Time Heroes - Fate Adaptation - Initial Thoughts and Character Sheet

Fifteen years ago or so, my group and I finished up a campaign I was running. After a brief hiatus I polled my group on what kind of game they'd like to play. There were votes for a science fiction game, another fantasy campaign, a modern spy campaign and a modern "regular joe" campaign. I made an offhand comment about it being too bad we couldn't run them all at once. From this, the idea for Time Heroes was born.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago. My current group and I had just finished up a D&D 4E campaign. We were discussing what we wanted to play and a similar conversation came up which made me to reminisce about the fun my old group and I had with Time Heroes.  My players loved the idea of it and asked me to bring a copy for them to look at. Sadly, the game was lost years ago. Instead, I opted to attempt to recreate the system as much as possible. I ended up with a short nine-page document with the basic rules, including character creation. My players had fun trying it and the game then basically faded into the background once again. If you're interested in looking at the original beta version of the game, you can get hold of it at the GeekWorld Online website (Time Heroes ver. 0.5).

At any rate, I have recently pledged the Fate Core Kickstarter and I'm finding it to possibly be the best investment I've made in some time. I'm on my second reading of the core rules and find myself completely falling in love with the system. In fact, I've decided that Time Heroes should be adapted to run using the system if not be transferred over to it completely. Fate is a narrative-based, open system that really captures the feel of what I had originally intended Time Heroes to be. After finishing the book for the first time I could already see correlations between aspects of my game and aspects (no pun intended) of Fred Hick's.

If you haven't' at least skimmed the initial rule set, the following may not make sense, so I recommend at least looking at the Time Heroes character sheet.

The biggest change I will have to make on the character sheet is obviously going to be the removal of the attributes section. Fate has no such attributes and I find I have no reason whatsoever to tweak the game to put them in.

The High Concept is basically a combination of the Time Heroes Occupation and Goals. Specialties and Combat Skills will end up combined into the Fate Core skills, renamed/tweaked a bit to fit the atmosphere of the game. Items in the inventory will still be there, but will be Stunts instead of just "equipment." In addition, magic, technological and other "special" abilities will be covered by Stunts as well. These will be defined in another entry once I start working on rules adaptation in general. Quantum Points and Fate Points are of course basically identical already.

That's all I'm going to touch on for now. I think, looking at things initially, the biggest obstacle I'm going to face when creating the Fate version of Time Heroes is going to be working out the Stunts in regards to the various inter-temporal special abilities characters and NPCs are going to end up having. But, that's a discussion for another post.