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FATE Horror Toolkit
FATE Horror Toolkit
FATE Horror Toolkit
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RYAN MIKE
BRIAN JEREMY OLSON
LEONARD KELLER MACKLIN
BALSERA ENGARD
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Welcome to the Fate Horror Toolkit, the newest book in the Fate Toolkit series.
The Toolkits are exactly what they sound like—a collection of add-on tools to
make things happen in your Fate games. As always, we encourage you to hack
the rules to your liking, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little help (or a little
inspiration), and these Toolkits are designed to provide just that.
So how does this new series differ from the Fate System Toolkit? The Fate System
Toolkit was like a buffet, but instead of serving a variety of foods, it was full of
ideas for all different kinds of games. In this Toolkit series, though, each volume
focuses on a specific theme. Some give help with a particular game element, such
as creating effective adversaries and using them to drive the plot of your campaign,
as in the Fate Adversary Toolkit. Others are dedicated to a particular genre of game,
like the Fate Horror Toolkit here. Rather than taking a cookie-cutter approach, each
volume is tailored to provide the most useful system hacks, samples, and story
starters for the topic, so you’ll find something new and different in every book.
We hope you’ll check out our list of current and upcoming Toolkits on our
website (www.evilhat.com/home/fate-toolkits).
Now, dare to open the creaking cellar door and face your Fate!
Many roleplaying games are lightly spiced with disturbing or scary elements
intended to thrill and entertain their players.
Others draw on the rich tradition of horror fiction to pose awful moral dilem-
mas, offer existential threats at every turn, and tell stories saturated with tension
and dread.
Such games gaze into the abyss and challenge it to gaze back—if it dares.
Horror Is Isolating
Horror fiction systematically isolates its protagonists from anyone or anything
that can help them, leaving them nobody to rely on but themselves. Sometimes
it goes even further, eliminating the protagonists one at a time until the last sur-
vivor faces a desperate struggle to survive against insurmountable odds.
In a horror game, the player characters find it difficult to persuade anyone to
help them, or their helpers meet grisly fates. The existence of their adversaries
is difficult to prove. At best the authorities view the characters as confused or
dishonest, at worst they’re seen as menaces to be handled accordingly.
Presuming, of course, that the authorities aren’t already owned by the adversary.
A game can be isolating without employing a high player character mortality
rate, but if characters are expected to die regularly—such as when evoking a
Halloween-style slasher movie—the game needs to provide options for keeping
the players of dead characters involved and engaged in the game.
During Play
• Don’t deliberately exploit the players’ genuine fears to get an easy scare
unless you’ve discussed it with them first and received their explicit and
enthusiastic consent.
• Consent given once does not imply blanket consent for the same thing
forever. Even if a player has previously been okay with an element in the
game, listen to them if they ask you to stop using it from now on. If you
use a tool like intensity aspects on page 27 from the beginning of the
game but a player becomes uncomfortable with them, stop using that tool.
• Ensure you listen when players use the X-Card or call for a Script Change
or otherwise express their desire to bypass or address something they are
finding too uncomfortable.
• While the X-Card or Script Change tools allow players to take control over
their own safety and to call for content changes, it is still your responsibil-
ity as the GM to ensure that everyone is having a good time. If a player is
visibly getting very uncomfortable but hasn’t said anything, don’t assume
they are okay just because they haven’t used a tool; call a brief break and
check in with them privately to be sure.
For your players to get the most out of your horror game, it’s critical that they
fully invest themselves in their characters and assist you in building and sustain-
ing the necessary mood. The tools provided in this chapter are designed to help
you achieve this.
A failing of many horror stories is that their characters are so poorly drawn or
so unlikable that the audience doesn’t care what happens to them. Much of the
advice we provide here is dedicated to ensuring that the characters and NPCs
in your game are sympathetic and fully realized, helping you create an effective
horror experience.
Choosing Aspects
Ask players to come up with grounded high concepts and other aspects. If a
player suggests the high concept aspect Elite Soldier for their character,
you might propose Grizzled Veteran or Experienced Infantryman as
alternatives.
People can also be vulnerable because of their physical limitations. The elderly
and children are typical examples of this in horror fiction, as are people with a
reduced ability to see, hear, or move about under their own power. If you use this
approach, it is important to treat the subject with respect. For more about playing
characters with physical limitations, see the Fate Accessibility Toolkit.
LINKED ASPECTS
Aspects that link to other player characters or NPCs (such as the ones chosen
during the traditional Phase Trio, Fate Core System, page 38) are extremely useful
for building a bond between the characters that you can later leverage to evoke
horror themes.
Choosing Stunts
Don’t allow stunts that undermine the horror themes of your game. For example,
the stunt Always Making Useful Things (Fate Core System, page 103) makes it
much more difficult to isolate a character from their tools and other useful items.
Instead, encourage players to take stunts for their characters that have a darker or
more cynical tint to them in keeping with horror themes. A good example is Lies
Upon Lies (Fate Core System, page 104), which makes it easier to lie to someone
who has already believed one of your lies in the current session.
You begin your game with a series of grisly killings, and the players’
investigations lead them to believe that an Outsized Dog is responsible.
Of course, the perpetrator is actually a Cursed Lycanthrope.
You can turn the availability of information in Fate Core to your advantage in
scaring your players. As Alfred Hitchcock pointed out, there is a big difference
between surprise and suspense, and the latter is a more effective way to scare
your players. If two players are at a scene in a restaurant when a bomb suddenly
explodes, they are surprised and probably horrified, but there has been no suspense.
If instead you describe the bomb under the table as they sit down and occasion-
ally mention as an aside that the number on its timer is ticking ever closer to
zero, you build tension and suspense that keeps them on the edge of their seat.
Ed’s GMing his horror game Morts and he says, “There’s something
about this building that gives you a bad feeling, but you can’t really
say why. Oh, by the way, I’m just going to put this situation aspect
here, Hiding in the Shadows with two free invokes. It’s nothing to do
with any of you. It’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it. Anyway,
what do you do next?”
HEROIC SACRIFICE
The heroic sacrifice is a special form of concession. Like any other concession,
a player can only choose to do this while they haven’t been taken out and before
the dice hit the table on a current action. When they heroically sacrifice their
character, they will die and there is no way for this to be prevented. The player
gets to describe the circumstances of their PC’s death in as much detail as they
like, adding reasonable story details as necessary, and can achieve one of the fol-
lowing results in addition to their glorious demise:
• Take out a mob of nameless NPCs
• Take out a supporting NPC
• Force a named NPC to take a severe consequence. If the NPC has already
taken a severe consequence, make them take an extreme one instead. If
they have already taken an extreme consequence, take them out.
• If the group agrees, immediately end an ongoing conflict. This is a form
of group concession and means the PCs don’t fulfill their objectives for
the conflict. The sacrifice allows them to escape without any further ill
effects, letting them lick their wounds and try again later. The PCs receive
fate points for the concession as normal.
• If the group agrees it makes sense, the dying PC immediately overcomes
a single obstacle without a roll, regardless of the opposition against them.
When a player chooses to heroically sacrifice their character, they can’t create
a new one until the end of the scenario. However, their character can live on
through a legacy aspect (see the next section) and/or as a ghost as suggested
on page 19.
HAUNTING
A player can bring back their departed character as a ghost. Ghosts can appear
even in games that don’t have any active supernatural elements. There’s a rich
tradition in drama where the ghosts are the living characters’ subconscious trying
to communicate to their conscious selves, allegorical representations, or manifes-
tations of guilt and internal struggle. Ghosts of this sort can’t manifest tangibly
in ways that affect NPCs or the world at large—nor can they be attacked—but
they can interact with living PCs.
Before the game begins, discuss what ghosts are and what they’re capable of.
Can they walk through walls? Read emotions? Manipulate electronics? Do they
even exist except as guilt-ridden hallucinations?
Ghosts are always less flexible and adaptable than the living, more focused on
matters related to their death and unfinished business. Convert them to a Fate
Core supporting NPC, choosing from the character’s prior skills. Change their
high concept to represent their ghostly state, and give them a new trouble that
relates to their unfinished business.
A character who dies and returns to haunt their friends through text
messages and other electronic ephemera is a Ghost in the Machine.
Another character returns as a more physical specter that’s Back from
Hell for Revenge.
The Ghost in the Machine rolls Crafts to get the aspect Repossessed
Car, giving them physical control over the vehicle for as long as the
aspect lasts.
While Manifested, the ghost can take actions to directly affect the material
world at +2 to whatever opposition applies.
Given their frailty, ghosts make better observers and informers than active
participants much of the time. Nothing is innately impossible for them, though,
and they are free to attempt whatever seems dramatic and interesting. Creating
haunting effects like ectoplasmic manifestations and eerie apparitions is a matter
of creating an advantage.
Marissa’s character Kelly has a stunt that makes her an expert at rec-
ognizing and translating foreign languages. Elsa builds an NPC with
a passion for creation myths and a stunt that gives him an almost
inexhaustible library of books in many languages that contain such
stories from around the world.
The group is about to go out into the city to scavenge food when
they’re approached by a survivor they don’t know very well. He tells
them they’re heading into the area of the city where he used to live
and he’d be ever so grateful if they could keep an eye out for his pet
cat and bring her back to him if possible. When the group is search-
ing a mini-mart for supplies, they find the traumatized cat and spend
a scene outwitting and capturing her for return to her exceedingly
grateful owner. Sessions later, when the cat owner is in dire trouble (or
worse, killed), the group will feel it more keenly because of the earlier
favor. If you use this specific example, the result might be that the
players care more for the cat than the survivor, but that could work
just as well for your purposes...
HUMANIZING VICTIMS
Every horror story needs victims, and it’s vital that the audience cares about them.
The following are some techniques you can use to encourage your players to care
about the victims of your vile plots.
Elsa has five people in her group. They’re going hiking in the wilderness
and she plans to have them stumble across the remains of a hunter
eaten by werewolves. She chooses the following details:
• The hunter’s satellite phone is still in his tent, and it has 18 missed
messages from “Lisa”
• The hunter is now little but scattered bones, gnawed almost clean
The players may declare details that fit the facts but are incompatible with
your plans—for example, Elsa’s players might decide that the attack was carried
out by intelligent wolves rather than a werewolf. If this happens you can change
your story to fit the players’ interpretation of the facts or keep to your original
plan—but if you do this, award each player a fate point when you dramatically
reveal the truth.
