Fate/Nasuverse

Been thinking about this lately - I'm actually thinking that an interesting way of playing it would be to use Silent Legions for mages, and Godbound for servants. They seem pretty compatible, and neither really rely on traditional (i.e. vancian) rpg magic, which seems appropriate for Fate.

It's the setup that's the hard part. You could run it Apocrypha style, but I think the most ideal situation would be 2 players - a master and a servant.

Something horrible.

Because it's a horrible setting.

It could possibly, marginally work with exactly four players split into pairs. At which point the gm becomes little more than a moderator between the players.

You can run a game with 3 players all fighting on the same side, one playing a master, one a servant, one another expectational human, mage, church servant, homunculus maids, Kiritsugu's sidekick, w/e. Having 2 servants for 1 one master one way or another is a thing too.
Now, whatever you do that, or run 2 pairs of servant+master, i'm not sure what system handles power discrepancy between heroic spirits and "normal" people well, probably something like order of might from mouse guard would be appropriate. Or dice shades from burning wheel, but neither system is applicable to the setting really. I don't think just having an aspect of being a servant in FATE would mechanically grant you enough oomph to comply with fiction. Unless you are hacking it to be so off course, but then it's not quite stock FATE already.

I think some Japanese RPG have a system to sort of deal with that. Where powerful entities would have high stats, and normal humans would get bunch of lack points to compensate for a discrepancy. Though i don't think you have to compensate in the first place, to play in a spirit of the universe.

There was this dragon rider game where everyone played their own rider and someone else's dragon
So A played Bs dragon and C player As

What about playing as masters for the social part of the campaign while the combat part is instead a number of consecutive summonings so everytime a servant dies they have the chance to get a more powerful one while putting them at a disadvantage because less heroes left/your enemies are closer to the grail.
Of course if your servant doesn't die they get "loaded" with mana, so they still have a chance against servants higher on the scale/summoned later.

I know I am writing terribly, the idea is:
Your faction has as many servants as the masters (if you want to add some as NPC your pick) plus some spares that get summoned when those who are already out die. The early servants on both factions are low powered, and they get more powerful ones with each summon. However the more a servant stays alive the more mana they accumulate, so players don't have to commit sudoku to stay relevant.
The first faction to finish all their servants loses. If that happens to your players, have them use their masters in battle trying to kill opposing masters.

About systems, no clue.

Fate/Apocrypha has a grail war that is two 7-master teams up against one another.
Could work, 4-6 player Masters/Servants, with the rest of their team being NPCs.

If you wanted to get crazy you could give each player two characters, one master and one servant. Their servant is another player's servant.

>some Japanese RPG
Exalted, maybe? The rules for exalted versus mortals are pretty well-defined as being a huge gap. The mortals have only very limited rules for magic though, which wouldn't really cover all the stuff Fate mages do. There'd also be a lot of work to be done to leverage the types of charms to fit the various servants.

>the rest of their team being NPCs
Some combo of NPCs and randos. Most wars tend to have one or two people drawn in that have nothing to do with the war initially, and might not work alongside the rest of your team.

>while the Grail Wars are always competitive.
i agree

which is why if you were to run it you should instead ignore them and focus on the setting at large (mages doing mage things/killing vampires)

you get a nice scale of progression and have a wide variety of enemies to fight, a reasonably complex setting and its still recognizably fate/turkeyhandle

>mages doing mage things
Horrific experiments that prove that 99% of mages are absolute monsters?

if you want to- magi are all terrible people and should be killed on sightrin included

or you could go operating a la kerry, maybe be part of an executor task force to retrieve a sealing designate, or recover a lost crest- maybe a relic is found, a modern noble phantasm like fragratch

Double Cross i think

what kind of classes archetypes could you have

>full magi (tokiomi/kayneth)
specializes in a certain type of magic, progresses via crest

>specialist (bazzet/kerry)
mixture of spells/cantrips and weaponry

>priest (kirei, ciel)
posses buffs and anti-monster weaponry

>human (kuzuki, maya)
regular humans- do what humans do but better

>inhuman (DA(A?) /TA/ demon/ nanaya/werewolf)
posses inherent traits of whatever monster- progress into bigger and scarier monster, receive negatives for social interaction and appropriate weaknesses

>progresses via crest
Crest is a one-time upgrade, that gets stronger each time it's passed on.

