Fate Core

About to start a game of "gritty, low fantasy" using Fate. I'm cribbing a lot of stuff from Age of Arthur, some harsher rules from Achtung! Cthulhu, and in general just planning on being a ruthless bastard GM (hard compels; modeling weather/terrain as enemies using the fractal to inflict fatigue, supply loss, etc.).

Any advice from fellow Fate players on what else I can do to make the world feel "real", dark, and hurtful?

P.S.: It will be morphing into a politically-charged campaign at some point, with war, backstabbing, spying, forming and breaking alliances, etc. (planning on using Romance in the Air rules for nations)

Making the world feel right isn't really a system-specific question.

Just describe things appropriately, including wounds and consequences.

And remember, it's a game designed to empower the heroes. Don't worry about 'realism' so much, and give them chances to shine.

Sorry, I should have specified I was looking for advice on *system advice* to help reinforce the genre I'm going for.

Thanks for the advice though, and yes, they will definitely have opportunities to show off their stuff!

One of them is the reincarnated blood of a dead god whose gifts make him a powerful tool to those who have (or force) his loyalty, one of them is an heir to an enemy throne (and being hunted by both sides because of it), the other is a man from faraway lands trying to reignite the ancient arts of his culture and uncover the secrets they buried long ago.

It's all about setting the initial tones of the scene through description. Perhaps set a background playlist of foreboding instrumental music.

I think your implementation of 'bastard gm' tactics would be veryyyyyy successful in immersing and engaging your players if you implement them well. Whatever you do avoid becoming an antagonistic GM.

At the same time you do want to give your players a reason to be invested into your games' premise: don't -just- beat them down alll the time, give them a breadcrumb trail of incentives, plot hooks, and hopes (even if some are false hopes).

Let them take risks. Let them win. Let them fail. Make them suffer. Make them question. Make them hate.

This is a great response, thank you! My goals are definitely in alignment with what you're describing, and ultimately while I want them to suffer both victories and terrible losses, I want the outcomes of their ultimate long-term goals to be uncertain right up until the struggle is over.

*suffer through both victories and terrible losses

I have problems fitting a gritty game into a Fate rules context. Fate isn't gritty.

One approach I have heard of by Ryan Macklin is to use that nature by taking it away when the character experiences traumatic events. Like fail your san check (?) and you can't invoke aspects for the scene. Also getting rid of consequences takes longer than the characters get time. I'm not sure about the details. But it sounds promising.

I'd use Torchbearer instead though. Goal, Belief, and Instinct are like Aspects in many ways. Sure, it's much crunchier and less meta. But for a gritty game I want numbers that I can chisel away at. ORE would be better as well. ORE is great for gritty!

If you want flavor advice go to the OSR thread, open the trove, and download Lamentations of the Flame Princess. That's gritty Fantasy! It's roguelike horror is what it is. And it's great. With tits, dicks, and blood.

My general Fate advice is to make sure every player has fully grasped how to compel their character, and how creating an advantage as an action works in combat. Then don't ever freeform but resolve even the most mundane things with stakes through the mechanics, or just skip them. Keep aspects in play visually present, use index cards or a chalk board. Play FAE until everyone is comfortable with the meta rules and only then expand into core or a game based on it.

Interesting comments, thanks. I have never heard of Torchbearer, I'll have to look into that, thanks!

>Any advice from fellow Fate players on what else I can do to make the world feel "real", dark, and hurtful?
Present more hooks than the players can follow. Everything they don't take care of has terrible consequences. Prioritizing poorly has worse effects.

Let the players feel the pain of the land. Tax their resources, kill their connections, make sure that every bad thing around them has a little effect on them. Want to let an orphan starve? Make sure the players have taken a liking to them first, maybe even expect a goody from them like street rumors or taking pickpocketing missions. Only then bad stuff happens to them, when the players will feel the hurt, not just as flavor.

Use tension instead of confrontation. Go for the pain, not for the kill. Combat can help momentarily, but ultimately it always makes things worse one way or the other. By alerting superior enemies, by giving the party a bad name, or by killing possible future allies, crucial future allies... Always make it seem like the real fight is still coming, and the characters have no control over it. Suddenly strange noises in the night have a meaning.

It's just what I would use. Look at Lamentations, it's much more interesting.

Great advice and has given me good idea fuel, thanks!

Would hacking this together with basic Fate Core be enough to play a Homestuck game?

>ORE is great for gritty!
I don't know much ORE, I've read some enchirideon and nemesis but never played it. What makes it so great for gritty?