The communal pool resets to zero at every significant milestone and can hold
as many fate points as there are players in the group—but don’t take points away
from the pool if it’s full and some of the players can’t make it to a session.
When a compel complicates matters for the group and not just a single charac-
ter, give the fate point to the communal pool. Some of the other systems in this
chapter also add fate points to the pool.
The use of communal fate points is designed to encourage the group to work
together, to think about each other’s characters, and to reduce the number of fate
points gained by the group when a complication affects more than one player.
Don’t use this system if distrust and group in-fighting are core elements of the
horror in your story.
Making communal fate points the only ones available to the players makes
teamwork an absolute necessity. Decide with your group during game creation
if you’ll use communal fate points, and whether they’ll supplement or replace
each character’s usual pool of fate points.
The following two systems use the communal pool to encourage players to
self-compel and to declare story details that complicate matters for the group.
Someone with Average (+1) Shoot trying to gun down a target for
whom they have a -3 intensity aspect would roll at Good (+3) because
they are attacking the object of their loathing. Someone with Average
(+1) Athletics trying to dodge a punch from someone with a +3 intensity
aspect towards them would roll at Good (+3) because their opponent
is working against their own desire.
A character who’s Always Faithful but has a Big Debt to Pay is offered
a waiver of their debt in exchange for a “harmless secret” about another
member of the group.
A character sees a Hated Enemy through her rifle scope and has a brief
window to shoot before they disappear to safety…but if she fires it will
make a loud noise and draw the Ravenous Horde.
Elsa decides that if the group takes no action against the spirit possess-
ing the firefighter, it will lock the doors during a matinee performance
at a major local theatre and then burn the place to the ground, incin-
erating everyone inside.
Elsa looks at the PCs’ aspects and sees that Marissa’s character Kelly
has the aspect No Woman Left Behind. Elsa decides that the firefighter
will be a woman so Kelly is more likely to argue for saving her instead
of trapping the spirit. Meanwhile, Sarah’s character has the aspect A
Stitch in Time Saves Nine, meaning that she’s more likely to argue
for causing a known amount of suffering to one person in order to
prevent an unknowable amount of suffering to others in the future on
the spirit’s return.
If a PC ends up strongly conflicting with others in the group due to the way
one of their aspects pertains to a moral dilemma, give them a fate point as if this
were a self-compel.
Resolution
Time pressure is essential to making a dilemma play out with the drama it
deserves, so the first part of triggering a resolution scene is to show the players
why they need to act in the imminent future.
Elsa says, “You have a dilemma on your hands. If you don’t act now,
hundreds of people could be burned alive. But will you hunt down
the firefighter and perform a dangerous exorcism, at best freeing the
spirit to return next Hallowe’en, or will you use the spell you discov-
ered in the Codex Infernus to trap the spirit forever in the body of the
firefighter, condemning her to a personal hell but preventing the spirit
from harming anyone else?”
Next the group discusses the situation and decides how to proceed, choosing
between the options presented in the dilemma or one of their own devising. If
the characters can’t come to a unanimous decision that’s fine—anyone who voted
against the choice made can refuse to get involved or actively oppose the other
characters during the following scene.
Climax: Whatever option the players choose sets the stakes of the climactic scene,
which you then resolve as a conflict, challenge, or contest—whichever fits the
situation best.
If Elsa’s group had decided to take their own option of using untested
magic to remove the spirit from the firefighter’s body and immediately
trap it in a doll, they would have gone into the climactic scene facing
Legendary (+8) rather than Superb (+5) opposition and knowing that if
they were taken out they would suffer at least an extreme consequence.
It’s a happier ending, but a lot more difficult to achieve.
Changes of Heart: If the group, or anyone in it, changes their mind and decides
to work towards a different option in the climactic scene, that’s fine—in fact, it’s
a great source of drama. If they switch to work on an option not declared in the
dilemma, they face increased opposition and greater risk as previously described
in “Going Their Own Way”.
Fate Core provides a system for mental conflicts and the potentially lasting con-
sequences that can result from them. The tools we provide here are designed to
supplement the standard mental conflict rules in handling the long-term mental
toll of horror on the characters.
Media Inspiration
The following books, movies, and TV shows are useful sources of inspiration
when considering the mental toll of horror:
• The Orphanage is an excellent movie that speaks to the extremes to which
grief can drive people.
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, along with several of his other
works, focuses on the repercussions of guilt and shame.
• Jessabelle is a Southern Gothic movie about recovering from extreme injury
while in your childhood home.
• 10 Cloverfield Lane depicts the consequences of isolation and uncertainty
on the human psyche.
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel exploring the twin roles of hope
and fear in driving the characters to survive in a bleak, post-apocalyptic
world.
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a classic about a man surviving alone
and surrounded by vampires who comes to realize that he has become a
monster to the monsters.
• The Shining by Stephen King excruciatingly depicts the descent of one
man into madness.
• Stakeland is a tale of humans surviving a vampire apocalypse, being herded
for food and facing unimaginable terrors in the night.
• Alien gets under your skin… Literally.
• Quarantine is a zombie film in a filthy, claustrophobic setting that practi-
cally assaults all five senses.
• Knights of Sidonia is action sci-fi with a heaping helping of visceral horror
and some good ideas about how to integrate it into other stories.
• Child of Fire features creatures that provoke a visceral reaction largely
outside of normal horror tropes.
• Scream, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre are
the classics of ‘80s slasher flicks, and capture the essence of splatter horror.
Players, take the time to research genuine mental illnesses when coming up with
trauma aspects, as this will help you to pick triggers and responses that really go
together instead of building a genre cliché. It’s possible that you’ll discover what
you were looking for wasn’t what you expected.
Rather than using a clinical name like Acute Stress Disorder, use an
evocative name that guides how the aspect affects the character—mental illness
doesn’t look the same for any one person all the time.
Richard’s character, Tanvir, was in a car crash that killed his husband. His
husband’s ghost has been haunting Tanvir in mirrors and windows ever
since. Richard researches post-traumatic stress disorder and decides
it would be the appropriate basis of a trauma aspect, so he chooses
Legacy of Shattered Glass.
A character can be compelled in other ways as they fail to cope with their trauma,
meaning they experience nightmares, experience a panic attack, or freeze in place.
They might instead use a maladaptive coping mechanism like ritualized behavior,
avoidance, or hypervigilance. See “Coping Conditions” (page 41) for a system
that builds on the idea of maladaptive coping.
When a character marks a box of mental or physical stress, that’s a good time to
offer a compel on one of their trauma aspects as the strain of the situation causes
the symptom to take effect. Most importantly, the player and GM should agree
on what triggers the symptom or condition.
Trauma aspects last until the character takes the time to treat them through
professional therapy or heart-to-heart conversation with another character. Each
game will function differently in how difficult it is to treat trauma aspects, but
the idea is to highlight the process of healing and treating mental illnesses. Players
heal their characters’ physical wounds by seeing a medic; why wouldn’t characters
also see therapists or psychiatrists?
Once a trauma aspect has completely healed, this means that the character
has learned to use healthy coping mechanisms to deal with their psychological
discomfort, which never entirely goes away. Healthy coping mechanisms aren’t an
aspect to be invoked or compelled, but part of how the character acts and behaves.
Tanvir eventually lays the ghost of his husband to rest; the literal
haunting ends, though he continues to be haunted by the accident.
Eventually, after regular visits to a therapist, he learns to cope with his
remaining symptoms of PTSD using mindfulness, exercising regularly,
and investing more deeply in his other relationships.
• Fleeting coping conditions remain checked for a scene but are cleared out
immediately when the scene ends or the character escapes from it.
• Sticky coping conditions remain checked until the character recuperates
naturally. The maladaptive coping behavior recurs when triggered by stress-
ful situations or affects the character continually until they have a chance
to find some peace with a good night’s sleep, a stiff drink, a convivial meal,
meditation, or some other calming and centering activity.
• Lasting coping conditions remain checked until the character seeks help.
The maladaptive coping behavior recurs regularly and the character must
receive counseling and/or medication to clear the condition, needing
someone to overcome at least Great (+4) opposition.
LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR
While this section is aimed squarely at emulating
gore and splatter horror, its systems also work
well for representing the disturbing and unsettling
nature of encounters with the eldritch and uncanny
which are the hallmarks of Lovecraftian horror.
Rather than gore, encounters are with mind-bog-
gling architecture and Things That Should Not Be.
In Richard’s survival horror game, the PCs stumble into the aftermath
of a zombie attack. Richard passes out a fate point to each player,
with the compel “The Brutal and Bloody Corpse Carnage turns
your stomachs. You spend several minutes throwing up and regaining
your composure, which was very much a bad idea. By the time you’ve
recovered yourselves, you realize that several of the corpses have risen
to their feet and are almost on top of you...”
Decision-based compels driven by viscera are a great way to set up classic horror
situations, like a character…
• …fleeing the scene and ending up alone with something dangerous nearby
• …fleeing the scene and leaving behind something (or someone) important
• …screaming and attracting unwanted attention
• …ruining their tough facade in front of someone they want to impress
• …abandoning a carefully-prepared ambush and frantically attacking
Viscera can also be used for event-based compels. These draw on the exact
circumstances more than decision-based compels, but some examples include
characters…
• …being so distracted that they miss an ambush
• …being mistaken as the cause of the gore by another party
• …slipping in the gore and getting thoroughly covered in it
• …incorrectly identifying the victim because they can’t bring themselves
to look carefully
Hardened Hearts
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense for a character to be bothered by viscera. In
some subgenres of horror, especially survival or splatter horror, this works with-
out further complication. Give your character an aspect like Expert Surgeon
or Combat Veteran justifying why they can shrug off a bloody mess or a room
strewn with internal organs. Since aspects are always true, you can use such an
aspect to argue that a viscera-based compel is inappropriate, and you’ll always
have something to invoke when defending against viscera-based attacks.
