Fate is an excellent roleplaying game that was released in 2013 and since it’s published under Creative Commons you can go ahead and read it right now if you like. It’s a game that is all about collaborative and emergent storytelling, and it has a whole rule system that is built with that in mind. In this post I’ll try to extract the stuff from Fate that could be used as general principles when running any RPG game, in order to be more flexible as a GM, and do more meaningful prep. And again; I’m taking bits and pieces out from a 200-page book, so it’s not going to cover all of the great ideas found in Fate. I’ve also tweaked the Fate ideas to make them more general, making this my own little distilled version. So, if you know Fate and don’t recognize parts of this text, this is to be expected and you have been warned. 

Step 1: Two Big Issues 

Come up with one ongoing issue and one impending issue for the adventure. The ongoing issue should be something that is more or less constant, like “the sun is a scorching red giant” or “the people are oppressed under the tyranny of the God King”. The impending issue should be something more recent and dramatic like “a cult is trying to awake the demon Hulagg from its slumber” or “ghoul raiders are pillaging the land”. 

For my example prep I’ll choose: 

Ongoing issue: the sun is a scorching red giant 

Impending issue: The cult of the Eternal Darkness is trying to awake the demon Hulagg from its slumber 

Fate suggests that the players are in on making the Big Issues and I can see how that might work out well for some groups. But you might want to write them yourself as a GM and from my point of view that is just as valid, especially if you feel like putting secret stuff in the Big Issues. Either way you do want to have the issues ready before the players make characters, so that they can tie the characters better into the drama. 

Step 2: Faces and Places 

Create a handful NPC and give them: 

• A name 
• Connection to a Big Issue and or group 
• An aspect 

It could look like this: 

• Argus The Broken 
• Leader of the Cult of the Eternal Darkness 
• Blind and utterly insane 

• Joane Ford 
• Mayor of Heleah 
• Taking care of “her people” 

Create some places, they may be just a name and a sentence, but you can make them as detailed as you like. 

• Haleah: a small town by an oasis 
• The Badlands: an area that people tend to avoid 
• The Walking Bazaar: a traveling caravan of merchants 

Step 3: Characters and Character Troubles 

Create characters as you normally would in the game you’re playing. The only addition is that each player should add a trouble to their characters. They should answer the question; what complicates your character’s existence? It’s usually a personal struggle like “I’ll do anything for a handful of gold” or a problematic relationship like “in debt to Greb the loan shark”. 

Step 4: Story Questions 

Write down a list of story questions. They should have the format “Can/Will (character) accomplish (goal)? You should base them on both the big issues and the characters’ troubles. Some will be very obvious like: 

• Will the characters be able to stop the Cult of the Eternal Darkness? 
• Will (character) be able to clear his/her debt? 

But you should try to come up with more questions that represent smaller steps towards that bigger goal, like: 

• Can (character) avoid confrontation with the Grebs thugs? 
• Can the characters locate the hidden shrine in the badlands? 

The more questions you write the longer the adventure will become. The idea is that you should try to answer 1-3 questions during every session of play – and when all the questions are answered the adventure is complete! 

Step 5: Start the game 

Now you should be ready to start playing, but how do you start? This is what Fate Core say: 

Start things off by being as unsubtle as possible—take one of your story questions, come up with something that will bring the question into sharp relief, and hit your players over the head with it as hard as you can. 

In my example I would probably want to come up with some way of establishing the Cult of Eternal Darkness as a threat. Maybe they send walking dead to attack the town, as a distraction while they try to poison the oasis water. The bastards! That should get things going. 

Summary 

If you’ve read The Lazy Game Master (great book!), or any Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) stuff, you’ll probably notice that there are similarities. And that’s great, you can take your favorite bits from all of them and make a custom stew. I would totally take the concepts of fronts from PbtA and the secrets and clues from Lazy Game Master and put that alongside the Fate story questions and faces and places. And nothing is stopping you from using premade settings, towns, dungeons and what have you.