Four-Color FAE: Supers Gaming via Fate Accelerated - pt6

Here in Part 6 I move away from discussing game-mechanics and play, towards the sort of features I would like to see as GM in our fictional world.

We will be building the world at the table using the rules provided in Fate Core, but this post was made to 'prime the pump' before we hit the gaming table.


See the whole Four-Color FAE series here


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Inspirations for our Supers Game

There is ALWAYS a monkey in Fate

First came the Golden Age: the beginning, an age of mystery men and women. An age of hope and optimism; an age of sacrifice and glory.

Then came the Silver Age: an age of boundless confidence. All problems seemed to be but puzzles to be solved by super-science and an unshakable sense of rightness.

This was followed by the Bronze Age. This was the era when the cracks began to show; when heroes were shown to have feet of clay, and when villains and heroes began to blur together and intermingle.

All this was before the dark times; before the Age of Iron. An age dominated by so-called 'heroes' with names like Bloodspawn and Venomreaver; an age of mindless violence and endless cycles of vengeance between what were effectively warring gangs of meta-talented thugs.

Thankfully this time has now past, and a new world is beginning to emerge from the ashes.

A world maybe more jaded and self-aware, but a world that believes in wonder, and a world that believes that right and wrong, in a sometimes hard to discern but very real difference between good and evil.

A world that believes that liberty and justice are not mere abstractions but inherent and eternal truths.

A world that believes in hope.

And this is your world now. And what you will make of it will define the arc of your story, your legacy, and our shared destiny.

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My inspirations for our shared game-world are largely from the comics of the late 1990's and the past decade, where a conscious attempt was made to recapture some of the gonzo energy, innocence, optimism and sense of wonder from the previous ages of comics after the lifeless and bland 'grimdark' of the Iron Age.

Inspirations include:

*Monkeyman and O'Brien (pictured)
*Top Ten
*Teen Titans (Wolfman & Perez era)
*Legion of Superheroes (Jeff Moy era)
*Leave it to Chance
*Astro City
*Young Justice (animation)
*Heroes for Hire (seriously!)

This a world where the unbelievable and the mundane, the sublime and the ridiculous rub shoulders with one another. Where no matter how gonzo things might seem to the outside observer, everyone is taking it completely seriously in the fiction.

Questions that could be asked of your hero during character creation:

*What makes you a hero? What is it that motivates you?
*Who are your heroes? Who inspires you? Are you somehow following in their footsteps?
*What is the source of your strength? What is your greatest weakness?

Keep in mind; a great superhero universe is a smorgasbord of seemingly incompatible influences; there are no bad ideas to bring to the table, but only ideas that we need to figure out how to incorporate into the whole.

Looking forward to talking about this more at the gaming table! 

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