None because class based systems are trash

not quite

your crest is like your carried magical memory- as you progress as a mage it gets better, so then your kids get you now upgraded crest and so on

having basic archetypes into which characters fit is a good thing, especially when there are distinct walks of life leading to that point

>Rin included

I will fuck you up.

shes amoral at best

she enters a contest where she would have to kill other people for no other reason than "gotta be no.1"

I currently have a game of Fate running, its pretty sweet but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work well with other groups because we are using a hodgepodge of rules to make it work. General idea is its a Great Holy Grail War so 7v7 until one team wins then it becomes a free for all, we use Ars Magica to generate our Masters and basically bullshit with FATE to come up with reasonable stats for Servants. We all decided to run as Master/Servant pairs because it's just more fun to play your team as you want. We are good enough role players that this works and doesn't get overpowered or stupid. We also have two GM's for the campaign to help smooth out issues so that pretty neat.

Honestly, I'd probably design a system from scratch for the job. That's easier than trying to adapt some ready-made system to the quirks of the setting.

The real question is how to integrate the crucial "bone your servant" aspect of the franchise.

And she's struggling through all of it and in the end finds her compassion.
Her father was a right cunt though.

Roll +Con when restoring your servants mana through sexual intercourse. Gain +1 margin of success for descriptions involving sea life. Gain +1D for descriptions featuring poorly made CG.

I actually made a custom system to run it it that used exclusively fudge/fate dice. We only managed to play it once, it was alright, had some problems, mostly that my munchkin-ass group managed to find a way to powergame it before I did.

A way I am doing a Fate/GO game at the moment is by mixing in elements from Fate/Kaleid Illya or however it's written.
The players get to hang out with Servants, but when combat comes around they "install" the Servants and use their powers to fight.

If you actually want to run a bonafide Holy Grail War, you will either have a game with only 1 or 2 players OR you will have to find yourself 7-14 people that are down with possibly a very slow game over Roll20 or some other online program because there's no other way for it.

>7-14 people that are down with possibly a very slow game

A PVP campaign modeled after Fate has the opposite problem, the game can end VERY fast for the first players to bite it.

Saw it when I took a curious read of a forum based grail war somewhere. They had long as fuck setups that involved players coming up with extremely detailed backgrounds and ability lists for their servants (each player was to run one master plus his servant). Each player must have put hours of work into those. Then in the literal first move of first fight one of the servants dies (which is realistic, that's pretty much how a grail war goes down without writer fiat). The master was alive, but the player left the thing without a word. Then the same thing happened again in the next fight, and again one player just left, having played like all of one post after a super long setup. After that, the thing collapsed since the players were just leaving as soon as they lost a fight.

The thing is, all of this makes sense. There's no reason for a player to stick around when there's no realistic way for him to win anymore in a PVP setup, and having spent five hours on a character that dies in five seconds is bound to make people ragequit. Yet that's exactly how a fight between servants would go according to lore. Only reason it doesn't work like that in the VN/anime is because the writer is protecting the main characters and constantly breaking up fights that should kill them. That doesn't happen in a game.

>the game can end VERY fast for the first players to bite it.
You are quite right, user. One time I tried a Great HGW a la Fate/Apocrypha with 4 friends and that one took forever because they were playing everything safe, so I guess I focused too much on that.
A game's speed is also fucked up by the existence of Command Spells.
The moment one Master spots another, there is nothing to stop them from telling their Servant to just insta-kill them.