In other genres, especially those focusing on psychological horror, this kind of
hardening comes at a cost. One way to handle this is with a stunt that exchanges
your internal cost for an external cost; instead of you getting grossed out, everyone
nearby is disturbed by your indifference.
Inured: You’ve got a strategy for coping with viscera and gore, but
it’s not comfortable for others. You have a sticky condition (Dresden
Files Accelerated, page 116)—Disturbingly Callous []—that you can
check at any time. While it’s checked you’re immune to gore-based
mental attacks and can’t have visceral aspects compelled against
you—but you also can’t use or defend against the Empathy skill. To
clear Disturbingly Callous, you must demonstrate that you are vulner-
able and human after all, for example by making an emotional appeal
in a safe place, or putting yourself in danger for your allies. Anyone
without Disturbingly Callous checked adds one to the shift value of
every gore attack they receive if they’re in the same zone as someone
with the condition checked.
Monsters are often the real stars of horror fiction. We’re happy to root for the
protagonists, but when the story’s over it’s the monsters we remember.
But monsters are the top of a horrific iceberg, and effective adversaries come
in many guises. From the manifestation of a personal fear—like dread of one’s
own capacity for evil—to body-ravaging disease, involuntary transformation, or
existential threat, adversaries reflect and magnify the fears common to the human
condition to scare and thrill audiences.
In this chapter we give you tools and techniques for making scary, memorable
adversaries in your games.
Making Monsters
From Frankenstein’s Creature to Jason Vorhees, there’s a pantheon of iconic mon-
sters that are regularly resurrected in new forms because of their enduring appeal.
Media Inspiration
We liberally borrowed from some classic horror movies when we were writing the
advice in this section. Works that inspired us include:
• Lights Out is the inspiration for the Shadow Specter on page 50.
The history of this antagonist and its relationship with the protagonists is
fascinating and well done.
• It Follows is the inspiration for the Ineluctable Hunter on page 50.
It’s a mysterious figure about which we know almost nothing, and it doesn’t
jump out and scare you. In addition to being a great example of how the
inexplicable can be scary, it’s an object lesson in the power of suspense,
and also poses an interesting moral dilemma.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Almost everyone is familiar with Freddy
Krueger, the legendary monster from this series of movies. He inspired
the Nightmare Stalker on page 50. He has an interesting past, an
excellent motivation for his horrendous crimes, and a beguilingly sinister
personality that turned him into something of an antihero by the end of
the series.
• The Omen: Damien, the child antagonist of this sinister movie, is the
inspiration for The Devil’s Spawn on page 50.
But now it’s time to make your own monsters.
Here are some other examples of monstrous high concepts and their associ-
ated themes:
• An Ineluctable Hunter latches onto a single victim and pursues them
at a walking pace until it catches and kills them, taking the concept of an
obsessive stalker to a supernaturally intense conclusion.
• The Nightmare Stalker is a monster that haunts people in their bad
dreams, symbolizing the debilitating effect of fear itself and the terrible
things people will do when they’re afraid.
• A Cursed Lycanthrope who transforms into a ravening beast on the
nights of the full moon represents the fear of loss of control, of unrestrained
rage and murderous intent.
• The Devil’s Spawn is a murderous child with psychokinesis who embod-
ies the fact that children are alien to adults, combined with the fear of a
parent that their child might be somehow wrong.
Elsa gives her Nightmare Stalker a skill called Nightmare which it uses
to enter nightmares and attack people in their sleep. She decides to
make it a full extra, because if a PC manages to get hold of the weapon
the stalker used during its living rampages they’ll gain the same ability.
She writes it up like this:
Nightmare
This skill determines the character’s ability to reach into a sleeping
mind and twist a dream into a nightmare, opening a weakness through
which the dreamer can be physically attacked.
Overcome: Nightmare can be used to overcome defensive advan-
tages that have been created inside a dreamscape by a lucid dreamer.
Create Advantage: Nightmare can be used to create advantages that
gradually twist a pleasant dream into a nightmare. Actively opposed
by Will.
Attack: You can use Nightmare to attack the dreamer if you invoke
an aspect you previously created with this skill. Defended by Will.
Nightmare attacks can only be absorbed with mental stress boxes or
physical consequence slots. Waking witnesses will see wounds opening
up on the sleeper’s body as they fill consequence slots.
Defend: Nightmare isn’t used to defend.
You make a sapient plant monster that can release soporific pollen to
make feeding easier. You give it a fleeting Depollenated [] condition
that it checks whenever it has used this ability, meaning that it can’t
use it again until the next scene.
Sticky conditions work well to represent states that toggle on and off when
particular conditions are met. You can create stunts that only function if a sticky
condition is checked (or unchecked) or use a sticky condition to give your monster
a new vulnerability in a particular circumstance.
Lasting conditions are suitable for a significant drain on the monster’s abili-
ties or a vulnerability that has a sustained impact on the monster’s health when
it’s triggered.
Choose Stunts
If you’ve chosen your creation’s monstrous skills carefully, you probably don’t
need to give your monster stunts that give it a +2 bonus on certain actions or
use a skill in an unusual way. Instead, concentrate on giving your monster stunts
that reinforce its theme by letting it break the usual rules of Fate in some creepy
and unsettling ways.
To help maintain mystery and suspense, you can either keep your monster’s
aspects hidden until they’re discovered by the PCs or you can deliberately word
them in a suspenseful way. For example, rather than being an Ancient Vampire
your monster could be a Sanguine Fiend.
Unique Conditions
[]Curse of the Daystar (sticky): Mark this condition at dawn and clear it at
sunset every day. While this condition is checked, the vampire is incapable of
healing or using stunts and faces a base opposition of Superb (+5) against any
action it tries to take.
[]Wolf Form (sticky): While in the form of a wolf, the vampire replaces its skills
with three approaches called Hunt, Kill, and Run. One is rated the same as the
vampire’s apex skill, one is one lower, and the other is two lower.
[]Bat Form (sticky): While in the form of a bat, the vampire replaces its skills
with three approaches called Fly, Hide, and Feed. One is rated the same as the
vampire’s apex skill, one is one lower, and the other is two lower.
[]Mist Form (sticky): When in mist form, the vampire can only drift at a
walking pace and has no skills or approaches. It can enter anywhere that isn’t
airtight and can’t be harmed except by an attack that invokes a vulnerability
that would logically affect an immaterial form—such as fire or sunlight. The
vampire cannot defend against such attacks.
Unique Conditions
Instead of using regular consequences and the Indestructible stunt, you can give
your slasher multiple conditions that represent progress towards taking it out.
Giving it three or four fleeting conditions, two or three sticky conditions and
one or two lasting conditions will make it very tough! Also, instead of hindering
the slasher, each condition it checks makes it more brutal and difficult to kill.
For example: Pissed, Brutal, Adrenaline Rush (Fleeting); Vengeful, Inured
to Pain (Sticky); Berserk Frenzy (Lasting)
Marking one of these conditions gives the slasher an aspect of the same name
and a free invoke on that aspect.
Unique Conditions
Conditions are a great way of representing the created monster’s unusual physiol-
ogy. Here are some possibilities:
[]Lightning Struck (fleeting): After being struck by lightning or using its
Lightning Soul stunt to shock itself, the monster becomes powerfully ener-
gized until the end of the scene. Immediately recover the monster’s lowest
consequence and gain two free invokes on its high concept.
[]Battle Station Mode (sticky): A robotic monster changes configuration into a
powerful attack form. In this mode it can’t move zones or dodge attacks, but
it gains Armor:4 and sprouts cannon, electrical generators, or another ranged
weapon with Weapon:2.
Media Inspiration
The following books and movies are useful sources of inspiration to help you
explore body horror themes:
• Many Clive Barker books, including Cabal, The Books of Blood, and The
Hellbound Heart all fit the bill. “Everybody is a book of blood. Wherever
we’re opened, we’re red.”
• David Cronenberg’s The Fly, in which the protagonist is the victim of a
matter transportation experiment that goes horribly wrong when he starts
transforming into a humanoid fly.
• Scott Sigler’s Infected, which focuses on a man’s battle with an intelligent
disease that’s infecting his body and that has its own agenda.
• Idle Hands and Evil Dead 2 both feature rogue body parts.
• The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey explores both the fear of being
transformed and the fear of already being a monster, in a few different ways.
• Ritual by Graham Masterton. Ritual autophagy and murder as a holy
sacrament feature heavily in this grisly novel.
• The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1983 original is the best, though the 2011
remake is also decent.
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a seminal example of a non-lethal
transformation.
Permanently changing a character’s body is of great narrative and emotional
significance and you must obtain enthusiastic consent from your players before
you use the techniques presented here. Don’t assume that your players are com-
fortable with their characters being mutilated or tortured just because they signed
up for a horror game.
Rufio has his Eye Gouged Out by a cultist who needs the body part
for a ritual. Rufio has the injury treated and the consequence recovers
at the end of the next session, but Nick decides to keep a memento of
the injury. He has Rufio don a rakish eye patch and changes his high
concept to Brash One-Eyed Swashbuckler at the next minor milestone.
If your game is really going all-out on the mutilation and bodily violence, you
can also propose that a character suffers mutilation when they succeed at a major
cost along with taking an appropriate consequence.
“Well, the good news is you’re not infected with the zombie virus any-
more. The bad news is, the doctor couldn’t purge it any other way, so
he had to tie a rubber tube around your arm and saw it off just above
the elbow.”
Fatal Alterations
Use physical consequences to progress the transformation. Once a consequence
slot is filled with a transformation consequence, it can’t be healed without
extraordinary circumstances. To help the player enjoy their gruesome trans-
formation, give them the free invoke on their new “feature.” See “Progressing
Transformations” on page 68 for guidance on when this happens.
This system evokes the genre by making it a relatively fast process from begin-
ning the transformation into a monster or puddle of molten flesh to being taken
out. Marking the first transformation consequence is the beginning of the end
for the character.
If you take out a character with transformation consequences in a conflict and
their player agrees, you can have them complete the transformation.
Progressing Transformations
Whether you use consequences or conditions, there are a couple of options for deter-
mining when the character must take another step towards their transformation.
• You can build the transformation as an extra (Fate Core System, page 271)
and have it attack the character periodically (e.g. once a scene or session) or
when a trigger is met (e.g. when the character becomes significantly stressed).
