The Player's Guide

What the game is about: the people who look at the man behind the curtain, and what they can do once they have.

Every term the rest of the book leans on, defined once and kept short. Skim it before you build, then flip back whenever you need it.

Fifteen steps, most of them a few seconds long, in an order that keeps you from painting yourself into a corner.

Two dice mechanics. The Core Roll handles almost everything; the second one only comes up when something is trying to hurt you.

Elements are what you are made of. Skills are what you have actually done with it - the training, the hours, the scar tissue.

Small permanent pieces of good luck. The quiet part of a character, and the quiet part decides more scenes than you would think.

What you have, who you know, and what picks up when you call. Rated in Levels, where a higher Level is the same Resource reaching further.

The thing your character can do that other people cannot. Narrow on purpose, five defined levels each, and what it looks like is your setting's business.

You promise the table your character will make things harder for themselves. The system promises to pay you for it.

Nature, Tokens and Ki: where the thumb on the scale comes from, and what it costs to press.

The part of your character you can lose in a river. Dice you are carrying, and Soak you did not have to be born with.

You earn XP for playing and spend it on whatever you like, in whatever order. No classes, no levels, nothing telling you what comes next.

For the person behind the screen. Setting Difficulty, ruling on the fly, running the consensus, and what to do with the pile of Fate Tokens the players keep handing you.