Grimm Tales (Skills, The Ladder, and Planning)

Let me start off by saying that some of this post will be duplicated from a post over on the Google+ Fate Community but I felt like it was a good idea to post it here as well.

Grimm from Fantasy Flight Games

I have decided to run a few games go Fate in the coming weeks at my local FLGS both to introduce new players to the system and to flex my Fate muscles.  My current plan is to run a different setting every other week to help illustrate how versatile Fate really is.  Currently my plans are to run fantasy (likely something generic and not related to the fantasy setting I mentioned last post), sic-fi (either Star Wars or Star Trek), pulp heroes, and kids vs fairy tales.  

My plan for the first session is the kids vs fairy tales setting because I am going to start with fewer aspects, use a smaller skill pyramid with an apex skill of +3, and subject matter is friendly and well known to all ages.  

Before I go any further, I do feel the need to say that this setting and much of the hack is HEAVILY inspired by the Grimm RPG by Fantasy Flight Games.  No, they’re not the first people to make a game like this, but they did a HELL of a job and it’s going to make developing my own setting much easier.  The book is no longer in print but I really recommend grabbing the PDF...totally worth it.  

Anyway, step one for me was to re-skin the Skill List and The Ladder to fit the setting.  I’m not 100% complete with the skills, but here’s what I have so far:

FATE CORE	GRIMM TALES
Athletics	Gym
Burglary	Juvie
Contacts	Popularity
Crafts	Shop
Deceit	Lying
Drive	Ride
Empathy	??
Fighting	Scrapping
Intimidation	Bully
Investigation	??
Lore	Library
Notice	Seek
Physique	Tough
Rapport	??
Resources	Backpack
Shooting	Throwing
Stealth	Hide
Will	Pluck
	Imagination
*Survival*	Scouts

I am still looking for the right equivalents for Empathy, Investigation, and Rapport.  I’ve had some good suggestions over on the G+ community, but I haven’t settled on anything just yet.  

Imagination is a new skill that will essentially be the "magic" the kids of access to and mostly be used to overcome and create advantages, though will proper stunt choices could be used for other actions as well.  

With The Ladder, rather than using “great, good, fair, etc..” I’ve decided to use school grades to indicate difficulty and competence.  The pre-generated characters will all be in the 4th or 5th grade so the Ladder helps reflect that:

+8	10th Grade
+7	9th Grade
+6	8th Grade
+5	7th Grade
+4	6th Grade
+3	5th Grade
+2	4th Grade
+1	3rd Grade
+0	2nd Grade
-1	1st Grade
-2	Kindergarten

Now I need to:

• Finish the skill list
• This is almost done, and shouldn’t be a big deal
• Write up the Imagination Skill
• Should be easy with the revisions to the Extras chapter
• Write up the pregens
• I plan on 6 characters based on typical kid “archetypes”, though this may change:
• Athlete
• Bully
• Day Dreamer 
• Nerd/Geek
• Normal Kid
• Popular Kid
• For each “archetype” I will have a male and female kid
• The plan is to use partially complete character sheets and let the player fill in some skills, a aspect, and a stunt to make them their own and show how cool the character creation process is in Fate.  
• Outline an adventure
• Open to suggestions....

So, that’s where I am at with it for now.  I have a few weeks before I have to run anything, so there’s LOTS of time to plan and work this out.  Comments and suggestions are welcome. 

I do have to say that I am more exited to run this series of games in Fate in than I have been for a while.