Elsa decides the Z-Virus has a single skill of Zombify at Superb (+5) and
it attacks an infected character once every scene, defended by Physique.
Elsa gives her Z-Virus a stunt called Corpse Flesh that an infectee gains
once they’ve taken a moderate or worse consequence from the virus.
The stunt reflects that their body is becoming numb and it makes them
immune to invokes on their physical consequences.
• You can have them mark off a consequence or condition without any kind
of defense either periodically or when a trigger is met.
Hand/Arm
NOTES
This is the classic example. Your rogue hand and arm can oppose anything
you try to do and can take independent actions to annoy, hurt, or inconve-
nience you. Your rogue hand has all the same skills you do.
STRESS
Physical [1][2]
CONDITIONS
Pins & Needles (fleeting), Dead Arm (sticky, lasts until you have a chance
to shake some blood into it and have a brief rest), Broken Arm (lasting,
until splinted and cast)
STRESS
Physical [1]
CONDITIONS
Swollen Tongue (fleeting), Half Chewed-Off Tongue (lasting, requires medi-
cal attention and rest to recover)
Heart
NOTES
If your heart takes you out, it can choose to kill you by punching itself out of
your chest. If it does this, it extricates itself from your body with a significant
portion of your circulatory system, allowing it to move around and grapple
using your veins and arteries in a squid-like fashion. While it remains inside
you, it has limited options for messing with you, but it can attack you by refus-
ing to beat, make you feel woozy by beating slowly or irregularly (arrhythmia),
or make you anxious with unpleasant palpitations. You can defend against its
efforts with your Physique as you strike your ribcage or solar plexus (or use a
defibrillator) to bring it back under control.
SKILLS
Great (+4): Heart Attack
Good (+3): Arrhythmia, Palpitations
STRESS
Physical: [1]
CONDITIONS
Chest Pains (sticky, cured by a few hours of sleep), Fractured Ribs (lasting,
cured by avoiding strenuous activity for a few days)
STRESS
Physical: [1]
CONDITIONS
Sore Eye (fleeting), Badly Bloodshot Eye (sticky, cured by an eye bath),
Weeping Blood (lasting, requires rest and bandaging until healed)
Media Inspiration
Our focus here is on the Other as a force of repression to be overcome or, con-
versely, initially unwanted but ultimately liberating change. These are a few of
the works that inspired us:
• Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson is a collection of short stories based on the
theme of facades and the real people inside our skins.
• Suffered From the Night: Queering Stoker’s Dracula, edited by Steve Berman,
is an anthology of short stories that shows just how many directions open
up when authors revisit old, familiar material without narrow assump-
tions. This volume contains an exuberant variety of reinterpreted histories,
relationships, and outcomes.
• The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, is a harrowing tale narrated
by a schizophrenic woman trying to make sense of experiences that may
be hauntings or may just be symptoms. The trans woman she’s in love
with plays a crucial part in separating true life and imagination, while the
mysterious woman who sometimes stalks her gains power in part from
the social norms that push the narrator and her girlfriend to the margins.
It’s an intense novel, sometimes grueling to read (as it was to write), but
the rewards are great.
• Occultation and Other Stories, by Laird Barron, includes the novella
“Mysterium Tremendous”. Barron tells the story of two gay couples whose
camping vacation turns into utter ruin, and shows the difference between
writing about characters being gay and writing about characters who are gay.
• Gothika has a protagonist who’s opposed by people who should be helping
her because they believe she’s mentally ill.
• Cabal by Clive Barker, filmed as Nightbreed, features someone in a con-
frontation with a supernatural Other who comes to realize that the Other
is not the enemy.
• Get Out is a modern classic exploring themes of racism and racial fetishism
in a terrifying and claustrophobic way.
• 1984 by George Orwell is the seminal example of a dystopian, all-con-
trolling, all-seeing government. It’s also a great example of something that
wasn’t written or marketed as horror, but which works great for horror
anyway.
74
ON OTHERING PEOPLE
Horror fiction often has a conservative, even reactionary, streak. People who
dare to have sex out of wedlock are punished. Gay characters are presented as
creepy and unnatural because of their sexuality. The Black character often dies
first. As part of this trend, the Other has historically been used to embody the
forces of change and diversity perceived to threaten an idealized, old-fashioned,
small-town community.
Othering the “weirdos” who believed in racial equality, the worth of women,
and the naturalness of non-straight relationships was rarely part of a calculated
agenda, but the things that everyone involved with a project took for granted
show where an era’s fears lay.
Instead of looking to the conservative roots of horror, we have chosen here to
focus on the example set by horror writers who belong to various marginalized,
oppressed groups. They have taken the notion of the Other and subverted it in
two different directions:
Redefining the Other: It turns out that the threat is not the outsiders, but the
mainstream that won’t engage with them as equals. Whether the outsiders win or
lose a battle against the Other, they’re the ones championing values of personal
freedom, civilization, and community.
Embracing the Other: It turns out that the outsiders have qualities that make
them fundamentally unlike the mainstream force fighting them...and that’s just
fine. The outsiders’ Otherness isn’t harmful, although it threatens the comfort
and security of those who shun Otherness.
Clive Barker’s works including Cabal and The Hellbound Heart are
prominent examples of this. He evokes the gay experience of accept-
ing one’s difference from others—and one’s similarity to others who’ve
been excluded and shunned—in his characters who discover that what
the world sees as monstrous has its own wonder and even beauty.
MEANS OF RESISTANCE
There’s a fundamental choice to discuss when setting up a game
featuring the Other: what kinds of resistance are effective?
The straightforward answer is “any means necessary.” Society at
large may come to think of the characters as terrorists, but their
violence can be very effective and justified by the nature of the
threat posed by the Other. In a game with an action-movie level
of depth, it may not even be an issue—of course the characters are
justified, they’re the heroes. In games with more depth, there will
either be enough people in authority to recognize the necessity of
the character’s actions for a heroic outcome, or there won’t, and the
characters will face condemnation and maybe worse.
Where the Other is providing a social critique by its very nature,
often haphazard violence won’t work, on the principle that using
the enemy’s tools brings the characters halfway toward being the
enemy themselves. The characters must find other ways to strike
back: peaceful sabotage against brutal violence, careful planning
and/or surreal chaos-making against physically overwhelming force,
magic against materialistic tyranny that denies the spiritual.
If violence against the Other is truly not the best strategy, change
the rules of the game to reinforce this fact. Either flat-out say that
attacks against the Other don’t work, or impose a cost every time
someone attacks the Other, regardless of whether their roll is
successful.
Recognition
After a few such encounters, play out a pivotal scene in which the characters and
the Other finally come to recognize the threat they each pose to one another.
This is a contest, challenge, or minor conflict in which the PCs are directly
opposed by agents of the Other and finally come to realize its existence as a
coherent foe rather than a series of coincidental problems.
Discovering the Other’s existence and responding to it challenges the characters’
worldview, even when it’s essentially a natural force at work. The Other confirms
every paranoid fear—the kind we usually try to talk each other out of—and adds
that, yes, it’s all very much planned, not just improvised by fumbling would-be
authorities who share our frailties. The individual or group at the top has a purity
of vision, a capacity for disregarding normal human impulses; they are unlike
most people, including the characters.
TRANSFORMATION
This is where the characters themselves become the front line of the struggle.
The Other has a target list of personality traits it wants to suppress, and others it
wants to mandate. Since every human thought is a very complex product of very
complex inputs, the Other can’t just decree that all its subjects will hold a specific
list of ideas. What it can do is set attitudes and priorities.
Transforming a PC in this way requires the Other to inflict mental or physical
harm on them in a conflict.
First, the Other must establish narrative permission to transform the PC by
engineering a situation that allows them to do so. The exact preparations required
depend on the Other’s nature, aspects, and skills.
OTHER OTHERS
Here are two variations on the theme.
Tristan is already one of the best verbal aggro generators in the world,
with Provoke at Superb (+5). After a series of clashes with the memetic
parasite that is the Other, Tristan also has fresh insights into how human
minds deal with conceptual assault. Tristan takes advantage of the next
significant milestone to raise Provoke to Fantastic (+6), and doesn’t
have to advance two other skills to Superb (and the cascading require-
ments down the pyramid) before being able to do so. Now, when
Tristan needles and unsettles, targets really don’t know what hit them.
Media Inspiration
These are a few of the sources that inspired us when we
were writing this chapter:
• Swift to Chase by Laird Barron has several inter-
weaving stories about a supernatural serial killer
in Alaska, and the ways those who escape are
twisted by the experience.
• Spider by Patrick McGrath: Distrust the ending
as Spider should.
• Devil’s Pass is one of the few really good found-
footage films, about American film students
investigating a historical mountaineering disaster
and falling into the remains of Soviet military
research and holes in time.
• The Nightmare Factory by Thomas Ligotti has the
most doomed artists and scholars since Lovecraft.
• The Bridge by John Skipp & Craig Spector. Like
every horror/disaster novel, but we all lose.
• The Mist by Stephen King, though it’s the film
adaptation that has an ending like a punch in
the gut.
85
Why Play if We Know How the Story Ends?
Genres exist because people like certain combinations of story ingredients and
want to enjoy fresh stories that contain them. Genre authors become famous for
their ability take familiar ingredients and make them into something exciting.
The same is true of your game. When players come seeking a zombie story, it’s a
safe bet that they want to interact with a collapsed or collapsing society, struggles
within and between groups of survivors, lots of zombies, and real danger for the
characters—including some or all of them dying along the way. That’s the recipe,
and as GM, you aren’t insulting the players’ intelligence by using a good recipe
for zombie drama and adventure when that’s exactly what they want.
Even knowing the ending in advance—or at least the general kind of ending—
doesn’t spoil the fun. After all, Titanic was the world’s highest grossing film for
ten years after its release despite audiences knowing the ending.
Stories about characters doomed to die appear in many genres, from entirely
naturalistic tales of criminals fighting the law and each other to supernatural
stories of the whole world crumbling into a metaphysical abyss.
Whatever doom may be waiting, the story’s not done until all of the charac-
ters are.
