The Seven-Sided Die

Turn Undead [−1]

You can rebuke undead creatures and send them fleeing or destroy them outright.

Musts: Your High Concept must be related to faith in some way.

Effects:

Rebuke: When you present the symbol of your faith and stand firm against an undead creature, you may make an opposed Conviction roll against its Discipline to place the aspect “Held At Bay” on it.

Cleansed In Light: You may make an attack using Conviction against the creature’s Discipline. If the undead is corporeal, stress dealt in this way is physical rather than mental.

By The Word: By paying one shift you may affect all undead in a zone, or (when using Rebuke) place the aspect “Fleeing!” instead of “Held At Bay”.

I was going to make the Must for Turn Undead be having Divine Miracles (the DHB equivalent of Sponsored Magic I’m using for priestly spellcasters), but for the Cleric template I took some inspiration from very early D&D editions and made spellcasting optional at character creation. So, Turn Undead (and their ability to use armour and decent weapons) is key to making a classic cleric work and I had to hang it on their faith-based character concept rather than spellcasting. The upshot is that characters without the Cleric template could conceivably take Turn Undead given a High Concept that is faith-related, but I don’t think that’s a problem as much as it might be a feature.

What I like about this power/stunt is that it captures the turn/destroy mechanic of D&D’s turn undead ability without needing a big table for it. Does the undead creature have low discipline (a zombie or skeleton, say)? Then you can very likely send it running, and if you’re good enough you can destroy it outright with the power of your faith. Of course, you have to choose which one you’re doing first, but that introduces a nice tactical consideration, I think. Are you facing a vampire necromancer and its zombie minions? If you just Rebuke you’re likely to get enough shifts to turn all the zombies but the vampire will be unimpressed; if you opt to attack then you likely won’t generate enough shifts to fill the zombies’ stress boxes and deal them enough consequences to take them out outright, but you’ve got a good chance of stinging the vampire if you try.

Of course, all this has to see playtesting before it can be considered good and functional under actual play conditions. But I certainly am fond of how this one has shaped up initially.

Druid

Druids are the guardians of nature and the self-appointed arbiters of the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Where small rural communities exist on the edge of the wilderness, the druid is a welcome—if awed—presence that calms weather, tames beasts, and drives out blight. From their perspective, druids serve the wilderness as much as such communities by keeping people’s incursions away from sensitive areas, teaching them how to co-exist with the beasts who are their neighbours, and educating the benighted to avoid the obvious mistakes when planting a field.

Musts: Druids channel the power latent in the patterns of nature, shaping it with their sentience to further and sustain those self-same natural cycles. Like clerics of gods, druids must take Divine Miracles but can only choose Nature as the sponsoring power (a Refresh Cost of −4.) In order to cast rituals, in addition to the other ritual components the druid must bear a focus item: a sprig of mistletoe harvested during the full moon with a silver or golden sickle consecrated to that purpose. Casting an evocation while not in a natural setting (assuming the lack of a natural environment allows the desired effect at all) also relies on this focus item as a link to the natural world that gives a druid their power.

Options: An experienced druid can call on Nature’s Wisdom [−1] to infallibly identify wild plants and animals, as well as clean water. Many can Pass Without a Trace [−1] through undergrowth without slowing their pace. A sign of an accomplished Druid is the ability to take on the Shape of Wild Creatures [−2] or the form of their Totem Animal [−1].

The Dungeoneer’s Handbook

To that end, I’m working on something tentatively called the Dungeoneer’s Handbook, “a guide for Fate players and GMs who love dragons and dungeons”. My first goal is a slim handbook [3] that we can use at the table as a quick reference and character-conversion guide to make using DFRPG for a D&D-style game as easy as possible. Things like skill changes, sample stunts, a combat manœuver guide to help map D&D-combat thinking into Fate mechanics, templates for the class archetypes, and a monster-conversion guide for me are the sorts of things that will go into this.

Ideally, I would like to have a second milestone for fleshing it out into a minimalist but complete Dungeon Delving with Fate book under the OGL, but the OGL notice in DFRPG is one of those super-restrictive ones that claims everything:

Any material found in this book which is not directly taken from the above named works [Fudge 1995, FATE, Spirit of the Century] is deemed to be product identity.

I’m not a lawyer [2], but I find this a concerning OGL notice. As far as the OGL is concerned, not just anything can be claimed as Product Identity. In particular, mechanics can’t be claimed as PI. But since DFRPG does introduce game mechanics (as defined under “Open Game Content”) that are new since Spirit of the Century, that puts the licensing status of DFRPG and anything based on it in considerable doubt. Regardless, PI does legitimately cover the names and descriptions of “special abilities [and] magical or supernatural abilities”, so reusing DFRPG stunts in a derivative work is verboten and making a “clean” derivative is prohibitive.

At some point I may take it up with Fred Hicks at Evil Hat to get some clarification, but the first, personal-use milestone is going to be plenty of work. Time enough to worry about the OGL later. And with that said, I really should get back to it!