Chapter 10

Fate

Fate is the part of the system that admits the dice aren’t the whole story.

Everything so far has been about what your character can do. This is about the thumb you get to put on the scale - where it comes from, and what it costs. Three things live here: your Nature, which is who your character fundamentally is and how they earn Fate Tokens; the Tokens themselves, and what you spend them on; and Ki, the pool that fuels everything supernatural you own.

Nature is the one people underestimate. It isn’t a personality label for the top of the sheet - it’s the trigger that pays you. Play to it and the system hands you resources. Play against it and you get nothing, which is its own answer about whether you picked the right one.

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 your own core rolls comes up exactly equal to your Klotho, you gain 1 Fate Token, automatically.

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] x 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 x 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 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. 1 Ki per step to move up one Action Bracket (Slow → Normal, or Normal → Fast; 2 Ki moves two steps at once). 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.

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:

Hard cap on how many Fate Tokens a character can hold. At most ([Stamina score] x 3) + 1 at once - see Holding Fate Tokens. 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. 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.

1 - Disadvantage on Physical rolls.

2 - Disadvantage on all rolls.

3 - Movement Rate halved, and no Fast actions.

4 - Every Ki spend costs 1 more.

5 - Unconscious, until somebody gets you warm, cool, or rested.

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.

Why It Costs What It Costs

The world is the way it is because everyone agrees it is.

That isn’t a metaphor and it isn’t philosophy. It’s the load-bearing fact of this game.

There were monsters once. Not “people told stories about monsters” - there were monsters, in the woods, and everyone knew it. You didn’t go past the treeline after dark because of what was out there, and what was out there was out there because nobody alive doubted it. The agreement was total, so the monsters were real.

Then we stopped believing. Not all at once and not on purpose - we lit the streets, we mapped the woods, we explained the noises one at a time. As the agreement thinned out, so did the monsters. There’s nothing in the woods now. We checked. We checked so thoroughly and so publicly that the checking itself became the thing everyone agreed on, and the woods emptied out to match.

Reality is a vote nobody knew they were casting.

Here’s the part that should worry you. It still works. If you could convince most of the human race that there’s an island off the west coast of America, and that the island has unicorns on it, then the island is there. Not that people would believe in it - it would be on the charts. Ships would have wrecked on it. It would have a history and a name, and somebody’s grandmother would have been born there. The world would rearrange itself around the agreement and hand you back a version where the island had always been, because that’s what the world does.

You can’t convince most of the human race of anything. That’s fine. You don’t have to.

Your character is a fulcrum. That’s what the Gifted are - the few whose will presses on reality directly, instead of going the long way around through persuading seven billion people. Everyone else gets a vote. You get to lean on the scale. Kotodama is you leaning.

So that’s the cost curve, and it’s why the prices climb the way they do. You aren’t paying for the size of the effect. You’re paying for how much agreement you’ve to overrule. A small claim slips through because the consensus was never firm on whether that door latched. A large one has to displace something a great many people are certain about, and their certainty is load-bearing.

Which is why the biggest claims can’t be made alone. One person’s will against the reality of the masses only reaches so far.

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.

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

Magnitude - pooled range (5+ tokens)

Everything above is what one person’s will manages on its own. Past that, the consensus pushes back harder than any single character can push.

Five and up always takes more than one of you. It also works differently from the tiers above it - you don’t read the price off a list. Tell the GM what you’re claiming, and they will tell you what it costs. At this scale the size of the change sets the number, and no table is going to anticipate what your table just decided to rewrite.

5 - Past any one person - A district keeps its power through a night it had no business surviving; an organization’s records of you are wrong in every copy at once; the storm breaks over the whole valley exactly when it’s needed; everyone who died in one specific event is found alive; a standing order changes and nobody can name who gave it

6+ - Universe-altering - The dead of a war aren’t dead, and never were; a language nobody has spoken in three hundred years is the one everyone grew up speaking; a continent that was on no map has always been there; a law of physics has an exception, and always did

At six and beyond you’ve stopped changing what happened. You’re changing what was always true - and everyone alive remembers it that way, because their agreement is what you rewrote.

Range - how far it has to hold

How far the change has to hold, which is another way of asking how many people’s agreement it has to survive.

Everything within your own reach is free. Magnitude is already paying for a claim about the world right where you’re standing, and charging twice for the same thing would price ordinary play out of existence. The bands below all cost nothing.

Past that, you’re reaching into places whose agreement you’re not standing in the middle of, and it costs. There’s no table for it yet - tell the GM how far you need the claim to hold and they will price it, the same way they price Magnitude 5 and up.

Free - Self / on your person - The flashlight in your pack

Free - Touch / arm’s reach - The door didn’t latch; the key’s under the mat

Free - Immediate vicinity / line of sight - The stolen motorcycle just around the corner; a hidden door across the room

Free - The space you’re in - The whole room, vehicle, or block you’re standing in - still bound to your own location

Priced by the GM - Anywhere you’re not - Another district, another city, a place you’ve only heard of

Plausibility

How hard the claim is to explain away afterward, independent of how big it is. A claim nobody can rationalize forces people to notice the override, and a consensus that notices is a consensus that resists.

