and themes, then lists several good Campaign seeds as themes, followed by discussion of tone. Periodic Insanity is a bad flaw: too real for fun, not real enough to be sensitive. Rules for the Community extras are complicated/confusing. Rules for community size and improvements are quite good.
“Wild Blue”:
My 2-second elevator pitch: Wild West Superheroes if America were Faerie. A much better case of using a narrator for setting information, and the game rules are presented “out of character.” This supplement keeps things simply by only introducing 2 new skills, both very sensible, and Ride basically replaces Drive. ”Wild Blue” has arguably the best rpg handling of superpowers I’ve encountered: you can have any power you want, but only one and with a sufficiently powerful drawback; if you’re fighting mooks your power reliably solves the problem you want it to, but if you’re up against a real threat it has a quantifiable bonus. The NPC write ups are good. The only thing I’m not a fan of is the art style; I expected to hate this supplement based on looks and it’s my favorite part of the book.
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