My buddy Harry recently introduced me to Fate. Or rather, he introduced Fate to me, as I haven’t had the opportunity to play it (and probably won’t, in the near future, unless there’s a fate GM in Berlin reading this who’d like a guest player for a few evenings).

Fate is a free-form, story-centric role-playing game rules system based on an older rules system called Fudge, a system that I always liked and have used in the past for some things; for example as a character description model in the design guide documents for some of my settings.

Since Fate is based on Fudge, it inherits the OGL licensing – meaning the core rules are basically free to use by anybody as long as the user complies with the OGL. In a nutshell, it means you have to keep everything you build on Fate open, except for “product identity”, i. e. your setting, characters, story, and so on.

Opening up the rules system seems to also have resulted in a fairly wide distribution of Fate; while Fudge never really caught on, Fate seems to be all over the place. (In fact there are so many different versions that it’s all a bit confusing at first. There’s a post on the Fate RPG site, listing different versions of the Fate rules – a good starting point.) At this point, if you were to choose between the two, the better support and brand recognition of Fate would make it the preferred choice.

For me, open rules sets are of particular interest as I am looking for a rules system as the basis for my Science fiction universe. The SF universe isn’t a “pure” role-playing setting, but of course creating a setting in such a way that it’s ready for use for gaming is something that goes quite naturally with the territory.

I don’t think I necessarily have to use an existing system as-is, I could create or adapt a system. I’ve considered Traveller and it’s not quite what I want to use, for a variety of reasons. There already are two Science Fiction rules sets for Fate: Starblazer Adventures, which I understand is based on quirky British Science Fiction and that’s not really my cup of tea. The game doesn’t even get a full page of description on the publisher’s site. And there’s Diaspora, which claims to be “hard science fiction” – and as far as I can tell is anything but. And that’s pretty much it.

Not exactly an unserviced niche, but there’s probably room there. I certainly have some ideas.

I’ve dabbled in rules design before – most of it privately, but some of it has seeped over into this blog. Creating a Science Fiction version of Fate might be an enjoyable exercise.