But You could get around this by BS-ing lore and making it a variant on Fate/Extra Multi-Master/Servant tournament

This also somewhat solves problems like two players going full Autist and both wanting to run Sabers or some shit

Personally I'd be interested in summoning since that is one of the parts of Fate I always thought was cool

For instance you could

Have a player take some kind of penalty like starting with no money or by making enemies in settling to require the artifact to summon a specific servant

Your player wanted to do something like Waver from Fate Zero they cold steal another player's artifact, but they would be playing with another player's character or with a pre-built character the GM prepared and have to learn a different play style

The player could try to summon a servant without an artifact and get one "Most suited/similar" to their character

Stuff like that would make the beginning sessions a nightmare but also be super cool and get your players really competing against one another and thinking like Master's do about being sneaky and preparing for every battle

Exalted basically has you playing as Servants.

Considering how this didn't seem to be a problem for most Master's in the series it would be more a matter of a Player taking some kind of draw back for a certain buff

Like if their Master took a hit to their caster level to run a high level/broken Servant they'd have to regularly "Restore Mana" between battles or risk being taken unawares if you were doing PvP where the players were actively searching for one another to get an upper-hand

Really though given that Fate/Zero went an entire series without people fucking their Servants you could probably get away with it unless someone wants to get weird at the table with their waifu

>powergame it before I did.
>powergame
>fate
the literal spear of "you die GGnoRE" is balanced in fate- how did you manage?

>But You could get around this by BS-ing lore and making it a variant on Fate/Extra Multi-Master/Servant tournament

Or you could bullshit some other circumstance entirely. Servants are just extremely powerful familiars, there are other reasons a mage would love to have them around.

servants require the grail to be summoned, since it not only provides the energy but also allows for the access to the throne of heroes

heavens-feel.com/fate_nasuverse_rpg.html

The supplementary material implied Waver was boning Rider. Seriously.

so

shirou/rin boning saber
shinji/randoms boning medusa
kuzuki boning caster
the world boning archer
waver boning alex
ryunoosuke boning giles and or little kids

Unironically this. Most battles between Servants involve one (or both) having a fuck ton of disadvantages piled on them beforehand, which is a major mechanic in FATE.

Basically. I'm thinking a Fate rpg would need a 'mana transfer' skill at this point.

>search thread
>no mention of ANIMA: Beyond Fantasy
The system is a janky mess but it's pretty much tailor made to fit the Nasuverse. Summoners work pretty much exactly like the Holy Grail War, mages have the same sorts of purviews and powers, you can make your own super powerful martial techniques, and there's even explicit rules for things like the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception.

You can have all the players fighting on the same side, eg. Kiritsugu's crew had 4 people in total. alternatively you can have 3 masters ally. They will have to duke it out when everybody else is dead, but that's not really a problem, since it's the end of the campaign anyway.

fade to black, its not like you can fuck it up

and its not like you have to do the seafood- you can have them drink blood

>alternatively you can have 3 masters ally
and ruin both the challenge and suspense of a grail war?

having two allies who you can trust almost implicitly is way too much

*2 masters

that actually sounds quite good

how bad is "janky mess"

It's a class and level based point buy system where your level decides how many points you have to build your character and your class decides how much things cost. In addition, you have a separate pool of points at character creation that allows you to buy special abilities including magic. Picking a spellcasting class does not give you the ability to cast magic innately. It's also a d100 roll over system with at least 10 subsystems that all run on separate yet roughly similar assumptions.

Define Supplementary materials

Fate/Nasuverse isn't viable for pen and paper, even the video games don't utilize anything close to the in-universe lore and mechanics.

First and foremost is that everybody in-universe are minmaxers; they build up, wear and literally throw a entire armoury of +1 items around like candy and have developed a entire complex economy based around this.

There's tons of other problems as well like lethality, fights last a couple of seconds at most, usually the first person that cast a spell wins so they heavily invest in defensive opinions and very little in offensive.

I could go on and on.