SCHEDULED EVENTS
You can use the doom clock to build tension by scheduling dramatic compli-
cations to occur when the doom clock strikes specific hours; this works most
effectively if the players have a rough idea of what’s going to happen.
Bruce’s group is trying to defend their village from silent zombies. Each
time the doom clock ticks, Bruce tells the group that the foul, obscuring
fog blowing in from the sea is getting closer…and it will arrive when
the doom clock strikes eleven.
Marissa’s character Kelly is trying to stay hidden from the threat that’s
stalking the group. She fails her Stealth roll with style and narrates how
the monster drags her out from her hiding place by the ankle, gloat-
ing about how powerful and perceptive it is. Later, Marissa uses her
failure with style token to gain a free invoke on the threat’s Egotistical
Warlock aspect.
A player can only hold one failure with style token. If they already have a failure
with style token at the start of a new scene and are supposed to earn another, they
can instead pass it to another character as long as they can narrate how this occurs.
Rufio had his eye gouged out by evil cultists and wrote down Gaping
Socket next to his The Book of Scars aspect.
Each PC can have five scars in The Book of Scars. Once the book is full,
the character can’t ever clear out their moderate, severe, or extreme consequence
slots (or recover from sticky or lasting conditions).
Medical treatment renames the consequence as normal (e.g., Broken Leg
becomes Splinted Leg) but the consequence will never fully recover.
The framework provided in this chapter is to help you run games where the PCs
face danger from an overwhelming threat and their continued survival is a result
of caution, preparation, resource management, and cleverness rather than the
repeated application of physical violence. This framework combines well with
the doom mechanics from Chapter 5: We Are All Going to Die, but works equally
well if you leave the PCs’ fate entirely in their own hands.
At the beginning of the game, the PCs are accompanied by NPC survivors.
Some are close friends and family members created by the players, and the rest
are less significant NPCs.
The PCs have to manage the resources needed by the survivors and handle
conflicts arising as a result of prejudice, incompatible moral codes, and differences
of opinion on what’s best for the group.
Can they maintain their humanity as the group of survivors is whittled down
one by one, until only they remain? And when they’re all that’s left, is there any-
thing they won’t do to survive?
Game Creation
Choose the consumables your group will be tracking and decide how many free
invokes on each consumable the group has as the game begins (page 96).
As a group, decide how many supporting and nameless NPC survivors are with
you. A larger group requires more consumables, but provides more characters to
sacrifice on the altar of your own survival. A good starting point is to use three
times the number of players as your pool of supporting and nameless survivors.
A third of these are supporting NPCs (Fate Core System page 218). As a group,
give each of them a high concept and a trouble.
The remaining survivors are nameless NPCs. They act as background color and
cannon fodder, so for now just write down how many there are.
If your game has five players, there are fifteen supporting and name-
less NPC survivors, of which five are supporting NPCs and ten are
nameless NPCs.
The systems for doomed horror work particularly well with this framework. As
a group, decide whether you’re using the doom issue, doom clock, failure with
style, and/or the book of scars.
Character Creation
In addition to their PC, each player makes a main NPC survivor (Fate Core
System page 220) with a positive relationship to their character. The player
initially chooses the NPC’s high concept and trouble and their peak skill or
approach; the rest of their traits can be filled out during play. One of each PC’s
aspects must include their relationship with the main NPC they created.
At least two of each PC’s aspects must create tension between them and other
PCs or main NPCs.
Nick’s character has Natural Born Leader while Sarah’s has Nobody
Bosses Me Around.
GOING WITHOUT
When a survivor goes without using a free invoke on a necessity they can either:
• Reduce their Physique (or Forceful, if using approaches) by one to a
minimum of Terrible (-2). To save the player from having to rearrange
their skill pyramid, the skill stays where it is on their character sheet, but
is treated as its lower value for all purposes.
• Take a consequence.
If they can’t do either, they are taken out.
The group’s Food Supplies necessity has 11 free invokes. They need 14
to feed all the survivors, so they’re short by three. The group puts the
six nameless NPCs on half-rations, meaning they only use three free
invokes and there’s now enough food to go around. The nameless NPCs
get a Desperately Hungry aspect that Elsa writes down, planning to
compel it later to inspire a revolt of the starving against the well fed.
DESPERATE MEASURES
Players can take desperate measures to get free invokes on some consumables.
For example, you can sacrifice an NPC to gain a number of free invokes on your
Food Supplies equal to their Physique.
SUPPORTING NPCS
These characters are given enough characterization that it will cause a minor
downbeat in the story if one of them is killed or maimed.
You can have a supporting NPC take an extreme consequence (Fate Core System
page 162) to avoid a mild consequence.
If you or the NPC have an aspect describing a positive relationship, you can
have them take an extreme consequence to avoid a moderate consequence, or
have them die or otherwise be permanently removed from the game to avoid a
severe consequence.
When a supporting NPC dies, at the next minor milestone promote a nameless
NPC to a supporting NPC.
MAIN NPCS
Each main NPC is created exactly like a player character. They are important
secondary protagonists, and it will cause a major downbeat in the story if one of
them is killed or maimed.
A main NPC can only take consequences for you if you have a significant,
important relationship with the NPC as described by one or more character
aspects.
A main NPC can take a consequence for you to avoid a consequence one less
severe. That is, you can have a main NPC take an extreme consequence so that
you avoid a severe consequence, and so on.
You also can have a main NPC die horribly or become a permanent enemy
(through descending into violent insanity, becoming a zombie, etc.) to avoid an
extreme consequence.
If another PC has a character aspect relating them to the main NPC that you
are sacrificing, they may reject your sacrifice by giving you a fate point. If they
do this you must find another way to absorb the damage.
When a main NPC dies or permanently becomes an enemy, at the next minor
milestone promote a supporting NPC to a main NPC, and a nameless NPC to
a supporting NPC.
Once a safe drive along the highway from the city, it’s now difficult to
get from the mall to the city and vice versa. In the Middle of Nowhere
works well to reflect its isolated nature.
Give the haven a Defend skill, which reflects how well protected it is against
external threats. A military barracks with razorwire fences and trenches around the
perimeter has Superb (+5) Defend while a trailer park has Average (+1) Defend.
The haven has no stress but has mild, moderate, and severe consequence slots.
If it’s taken out, the haven is destroyed or becomes overrun and the group must
flee to find another haven.
Draw up a quick map of the haven and divide it into zones. This will come in
handy when the haven is threatened.
ATTACKS ON A HAVEN
The survivors’ haven can be attacked at any time. Often this will be during a
calm moment, but it can also ratchet up the tension if an attack comes right in
the middle of another crisis.
Use a full conflict scene to resolve the attack if:
• The survivors notice the attack coming and mobilize to intercept the
attackers outside the haven.
• Someone (or something) lets the attackers into the haven.
• The haven has an unrepaired consequence, giving the attackers a point
of ingress.
• The haven is breached in the initial attack (optional, see below).
A school bus on its way to safety at the mall hits a zombie that busts
through the windshield. Soon all the passengers are turned. The resulting
Undead Football Team starts shambling towards the mall in search of
food. The GM, Elsa, decides they have Fair (+2) Attack.
• Roll the Attack skill of the threat. You can invoke any relevant aspects with
free invokes or your fate points for the scene.
• The players pick someone to roll Defend for the haven. As a group they can
use free invokes from consumables such as Ammunition to help fend off the
attack. Each PC can also use a fate point or free invoke to invoke ONE other
aspect to aid the defense of the haven.
• If they succeed with style, the haven is unharmed and they gain a free invoke
on an aspect of their choice. This can be a consumable, if they can justify it.
• If they succeed, the haven is unharmed.
• If they tie, the haven is unharmed but you add an additional fate point to
the GM’s pool for the next scene.
• If they fail, the haven takes a hit equal to the attack’s shifts. The survivors
must absorb this with the haven’s consequences or by sacrificing NPCs
using the rules on page 100. The haven’s defensive perimeter has been
breached and it’s time to zoom into the action as the survivors deal with
the situation—run the rest of the scene as a conflict or contest. If zombies
breached the perimeter, they need to find and kill them; or maybe some
of their consumables are destroyed, leading to a need for a scavenging trip.
When the Undead Football Team attacks the mall, Elsa rolls +++- for
a total Attack of Great (+4). The players nominate Nick to roll for them
and he gets --00 for a total Defend of Average (+1). Jennifer recently
established Regular Security Patrols, so she uses her free invoke on that
to get the group up to Good (+3). Phil’s character is A Cop One Day Away
from Retirement which he explains means he’s spent hours at the target
range, making it easy to pick zombies off with his service revolver. He
invokes his aspect with a fate point, taking the group’s result up to Superb
(+5). That beats Elsa’s result by a shift, so the zombie jocks are defeated
without the haven being harmed.
Haven consequences can’t be fully repaired. PCs can make an overcome roll to
change one into something slightly less bad for defense (e.g., a Gaping Hole becomes
a Boarded Up Hole), but there’s no fighting off the inevitable slide into entropy.
Eventually the group will run out of survivors or their haven will fall.
Zombie Apocalypse
Current Issue: The Dead Walk the Earth
Pending Issue: The Living Are More Dangerous Than the Dead
Consumables: Food (necessity, daily invokes required), Medical Supplies,
Ammunition
Wilderness Slasher
Current Issue: The Appalachian Stalker Is Picking Us Off One by One
Pending Issue: The Middle of Nowhere
Consumables: Warmth (necessity, hourly invokes required; represents fire-
wood, hand warmers, gasoline, and other material that can be used to generate
heat and fend off frostbite and other effects of the cold), Phone Charge (can
be used for light, play music for morale, call for help if they reach a cell phone
mast high on a peak), First Aid Kit
Women are often told that what they fear and what they face isn’t real, but in
horror fiction, it is real, it is affirmed, and it is explored. Having their fears vali-
dated draws some women towards horror in fiction, games, and movies.
However, many women have a complicated relationship with the genre. On
the one hand, horror fiction treats women as victims or object lessons to teach
women that they are at least partly to blame for what is done to them—in slasher
movies, a woman is often the first victim, usually in the guise of the promiscuous
hot babe who always trips while running away.
