Truly interesting ideas. Fresh and original. I liked definitely

If you want to know what is in the book, read Björns excellent review.

this is more monster of the week. More options, playbooks, magic, mysteries, everything.

get it.

I read this one after reading Fate Core so.

I liked a bit more the reading of this Fate book, the rules are much better explained than Fate Core and the book is less big to read (60 pages only).

The issue is I don't thinks this book is useable if you want to use the thing called Extras in Fate Core because they aren't present here. If you create a setting which does not need extra, it"s fine but if that's not the case, well there are no explanations on how you deal with it. If you never read Fate Core before, you don't even know that you lack tools to improve your Fate Experience.

Still the book has plenty of optional rules so...I think you better with Fate Condensed than Fate Core.

I tried to read thrice this book, in english and in french. I liked character creation and how the mechanic runs. I'm stil lost on how to gm these rules. They seem a lot too abstract to men, I'm confused by the lack of true rules for Magic, Hadware or whatever they call "Extras" so maybe I will play it in the future as a player but not as a GM, I don't feel it.

I played with with a big Dresded fan while the rest of the group knew it just on passing. And still it was one of the most intrincate playsets I've played. It was funny, and it kept going forwards. What I got from my dresded fan friend was "It really works as a Dresden game"

Overall good and solid module. My group had fun playing it. From the DM side I liked possibility to choose between villains.

This is one of those games that captures the heart of its topic and brings real joy to the gaming table. If you love Cats or despise them it won't matter, because all of the mysteries of why cats do what they do will be explained. I finally know why the cat leaves dead mice at the door, so thanks Innana for keeping the house safe from evil spirits.

The mechanic is pure Fate with the enhancements required for the schools of Cat magic and a number of cat talents. The opponents are dastardly and evil. The cats have an endless task defending thier charges from self inflicted wounds and risky behaviour.

Its a great game, one that the whole family can enjoy (its readily turned down or up in creep factor to address audience issues). If you have a few bucks to spare, this is the game to spend it on.

PS it does require that you have core Fate Rules as a starting point.

The fate of humanity - a Mephisto review

Combining the Fate rules system with the background of Cthulhu is an idea that is actually quite obvious, so you almost have to wonder how long it took until Fate of Cthulhu was released (strictly speaking; however, with the Fate variant of Achtung! Cthulhu already exists a roleplaying game that combines both parts).

If you now expect Fate of Cthulhu to be a simple adaptation of the usual background and (presumably) necessary rule mechanisms for Fate, you will be surprised by this book. Fate of Cthulhu is not merely an adaptation of the rules, but provides, as is so typical for Fate, a very unusual approach to the setting. The starting point is bleak: In 2030, one of the Great Old Ones appears, and humanity is almost completely wiped out. Or rather: that would have happened. For with the solution from the Terminator films, the last humans - here in a dangerous ritual - send several people back ten years into the past to change the timeline and stop the events that led to the appearance of the Great Old One.

Fate of Cthulhu thus follows a very schematic approach in its gameplay: There are always four core events that led to the appearance of the Great Old One - and the player characters familiar as time travelers are familiar with these events. It is now up to the player characters to stop or at least mitigate these events, which in turn are defined by four so-called catalysts - places, people, enemies, and objects - so that humanity still has a chance in the future. The book provides five such scenarios, each one focusing on one of the most famous Great Old Ones: Cthulhu, the King in Yellow, Shub-Nigurrat, Dagon, and Nyarlahotep. At the end of the book, however, there is also advice for the game master, how to plan a tailor-made apocalypse (to be prevented by the player characters, hopefully).

Playing with the timeline is not only a ruse for drama, but depending on how the players act, they can change the events, which should also manifest itself visibly in their timeline. But beware: the risks and side-effects that are typical for the genre will probably occur.

In terms of rules, the book provides complete, very compressed and adapted Fate rules, so that you do not necessarily need Fate Core for this roleplaying game. In fact, Fate Condensed is based on this variant of the rules and has taken up many of its simplifications. Of course, such a book also provides additional rules needed for the setting. In contrast to classic Cthulhu scenarios, however, the investigators are not driven insane but corrupted by the events, which manifests itself in aspects and also stunts. The corruption gives the player characters additional power and strength - but at a very high and very dangerous price. The rules that determine whether the player characters in the individual scenarios change the story for the better or worse - and how this affects the overall timeline - are also explained in detail and are surprisingly mechanistic for Fate at first glance. But they are very useful for measuring the success of the player characters more objectively.

The five exemplary scenarios are well designed and build on the individual characteristics of the Great Old Ones. And as you might expect, the information of the time travelers is not always accurate, so there will be some surprises in this respect as well. Even with the trick of time travel, the chances of humanity are minimal.