"saber grew a dick"- the canon alternate universe explanation of the 4th HGW

>There's tons of other problems as well like lethality, fights last a couple of seconds at most, usually the first person that cast a spell wins so they heavily invest in defensive opinions and very little in offensive.
which is why you never engage a magus unless you have solved their mysteries- something that could be done in a campaign

basically, the actual magi part of the setting works, its only when you try and do a grail war that you get issues

I think it was the character material or something like that. Rider was popular with the gays because Alexander was bi in real life, so they threw in a line implying Waver was restoring his mana via sex to get more gaybux.

Oh so it isn't Canon, but it's not "not canon"

Make of it what you will huh

If you read some of the written material constant infighting and murder is actually a huge problem among Magus, entire families get wiped out and all their research is lost on a regularly basis.

Fate/Strange Fake is a nice summary of everything wrong with the Nasuverse, just read the Archer summoning chapter, It's heavily implied that because she's a native of the land she receives significant bonuses compared to a foreigner, basically the reserve of the Matou family who are so incompatible with the mana of Japan they've become impotent despite having some of most effective familiars seen in the canon so far.

>If you read some of the written material constant infighting and murder is actually a huge problem among Magus, entire families get wiped out and all their research is lost on a regularly basis.
well yes, magi are all monsters

>shes a native
isnt it because (due to being native and shit) that she knows how to use the leylines better?

get better taste op

I don't know about the system, but I'd run it less like the traditional Holy Grail Wars, and run it like Fate/Grand Order. Where the players play a master or servant (could be both too) and are part of an organization that travels back in time to various anomalies to fix them to keep the future on track.

>isnt it because (due to being native and shit) that she knows how to use the leylines better?
That's one part of it, but there's plenty of examples throughout the rest of the canon that race/genetics plays a huge part of compatibility (a running theme in Type-moon).

Somebody on Veeky Forums in one of the Grand Order threads made a good post about how earlier material is borderline fascist and how modern type-moon are heavily overcompensating by retconning all theses accidental implications.

Do you have a screencap of that or am I going to have to look for it?

>arlier material is borderline fascist
what

How would the Alaya Vs. Gaia conflict come into play? when the players step out of line unlike other games the Nasuverse has built-in mechanics to prevent them going murderhobo or fucking shit up shit too badly.

GM decides

"rocks fall everyone dies" through either arc or assasin kerry most likely

It is distinctly nip supremacist. The only nip villains in stay/night were either secretly immigrants or Kirei, who could be seen as a race traitor for joining the Catholic Church.

Eugenics doesn't just work, It's objectively a force for good, through extensive mate selection Magus have been able to fight against the ever increasing hostility of Gaia, Ryougi is a product of this and she basically confirmed the practices of the Demon Hunter Organization produce specular results, until that is they decide to have offspring with plebeians which undoes several generations of improvements instantly. Unfortunate implications indeed.

>Eugenics doesn't just work, It's objectively a force for good, through extensive mate selection Magus have been able to fight against the ever increasing hostility of Gaia
>the morally ambiguous at best mages have managed tom keep doing mage things through eugenics
that would also make 40k fascist

>The only nip villains in stay/night were either secretly immigrants or Kirei
the nip characters are shirou. rin, issei, taiga and the schoolkids- well and kojiro

of those two are the protagonist/heroine and the rest arent relevant to the story

and kojiro is the antagonist

>that would also make 40k fascist
Are you implying it isn't heretic?

no, because the imperium is never described as a positive or admirable force. its an oppressive retarded mammoth and everyone knows it

likewise the magi are never stated to be admirable or moral, simply because the methods they employ work doesent change that

>require a lot of planning

Would it even be possible?

In Fate GO, Alexander has a skill called Fair Youth. It Charms a humanoid enemy. His doesn't target gender, unlike every other charm in the game.

M&M, Champion or other superhero game. Possibly Gurps or FATE.

d'Eon's doesn't target a gender either. I'm pretty sure there's another too.

A heavily modified GURPS with influences from Burning Wheel, It would almost certainly require a custom dice mechanic, probably grafted from Cortex.

Gils "fair youth"