The Kerberos Club

This April, I am going to be running the FATE Edition of The Kerberos Club at JonCon '13 in the Twin Cities. JonCon is a private gaming convention that emerged from a core of friends who have played for many years in each others' gaming groups. Horror games such as Call of Cthulhu are a hallmark of  JonCon, and I can honestly say that the only truly scary Call of Cthulhu game I have ever played was in a JonCon CoC tournament.

So this year I know I will get in some great games, and my own offering at the Con will be running The Kerberos Club. I am slowly making my way through the narrative background on the Kerberos Club, which is a society or private club for 19th Century Victorian heroes who have been touched by... The Strange. Early in the Victorian era, the level of weirdness in the world is modest, and the Club is secret. By the late Victorian era, the Kerberos Club is completely out in the open - rather like a high weird Victorian JLA - and has frequent clashes will all manner of technological and occult threats. Imagine several dozen singularities unleashed at once, and you have a sense of the haute weird at the end of the Victorian age.

The Strange FATE system which powers The Kerberos Club (Strange FATE SRD here) is on the complex end of the FATE spectrum, with a skill set tailored for Victorian age weird heroes, and skills organized into three distinct power tiers that differentiate the powers of heroes from those of mere mortals. There are also Gifts, which stand-in for Stunts in this implementation of FATE.

So far, I am finding the background text by Benjamin Baugh to be pretty evocative - sometimes quite subtly so - and as well as a little odd at certain points. There are a few places where a sentence seemed to belong earlier in the paragraph. But nevertheless I am pretty intrigued by the setting and am looking forward to digging into the mechanics of Strange FATE in another week or so. There's 180 pages of setting background to push through first!