I’m looking at four human factions to start with in this campaign. As described in my post on our subreddit, factions are roughly equivalent to PCs. I’m envisioning each player assuming the role of a single faction and gaining control over individual groups, organizations, and characters. These groups are how the faction interacts with the world. They also have their own agendas – organization-specific issues – that they must complete to grow in power. My four starting factions are:

• The Expedition Leadership
• The Mutineers
• The Military Crew of the Exodus
• Everyone Else Caught in the Middle

Tackling the Issues

Before I get into the various orgs and groups, I want to return to the issues and opposition. Looking at how interaction with the issues will work, I’ve been focusing on We Have to Find a Way to Feed a Quarter Million People. I considered using a countdown clock or something similar, but I don’t want such a direct time pressure in one of the first scenarios. Using countdown also puts the players in more of a passive/defensive position, and I want them to take a more active role.

Right now, I’m thinking that each issue aspect will have a stress track. Players will use their orgs and groups to take action addressing the issue, thereby attacking it and inflicting stress until the issue is resolved and removed from play. Simple enough, except for the fact that the issues exist at a higher level of scale (or maybe just offer a higher passive opposition), so the players have to create advantages just to carry out an attack that has a reasonable chance of inflicting stress. This can also put the players in a position to make a choice – focus on creating temporary advantages to facilitate attacking the issues or pursue the agendas of one or more groups to make them more powerful and make it easier for them to tackle the issues down the road.

Opposition and Problems

There should be two basic forms of problems the players have to contend with. First, what happens when they fail a roll – the costs – I haven’t drilled down on this one yet. Second, how the issues impact the game the longer they exist. I considered give the issue aspects skills they use to periodically attack the colonists. So, We Have to Find a Way to Feed a Quarter Million People would have a Starvation skill and make attacks against groups or the population in general. This could involve having a separate stress track and consequences for the colonists. Has potential, but would require some more work to integrate how those tracks would affect the game.

Building on the idea of the event deck as described in another subreddit post, I could put together a deck of compels. At defined points in the game, each player draws a compel. As with Fate they have an option to accept the compel and receive a Fate point or spend a point to reject the compel. The card would actually compel one of the issue aspects and produce some sort of negative affect. This could be an attack against one of the player’s groups in the form of Starvation, Disease, Food Riots, etc. but every compel could be different, which I like better than having a standardized attack every few turns. This also reinforces the Fate point economy. Drawing from the compel deck could be required every X number of turns, as desired by the players (whenever they need to get some Fate points back), or even when they need a serious cost to succeed on a failed roll.

Structure Forming

So now a rough game structure is beginning to emerge. I’m still picturing this as using cards, so I’d have a few types of cards at this point:

• Issues: Aspects representing the issues of the scenario which are related to the scenario’s stakes and can be compelled. Many have stress tracks and can be attacked by the players to resolve the issue.
• Groups & Organizations: These are the key players in the scenario and provide the player factions with the means to interact with the world. They have aspects, skills, stunts, etc.
• Agendas: These are long-term objectives which groups/orgs can complete to expand their power, possibly by advancing skills and introducing aspects which represent how the org is changing the field of play. They might be completed within the current scenario or require multiple scenarios to complete.
• Compels & Costs: These are events, generally problematic, which take place by compelling the issue aspects, or possible other aspects attached to orgs/groups (consequences). These could be separate decks (or no cost deck might be needed at all).
• Tasks: These are specific actions available to the orgs/groups – think of them as specific versions of the core actions with defined stakes. Short-term tasks might be resolved with a single action, while long-term tasks might require a series of successful actions (similar to a contest). These will be among the most common cards used.
• Opportunities/Encounters: These represent choices the players can make in how they deal with different situations (via orgs/groups/characters). These may or may not require a roll. Not sure about this one.

I’m working on developing a scenario for the strategy game to accompany Proteus to help flesh out the basic mechanics. In many ways, this is similar to game creation in vanilla Fate Core – establish the main issues, identify the players, and identify the opposition. Of course, there are some major differences too. First, the strategy game will need more structure than the typical Fate roleplaying experience. Fate gameplay is broken up into sessions and scenes, both of which are abstract and highly variable in terms of game time. The flow of the strategy game will be more regimented – not unlike a Conflict in Fate.

More importantly, there will be no GM in the strategy game. I want players to be on a more equal footing. In some scenarios, players may be competing directly with one another, cooperating against a shared threat or enemy, or a combination of the two. This means the responsibilities normally handled by a GM in Fate have to either be shared by the players, handled by the system itself, or some combination of the two.

Conceptualizing the Gameplay

I originally thought of the strategy game as being just as freeform as the roleplaying game. While Fate players might be comfortable with that level of freedom (though a lot more about this might make those players uncomfortable for other reasons), a more common tabletop strategy gamer might have a tough time with this. Instead, I can develop campaigns and scenarios and simultaneously establish guidelines for developing those scenarios. These guidelines can be used by players to develop their own scenarios – providing players with the freedom I was originally going for and hopefully helping to build a community at the same time.

