Evil Hat Productions - Fate: System Toolkit

This book is a Fate System Toolkit . It is not The Fate System Toolkit .

What do we mean by that?

This Fate System Toolkit began as a stretch goal for the Fate Core System kickstarter. Originally, it was only the magic system section of the book. As the funding for that campaign grew, so did this book. And close on its heels, far outstripping the capacity of this book, came the requests for what should go into this book.

It was damn flattering to think folks thought we could take on all those topics. Impossible, mind youbut damn flattering.

That said, we knew we had to fulfill the spirit of all those requests, even if we couldnt match the letter of them. And so, expanding outward from our magic toolkit, is this Fate System Toolkit .

True to its name, our Toolkit is not a device that does exactly what you want right out of the box. But it is a collection of ideas, approaches, and other fiddly bits that can get you there. To put it another way, when folks asked us for the moon, we decided instead to offer them a variety of methods for building rockets. (We build rockets now. Rockets are cool.)

When looking for the right fit for your game, dont get suckered by appearances. Say something in here talks about handling giant monsters as maps or as collections of characters, rather than as a single scaled-up character. While it says on the tin this heres a method for handling giant monsters, thats just how the idea was packaged. It also offers you a method for how to handle boss fights in general. Or a strafing run against an orbital death satellite. Similarly, ways to take on the topic of superheroes in your Fate game are covered by a variety of concepts and sections within this bookonly one of which is labeled superheroes.

This is not to say that every tool out there could be in here, but there are enough ideas and hard surfaces to push off of that youre sure to find something that gets you going. And when you do find yourself with a new idea, please dont keep it to yourself. There are many places where great, excited conversation is happening right now that could use your voice and ideas, whether its the FateRPG Yahoo Group, the Fate Core community on Google+, the tabletop gaming forums on RPG.net and RPGGeek, or elsewhere online or off. Fate s audience is thousands strong and full of smart people, a whole passel of whom are way smarter than the folks who made Fate in the first place.

More than anything, this Fate System Toolkit is a training guide for your brain. In this kit youll find dozens of ways to add something new, something else, something different to your Fate Core game. In a few cases it will be exactly the right thing. In the vast majority of circumstances, it will be a starting point for further tinkering. Roll up your sleeves. Youve got a master collection of tools to work with here. Now lets see what you can make with them!

Fred Hicks

July 15, 2013