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Fate Tokens

A parallel resource layered on top of the core roll - playing into vulnerability, flaws, and bad luck funds a currency spent later.

Nature

Every character has a Nature - a short archetype capturing a core drive or way of engaging with the world, written on the character sheet. Playing to your Nature at a dramatically appropriate moment grants a Fate Token.

Starter Natures

Pick one of these, or write your own.

Nature	Drive	Playing to it looks like
Analyst	Nothing gets acted on until you understand how it actually works	Pausing the plan to dig into the mechanism, the pattern, or the real cause before moving
Avenger	A wrong doesn’t stay unanswered	Pursuing payback or justice even when it isn’t the smart move
Caregiver	Other people’s wounds are yours to tend	Stopping to help, heal, or comfort someone at your own expense
Charmer	People are won over, not overpowered	Turning a hostile or closed-off person into an ally through charm alone
Competitor	Everything is a contest you intend to win	Turning a task into a competition and pushing yourself past what was needed
Daredevil	The safe option is the boring option	Taking the reckless, high-stakes move when a safer one was sitting right there
Diplomat	Every conflict has a deal hiding inside it	Talking two sides down from a fight instead of picking one
Enforcer	A deal is a deal, and someone has to make sure it holds	Making someone answer for a broken promise or unpaid debt
Fixer	Every problem has a working solution if you’re clever enough	Solving a mess through leverage, favors, or a clever angle instead of force
Ghost	The less anyone knows about you, the safer everyone is	Choosing to disappear, stay unseen, or erase your trail instead of being known
Guardian	Some things are yours to watch over	Standing your ground to protect a place, group, or thing you’ve claimed
Idealist	The world can be better, and you’re proof it’s worth trying	Pushing for the principled option when the cynical one is easier
Judge	Right and wrong get named out loud	Calling out someone’s conduct plainly, even when it’s socially costly
Leader	Someone has to call the shot, so it’s you	Making the hard call for the group and owning the outcome
Loner	You handle it yourself	Refusing help, or cutting yourself off from the group, to solve something alone
Mentor	Someone else’s growth matters more than your own credit	Stepping back so someone else can learn, lead, or take the win
Opportunist	Chaos is just an opening nobody’s grabbed yet	Turning someone else’s disaster into your own advantage
Perfectionist	Good enough isn’t	Redoing, refusing to ship, or pushing back on a “good enough” result
Protector	Someone else’s safety comes before yours	Taking a hit, a risk, or a loss meant for someone who can’t fend for themselves
Rebel	Authority is something to test, not obey	Breaking a rule or defying an order specifically because it was given
Showman	The room should be watching you	Turning a moment into a performance, at some cost to subtlety or safety
Skeptic	The comfortable answer is usually the wrong one	Refusing to accept an easy explanation until you’ve checked it yourself
Survivor	Getting through today matters more than looking good doing it	Choosing the ugly, practical option over the proud one to come out ahead
Trickster	The straight path is boring	Solving a problem through misdirection, a lie, or a bit instead of the obvious approach
True Believer	A cause or code outranks your own comfort	Sticking to your code when the easy move would break it
Wanderer	Roots are just something to outrun	Walking away from a place, group, or claim rather than settling into it

Writing a Custom Nature

One or two words - a label, not a paragraph. If it doesn’t fit on the character sheet in a glance, it’s too long.
Write the Drive as one sentence - what you want or how you engage the world, not a backstory fact. “I lost my brother” is backstory; “I don’t let anyone else lose someone they can save” is a Nature.
Make the trigger concrete and repeatable. If you’d have to ask the GM whether it applies, it’s too vague - a Nature should come up scene after scene, not once at the table.
It doesn’t need to cost you anything the way a Flaw does, but the best ones occasionally do - a Showman blowing their cover for a dramatic entrance is playing to Nature and creating a problem, and that’s when it’s most fun.

Fate Gain

Nature - playing to your Nature at a fitting moment (see above).
Voluntary Disadvantage - a player may choose to take Disadvantage on a roll in exchange for a Fate Token.
Flaws - every character has Flaws. When the GM or the player invokes a Flaw in a scene, the invoking side’s choice grants the player a Fate Token.
Daily Regeneration - characters regain 1 Fate Token at sunrise, every day.
Milestone Award - when the party overcomes a significant challenge (a session’s climactic fight, defeating a notable threat, a decisive turning point in the story), the GM awards 1 Fate Token to every PC, roughly once per session - rarer than that and it stops feeling like a beat worth marking; more often and it stops feeling like a milestone.
GM Discretion - the GM can directly award a Fate Token for good roleplay or a clever idea, independent of the other triggers above.

No double-dipping: a single scene beat pays out at most one Fate Token, even if it could honestly be described as both playing to your Nature and invoking a Flaw (or any other two triggers above) at once - e.g. a Soft-Hearted character with a Caregiver Nature stopping to help someone vulnerable. Pick whichever source fits best and pay out once.

Fate Triggers

Fate Tokens are spent on Kotodama, or on any of the following, each a flat 1 Fate Token:

Overcome a Flaw - one of your Flaws doesn’t apply for the rest of the current scene.
Automatic Success - a single roll succeeds outright, no dice involved. Fate Tokens are rare enough that this stays a flat cost regardless of the Difficulty being bypassed.
Boost a Check - gain Advantage on a single roll. Distinct from the Skill Training Tiers’ own Advantage: Adept and above grant it permanently, but only on rolls using that one trained Skill. This covers everything else, an Untrained roll, an off-Skill Attribute check, anything you’re not otherwise good at.
Shrug Off an Effect - ignore a negative status or condition (Distracted, Surprised, Flustered, Overwhelmed, Exhausted, or similar) for a moment.
Refill Ki - your Ki pool refills completely, right there in the moment, no need to wait for a rest.

Characters with Iron Will may also spend 1 Fate Token to Assert Your Will - declare “my will is my own” and flatly negate an attempt to intimidate or dominate you, no roll. A micro-Kotodama: same shape as the main mechanic, but flat-costed and scoped narrowly to defending your own mind.

Fatigue Check

Every time a player spends a Fate Token, they immediately make a Fatigue Check - roll 2d10 against Ki (see below), same roll-under shape as the core roll, with Ki’s current total standing in for a target number instead of a GM-set Difficulty.

Success - no effect, the spend goes through with no cost beyond the token itself.
Failure - lose 1 point from Ki, until it’s refilled.

Refill: a Short Rest restores Klotho ÷ 2 Ki (round up); a Full Night’s Rest restores Ki fully. These are the big damn heroes, after all - Ki isn’t meant to be a slow trickle back.

Ki (the pool)

Fate Tokens are the resource players earn and spend; Ki is the pool that gets risked when they do. Ki is the wellspring of a character’s superhuman capability. Ki = the average of all five combat sub-stats (Soak, Initiative, Ferocity, Stamina, Atropos), doubled to land in the 2-20 range.

Ki has four jobs:

Target number for the Fatigue Check (above).
Direct spend: 1 point from Ki preserves one Health Level or Sanity Level that would otherwise be lost to an unsoaked hit. Poise works differently - see Poise.
Direct spend: 1 Ki per step to move up one Action Bracket (Slow → Normal, or Normal → Fast; 2 Ki moves two steps at once).
Direct spend: 1 Ki per die to boost an attack die - see Ki Infusion, covering all three attack types (Physical/Ferocity, Social/Presence, Mental/Psyche).

Jobs 2-4 are direct spends - no roll, no Fatigue Check, no Stamina spend-cap interaction, since none of those are tied to Fate Token spending specifically.

Stamina’s Job

Action Brackets themselves (Fast/Normal/Slow) cost nothing to declare - that’s just normal combat flow, not something Stamina governs. Instead, Stamina does two things:

Hard cap on Fate Token spends per Scene. A character can spend Fate Tokens at most [Stamina score] times per Scene - the Time Band a combat encounter is contained within - regardless of how many Fate Tokens they actually have banked.
General endurance/exhaustion-resistance gauge. Stamina sets a free baseline duration for any single sustained exertion (holding breath, forced marching, sustained labor, running flat-out) - Stamina Rounds, Minutes, Hours, or whatever Time Band unit fits the activity, GM’s call. Past that baseline, roll Water + Difficulty once per additional unit of time, with Difficulty dropping by 1 each successive check. Failure imposes one level of Exhausted.

Exhausted is cumulative, each level stacking on top of the last:

Level	Effect
1	Disadvantage on Physical rolls.
2	Disadvantage on all rolls.
3	Movement Rate halved.
4	Can’t take Slow actions - too worn down for that kind of precision.
5	Collapse: falls unconscious, can’t act until rested.

A Short Rest drops one level of Exhausted; a Full Night’s Rest clears it entirely, mirroring Health Level Recovery’s own split.

Kotodama

言霊 (kotodama, “word spirit”) - spending Fate Tokens to assert a fact into the fiction directly, rather than touching a die roll. A player states a fact about the world, spends Fate Tokens to back the claim, and the fiction bends to make it true.

A claim’s total Fate Token cost is the sum of independent components, not one flat lookup on a single scale. Multiple players may pool their Fate Tokens together for a total no single character could afford alone.

Four components: Magnitude, Range, Plausibility, and an optional Duration surcharge.

Magnitude - solo range (1-4 tokens)

Four tiers, one person acting alone, each step more exhausting than the last.

Tokens	Tier	Examples
1	Minor coincidence	The flashlight was already in your pack; there’s just enough battery left to get the engine started; the key is under the mat; the door didn’t latch; your phone happens to have signal here
2	Meaningful, deliberate change	A hidden door that might not have been there before; the stolen motorcycle is just around the corner; the perfect tool was left by the side of the road; the security camera was already pointed the other way; a witness remembers seeing something useful
3	Decisive, unmistakable feat	A structure collapses or appears exactly where it’s needed; a patrol’s morale breaks all at once; a faction’s loyalty visibly flips in the moment; the crowd’s fear turns to anger, aimed at exactly the right target; the bridge holds together just long enough
4	Solo ceiling	An NPC’s true nature or history is revealed to everyone present at once; a building that should be collapsing suddenly isn’t; a faction’s allegiance flips for good, not just the moment; a locked-down facility’s systems glitch out all at once; an entire crowd’s memory of what just happened is uncertain afterward

Pooled magnitude (5+ tokens), not yet detailed: since 1-4 is explicitly what one person can do alone, nothing solo ever reaches 5 - pooling is just what happens once a group’s combined total exceeds any single member’s ceiling. Tier 5 is its own step; Tier 6+ is a flat ceiling where the exact token count stops mattering mechanically. Examples for both still TBD.

Range - personal scale (1-4 tokens)

A second, independent component for how far a Kotodama reaches. Only the “personal” end (bound to the character’s own body/location) is defined so far - scene/district/city/setting-scale range isn’t worked out yet.

Tier	Range	Example
1	Self / on your person	The flashlight in your pack
2	Touch / arm’s reach	The door didn’t latch; the key’s under the mat
3	Immediate vicinity / line of sight	The stolen motorcycle just around the corner; a hidden door across the room
4	The space you’re in	The whole room, vehicle, or block you’re standing in - still bound to your own location

Plausibility

A third component: how deniable the claim is, independent of how big it is. Three tiers, token costs not yet assigned:

Tier	Description	Example
Whisper	Entirely within the range of normal luck - a witness wouldn’t think twice	The door happened to not latch
Murmur	Technically still possible, a notable stroke of luck a skeptic would talk themselves out of suspecting	Every camera on this block happened to be pointed the wrong way
Shout	Flatly breaks what anyone present believes is possible - no rationalizing it away, and it’s remembered	A locked vault door swings open with no one touching it

Duration (optional surcharge)

Permanent is the free default - a spoken truth just sticks, no extra cost. Paying more buys a controlled, non-permanent shape instead:

Shape	Surcharge	Description
Transient	+1 token	Happens once, then unhappens - the door unlocks now, but it’s an ordinary door again after
Intermittent	+2 tokens	Comes and goes, unpredictable - the lights flicker whenever it matters, not on any schedule
Cyclic	+2 tokens	Repeats on a dependable pattern - the gate opens every night at midnight, reliably

The GM’s Own Pool

Rather than Fate Tokens just draining from players into nothing, when a player spends a Fate Token, the GM gains one in a separate GM-side pool - spending isn’t just depletion, it’s a transfer of leverage from the players’ side of the table to the GM’s.

The GM’s pool is narrative-only - it does not mirror the player Fate Triggers menu, no mechanical crunch bonuses for NPCs. Instead the GM spends their pool on complications, twists, and consequences woven into the fiction - not a flat “the NPC gets +2,” but “the ambush was a distraction,” “the ally you saved owed someone else a debt first,” or any other fictional escalation.

Since the GM gains a Fate Token for every one a player spends, a bigger Kotodama spend automatically hands the GM proportionally more leverage - no separate consequence math needed. Small edits barely move the GM’s pool; massive pooled edits load it up considerably.