Running the game

Common Framework

1. State Intent & Approach. What do you want to achieve, and how?
2. Set Position & DV. GM determines risk (Dominant/Controlled/Desperate) and difficulty (2–7+).
3. Roll Attribute + Skill. Each 6+ = success; each 1 = SB for the GM.
4. Apply the Outcome Matrix. Clean Success, Success with SB, Partial, Miss.
5. Spend SB. GM introduces complications, shifts Position, or advances timers.

Timers in Encounters

Timers track cumulative progress or increasing pressure.

• Progress Timer (4–8 segments): Fill to succeed (e.g., persuasion, escaping a maze).
• Threat Timer (4–8 segments): Fill to trigger a disaster (e.g., reinforcements, structural collapse).
• Contest Timers: Two timers — one for each side; first to fill wins.

Ticking Timers:

• Partial: 1 tick (GM discretion).
• Clean Success: 2 ticks.
• Miss: may tick opposition timers.
• GM may spend SB to tick a timer.

Social Encounters

Use Persuasion Timers for extended negotiations, debates, or intimidation.

Environmental Encounters

Magical Encounters

Extended Rituals and Downtime Encounters

Use a Progress Timer (4–12 segments). Each segment represents a scene or a block of time. Players describe their approach and roll an appropriate skill; success advances the timer. Complications (GM SB) may add segments, require rare components, or draw unwanted attention.

Quick Reference Table

GM Reminders

• Let non-specialists contribute — use Setup and Assist actions, and allow creative skill use.
• Spend SB to escalate, not punish. A well-spent SB changes the situation, creating new choices.
• Timers make progress visible. When a timer ticks, describe what changes in the fiction.
• Follow the procedure for Armor & Fatigue: convert, apply remaining Harm (clears existing Fatigue), then add Fatigue. Minimum 1 Fatigue per hit.

Story Beats (SB)

Story Beats are the GM's currency for introducing complications. Each die result of 1 generates 1 SB. Re-rolling a 1 does not erase its SB; if the re-rolled die also shows 1, it generates additional SB.

Boons (Player Resource)

Boons are the players' resource for mitigating complications or turning the tide. See §3, the Core Mechanic, for how they are earned and spent.

Timers

Timers track accumulating threats or progress. They are a visible way to manage pressure.

Hazards

Hazards are ongoing complications that require action to avoid or mitigate.

Fear Effects

When a character escalates on the Fear Track (Shaken → Frightened → Panicked), roll or choose an effect from the table below. Apply to NPCs by default; PCs may adopt as narrative guidance.

The Deck of Consequences (Optional)

The Deck of Consequences is a narrative tool that turns Story Beats into thematic, unpredictable complications. It replaces or supplements GM fiat with randomized twists.

Integrating Complications with SB and Boons

• SB and Boons create a push-pull: SB gives the GM tools to escalate; Boons give players tools to recover or resist.
• A well-spent SB should change the situation, not just punish. Offer the player a Devil's Bargain:

  "I will spend 2 SB to have the guard turn around – but you will owe a favor."

• Timers make threat visible; when a timer ticks, describe what changes in the fiction.

Example: Complication in Action

Rating an Adversary: Threat Level

Every adversary in Fate's Edge is rated on one axis: Threat Level (TL), an integer from 1 to 10. TL is the whole rating. It sets how hard the thing hits, roughly how big its pools are, and how much punishment it absorbs before the scene turns.

Three words that look like ratings are not ratings, and never appear on an adversary:

• Tier means a player character's progression band by XP (Tier I Novice through Tier V Mythic). A creature does not have a Tier.
• Cap means a Follower's Capability, 1–5, bought at Cap² XP. A creature does not have a Cap. A Follower who fights is rated by Cap because you paid for them; an adversary is rated by TL because you did not.
• Class, where it appears in older material, is a taxonomy — Class I spirits, Class IV spirits — not a difficulty. It is a name for a kind of thing, not a number.

Resilience, not Hit Points

An adversary has no Hit Points. It has Resilience: the number of times it can be made to bleed, break, or bend before the fight is over. There are exactly four legal values, and every adversary has one of them:

• 3 (standard) — TL 1–4. Three points of Resilience loss defeat it.
• 8 (advanced) — TL 5–6. Named things, meant to last.
• 8 per phase — TL 7–9. When a phase's Resilience is exhausted the phase ends and the next begins, with its own pool and its own moves.
• None (puzzle) — the one override, and it is available at any TL. Use it when the fiction says the thing cannot be killed by hitting it: an Avatar, a demon that must be exorcised, an Echo that must be witnessed, a door that was never opened. It is resolved by a bargain, a true name, a witness, a debt paid — something other than attrition. A TL 2 spirit can be a puzzle; a TL 9 dragon can be a fight. If your adversary has no Resilience, it must have a stated Resolution.

