Monsters

FATE SYSTEM TOOLKIT

Monsters

The rules for NPCs in the Fate Core book are great for creating people—other humans whose goals put them into conflict with the PCs—but as the GM, you might also want to include a few monsters in your game. With these tools, you can create monsters that are inhuman and tricky, challenging players to find clever approaches when dealing with monstrous antagonists.

Instinct Aspects

To create interesting monsters, start by laying out some of the core drives that spur the monsters to action. What makes them take risks and chances? What do they care enough about to get in fights with the players about? It’s likely they have inhuman drives—desires that ordinary humans would probably never have.

Take your initial thoughts and condense them down into an instinct aspect. Monster characters can use their instinct aspect as normal, but they may add +3 to their roll instead of +2 when they invoke it. Monsters are often singularly driven to obtain their goals, and the players will have to work to overcome these foes.

Rey is running a game of urban horror. When he writes up a set of zombies, he gives them the instinct aspect Hungry for Brains. Anytime that he invokes their aspect, they get a +3 to their roll.

Monster Abilities

Monsters are distinct from other NPCs because their abilities tend to challenge the rules and disrupt the normal flow of conflicts. Many monsters are entire fight scenes waiting to happen, as the players have to figure out how to defeat an enemy that is changing up the rules on them.

Some examples of interesting monster abilities:

Hard to Kill: Monsters can survive much more damage than other characters, either because of longer stress tracks—like Frankenstein’s monster—or because they can regenerate quickly—like the Hydra.

Immune to Damage: Monsters are often immune to all damage save one type—such as vulnerability to silver—or until a specific condition has been met—such as destroying a specific magic item.

Prone to Change: Monsters tend to transform themselves—like vampires who turn into bats to flee—or the environment—such as summoning additional minions in the middle of a fight.

While it’s easy to see how these traits could be turned into stunts, they are often too powerful to be activated without spending a fate point. However, if you add such a cost, the players can grind down an enemy like the Hydra, waiting for you to run out of fate points. In addition to making your monsters weak, such costs make conflicts a drag. Who wants to play until the GM runs out of fate points?

Rather than add a cost, you can instead add a weakness to a monster in order to be able to activate a stunt without paying the fate point cost. If you add a lesser weakness, you must still pay a fate point at the start of the scene in which the monster uses the power, but if you add a greater weakness, you don’t have to pay any fate points at all to use the stunt.

When the PCs discover and use a lesser weakness, the monster can still use the stunt, but must now pay each time that it uses the stunt. If the PCs discover and use a greater weakness, however, the monster loses the stunt completely.

Rey decides to create a demon named Masabra. He gives Masabra a stunt that makes the demon immune to physical stress at the cost of a fate point. Rey wants Masabra to be extremely dangerous, so he gives him a greater weakness of blessed weapons, allowing Masabra to use the stunt without paying a fate point cost. If the PCs ever acquire blessed weapons, Masabra would lose access to this stunt when he faced them.

Multiple Zone Monsters

For very large monsters (VLM), you can go even further by treating the monster itself as a map with several zones. In order to defeat such a monster, the characters need to defeat each zone independently, while navigating the obstacles between the zones. By statting up the monster in pieces, you can split up the PCs and give the monster a number of extra actions—one per zone—to convey the size of the foe and keep the conflict interesting.

The Elder Dragon of Ormulto is a VLM in Rey’s game. He’s so large that he has four separate zones: his two claws, his head, and his tail. When the players try to keep him from destroying an apartment building, they will need to deal enough stress to his head to bring him down. However, if they don’t do anything about his claws or tail, he will quickly rain destruction down upon the people the heroes are trying to protect. They will have to split up among the zones to keep him in check.

In addition to the size of VLMs, you can also create stunts that help to convey the theme and style of the monster. Many of these involve transformations, stunts that fundamentally alter the monster or change the nature of the fight, changes that are familiar to players who have previously fought video game boss monsters. As with smaller monsters, you can tie these stunts to weaknesses if you’d like to be able to activate them for free.

In order to mark the importance of the intermediary steps needed to defeat a gigantic monster—such as destroying a part of it or closing a portal from which it draws strength—VLMs gain an additional transformation stunt tied to their partial defeat.

Since his claws and tail are much weaker than his head, the Elder Dragon of Ormulto has a transformation stunt tied to the destruction of those zones on the map called Breath of Fire. If the PCs destroy one of his appendages, the Dragon activates the stunt to deal two stress to each character on the map, regardless of zone, and adds the situational aspect (Name) Is On Fire! where (Name) is an important building or person near the fight.

Many of the rules here can also be used to add interesting features to nonhuman characters that aren’t antagonists in the story. You could give the player’s familiar a stunt with a weakness that human NPCs could attempt to discover, or map out a spirit guardian the players summon across multiple zones.

How to Train Your Mutant Fire Dog: Monster Training in Fate Accelerated

by June Shores

Luminescent fungus carpets the cave floor. It covers the tunnel with an eerie, multi-colored glow. Kairi can hear water flowing just beyond the tunnel walls. The walls press in on the space around her, pricking up goosebumps on her skin.

Zipp, her mutant fire dog, lets out a whine. He sticks close to her knees.

A rock falls ahead and Zipp jumps.

Eight gleaming eyes stare out from the darkness of the tunnel. A dreadful hiss echoes off the walls. The spider, as large as an elephant, rears up out of the dark with acid dripping off its joints.

“Zipp.” The dog hears Kairi's command and stands ready. “Burn it up.”

Monster training is a popular genre. From Pokémon and Medabots to Digimon and Shaman King, monster trainers get around. In this article I'll show you a way to drop player-directed monsters into your ongoing campaigns, how to give them life, and how to improve their abilities over time.