On the other hand, women are also the Final Girl—the last survivor with a
gender-neutral name who gives the baddie some sorely needed comeuppance.
Horror from a feminine perspective usually involves powerlessness; it takes place
on and inside of bodies, and in spaces that are supposed to be free from danger.
Women aren’t the only ones who connect to this kind of sinister storyline. The
power of horror appeals to folk from all walks of life, making the exploration of
femininity through the lens of horror all the more powerful. If these themes are
something you have never experienced, what better way to explore them than
within the dark embrace of a horror game?
Scent of a Woman
Encouraging selfish behavior
Romance is often at the core of horror stories. The cute cheerleader only sees the
redeeming qualities of the weird loner after he exposes the bad behavior of the
perfect high school hunk whose house is frequently free of all adult influences,
and who is so obviously a bad guy at heart. Or the serial killer stalks women who
look like his ex-wife, taking out his feelings of betrayal and anger on women who
remind him of her.
These toxic romantic elements can be used at the table as compels and conse-
quences to encourage trying to survive at the expense of everyone else.
Sarah and Ariana’s characters are running from a serial killer who’s
targeting all the brunette women on campus. Their characters are
in a romantic relationship. Marissa, the GM, tells Sarah that she sees
Ariana run one way, with the serial killer after her. She reminds Sarah
that her character is a brunette, so if she shouts a warning to Ariana,
the killer will most likely go after her instead. Marissa compels Sarah’s
Desperate Measures, and Sarah decides to sneak away in search of
help instead, leaving Ariana’s character to her fate. This goes badly
when Sarah gets to the campus security office, though—the killer got
there first, and she has to watch as he kills Ariana’s character.
You can make it fun for someone to play a bad guy by encouraging everyone
to play someone who is flawed, or by discussing how to make sure everyone is
okay with one player being an antagonist. Is that player portraying the weird
loner who lusts after the cheerleader?
Leave this aspect blank until the time feels right. Do not give your players
control of creating this aspect—the lack of agency helps hammer home the theme
of powerlessness that underlies feminine horror.
Assigning a character’s feminine horror aspect is a very powerful moment in
the game, where a fundamental piece of agency is stripped away from them and
there is nothing they can do about it. Pick a moment where it will cut them the
most deeply, whether it’s a revelation that curdles a moment of apparent triumph
or kicks them in the stomach when they’re already at a low ebb.
Dangerous Spaces
Bringing horror to your table
The best way to unsettle your players is to use the things that you personally find
horrifying and listen to their reactions and feedback. What scares you will scare
your players, if you focus on how the scene makes you feel, rather than only
describing how it looks. When running a horror game, pay strict attention to
your players. If you notice a nervous tic, like someone rubbing their earlobe, you
know that means they’re feeling what you’re portraying.
Describe things using all the senses; for example, people really freak out when
they touch something seemingly innocuous, like the banister of a staircase, only
to find that it’s warm and pulsing with the rhythm of a beating heart. If you’re
describing a bodily sensation, like the shifting weight from a monstrous pregnancy
or the first signs of realizing you can conjure magic by cutting yourself, try stand-
ing up and showing them with your posture and gestures how that feels. Lean in
to the table and speak quietly to your players. Be aware of how your presentation
creates that intimate atmosphere that makes up feminine horror.
Domestic
A place where you cannot find comfort
Home is where everyone wants to feel they are safe. The PCs expect something
terrible to happen if they spend the night in a mineshaft rumored to be haunted
by the men who died in an awful accident, but not when they’re relaxing at
home with a nice cup of tea. Yet the best time to spring horror on characters is
when their players assume they’re safe. Perverting the purpose of rooms to place
the characters in jeopardy can bring new life to a horror game.
A crew tasked with exploring the remote depths of the ocean find
themselves isolated inside of the compartments of their deep sea
vessel, all too aware of the distance between themselves and any out-
side help. Pick off crew members one at a time, making their demise
seem innocent for as long as you can. Then enlist those players to
assist with GMing duties, and watch the final survivor gasp for breath.
Internal
A place where you become the monster
An early theme of horror was the line between humanity and the monstrous (all
love to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley), and it continues to fascinate people even
now. Not only do women deal with the changing of their body during puberty,
childbirth, and menopause, but their very identities can be challenged during
these times. Far worse than filling up your mental stress track is to lose control
over your very being, and to become what you fear. This can be literal, with
characters slowly transforming into monsters (see “Body Horror”, page 65, for
more on this), or subtler, with the players slowly realizing that their end goal isn’t
as benevolent as they thought. Give your players all the rope they need before
they find that they’ve rationalized themselves into a worse situation than they
would have guessed.
Poisonous Sexuality
Horrific desires
Sensuality and horror have a common theme of building tension and a mounting
need for release. There is a trope of female sexuality being contagious, infecting
unwary men and innocent women alike, with society trying to control it through
reminders of possible dire consequences such as STIs and pregnancy, and labels
such as slut and prude. However, many women also find power in their sexuality
and how they express it. Frequently society deals with this empowerment by por-
traying them as predatory and obsessive—sometimes even beyond death itself.
Adding overt or subverted elements of feminine sexuality to a horror game
is the perfect way to spice things up. Some literal embodiment of frightening
female sexuality—gorgons, maenads, furies, and so forth—may be just the thing,
or you can take a fear and turn it into a supernatural force. If there’s a sexually
transmitted marker that attracts death, do the players try to stop it—or do they
seduce anyone bent on punishing their licentious ways, thus turning the tables?
You can enact a social stigma for promiscuous PCs that follows those they spread
their infection to, apply it to those who aren’t sexually active—or both! Focus on
the juxtaposition between sexuality and contagion.
STUNTS
Double-jointed: You bend all the ways. Gain +2 to Athletics when you’re con-
torting yourself to do something out of a normal person’s range of motion while
someone else is watching.
Dirty Mind: Once per conflict, you can spend a fate point to create the aspect
Distracted with a free invoke on anyone you’re flirting with. Distracted
disappears if someone successfully inflicts stress on your character.
NPCS
Name: Channer Dankworth
High Concept: Medium Hawking His Talents
Trouble: Crushing Debt
Channer is walking a fine line between true believer and huckster. He believes
the path to fame and fortune lies in getting his own reality show about ghost
hunting, even though he knows it will be at the expense of truly helping the ghosts.
Those student loans need to get paid, and he likes all the attention.
Name: Harper Ajax
High Concept: Widow Seeking Answers
Trouble: Denying the Truth
Harper misses her deceased husband, Barnaby, to a distracting degree. She
believes Channer can help her contact her lost love, and she will go to any lengths
to do so. After all, surely there is a perfectly rational explanation for all the jewelry
belonging to other women Harper found after Barnaby died...
LINGERING ISSUES
In addition to the Dark Spirits and the threat it poses, there are a number of
other lingering issues that will cause the investigators problems in the future.
The Allure of Alcohol: It’s always been there and there is no way out.
Sometimes it makes the day tolerable, other times its grip is unbearable, and it
usually compromises your judgment.
Face: Jasmine
Everyone has lost someone, but she was such a sweet girl with little knowledge
of the world. Crossed over, some say, but in your travels you haven’t seen her.
You can’t hold her in your arms one last time.
Face: Mr. White
A loyal cameraman, investigations didn’t used to be his full time gig—some
of the cases he even did pro-bono—but things got messy at his day job when
his porn stash was found, and Mr. White was fired.
Veteran Investigators: You’ve seen things, heard things, and you know the
darkness looked back. What happened at the last paranormal scene you investi-
gated? Can you ever forget that feeling?
Face: The Voice
A dark guttural noise that rises from within. Being a medium is a useful skill
in the business, but how long before the other side uses you as a doorway to
cross back and take over your body? It’s only happened once. Maybe it won’t
be heard from again?
Face: Bethany
For years she suffered. Left in that damp basement to rot as a forgotten
plaything. Long after her body gave out, her ghost remained, dragging herself
across the floor by a fleshy stump, reaching out, jaw distended. But it was too
much to handle, and Bethany was once again left there…by the only ones
who could have helped.
STUNTS
Apex Predator: When you use Empathy to create an advantage on a neutral
NPC, gain an additional free invoke on the aspect you create, even on a tie.
Animal Magnetism: Whenever you are in the company of animal allies, gain
+2 to overcome fear or terror using Will.
NPCS
Name: Elizavetta Roth
High Concept: Headmistress of the Order
Trouble: Fell for the Wrong Girl
Elizavetta Roth is the headmistress of the witch hunter academy. She takes her
job very seriously, although she’s not above showing favoritism towards the stu-
dents she’s had a hand in shaping. Roth has a brisk manner and enforces the rules
with an iron fist…unless it’s her beloved, Adelheid Engel, who is breaking them.
Name: Adelheid Engel
High Concept: Power Hungry Sleuth
Trouble: Bit off More than She Can Chew
Adelheid Engel teaches the students the history of witches, the secret wars,
and past heroes of the Order, but she has delved far deeper in the dark secrets
of witches than anyone knows. She’s in too deep, and it’s starting to affect her
teaching, her hygiene, and her relationships with other people. Adelheid doesn’t
really love Elizavetta, and she’s lost track of the line between human and witch.
LINGERING ISSUES
In addition to the Witch Hunt and the threat it poses, there are a number of
other lingering issues that will cause the students problems in the future.
Buried History: An ancient conspiracy between the Order and the witches has
begun to surface. Dark alliances, recorded in blood, have passed down a magical
pact that can no longer be ignored.
Face: Damien the Warbird
A celebrated hero among the witch hunters, Damien was accused of being
a part of the conspiracy and outed as a cowardly villain.
Face: Selena, Queen of the Witches
Recently awakened in a young woman’s body, Selena is back to collect on
past debts.
The Power of Ash: “Burn her! Burn her!” they all scream. Who knew you could
get so high off this stuff? The addictive properties of the ashes of burned witches
has made many men rich.
Face: Jamie the Funeral Director
Jamie just burns whatever bodies he’s given and doesn’t ask too many ques-
tions. But his new business partner has been collecting the ashes of a lot of
dead youth who could be witches.
Face: Monica the Police Inspector
Monica has been investigating a series of mysterious disappearances and the
appearance of a strange new substance on the market.
