The gaming system is FATE v3, as seen in Spirit of the Century.
Each character has ten aspects. Aspects define who you are. Since Star Wars is a space fantasy, one of these aspects is your species; the other nine are other ways that define your character’s identity.
Each session, you get one fate point for each aspect you possess, even if you were completely out at the end of the last session; if you have more than that left over at the end of an evening, you keep that total for next time. Any time an aspect would aid an activity, you can spend a fate point to invoke the aspect and improve your roll or get a reroll; any time that aspect might be to someone else’s advantage (usually an NPC’s), they can compel that aspect and you get a fate point.
Your species aspect can be invoked any time you’re doing something at which your species excels: Humans are adaptable, Duros are spacers, Twi’leks are charismatic, and so on. You can also use it any time you need to disappear into a crowd containing a significant number of your species. It can be compelled when someone has it in for your particular species, an inherited weakness comes into play, or your Wookiee frame doesn’t maneuver well in close quarters. If you are atypical for your species in some way, you can modify it to show how you differ from normal behavior: Human Raised by Cereans, Beneficent Hutt, Gamorrean Philosopher, Bith Hooligan. This may be a penalty to social interactions with your own species, but also gives you opportunity to make friends in odd places. (Humans may have a nonstandard species aspect if they come from a distinctive culture such as Corellia.) Your chosen species will also affect the baseline levels of some skills.
Having positive aspects is good for your short-term tactical
advantage, but if you have nothing but positive aspects, you are
unlikely to get compelled, and will run out of fate points quickly.
Negative aspects will get you more fate points to work with. Mixed
aspects that can do both are optimal. When you come up with an
aspect, think of both how you can invoke it and how it can be
compelled; if you like getting in a particular kind of trouble,
it’s just fine to have an aspect that is mostly a difficulty,
because you’ll be getting fate points to fuel your other
aspects. Note that there is plenty of flexibility in accepting a
compel: a splendid example from the FATE mailing list has a character
with the aspect Knives Speak Louder Than Words
accepting a
compel and, instead of starting a fight, pulling out his blade,
cleaning his fingernails and delivering a the steely-eyed glare.
If you are playing a Force-user, you should have an aspect corresponding to this. (In a game set after the rise of the Jedi, this aspect might be Strong in the Force, Padawan Learner, Sith Apprentice, Jedi Knight, Dark Lord of the Sith, Jedi Master, Force Witch...) For this campaign, take the name of the Force-using organization in which you were trained, or something like Wild Talent, Strong in the Force, etc. You are not limited to a single aspect in this regard, e.g.: Qui-Gon Jinn had Mindful of the Living Force as well as Jedi Master.
Note that emotion plays a strong role with Force powers. Most Force powers can get bonuses from at least one sort of emotion; if your character is Serene or Compassionate, you’ll be able to invoke that aspect to enhance one set of powers, but if they’re Passionate or Righteous they’ll be able to invoke a different set.
It helps to make your aspects vivid. You could just be Strong, or even Muscular, but how about Great-Thewed, Strong as a Bantha, or Could Pull the Ears Off a Gundark? A character that you envision with a high Constitution score could be Robust, or Glowing With Health. Why be Intelligent when you could be Sagacious, Scary Smart, or have a Voracious Intellect? Is your character Wise or World-Weary or have they just Seen It All? A Misspent Youth is a great background.
If you had a character class or two in mind from some other game, you can easily take those as aspects: you can easily be a Warrior or a Rogue— but you might get a lot more flavor out of being a Space Marine or a Robin Hood. You can just as easily use a profession like Computer Programmer, Spacer, or Assassin, but try on Renegade Hacker With a Day Job, Grew Up on a Tramp Freighter, or Killer With a Conscience for size before making your choice.
Aspects don’t have to just describe those traits. You could
be Lucky, or have Strange Luck, or even be Dating Lady Luck; the game
master can have more fun with the latter. You can be Well-Prepared,
Organized, or a Minion of Order; Spontaneous, Disorganized, or an
Agent of Chaos; a Hotshot, Wild Card, or Daredevil. You can be Loyal
to Your Friends or Devoted to Your Cause, a Credit-Pinching Bean
Counter or have the Art of the Deal. Is your character Beautiful
or a Distracting Beauty? They can even be catchphrases like I
have a bad feeling about this
, I have you now
, Full
throttle!
, or It’s a trap!
(C-3P0 has We’re
doomed!
just so other people can tag him as being wrong and get
bonuses.) Stealing from other stories is also fine: Trent the Uncatchable
has People never look up.
, and Dr. McCoy has
I’m a doctor, not a ...
In Leverage, the
character Eliot Spencer has I dated a...
And Grant Imahara’s
For science!
is an excellent battle cry. In The
Princess Bride, Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my
father. Prepare to die.
is a long but effective aspect.
Colorful aspects can also work. Soap opera addict
can drag you in
front of a holoset a lot, but it’s also a bonus when breaking the ice with
NPCs; MedBase One has viewership all across the
galaxy.
Culture of Honor means that even small disputes can become contests for reputation and social status; such cultures value the appearance that one cannot be pushed around, which can be a bonus when dealing with other folks in such a culture or when establishing your credentials in a Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, but can be real trouble if you need to keep a low profile.
You can have aspects that contradict each other; that can be particularly interesting when both get compelled at once, but you can earn two fate points if you find a way to resolve the contradiction. (For example, your game master is both Lazy and Reliable, and resolves the conflict at work by planning ahead and solving general-case problems so he’ll save time later.)
You aren’t stuck with your aspects. If you feel your character has undergone a change as a result of their experiences, or you’re getting to know them better and have refined your understanding of an aspect, discuss it with the GM between gaming sessions. (An example from the FATE mailing list: one Worldly character refines the aspect to Friendly with the Natives, while another refines it to Exotic Lore.)
Skills define what you do; this includes traits that might normally be
seen as defining abilities in other games. Might and Fortitude and
Athletics and Resolve look a lot like Strength and Constitution and
Dexterity and Willpower, but you can improve them with experience—
much like the real world. You may have aspects that enhance these
skills: great-thewed
is something that you can invoke to
enhance your Might, and often your Intimidation, and can be compelled
by someone looking to start a brawl.
Well-traveled characters will want the Cultures skill, as that’s key to getting along with other species. Basic is the most common language in the galaxy, followed by Huttese, and most spacers are bilingual in Basic and Duro.
Stunts are your particular specialties, granting new abilities or bringing a particular difficult thing within your reach. It will make sense for some characters to have overlapping stunts, but there are a sufficient number that it should be easy for characters to be unique.
Stunts don’t have the give-and-take quality of aspects. To take an example from the FATE mailing list, an aspect of Friends in Low Places is something you could invoke to help your Contacting, but someone might also compel it to ask you for help; if stunt named Friends in Low Places were created, it would be purely to your streetwise advantage.
Be careful taking Companions and Minions; if you do, use the reloaded rules. The gamemaster will be providing the party with a plucky astromech droid at the start of the game.
Note that the smallest vehicle to which you can fit a hyperdrive is
the light freighter. A concept like hotshot fighter pilot
won’t work as well as it would in the era of the movies, where a
fighter pilot could fly their personal starfighter next to the light
freighter carrying the rest of the party. Hotshot smuggler
pilot
will work just fine.
I’ve tried to put a representative sample on the Gear page, but there’s no way I can come up with the entire variety of available goodies from a galactic future-tech civilization. In general, you can assume that most of the gear available in the modern day and in near-future SF settings like Cyberpunk 2020 is available unless it would be painfully obsolete or actively repressed.
|
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License; see the disclaimer for details. | |
|