Hey Veeky Forums...

Hey Veeky Forums, I was wondering if I could get recommendations for a system or homebrew to run a Fate Stay Night style campaign

Anyone got anything you think would fit the bill?

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Godbound or Exalted.

The characters in those games are meant to be demigods from the start and they can do some crazy insane things so they'd be perfect for Servants.

Mages could be "Heroic Mortals" who aren't on par by any means but given the right circumstances can give servants a run for their money.

here's a link to godbound sendspace.com/file/046n0z

Thanks I'll give it a look, me and my friends are big Fate Fans and and wanted to try an anime style campaign instead of typical DnD so this helps a lot

If you want a system that can stat almost any power down to minute details, look at Anima. It's a crunch heavy anime inspired fantasy game which is good for any sort of over the top fantasy.

If you're okay with something more abstract, I'd recommend Legends of the Wulin. It's originally designed for Wuxia stuff but it works well for anything action oriented. In particular for Fate, the ability to make a characters ideals and beliefs mechanical bonuses feels very much in theme for the franchise.

What would be the best way to run a Fate/ style campaign? The classic 7 master free-for-all would be very hard to do at a table. Maybe something in line with the 7 v 7, where players control all of the Masters on one side? Maybe just a few players, like 3, as Masters in as allies. Or 3 masters, with other players also acting as their 3 servants?

I second Anima, it has plenty of groundwork for Nasu works.

However, last thread we had about Nasuverse, it basically boiled down to "The only good way to play in Nasuverse, is to not run a Grail war".

First, you have to realize that the Fifth war is an odd war by itself, with the masters all being children and women, ending up in constant alliances and a duality of good guys and bad guys. The Fourth war was closer to reality, and how actually magi operate in Fate.

If you really need to have servants, there is a kind of a side way. Everyone builds a Nasuverse character, and for some reason they are stuck in the middle of an active war. Take inspiration from Fate/Strange Fake, and have them each player have a single Command Spell, and it can be used to summon a Servant for one battle, and they are then forced to abuse the system and the alliances.

So, unless you have a good idea on how to play a Grail war, either with Servants PC or not, 7 free for all, 7 vs 7 Apocrypha Style, or Extra styled "Tournament to death", you most likely run into more issues than it's worth. Just go full Tsukihime/KnK/DDD and have weird characters in an even weirder urban fantasy.

Eh, I think you could still run a grail war, it's a question of ensuring the players understand the narrative tropes of the series along with the in character/in universe rules.

Yes, the series tells you that Holy Grail Wars are brutal contests where there are no allies... But the story never actually works that way. You always end up with a group of Masters and Servants who are generally allies and work together for most of the plot. If your players are on board with that idea, you can work as a group to keep things coherent instead of it becoming a PvP murderbrawl.

The First Grail War was a murderbrawl of epic proportions, don't forget that. It taught the three families how their little game would be actually played. The Third War as far as we know it's about how every family tried their best to cheat as much as possible, and the Fourth is the same thing, only by that point the war was infamous enough that most of the smart people just turned their backs to it. The Fifth war is an oddity, something extremely weird based entirely for "The Strongest Servant is on the hands of the most retarded master".

But if you are all set up on running a classic grail war, you first gotta decide the style. Stay Night free for all, Apocrypha team based, Ataraxia "The war was over, but not anymore" clusterfuck, Extra Tourney, or Grand Order Rules (That means no rules).

Second, is choosing if Servants are PC or not. Obviously if there is a married couple or two in the group you can easily give everyone pairs, but if you don't then stuff will get bad if people miss one or two sessions because it fucks not only you as a GM, but another player.

Third is the system. The thing I recommend is a Nasuverse fanmade one, found on "Heavens-feel dot com", that has a lot of quick and fast support for making Nasu characters. With this comes the hard hard, how to balance the party in general.

Fate has a weird balance, with strong Servants with weak Masters and vice versa, as well weaklings and bullies together. The only reason both Tohsakas lost was because servant incompatiblity, but Medea can live on her own until the end of the war by playing smart. And Illya and Berserker is clearly something you don't want to fight no matter what, even with plenty of bullshit.

(cont)

And lastly, comes the hardest part of all. Will the PCs make their own characters or not. This is a big deal if you are making Servants, because unless you have a system for Noble Phantasms (Which heavens-feel kind of has but not really) they will end up making balancing multiple PC a living hell. Anima has actually a better system for making Noble Phantasm, but the English translation is butchered a lot, so either go read a lot of unofficial errata o unofficial modifications to the system.

On Anima, you can make mages low lvl (Kind of a 10 level gap between them) to clearly make them on different leagues, but it's a system where one or two levels is a big fucking deal so you will need to minmax a lot to 1v1 a Servant. Also, it's magic system is not very Nasu-ish, but psychic/ki makes it easy to make non-magi Masters have some supernatural qualities.

So my main offer is, first find players and see what they actually want to play. Then see if you will have Servants PC or not, and with that the system selection gets a lot easier. If the game is master focused, go Heavens-feel. If the game is mixed, Anima probably your best bet. If the game is Servants only with Masters NPCs just go any very high power system.

I guess it all depends on how much you're willing to accept abstraction. A lot of what you're saying makes sense if you want to get into the minutiae of Fate, and I know that's what appeals to a lot of people, but I think it's a lot simpler to use something like Legends of the Wulin for a game more focused on the themes than exact specifics of how things work. LotW can represent almost any set of abilities as a functional fighting style, as well as letting you factor in more ephemeral things as real, active combat bonuses, along with having a great combat system to boot.

It's far from the only way to run it, but it's the one I'd go with, since I don't mind bending things a bit to fit the RPG format.