Even though Fate of Cthulhu surprised me with its approach initially, which I did not expect at all, I like this roleplaying game very much. The concept of time travel is a fitting element for the Cthulhu background and gives the game its additional charm. Of course, most groups will probably not play several apocalypses—still, the option to choose the appropriate variant or use it as basic material for your background is very helpful. If you are looking for a simple adaptation of the Cthulhu setting to Fate rules, you will only find a few pieces of the puzzle here. But if you want to play a truly epic campaign against the Great Old Ones, which can be bizarre, dark, and sometimes a bit black-humored, this book is one of the Fate series' highlights so far.

(Björn Lippold)

Daemons and intrigues - a Mephisto review

Grimoire is a compact game setting for Fate, which plays in the world Ganseldom. Here, powerful city-states compete with each other. One way to gain influence is to use the powers of daemons. There are instruction books - the grimoires - to summon the daemons and bind them into the services. In theory, anyone can bind a daemon, but the catch is that this is a challenging task, so few specialists have the training to do it safely. To summon a daemon, a grimoire is also required, which describes the necessary summoning rituals.

However, the predominant church opposes the summoning of daemons, so that the warlocks are persecuted. However, this does not prevent many powerful noble families from using the services of a warlock to gain an advantage.

The small book compactly presents the essential game world, which is transitioning from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It briefly describes, for example, the various city-states and religions from the main daemon-hostile mainstream religion to a few pagan currents. The rule system's central element is playing a warlock because this setting requires all players to play exactly this role. Accordingly, detailed rules for summoning daemons and binding these powerful (and dangerous) creatures are provided, and some example creatures are presented. An adventure that revolves around the intrigue of a house offers immediately playable material.

Grimoire is a well-thought-out setting, and the rules concerning daemon summoning are also fitting. From my point of view, the focus on the fact that all players are warlocks and usually carry out missions in the service of a noble house provides a somewhat limited setting, which is more suitable for a few game nights - instead of a long campaign. For gamemasters who are looking for ideas and rule mechanisms for daemons and their summoning, however, here is an excellent toolbox to use for the own game worlds. In this respect Grimoire is a quite exciting setting.

(Björn Lippold)

Absolutely love how easy Fate Condensed makes it to wrap your head around the system. As someone coming from more rules heavy systems, and greatly looking forward to more narrative based systems, as great as Fate Core was, Fate Condensed distills it all into a very easy to understand formatting, while updating the rules, and making it ultra presentable. Highly recommended, especially if you're a new GM and need to quickly get players to understand the system.

Fate Accellerated was one of three finalists in my search for a new game system. The other two being Dungeon World, and SWADE (the eventual winner). There are some great ideas in this book, and I enjoyed reading it. In the end, it felt too much like a "toolkit" with some ideas and recommendations for how to do things, whereas SWADE (what I am running today) feels like a complete and flexible game system. It's not a bad system at all, just not the system for me. I may even eventually come back to it someday if I get tired of SWADE.

I ran my group through some of these activities and it has made a measurable difference to the quality of my games. An excellent book perfect for groups that want their main goal to be "to tell an interesting story together"

This toolkit will save you a lot of research into topics that you may not be aware of -- which makes it even better because you wouldn't research it if you were not aware of it. It gives background on specific issues that you may face with a disability, as well as describing things that you may assume to be an issue but may not be. Very importantly, and fitting for FATE, it gives a positive as well as negative spin on aspects based on disabilities. I'm a bit anxious how much cooler my character with anxiety issues is than me with anxiety issues, but the same goes for their amazing physique.

When actually running a PC or NPC with a specific disability it gives good, condensed information -- that you will probably need to read multiple times to really digest it. This is not a negative, it just means that it's dealing with a complex topic in a differentiated way.

> Great for a narrative, so the system isn't very crunchy. > After a succinct and fair reply, playing another session, and finishing listening to The Adventure Zone: Amnesty I'm upping my review. Easily one of my favorite systems and reading the book made me grasp Keeping the game easily. the repetition is good for people not familiar with the concepts and veterans generating new ideas from old tropes.

Fate is my favourite system but for years I never ran or played horror in it, because I'd so often heard people say it just wasn't suited.

I bought this because I was curious, and a couple of weeks later I ran my favourite horror one-shot ever, in Fate Core with some modifications and tools I'd gleaned from this book.

I've now run several more and I wouldn't hesitate to run a horror game in Fate these days: with a little tweaking and thinking, the system becomes a great fit. The Fate Point Economy was maybe the one thing I feared would break horror the most, but the advice in the toolkit helps you turn Fate points into a desperate version of the "how much do you want it" central question they usually embody.

It's an excellent Fate sourcebook, but honestly it's far more than that, it's a great piece of writing about what horror in gaming really is, the different flavours of it, why it works when it works and why it doesn't when something is off.

I've been playing and running TTRPGs since 1991 and Evil Hat remains the company I hold in the highest esteem.