EXAMPLE SETUP
The PCs are on a long-term space mission and are currently out of hi-tech hiber-
nation to perform some routine maintenance. They discover an alien artifact and
bring it back on board. Then a bunch of readings start being off, and the scan-
ner keeps reporting people in different locations than they actually are. Doors
inexplicably close and lock themselves, and one PC is trapped in a room that
temporarily loses life support. When they’re taken back to the medical division,
it’s discovered that they now have a rapidly growing parasite inside them, gaining
the Host mild consequence and the Maternal Instinct stunt. They can spend a
fate point to pass the Host consequence and Maternal Instinct stunt to another
player, or give them the Fatalist mild consequence. While any PC has this
consequence, it can be compelled to make the PC take risks to figure out what’s
going on or put themselves in danger to save others.
STUNTS
Maternal Instinct: Gain +2 to Fight when you’re trying to protect the parasite
from harm.
Nuke It from Orbit: Treat any success using improvised explosives as a success
with style.
NPCS
Name: Alexi Chownyk
High Concept: Head Medical Officer
Trouble: The Bottle Rules Me
Alexi would be a great doctor if they didn’t drink so much. They’ve been
assigned to this mission to keep them out of the way of anything important.
Alexi does love a medical challenge and would jump at the chance to investigate
any physical anomalies.
Name: Gotzon Castell
High Concept: Naive Engineer
Trouble: Far Too Trusting
Gotzon didn’t know signing up for deep space missions would be this boring—
or this lonely. He’s young and a bit dumb, but has a knack for fixing things.
Gotzon would jump to protect anyone, probably because he doesn’t really believe
in his own mortality.
CURRENT ISSUE
Hull Breach: They are inside the ship, in the dark, scuttling around the air
ducts, waiting for their chance to strike. Sometime during hypersleep there was
a hull breach and an alien lifeform made its way onboard. Now that it’s here, not
everyone may have the crew’s best interests at heart. This undocumented species
could be a valuable asset to the inner ring.
What Is This?
If you thought vampire hunting was scary, try 7th grade gym class.
Welcome to Spooky Fun! In this chapter we give you a toolkit for running
horror games in the style of fiction and shows like Goosebumps, Scooby Doo, and
Nancy Drew. This material is aimed at younger players—in the 8-14 age range—
but older players may have fun with these tools as well. The characters in a game
focused on Spooky Fun are children of roughly middle school age, but we’ve
written the rules on the assumption that the GM is a little older.
MONSTER TWISTS
Although monsters in children’s horror are based on standard tropes,
they may still have twists to make them unique. For instance, in Bunnicula
the menace is a vampire, who also happens to be a bunny. Spooky Fun
lets all the players contribute twists; see “Twistcraft” on page 136.
Empowerment
Horror presents a great opportunity for empowering children to confront their
own fears. This is particularly true in a group game setting, where children can
work together and talk out what’s scaring them—and then vanquish it. This is
an important part of Spooky Fun: the children must be able to handle whatever
menace is presented to them, and shouldn’t ultimately be saved by adults or
other forces.
In fact, adults in children’s horror are frequently depicted as incompetent or
unaware of what’s really going on. They aren’t able to relate to the children, nor
do they believe them. Kids play the role of the defenders, breaking the rules that
are supposed to keep them “safe” in service of fighting a grave threat.
As with horror for adults, the menaces may be metaphors. For example, they
could be twists on the perils of social media, dealing with hostile cliques at school,
or having trouble with a particular teacher. Any of these can be given a spooky
sheen and used to explore topics that are personal and meaningful to children.
Fun
Your Spooky Fun game must be fun! The best way to achieve this is to discuss up
front what sorts of scary stories everyone likes. Is there a particular kind they like
more? The monster stories of Goosebumps or maybe the mystery of Scooby Doo!?
“Aspects” on page 126 discusses the use of a nightmare for each character. This
is a very important tool in both setting boundaries and figuring out what each
player wants to see. Setting expectations is a big part of any game, but particularly
one that’s designed to scare the players.
Aspects
Characters in Spooky Fun have three aspects—high concept, nightmare, and
clique—which are fleshed out during character creation. The youngest players
may find it difficult to come up with good aspects, so ask leading questions to
get the creative juices flowing. You can also give them suggestions to guide the
process.
High Concept: Functions the same way it does in Fate Accelerated. What’s their
deal? Are they an Introverted Bookworm or a Sassy Track Star? The high
concept should suggest a niche for their character.
Nightmare: This aspect lets each player highlight what their character is afraid
of. This gives the players some control over what they want to see in the game.
Are they afraid of concrete things like Snakes or Spiders or something more
abstract like Looking Stupid or Not Sticking Up for My Friends?
Discuss with the players how this nightmare would look during the game. Make
sure they choose something they’re comfortable seeing—this is something the
character, not the player, should be afraid of. Their nightmares will come up in
the game, so make sure that all of the players are comfortable with each character’s
nightmare. If one player can’t deal with clowns (and let’s be honest, who really
can), that’s a bad nightmare for anyone to choose.
Clique: You remember how junior high was, right? Yeah, it’s painfully socially
stratified and fractured. This aspect highlights what group the character runs in,
like the JMS Drill Team or Kevin Baker’s D&D Group. It’s also fine being
a Lone Wolf, but highlighting how groups treat each other lets the players play
through experiences and situations that are familiar to them. Having to approach
different groups for favors and help makes for a fun roleplaying opportunity.
SKILLS AS APPROACHES
Skills in Spooky Fun are very broad. They straddle the line between skills
in Fate Core and approaches in Fate Accelerated. Problems should be
amenable to a wide variety of solutions. In this sense, these skills become
prescriptive in driving a certain type of fiction while in play. Getting away
from a bully might not require Physical Education. Instead, a player might
have an idea to steal a letterman jacket from the band room, and use
Drama and Art to slink away with a gaggle of band kids.
Aspects and stunts can be used to help increase diversity. For example,
a Track Star might be quick, but doesn’t necessarily have a high score
in Physical Education, perhaps because they aren’t a good teammate.
Similarly, the Debate Team Captain might not do as well in English and
History, getting by more on charisma than scholarship.
CONDITIONS
• Angry: When a plan doesn’t work out for the characters. When a character
is humiliated in a social situation.
• Weary: When the characters must travel far and didn’t do well enough in
Physical Education to not be winded. When the characters have a run-in
with a menace. This condition goes away after a short rest.
• Spooked: A Spooked character is always looking over their shoulder for
signs of trouble. When you’re Spooked, it’s difficult to do well on home-
work. Spooked is a good condition to take when a character sees signs of
the menace, but hasn’t been directly confronted.
• Terrified: Terrified is a more severe condition than Spooked, probably
brought on by failing to overcome fear when confronting the menace. A
Terrified character mostly wants to get away and hide. If forced into a
confrontation, they prefer to stay in the back and throw objects maniacally.
If a character becomes Terrified, the other players should work to get them
un-Terrified. Perhaps those Drama skills can be used to put on a brave face.
• Grounded: Parents just don’t understand. The players are always in danger
of getting in trouble, and this is what happens when they get caught! Time
to start sneaking out of the house.
• Detention: Teachers just don’t understand. Late to class due to “ghost
hunting” is not an excused absence. On the plus side, detention is a great
place to meet that rebel kid whose uncle has all those old books about
vampires.
• Suspended: If Detention is already checked and more suspicious stuff
happens at school, you may get Suspended. Although this opens up time
for monster hunting, it can make it very hard to work with other kids.
Typically, getting Suspended also means getting Grounded, unless the
character succeeds at some fast talking.
• Untrustworthy: Too much of that monster talk gets you labeled as a liar.
There aren’t many in the adult world who are okay to talk to.
NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS
Occasionally you may find it necessary to create other NPCs besides the
menace for the players to interact with. In these instances, use the rules
for creating mooks found in Fate Accelerated Edition (page 38). This
consists of listing a few things the NPC is good at, for which they get a
+2, a few things they are bad at, for which they get a -2, and everything
else gets a +0. If the character is an adversary of some sort, it also may
be useful to give the character a Fear skill, which should be lower than
the menace’s Fear skill. That gives an opportunity for Courage to have an
impact, which is the core mechanical engine for Spooky Fun!
131
Never Say Die: Confronting Evil
In Spooky Fun, the players work to defeat a menace. The menace may or may
not be supernatural. The menace may or may not be a monster. But it always
impacts the characters’ lives negatively, and above all, it’s spooky. The key skill for
a menace is its Fear, which is opposed by the heroes’ Courage. Courage and Fear
function as pacing and teamwork mechanisms for the investigation.
Courage
Courage is a special skill shared among all the players; it accumulates as the play-
ers learn more about the menace and work together to stop it.
Courage only applies to one menace at a time. When the players face a new
menace, their Courage resets to zero. When a player earns Courage, it’s added to
the group’s Courage total. If the menace isn’t defeated in one session, keep track of
how much Courage the players have accumulated! It doesn’t reset between sessions.
Like Fear, Courage represents more than just the character’s innate bravery—it
also reflects knowledge that the players have about the menace. One common
theme in kids’ horror is that understanding your fear is the first step to conquering
it. This ties in with Lovecraft’s maxim that the strongest and most powerful fear
is the fear of the unknown. Thus, as the players learn more, they gain Courage.
Of course, Lovecraft would also say that as you put together all the pieces you
go hopelessly insane. But, well, this is Spooky Fun, not My First Existential Terror.
So how do players earn more Courage?
CREATING A TWIST
The final way players may earn a Courage point is by suggesting a twist for the
menace. A twist is a spooky turn in the story. Suggestions are given in “Twistcraft”
(page 136). There shouldn’t be more than one or two twists in a session.
MAX COURAGE
The players may never have more points in Courage than the Fear rating
(page 134) of the menace they’re investigating.
The Menace
Before you sit down to play Spooky Fun, you need to create a menace. For inspi-
ration, look at “Influences and Inspirations” (page 124). Or substitute teach at a
middle school. Or both.
With all that in hand, think of clues that might lead to the menace. Try to keep
these clues open-ended so that they don’t have to be found in a certain order.
Having too much structure in the placement of clues can work against the clever
ideas of the players.