Monsters as Extras

Monsters are powerful, probably far more powerful than your player characters. That's okay because monsters are here to lend power to their trainers.

To make this power more real we’re going to create the monster as an extra (Fate Core, page 207) to attach to your PCs. While you won’t find extras discussed in Fate Accelerated Edition, anything from Fate Core can easily be tweaked to suit your FAE game. We’ll take basic Fate Accelerated building blocks of aspects, stress, stunts, etc. and make something new with them.

Monsters are simple for players and GMs to create. Wild monsters and monsters commanded by NPC trainers can be written up as mooks or characters in their own right. Once they’re in the hands of PCs, though, they’re written out like this:

Name

Name your monster anything you like. A nickname, a code name, or whatever happens to come out of the monster’s mouth.

Stage

Monsters are divided into stages that outline how powerful they are. There are 3 stages in all. To ascend through the stages you need to gain XP (we’ll get back to this a little later).

Aspect

Each monster gets their own aspect detailing three things: a core personality trait, an element that they embody, and a real-world animal or object that they resemble.

Stress

A monster has three stress boxes, just like their trainer.

Consequences

A monster's consequences depend on their stage. Stage one monsters have one mild consequence slot, stage two monsters add on a moderate consequence slot, and stage three monsters get a severe consequence slot.

Stunts

A monster gets one stunt at stage one, and one more each time it ascends to a higher stage.

XP track

Each monster has an XP track with a number of boxes to fill. Stage one monsters have five boxes, stage two monsters have six boxes, and stage three monsters have seven boxes.

Approaches

Monsters don't have their own approaches. They’re only as good as their trainer and therefore depend on their trainer's approaches.

Zipp

Stage One.

ASPECT

Monster Concept: Loyal Fire Dog

STUNTS

Heart of Fire. Because I have fire in my heart, I get a free invoke on the first consequence that my trainer or I take in a conflict.

STRESS

□□□

CONSEQUENCES

Mild (2)

XP

□□□□□

Monsters in Play

Monsters can do things that their trainers can't. Throwing fire around like it’s a play thing is an example of this, but so is tracking by scent.

Zipp is a dog made of fire. By his nature, he can do all that implies, such as throw fireballs with his mouth, listen closely with his ears, or bite with his teeth.

PC monsters act on behalf of their trainer. Whenever a PC could take an action, they can use their monster instead, as long as it makes sense in the situation. Monsters don't get separate turns—when they act, they take up their trainer's turn. You’re basically substituting your monster for yourself. Perhaps you join in the fray and act together with your monster, but this is primarily narrative—either way, you get one action per turn between you and your monster.

The giant spider is closing in fast. Kairi orders Zipp to protect them with a spray of fire to force the bigger monster back. Kairi’s player rolls her Forceful approach and succeeds on her defense. The spider’s attack is stopped in its tracks.

If you fail a defense action then you can choose which of you takes the stress or consequences.

Let’s say that Kairi and Zipp failed that last defense action. The spider inflicts 2 stress on Kairi and Zipp. However, instead of letting Zipp take stress, Kairi’s player decides to soak up the stress with a mild consequence, Shaken. The spider is driven back by the fire, but Kairi is affected by the close call.

When a monster attempts to overcome an obstacle or create an advantage and the GM needs to set a target number, keep in mind the kind of monster it is and the aspects that could be working against it. Think about adjusting the difficulty for the action, perhaps by adding a +1 for every aspect working against it and +2 for aspects with elemental details that trump the monster's element.

Kairi and Zipp are trying to escape a collapsing tunnel. As they flee, water is trickling down from the roof and is about to crash into the tunnel along with some very big rocks.

The players at the table decided earlier that fire elementals don’t do fantastically against rock, so the GM decides that the difficulty would usually be Good (+3) for the collapsing tunnel. However, that Impending Flood is awfully intimidating to Zipp, which adds a +2 to the difficulty just for having the watery aspect present in the scene and making trouble for Zipp. So Zipp needs to get at least a Superb (+5) to make good on this escape.

If an NPC invoked such an aspect in a conflict, they’d award fate points to Zipp, but this sort of passive difficulty adjustment does not.

Monsters are also empathic toward their trainers. Any consequences that the trainer has will worry a monster. Consequences and other aspects on a trainer can be the basis for a compel on the monster's behavior. Any compels on the monster's behavior award fate points to their trainer.

XP

And now, as promised, we’ll discuss XP. You might be scratching your head. “But June,” you say, “there are no experience points in FAE!”

Well, now there are, although they don't work the way XP usually does. In How to Train Your Mutant Fire Dog, a monster moves on to the next stage in a time of crisis or uncertainty. To model this I've added another resource to the game: XP. Once you fill up the required amount of XP, your monster develops new abilities and maybe even changes shape.

To gain XP:

Your character must be involved in a conflict.

Your monster must participate in that conflict.

Your character or your monster must take a consequence in the conflict.

In the end, you must concede the conflict.

Conflicts where you win don’t count. When you concede a conflict, you gain an XP and fill in a box on your monster's XP track. Once all the boxes are filled, your monster ascends to the next stage.

When your monster moves up a level, you do the following:

Add a stunt to your monster.

Redefine your monster's stunts (optional).

Add the next level consequence slot to your monster.

Redefine or add a part to your monster's aspect (optional).

This little sub-system rounds out the monster training experience, but….

There Are Still Spaces to Explore with This

Maybe you can catch and tame new monsters in your game. Perhaps the GM plays the monsters, or the players each play another PC’s monster. Or maybe you just want to drop the monster mechanics into a game about a magical school to give extra flair to familiars. There are a thousand different ways to train your mutant fire dog.