Apart from that one override, Resilience follows from TL. If you find yourself wanting a TL 3 creature with eight Resilience, you do not want a tougher TL 3 — you want a TL 5, and its attributes and Harm should come up to meet it.

Note the two senses of the word and keep them apart on the page: Harm on a stat line is what the creature deals. Resilience is what it absorbs.

SB Moves

An adversary has no separate initiative turn. Threats frame player responses; new independent attacks and special moves cost SB as described in the resolution procedure. It costs Story Beats. Every stat block lists a short menu of things the GM can buy with the SB the players hand over by rolling 1s, and that menu is the creature's entire personality in mechanical form — write the moves that only this thing would make.

• Two to five moves. A TL 7+ creature may run to seven, because a boss needs options; below that, five is already generous and three is usually better.
• Cost 1 to 3. One is a jab, two turns the scene, three changes the situation.
• One Signature move may cost 4 or 5, and only on a creature of TL 5 or higher. This is the thing it is remembered for. A creature gets one; there is no second Signature.

Move Tags

A move may be prefixed with a bracketed tag. Tags are a filing convenience, not a rule — nothing keys off them mechanically — but keeping to one vocabulary means a GM scanning a page finds the lever they want. There are two kinds, and they do not mix.

Function tags say what the move does, and are the ones worth being consistent about:

[TIMER] advances or starts a clock • [ENVIRONMENT] changes the ground everyone is standing on • [REINFORCEMENT] brings more • [AMBUSH] arrives from somewhere unaccounted for • [SOCIAL] works on people rather than bodies • [BARGAIN] offers something, which is always worse than it sounds • [HAUNT] presses on the mind • [POSSESSION] takes a body • [ILLUSION] makes them wrong about what is there • [MEMORY] takes or rewrites what happened • [CURSE] leaves something behind • [TRAP] punishes a choice already made • [TACTICS] repositions • [OMEN] tells the truth about what is coming.

Flavour tags name the element or medium and are free-form — [FIRE], [ICE], [STONE], [WIND], [TIDE], [BLOOD], [VENOM], [SHADOW], [DREAM], [SONG], [FEY], [PRESSURE]. Invent what you need.

Not to be confused with the block icons some supplements print beside an entry — [W] weakness, [C] timer, [L] lair, [P] phase, [D] drop. Those annotate the entry; these annotate a move.

Filling In the Numbers

Where a published creature gives no attributes, Harm or Fatigue, read them off its TL band and get on with the scene. The bestiary does exactly this: every entry carries a key attribute, Harm and Fatigue defaulted from its TL, and Armor: None unless the fiction says otherwise. They are starting points, not rulings — move any of them the moment the fiction wants it moved. What you may not move without changing the TL is Resilience.

Template Format

Rating a Military Unit: Capability and Scale

Threat Level rates a creature. It does not rate an army, and trying to make it do both is how the war supplements ended up with three incompatible ladders. A body of troops is not a big monster; it is a Follower that happens to be several hundred people, and it is rated on two axes that answer two different questions.

Capability — quality

Cap is the ordinary Follower Capability rating, applied to a formation — the same 1–5 scale bought at Cap² XP, not a parallel ladder. It behaves exactly as it does for any other Follower: the unit assists at min(Cap, the relevant Skill), and no roll takes more than +3 dice from all sources combined. There is no Cap 0: a formation too poor to help is Cap 1 that the GM declines to let assist, which is a fiction call rather than a sixth rung.

Scale — size

Scale is only size, and therefore only reach: how much ground a unit covers and how much of the field one order moves. It is never quality — a Scale IV levy is a large bad army, and the two facts are recorded separately because they matter separately.

Scale mismatch. When formations of different Scale meet, the difference changes Effect, never the DV and never the dice:

• One step larger: +1 Effect on anything that covers ground — volleys, charges, encirclement.
• One step smaller: −1 Effect, unless the action is precise rather than broad. A squad cannot rout a host, but it can absolutely kill the host's commander.
• Two or more steps apart: the smaller formation cannot engage the larger head-on at all. It can raid, scout, assassinate, sabotage or delay — and those are the interesting options anyway.

Humanoid NPCs

Supernatural NPCs

Animal NPCs

Building Custom NPCs

Use these guidelines to create your own NPCs quickly.

NPC Quick Reference Table