Project Generations FAE At U-Con

FATE SF ran two games at U-Con in Ypsilanti, Michigan this past weekend. Saturday's game used Fate Accelerated Edition. I ran a session of Project Generations, part of my forthcoming series of Fate-based generation ship offerings from Modiphius Entertainment.

The session started with the players taking Project Generations' collaborative and Diaspora-inspired "Create a Generation Ship on the Fly" rules for a test drive. That went amazingly well. The players created a rickety generation ship: a desperate, nameless ship fleeing a cosmic disaster. The way the players described the disaster was "Cthulhu ate earth." A generation ship had been under construction for a while. Humanity was already colonizing the solar system. When the disaster struck, survivors in the colonies decided to act immediately and launch the ship ahead of schedule.

At the time of the launch, certain things had been taken for granted. Most of the nameless generation ship's reaction mass was used in a getaway launch burst. Some technologies were still in their infancy, such as AIs and nanotechnology, but assumed to be on a good trajectory. By a couple hundred years after launch, everyone expected that things would be even better. Many problems at launch would have been solved.

Not so much.

Things just got worse and worse.

The PCs were part of the reserve crew for a future launch; they were already in suspended animation at the time of the launch, and knew nothing of the cosmic disaster which has struck Earth. Their first clue that something was wrong was when a ham-handed Engineering robot awakened them some 300 years after ship's launch. No Medical robots or personnel anywhere in sight. Things only got worse from there.

The ship was in very bad shape. The humans and robots on-board had company. The inimical kind, from beyond time and space.Fortunately our heroes were the A-Team. They pressed on, confronting horror after horror. Tough bastards that they were, they eventually got to the bridge and took control of the ship.

***

Everyone seemed to have a good time. One player even ordered a copy of the Deck of Fate while I took a brief bio-break. He liked how I was using it to flavor situations and dice rolls with the Aspects on the card. I can't say I mind being called "oracular" one little bit.

Great players, and a great game!