Right now, I’m visualizing the strategy game using cards, a map, some tokens, dice, and maybe some sort of markers or miniatures to represent the position of key characters or units. A typical Fate game uses note cards to represent aspects and anything that possesses its own aspects, skills, etc. Many of the cards used in the strategy game would be used in an identical fashion, but other may be used to represent available actions, compels, costs, etc.

This scenario involves humanity’s survivors reaching an abandoned city and needing to get a basic viable colony established. Each scenario should have stakes – the effects on other levels of play that can be expected to result from how the scenario plays out. The stakes will normally be known from the beginning of the scenario, but some scenarios might keep the stakes vague or hidden at first. Actions taken during play could also alter the stakes.

In this case, the stakes are fairly straightforward: If the players are successful, the colony is established and achieves a minimum level of viability – enough to move on to slightly less desperate circumstances. If the players fail, the survivors will find themselves in a worse situation, and humanity will be one step closer to extinction. Lesser stakes will also be present in the form of which groups and organizations will begin to form within the colony.

The immediate issues are food & water, finding safe shelter within the city, and establishing basic services & infrastructure. These serve as the objectives for the scenario in the form of aspects:

• We Have to Find a Way to Feed a Quarter Million People
• We Must Take Shelter in the City, But Is It Safe?
• Food and Shelter Isn’t Enough, We Have No Infrastructure

I might add a couple of other issues as well – even getting this many people to the city safely could be challenging – or I could split these up, but this seems like a good start. In this scenario, the environment itself (and time) are the main sources of opposition. Running out of food, native wildlife, and whatever might be found inside the city are all possible threats. The players are working together to ensure the colony’s survival, so this is a cooperative scenario. There is also a competitive component as the character, groups, and factions controlled by the players begin struggling to gain influence and power in the new colony.

Even before they set foot on the planet, there are already some lines of division among the colonists. There are those that actually planned on settling the new colony, and then there is the military crew that was only supposed to get them there. There was an attempted mutiny on board before the colony ship left Earth’s solar system, so you have those that staged the mutiny and ultimately failed. At the same time, you have the expedition leaders that managed to maintain control after the mutiny. And naturally, there will be people who blame either side (or both) for the colonists current predicament. Just mixing at matching those ideas can produce a few factions and a variety of fledgling groups.

As I’ve recently posted on the base113 Games subreddit, I’ve been working on integrating Fate mechanics into a strategy game that will exist alongside Proteus. This has been a long-term goal of mine for a while, but I intentionally held off on working on the strategy game because I wanted to get the roleplaying game closer to completion first. However, I suddenly had some ideas for using Fate mechanics on the strategic level and didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to make some progress. There’s also some real potential that developing the strategic game will further assist with worldbuilding and work on some elements of Proteus.

There are a couple of conceptual challenges I still have to deal with at the strategic level – not having a GM is a big one, but I’m making a little bit of headway there. Some members of the Fate Core G+ community recommended I check out a couple of other games as well, but all of them are a little too narrow in focus for what I’m going for. I may be overly ambitious, but the kind of game I want to play is a bit more epic in scale. Part of the challenge with this is two-fold: lack of a defined end point and the challenges of storing the game state between play sessions. Looking at some of the recommendations from others did lead to me rethinking the campaign & scenario approach, which may help with both of these issues.

I’d already been considering a sort of living campaign approach to introducing more of the storyline to both the strategic and roleplaying games, and scenarios works well with that. Expanding further, we could have multiple concurrent campaigns within the overall game world. Each would focus on a different set of global issues and affect the overall state of the world. Each campaign would include a variety of scenarios and adventures, and scenarios could take place at different levels of focus. Some scenarios would involve play across an entire region, while others would zoom into the local level of a single city or town. And of course a variety of characters would be engaging in adventures tied to all of it. Players could just play the adventures of the roleplaying game, focus on the scenarios of the strategy game, or they could play both – using their PCs to shape how organizations’ actions play out across the world and using organizations to change the state of the game world in which the characters exist.

Moving Forward

Thinking about the mechanics of the strategy game, it’s helpful to consider them in the context of a specific scenario within the game world. I’ve been taking a similar approach in my work on Proteus, choosing to focus on a time period prior to the timeline presented in the core game. This gives me the opportunity to work on the system in the context of the setting while simultaneously helping build the game world. It might also help present the game world to players during development. Taking the same approach with the strategy game should provide the same benefits.

One of the adventures I’ve been working on as a quickstart for Proteus is Planetfall. The PCs are the first humans to set foot on Ortellum; they must assess its viability and determine the best location in which to establish the colony. Getting the colony set up seems like a good scenario for the strategy game, so I’m using that as my starting point.

More to come…