| FATE: FUDGE Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment | Miskatonic Mayhem |
Miskatonic Mayhem is an action mini-campaign set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, nominally taking place sometime in the late nineties, and not wholly subject to the constraints of canon. It is also a Cthulhu Mythos mini-campaign, as the action takes place at Miskatonic University. We work with the basis of a Cthulhu episode where everyone is supposed to be freaked out and doomed, and instead keep them freaked out, but give them a fighting chance and snappy dialogue.
Miskatonic Mayhem will run every other Thursday (with the occasional at-option doubling up), at 7pm, for approximately 2.5-3 hours per session. Number of sessions is as yet to be determined.
Mayhem will, perhaps unsurprisingly, use the Fate
house-rules variant of the Fudge rules (available from
Grey Ghost
Games).
Characters will freshman college students, or nearabouts to that, attending Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusets. The phase choices a player makes during character generation may not preclude the character from attending in the final phase.
Characters will be six-phase characters, who start (unless suggested otherwise) in the eighth grade. The middle four phases will each span a school year (9th, 10th, 11th, 12th). The first is "childhood", and the last is "what I did last summer". You may treat the first phase as accumulating a point of Potential, if so desired, which, if not spent by the end of the last phase, will be converted into a level of Destiny.
Your character does not have to attend Miskatonic U if they do not attend any college whatsoever and instead take on a part or full time job in the town around there.
As this is meant to reflect a slightly inbred social crowd situation (similar to the show's Scoobies), it will be mandatory that some sort of relationship between your character and at least two other PCs be defined. These relationships include, but are not limited to:
Players who don't work on establishing these ties themselves will find the ties established at random by the GM. Capriciousness is not beyond the GM. Once firmly established over the course of character generation, the final state of the "top two" relationships for your character will be cemented as single-level, no-skills-provided Aspects.
Those who do attend Miskatonic U should submit a list of 3-6 courses (with or without alternates for each one) they'll be trying to register for as a Freshman. This will be done as a conclusion to the sixth phase, and will probably include a little bit of roleplaying. The GM will then decide what courses you actually got.
Other random elements may be thrown into play at or near the beginning of character generation.
Before character generation commences, an informal vote will be held amongst the players as to who among the female players will play the Slayer -- this is not a full-on Slayer, mind you, but a Slayer-in-training who was sufficiently far down the list of potential candidates that the Council ultimately decided she was moving past her prime without a great likelihood of assuming the mantle, so not so much with the "training" part of that.
Whoever ends up as the Chosen One will be under certain restrictions in how she can apply her phases:
Childhood manifests as a point of Potential which must be spent on the Slayer aspect in a later phase, or converted into a level of Destiny at the end of character generation.
Grades Nine through Twelve must have at least one phase dedicated to the "Slayer" Aspect, and no more than two phases may be focused on things which help cope with mundane life.
What I Did Last Summer is entirely up for grabs.
The Slayer Aspect, when taken, is treated as Plot Aspect, and thus provides 5 skill levels instead of the usual 4.
No Watchers allowed (unless you make a damned good case to the GM for it).
Skills are fairly freeform, should by and large conform to what can be found in the Fate handbook, and should be appropriate to skills one might pick up as an American teenager.
Combat skills will be strongly limited, and will be primarily available through the selection of the Slayer aspect, and a handful of other aspects as approved on a case-by-case basis.
Generally speaking, for a single given skill, only one player will be allowed to be Good at it (with the goal of supporting character schtick). If that player is Great, then others may be Good. Achieving better than Great skills should not be possible with a six-phase character. This rule can be bent if all players involved agree and the GM approves.
Special powers (psychic abilities, minor magics, etc) are possible, but must be discussed thoroughly with the GM, and will be fairly low-powered (but not useless).
Players will start out with no Fudge points; Fudge points will be awarded through involuntary aspect invocations and NPC contributions (see below). If a player chooses to inflict an involuntary invocation upon him or her self, a petition may be made to the GM to be rewarded for it (but a reward should only really come about once per scene at most).
Remember, this genre is as much about relationships and dialogue among the main characters (the PCs), and playing within the constraints of your Aspects both earns Fudge points (as above) and furthers the setting's theme. If an hour of one session is spent untangling the problems of a love triangle or an argument and reconciliation between best friends, then something is going very right.
Players who contribute NPCs to the game world will receive one or two Fudge points per contributed NPC (a minimum of one paragraph). The NPC must be a character that will be clearly encountered during the course of a game set at Miskatonic University in Arkham.
Beyond the usual uses of Fudge Points in a Fate game, you can spend them in the following fashion for teamwork effects, provided you can quickly narrate how your character is getting involved:
Spend one point to take a wound (a hit) instead of someone else, even if it isn't your turn, so long as it's reasonable you could interpose yourself, without having to roll against a skill for maneuvering.
Spend one point to switch positions with someone else, even if it isn't your turn, so long as it's reasonable you could quickly change positions, without having to roll against a skill for maneuvering.
Spend one point to be able to spend a second point on someone else's roll. The second Fudge point you spend gives a +1 in addition to any plusses from other players or from the player himself. A single PC may not spend more than two fudge points in this manner on the same roll. (So, Willow and Xander could each spend 2 Fudge points apiece to give two +1's to Buffy's roll, for a total of +2, but Willow can't spend 4 by herself to give Buffy a +2.)
An applicable Aspect may check off one box as a single Fudge point expenditure, toward the above effects, if so desired.