To make a menace for Spooky Fun, follow the steps in “Making Monsters”
(page 49), but the first step is to figure out how scary and powerful it is.
Fear
Fear is represented in the form of a Fear skill which is rated on the Fate ladder
as normal. On the lowest end, the players can confront the menace without any
work at all. That’s a sad menace indeed. A bully of the lowest sort. Or a flumph.
No, not very scary at all. On the highest end, the menace is both terrifying and
has broad reach and ability to affect the world. The players will need to spend
a few sessions gathering resources and information before they can thwart it. A
menace with a Fear rating two higher than the peak skill of the characters is a
great adversary for a one-shot adventure.
Get Spooky!
The next step is to determine the nature of the menace. Is it natural or supernatu-
ral? Is it a living thing? Is it an object? If the characters are already created, use
their nightmare aspects to help in the creation of the menace, so it can capitalize
on those fears. Also figure out a goal for the menace. Scare as many children as
possible? Stay youthful? Accumulate gold? Keep tourists away from the illegal
mining operation? The goal helps you frame what the menace is up to. Don’t
worry as much about its ultimate motivation; just think about what it’s going to
do that will affect the characters.
How will the menace negatively affect the characters? Come up with a list of
ways to scare the characters and make their lives difficult. As you run the players
through the game, refer to this list frequently to keep the action going.
Use the menace’s nature, goals, means, and evil plots to help you choose its
high concept, trouble, purpose, and other aspects (page 50).
Skills
The main skill that menaces use is Fear. This is a broad and effective skill, used
both to scare off the characters and for when the menace is exercising its true
nature. However, it’s fine to give menaces a few monstrous skills as well, as
described in “Making Monsters” (page 54). If Fear or monstrous skills don’t
apply but a roll is needed, the menace rolls at Mediocre (+0).
Weaknesses
Menaces also don’t have stress or consequences. Instead, they have some number
of conditions that fit their nature. As a starting point, give the menace a number
of conditions equal to half the menace’s Fear. The menace’s conditions work the
same way they do for characters, although typically once a menace has a condi-
tion checked, they may never uncheck it.
Taken Out
If a menace has no relevant conditions when it needs to check one off, it is taken
out. Unlike the characters, when a menace is taken out, it is taken out for good.
This can take many forms depending on the nature of the menace. For example,
monsters may be destroyed, criminals discovered, and ghosts sent to rest.
Oh No!
Here’s a list of different twist ideas for inspiration. Feel free to set this out on the
table so all the players can see it, and have them add their own creepy suggestions.
Generally, these are all in the form of a revelation, such as “Oh no...” Remember
the lessons from the uncanny valley: something almost, but not quite, like its
real life counterpart is spooky. Thus, little twists on something familiar to the
players is likely to be spookier than something completely and totally unfamiliar.
However, be careful not to introduce real people as the antagonists of the game.
It’s already easy enough for kids to badmouth students and teachers they don’t
like—no need to also turn them into forces of darkness.
TWISTS
Oh no…
• …my parents are in on it!
• …our teacher is in on it!
• …the police are in on it!
• …that house has been abandoned for 10 years!
• …it’s controlling my cat!
• …it’s already in the house!
• …the conspiracy goes way deeper!
• …it can walk through walls!
• …it can read my mind!
• …it can eat our dreams!
• …it already got to our parents!
• …they’ve been dead for over 10 years!
• …it feeds on electricity!
Back to Reality
After the session, it’s time to come back to earth. Particularly if the game fea-
tured places and things familiar to the players, it’s useful to briefly discuss the
distinction between what happened in the game and how those places and things
function in real life. One effective technique for doing this is to put the players
in the shoes of a horror writer. Pull back the curtain on how fear was created
in the game. Knowing the tricks can help children realize how their fears are
manipulated by imaginary things.
Weaknesses
Coach Wimbly needs to feed on electricity to survive. If he doesn’t consume
batteries every day, he begins to fade out of existence. If the characters can keep
him from getting his battery supply, they will weaken him, possibly to the point
of defeating him. They may also be able to use science to construct a device that
draws power from him. Or hack into him and infect him with a computer virus
that shuts him down.
The Hook
Maxine Green, friend of the characters, is in trouble. She got caught breaking
into Dalton Haywood’s house. The characters know her very well, and she’s not
the kind of person to do something like that. But no one believes her, and now
she’s in trouble. She doesn’t remember anything about what happened. The last
thing she remembers was filling out her exercise information on the JMS Fitness
Wizard. Maxine was proud of herself for finishing the three mile jog. And then—
bang!—she’s suddenly sitting outside of Dalton’s house waiting for the police.
Weirdly, she had Dalton’s phone with her, apparently the only thing she took.
Through investigation, the characters may discover that Dalton Haywood
doesn’t go to Jackson Middle School. Instead, he goes to their rival, Mesa Prep.
He also happens to be Mesa’s top goal scorer on the soccer team, as well as an
excellent student.
Maxine successfully installed the JMS Fitness Wizard onto Dalton’s phone,
and when he opens it, Coach Wimbly will infect Dalton’s brain. Dalton will
suddenly feel ill and not be able to play for the upcoming game. The players may
learn about his absence by going to the game or through the school rumor mill.
Clues
The following are lots of spooky clues and events to use during the characters’
investigation:
• In the JMS gym store room, the players discover buckets and buckets of
used batteries.
• The characters see Coach Wimbly ingesting a battery by placing it in his
mouth. His entire head lights up with energy. When he’s done, he spits it
out onto a pile of used batteries.
• The players find a weird hotspot—WINNRWIMBLY—at school near the
gym. If the players go to school at night to investigate the gym, it’s not
there. In fact, it seems to only be around when Coach Wimbly is around.
How could that be? Once the players learn this, it can be a good way to
show when the Coach is nearby and stalking them.
• Coach Wimbly moved here this past summer from Oakwood Academy,
a school in a nearby district. There were lots of angry reports filed against
him, suggesting he sabotaged other soccer teams he competed against.
Strangely, these reports never saw broader circulation and didn’t reach the
administration at JMS.
STUNTS
Mind Control: Provided they have used his
mind control app, Coach Wimbly may
implant a suggestion in the target’s mind
unless the target successfully defends
with Courage against Good (+3) passive
opposition. The target can use Courage to
resist the suggestion even if they are alone.
WEAKNESSES
[]Hungry for Energy
[]Auxiliary Power
[]Frustrated by Losing
For reasons of space, we present only the key details of the X-Card text here for
your reference. GMs, we encourage you to read the full document at the link
included here.
The X-Card is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) by John Stavropoulos http://tinyurl.com/x-card-rpg
The X-Card is an optional tool (created by John Stavropoulos) that allows
anyone in your game (including you) to edit out any content anyone is uncomfort-
able with as you play. Since most RPGs are improvisational and we won’t know
what will happen till it happens, it’s possible the game will go in a direction people
don’t want. An X-Card is a simple tool to fix problems as they arise.
To use, at the start of your game, simply say:
“I’d like your help. Your help to make this game fun for everyone. If anything
makes anyone uncomfortable in any way… [draw X on an index card] …
just lift this card up, or simply tap it [place card at the center of the table].
You don’t have to explain why. It doesn’t matter why. When we lift or tap
this card, we simply edit out anything X-Carded. And if there is ever an
issue, anyone can call for a break and we can talk privately. I know it sounds
funny but it will help us play amazing games together and usually I’m the
one who uses the X-Card to protect myself from all of you! Please help make
this game fun for everyone. Thank you!”
Notes:
• The X-Card speech above can be more useful than the X-Card itself. It
makes it clear that we are all in this together, will help each other, and that
the group of people playing are more important than the game.
• Use the X-Card early, even on yourself, to lead by example, and model
the behavior.
• The X-Card does not have to be a tool of last resort. The less special it feels,
the more you use it, the more likely someone will use it when it really is
badly needed.
• The X-Card is not a replacement for conversation. If you prefer to talk
about an issue that comes up instead of using the X-Card, please do. Just
because the X-Card is available does not mean it has to be used. But
when it is used, respect the person who uses it and don’t ask why or start
a conversation about the issue. The X-Card is optional.
• The X-Card is a safety net, but not everyone will feel comfortable using
it in all situations. If a player had a problem with the game and wants
to talk to you about it afterward, please listen. It is not okay to say “but
you didn’t use the X-Card” as a defense. Don’t use the X-Card offensively.
Listen and talk it out.
What other things can you do to enhance the game with Script
Change?
You can do a lot of fun things, but two particular options are a Highlight Reel
and an Instant Replay.
With an Instant Replay, right after a scene happens, you can call a pause just
to go over what happened out of character. It is a metagaming tool, but can be
useful to make sure everyone is on the same page. This is particularly great when
you’re doing intense social scenes or complicated action, or if you have a longer
scene that might leave people lost.
A Highlight Reel is at the end of the session. This is a strictly positive thing,
and the intention of the tool is to allow players to point out things they liked
about the session. Each player should have the opportunity to mention a specific
scene or interaction they liked in the session, and the GM gets the chance to do
the same. Since it’s inevitable that players might have negative or constructive
feedback for the game, it’s suggested that all sessions have a Wrap Meeting as
an optional tool - for emotionally intense games they’re heavily recommended.
Wrap Meetings are an opportunity for the group to go over anything that hap-
pened in the game that people might need to discuss, from constructive to negative.
It’s good to develop a habit of talking these things through. Some things people
might want to talk about: if a certain action in game went over their boundaries
and they didn’t feel comfortable calling pause or rewind, or if something had an
impact on them emotionally that they need to talk out. This should be a sup-
portive environment, and no one should tell someone their feelings are “wrong.”
Constructive criticism is always great, including in regards to plot choices, feelings
of imbalance in character focus, or even mechanics disagreements. In general,
use wrap meetings to talk about the game and what could be improved and how
it’s impacted the players, or the GM. Everyone is an equal in this conversation.
REWIND
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146 FATE HORROR TOOLKIT + Appendix 2
APPENDIX 3: COMPLEMENTARY TOOLS
Not sure which of the many tools in this book to use in your game to get the best
effects? To get you started, here’s our guide to a few sources of inspiration and the
tools that work particularly well with each other to emulate them: