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.

The list of starter Natures, and the guide to writing your own, are in Creating a Character, because that is where you pick one.

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.
• Lucky Number - whenever one of a character’s own core rolls comes up exactly equal to their Klotho rating, they gain 1 Fate Token, automatically (see Klotho).
• 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.

Holding Fate Tokens

A character can hold at most ([Stamina score] × 3) + 1 Fate Tokens at once. A Token earned while already at that cap is lost rather than banked - including the daily regeneration and Milestone awards.

Both Fate Token limits come from Stamina, and they are deliberately the same stat at two scales: (Stamina × 3) + 1 is how many you can hold; Stamina + 1 is how many counted spends you can make in a single Scene. Banking across a quiet stretch of play is possible, but it tops out quickly, and it tops out sooner for the character who could least afford to spend them anyway.

A character with Stamina 0 holds 1 Fate Token at most, and can spend it. The +1 on both caps is there so that nobody is shut out of Fate entirely: the Token that arrives at sunrise always has somewhere to go.

Fate Triggers

Fate Tokens are spent on Kotodama, or on any of the following, each a flat 1 Fate Token. None of these flat triggers count against Stamina’s per-Scene cap; only what you’re holding limits them.

• 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.
• Shrug Off an Effect - ignore a negative status or condition (Off Balance, 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.
• Get Back Up - spent while Dying, it puts you at 1 Health Level, conscious and able to act. You can spend it while unconscious.

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.

Ki (the pool)

Fate Tokens are the resource players earn and spend; Ki is the pool that powers everything superhuman a character does. Ki is deliberately common: Ki = your strongest Element + 8, which puts every character between 13 and 18 regardless of how they built the rest of the sheet. Whatever a character is most is what channels their Ki - the frail specialist draws on as much as the bruiser.

Ordinary people have 1 Ki. Anyone without a Gift - the ordinary NPC, the bystander, the child - has a single point, and it’s there for one moment past what they should be able to manage: the grandmother who lifts the car off a child, the runner who finds one more mile. A player character always has the full pool, Gift or not.

Ki has three jobs, all of them direct spends - no roll, no check, and none of them interact with Stamina’s per-Scene cap:

1. 1 point from Ki preserves one Vital Level - Health, Poise or Sanity - that would otherwise be lost to a die that got through the wall. At or below 0, 1 Ki instead restores Poise or Sanity to 1, without waiting for a rest.
2. 1 Ki per step to move up one Action Bracket (Slow → Normal, or Normal → Fast; 2 Ki moves two steps at once).
3. 1 Ki per die to boost an attack die - see Ki Infusion, covering all three attack types (Physical/Ferocity, Social/Presence, Mental/Psyche).

Most Gifts also cost Ki to use, called out per Gift and per Level, and some of them additionally call for a Gift Check rolled against current Ki.

Raising it: XP can buy Ki directly, a point at a time, each costing whatever the pool stands at when you buy it - so the tenth point costs more than the first, and a character who already channels a lot pays more to channel more. The ceiling is twice your figured Ki, the value your strongest Element gives you before any XP. Raising that Element lifts both the pool and the ceiling together. See costs.md for the rate.

Refill: a Short Rest restores Klotho Ki (minimum 1); 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.

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 three things:

1. Hard cap on how many Fate Tokens a character can hold. At most ([Stamina score] × 3) + 1 at once - see Holding Fate Tokens.
2. Hard cap on counted spends per Scene. A character can make at most [Stamina score] + 1 counted spends per Scene - the Time Band a combat encounter is contained within - regardless of how many Fate Tokens they actually have banked. It counts spends, not Tokens: a 7-Token Kotodama is one spend. Counted: a Kotodama of any size; your share of a pooled Kotodama, one spend for each character who puts in, including a Claimed rescue; and burning off Corruption, one spend per level burned. Not counted: every flat Fate Trigger - Overcome a Flaw, Automatic Success, Shrug Off an Effect, Refill Ki, Get Back Up, and Assert Your Will.
3. 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:

A Short Rest drops one level of Exhausted; a Full Night’s Rest clears it entirely, mirroring Health Level Recovery’s own split. Exertion is one source; cold and heat are the other, and a level taken from an environment cannot be cleared while the character is still in it. Exhausted holds the full entry.

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. Each character who puts in uses one of their own counted spends.

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.

Magnitude - pooled range (5+ tokens)

Five and up always takes more than one character, pooling their Tokens, and it isn’t read off a list: the player says what they’re claiming and the GM sets the cost. At this scale the size of the change sets the number.

At six and beyond the claim stops changing what happened and changes what was always true - and everyone alive remembers it that way.

Range - how far it has to hold

Everything within your own reach is free: Magnitude already pays for a claim about the world where you’re standing. Past that, the claim has to hold somewhere whose agreement you aren’t standing in, and the GM prices it, the same way they price Magnitude 5 and up.

Plausibility

How hard the claim is to explain away afterward, independent of how big it is.

A Shout is +3, not +2, because it costs twice: once to overrule what everyone agrees is possible, and again for everyone who watched it now believing something impossible happened.

Who is watching decides the tier, not what you did. The same claim is a Whisper alone in a stairwell and a Shout in a crowded bar. If nobody sees it at all, drop one tier, to a minimum of Whisper.

Adding it up

Magnitude, plus Range if the claim reaches past you, plus Plausibility, plus a Duration surcharge if it isn’t permanent.

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:

Thin Places

Reality is not equally solid everywhere. A stretch of consensus that has been overwritten enough times stops holding its shape - and corrupted things are easy to change.

Kotodama costs less in a thin place. How much less is the GM’s call, with no table behind it: how worn a place is isn’t a number, it’s a fact about the story. A player who thinks they are standing somewhere the world has already been argued with should say so and find out what it is worth.

Two things hold whenever one is used. A thin place is cheap for everyone, not just the party - whatever else leans on that spot finds it easy too. And it got thin because somebody did this before: somewhere cheap to rewrite is somewhere that has already been rewritten.

The GM’s Hardening is the opposite number to this.

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.

A special NPC’s own Fate Tokens never reach the pool. An NPC who holds Tokens of their own spends them the way a player does, but a Token an NPC spends is simply gone - otherwise the GM could fill their own pool.

The pool buys three things, and every one of them is the world acting rather than a bonus bolted onto somebody’s die roll.

• A Twist - 1, 3, or 5+ Tokens. Escalate what is already in motion. One Token is a small complication; three is a real turn in the scene; five or more reshapes the arc.
• A Claim - the GM asserts a fact into the fiction, paying the same Magnitude, Range and Plausibility a player would, off the same tables.
• Hardening - 1 Token per point. Each Token raises the cost of the players’ next Kotodama in this Scene by 1. The opposite number to a thin place.

The rule that outranks all three: the pool never undoes a claim that was paid for. A fact the players bought is true and stays true. The GM’s Tokens buy what happens next, never a reversal.

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.