Whisper, +0 - Entirely within the range of normal luck - a witness wouldn’t think twice - The door happened to not latch. The consensus never had an opinion on this one, so there’s nothing to overrule and nothing to pay.

Murmur, +1 - 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. The agreement bends. It doesn’t break.

Shout, +3 - 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.

Three, not two, because a Shout costs you twice. You overrule the agreement, and then everyone who watched you do it walks away believing something impossible happened - which is its own change to the world, and you’re paying for that one too.

Which tier you’re in is decided by who is watching, not by what you did. The same claim is a Whisper alone in a stairwell and a Shout in a crowded bar. Work out who can see it before you work out what it costs.

If nobody sees it at all, drop one tier, to a minimum of Whisper. The world still notices an open vault door. It just has to work out for itself what happened.

What That Adds Up To

Magnitude, plus Range if you’re reaching past yourself, plus Plausibility, plus a Duration surcharge if you want something other than permanent. Here’s what that looks like on real claims.

1 - Your phone has signal down here - Magnitude 1, Whisper

1 - The key is under the mat - Magnitude 1, Whisper

2 - The key is under the mat, and nobody is around to see you use it - Magnitude 2, Whisper

2 - The fire door you’re running for was propped open this morning - Magnitude 2, Whisper

3 - The camera on this corner happened to be pointed the other way - Magnitude 2, Murmur

4 - The patrol’s nerve breaks, all at once - Magnitude 3, Murmur

4 - The vault door swings open, empty building - Magnitude 3, Murmur

6 - The vault door swings open, crowded lobby - Magnitude 3, Shout

7 - The building that should be coming down isn’t - Magnitude 4, Shout

Pooled - Everyone who died in the fire is found alive - Magnitude 5, the GM sets the number

Pooled - The dead of that war were never dead - Magnitude 6+, the GM sets the number

Two pairs in there are worth sitting with. The key costs 1, and the key with nobody around costs 2 - that second fact is a second thing the world has to agree to, and you pay for it. And the same vault door is a 4 or a 6 depending on nothing but who is standing in the lobby.

That gap is the only lever in the whole system you can pull with planning instead of Tokens. Clear the room first.

Thin Places

Reality isn’t equally solid everywhere.

A stretch of agreement that has been overwritten enough times stops holding its shape. Think of a file saved over once too often, or a glitch in the matrix - the same cat through the same doorway twice, and nobody quite able to say why it bothered them. The consensus there is corrupted, and corrupted things are easy to change.

Kotodama costs less in a thin place. How much less is the GM’s call, and there’s no table for it, because how worn a place is isn’t a number - it’s a fact about the story you’re all in. So ask. If you think you’re standing somewhere the world has already been argued with, say so, and find out what it’s worth.

Two things worth knowing before you go looking for one. A thin place is cheap for everyone, not just you, and whatever else has been leaning on that spot is finding it easy too. And it got thin because somebody did this before you arrived. Somewhere cheap to rewrite is somewhere that has already been rewritten, and it’s fair to wonder by whom.

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:

The Tides of Fate

Fate Tokens don’t appear and disappear. They move.

They come to you from the world - your Nature when you play it at a cost, your Flaws when they bite, the sunrise, the moment the group gets past something that mattered. And they go back to the world when you spend them, into the GM’s pool, where they become whatever the world has to say about what you just did.

So the table has a tide. While the party is holding Tokens and the GM’s bowl is nearly empty, the world is quiet and you are the ones acting on it. Spend heavily and the tide turns - you got what you wanted, and now there is a pile of leverage sitting on the other side of the table with your name on it. Neither state lasts. The sunrise refills you, the GM spends theirs back down, and it goes out and comes in again.

Nothing is created and nothing is destroyed. It only ever changes sides.

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 Tokens never reach the pool. An NPC who holds Fate Tokens of their own spends them the way a player does, but a Token an NPC spends is simply gone. If it went into the GM’s pool, the GM could fill their own bowl.

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 - the door was alarmed after all. Three is a real turn in the scene - the ambush was a distraction. Five or more reshapes the arc - the ally you saved owed somebody else a debt first, and they have come to collect.

A Claim - priced exactly like yours. The GM asserts a fact into the fiction, paying the same Magnitude, Range and Plausibility that a player would, off the same tables. The world is doing precisely what you do, by the same rules. This is what the pool is really for.

Hardening - 1 Token per point. The consensus digs in. Each Token raises the cost of the players’ next Kotodama in this Scene by 1. It is the opposite number to a thin place, and it is what makes a claim somewhere the world is paying attention to genuinely expensive.

And 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. They asserted the guard was already asleep, so he is - and he was due to check in ten minutes ago, and somebody has just noticed he hasn’t.

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.