If you're looking for game specific advice, you could replace some or all of the stress boxes with consequences. You cannot take a hit without feeling it.

People have done it.

Precise damage while hella-fast. Best madness in gaming. No meta rules unless you make them, so the players don't have to meta play against their characters. And it's really flexible. So if you want to make hunger a stat, or hope a resource, it's really easy to get it right with ORE. Everything balances in the dice pool at one look.

Plus the mechanism is gamist fun. I don't know any generic crunch that does combat faster. It never becomes arbitrary, at the same time it's really easy to pick up. Once you get what a set is it's pretty self explanatory, and sets are simple. It's two or more dice showing the same face.

Enchiridion (Reign) and Nemesis both play it pretty straight. Look at Better Angels, Monsters and Other Childish Things, and A Dirty World for funkier mechanics.

I heard (part of) a podcast series of people playing Better Angels it seemed pretty neat. Don't know much about the other two other than the premise of MaOCT.

I would abandon FATE if your goal is low fantasy. Look at the cover of the book, it's not that type of game. Runequest or Lamentations of the Flame Princess (already mentioned) is a better fit. Also you can dispense with all the aspect/compel nonsense if you don't use FATE, which ends up being a goal for everyone once they've played it a few times.

The one in the charter school?
It's long.
I love the mechanic of playing your table neighbor's evil demon who rations your super powers until you do enough bad stuff.

MaOCT keeps it pretty simple for the children PCs. The remarkable thing is Relationships. Just like stats and skills they go into the dice pool when applicable. Like if science is one of your relationships (usually people) and a bully is trying to trip you while carrying your baking soda volcano to the school science fair, then you can add the relationship die/ce to the dodge pool.

A Dirty World has moral stats and derived skills. They are scales with opposed extremes. Any action that gets rolled for is a moral decision.

Fate can work for low fantasy, but the players need to be really on board with it. Fate works best when the GM is sharing lots of narrative control, and the players are free to go in whatever direction they want. If whenever they're compelling or choosing consequences they go for more high-powered fantasy stuff then you're going to have power creep and the low-fantasy campaign will fail.
>reincarnated blood of a dead god
>man from a faraway land
Those concepts already seem to be going against the grain a bit.

If you just play so that you never let the players have narrative control you're not going to be making the most of Fate.
>make the world feel "real", dark, hurtful
You've done the session where you worldbuild together, right? You should've asked your players then how they want those things to be actualised at the table.

So either make sure your players are totally on board or pick another system.

Check out the archive, there was a recent storytelling of a long ass SBRUB session.

The 'Current Issues' and 'Impending Issues' bit of game creation (worksheet for that attached).
Current Issues: Poverty, overpopulation, poor & unsafe roads, such and such border disputes; what have you.
Impending Issues: Whatever it is the players will get drawn into that will then define the climax, other big regional or worldwide problems on the way; whether it be famine, an arms race, etc.

Like suggests, have one less stress box--and two [2]-point consequence boxes. The strongest characters will be able to shrug off a lot less punishment then the strongest characters in a 'normal' Fate game, but the weakest won't die any faster (you're replacing a [2] stress with a [2] consequence)--and they'll carry more hurt with them.

The interlinked stories bit of character creation. Have suggestions for this point that define the highs and lows of the settings as well as how the characters sit in it. Don't shy away from workshopping ideas.

Make sure to use scene aspects for tonal purposes, and when doing so to have them be known to the players.
"The market streets are [Crowded], [Noisy], and in this city, notably [Squalid]", laying down the notecard of scene aspects or what have you. That sort of thing.
Even if you don't expect these aspects to get played off of by them, they're something the players will take note of--and if they *do* use them to accomplish something, it's that much more engagement and gets them thinking about how all the pieces connect.

Generally I'd recommend as GMing advice in most systems (minus the 'pain of the land' bit). Tension's always good, and when the characters are downtrodden or occupy the low places in society sometimes there's less catharsis.
Many facets and hooks and openings directing into a smaller number of discrete paths is always good--and in this case then making the uncharitable or unhappily capricious nature of world felt by way of those hooks is easy.

Also, is 100% right. Fate's best when you're open to workshopping things and open to suggestion, which means all the players need to agree on this tone.

Of course, that's what the first session's all about--locking in those campaign settings, character origins, even what skills you have in the game, as a group.
Hell, I bet some of your players will even have some keen suggestions to help make the world feel right too.