Today I am releasing some of the work I’ve created through Patreon. Some of the work is mostly finished, while some of the work needs, well…work. I share in the hope that it you’ll find something useful in your games and storytelling endeavors.
I encourage you to share the work if you like it, and if you want, you can support my work through Patreon.
The first work I am releasing today is the intro for a fantasy game using Fate (Core and Accelerated) called the Tapestry. I created it around two years ago as a starting point for creating Fantasy settings and stories that were concerned about cultures and communities rather than the whim and power of individuals. It’s just the setting and character creation right now, but if there is demand it might be worth fleshing out some more.
I hope you enjoy! The first few paragraphs are here, but you can grab the whole 12 pages from Gumroad.
The Tapestry
A Fate game of Fantasy Culture by Quinn Murphy
The Tapestry is a fantasy game using the Fate system (both elements of Fate Accelerated and Fate Core) that emphasizes the creation and exploration of fantasy cultures. Your group will first make a set of cultures (“a Tapestry”) that are intertwined and in conflict. Your group will then create personas attempting to meet their own goals and affect change in this nexus of cultures.
We use elements from Fate Core and Fate Accelerated. The game uses a mixture of approaches and skills, and uses the basic mechanics of stress and invocation as described in the Fate SRD. The SRD can be found here: http://fate-srd.com/
The Tapestry is released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. The Tapestry uses modified text from the Fate SRD.
Cultural Approaches
The Tapestry uses Approaches as described in Fate Accelerated, but it uses its own set of approaches, referred to in some places in the document as cultural approaches, but other times as simply approaches. Assume that when we refer to approaches generically that we refer to cultural approaches.
A cultural approach describes how a culture can approach the problems and obstacles of their life. Individuals from these cultures reject or embrace these cultural approaches and use them as well.
The cultural approaches are:
Proud. A Proud action is when you proclaim and assert your worth and accomplishments to intimidate, impress, or motivate. Scaring off a foe. Wooing a potential mate. Selling your wares.
Honorable. An honorable action enforces, respects and creates codes of behavior to bind people closer and create moral order. Impressing your superiors. Creating a peace treaty. Ethics of fair trade between merchants
Combative. A combative approach embraces conflict and tension rather than avoiding it. Advocating for one’s rights. Winning an argument. Overwhelming an enemy with force.
Spiritual. A spiritual approach finds answers, solutions and inspiration from religious or contemplative sources. Calming an angry person. Creating a beautiful poem. Negotiating a lasting peace between nations.
Lawful. A Lawful approach regulates the code of conduct and punishments between individuals and nations to create order and establish rules and punishments. Prosecuting a thief. Creating a peace-keeping milita. Establishing new rights for a persecuted group.
Insightful. An Insightful approach invents, observes, and creates new solutions to problems. Creating a secret language. Inventing steam-powered machines. Analyzing complex magical patterns. Devising innovative defenses for a city.
Approaches are used on the personal level by characters and NPCs, are preferred and abhorred by cultures, and also used in regions to determine basic thresholds against changing the conditions in that region. More on regions later.
Weaving
Weaving is the process of creating people and regions and a map to set up the region for play. The last stage of weaving is creating persons of interest for each player to control. These characters will be tied to each other and the world you create.
Weaving is meant to take around two hours. You can split this up into two smaller sessions (I personally like to do hour long sessions) or one larger session to get everything done all at once. Optimal group size is three people and one GM, so if you have more people, this process can take a bit longer. Once you’ve completed the Weaving you are ready to play with your characters in the world you created!
For the weaving you will want a blank piece of paper to serve as a map, some index cards to reference people and regions, and character sheets for your characters.