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| 3-6 | 12+ | 2-8 hr | $10 |
Fate Accessibility Toolkit
The Fate Accessibility Toolkit is a new toolkit for Fate Core that brings characters with disabilities into your game and supports players with disabilities at your table. We’ve assembled a team from disabled communities to ensure that this book speaks to you from their real, lived experiences.
You’ll also want a copy of Fate Core or Fate Accelerated to play; that said, we provide plenty of advice and perspectives you can use with any game system!
Inside the Fate Accessibility Toolkit you’ll find:
- An exploration of the challenges and experiences facing people with a variety of physical and mental disabilities, in their own words.
- Advice on compassionately and respectfully playing characters with disabilities, as well as strategies for welcoming disabled players to your game table.
- Discussion of specific disabilities, including blindness, D/deafness and hardness of hearing, mobility issues, dwarfism, chronic illness, autism, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolarity, and PTSD.
- Options for representing disability in the Fate system, using a mix of aspects, stunts, and conditions, and including an exploration of adaptive devices available to characters across a variety of settings.
- Appendices focused on creating safe spaces at your table, an ASL reference for common RPG terms, and a large-print character sheet for Fate Core.
This is the Prototype Edition of the Fate Accessibility Toolkit. What’s that mean?
TL;DR: There’s no art, but sales of this will help us get art, and once we get art, we’ll upgrade your PDF to one with art at no added cost.
The Fate Accessibility Toolkit has been under development for several years at Evil Hat. During that time we’ve gone through a number of transitions. Towards the end of 2018, Evil Hat realized it was over-extended and needed to slim back its product offerings for the coming year. You can read more about this in our public blog post from then, found here.
Even facing some financial turbulence, we remained committed to Fate Accessibility. The mission of the book was too important to us to consider canceling it. We knew we would be able to ensure that the game’s text would be completed at the very least, and we knew we could make that text available to the public if all other avenues failed.
So for the Fate Accessibility Toolkit, we’re going to do a “Prototype Edition” release. While there isn’t budget to make the art happen at this time (let alone put the book into print), we can make the content of the book available to you now. So with that in mind, we’ll sell Fate Accessibility in this art-free form (the grey rectangles throughout the text are place-holders for eventual artwork) until it generates enough revenue to pay for the missing art budget (likely requiring several hundred sales as a baseline).
Once we have that, we can commission the art, and at least provide a final version of the book in electronic form. (If that happy event comes to pass, we’ll upgrade all purchases of the Prototype Edition PDF to the full final PDF version at no added cost.)
As to whether or not the book will see print, who knows? At the least, if we get the budget for art, we’ll be able to take a look at making it available as a print-on-demand title here on DriveThruRPG. If interest is high, we may go beyond that. Your purchase is your vote! (And thank you for your support.)
Fate Toolkits. All the tools to build your stage.
Expansion Information
Number of players: 3-6
Age of players: 12+
Length: 2-8 hours
Type of Game: Roleplaying Game Supplement for Fate Core
Languages Available: English
Prototype Edition Price: $10
Length: 124 Pages
Format: PDF
Release Date: July 23, 2019
Game Designers: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Laurel Bell, C.D. “Casey” Casas, Lillian Cohen-Moore, Philippe-Antoine Ménard, Zeph Wibby, Mysty Vander, ASL For RPG, Brian Engard, Clark Valentine, Sophie Lagacé.
I’m not playing Fate at the moment, but I’m really interested in the “Accessibility Toolkit” part of this. How much of the material is system-agnostic, and could be used in other contexts, vs how much is geared specifically towards Fate games?
I’d say the majority is system-agnostic, but it’s not like we have some sort of quantitative analysis of that — that’s just my gut feeling. Pretty cheap to buy the PDF and find out, tho.
I am a child counselor, and I’m interested in using RPGs during therapy sessions. Does this toolkit offer more than inclusiveness? I would like to have game-play situations that could help teach coping skills and behaviors for my clients with different needs. For under $10, I’ll probably buy it and figure it out anyways, but I’d appreciate a heads up before I go feet first into a new system. Thanks.
The book’s focus is on a few things: representing people of varying ability in the fiction of games, ensuring that the system respectfully and accurately represents such people in the game, and welcoming and including players of varying ability at the gaming table. It doesn’t offer “game-play situations” the way that I understand the phrase, but it could certainly be used to construct them.
I wonder if there’s any further updates on this project, as an autistic gamer I really would love to see this be published (printed)
I’ve already contributed in excess of $50 towards it
I understand that the COVID19 crisis has had a significant impact on your industry but also understand that RPGs are often the only social activity that many neurodiverse people can easily participate in.
Please tell me that this hasn’t fallen by the wayside and will one day actually be released
It has not fallen by the wayside. It has run into turbulence, most recently around finding an in-community art director able to stay with the project for the duration. COVID has made addressing that more difficult, and the impacts to printing operations globally have reduced the urgency to get it to press because presses just aren’t getting books printed as quickly as before. Regardless it remains on our must-do list.
I just want to say thank you for doing this. I am not disabled, and I don’t have any people in my game group who are. So, I would never, ever have thought that this was a needed resource. And, I admit, at first I did not ‘get’ it. But, thinking on it a while, well, wow. Very thoughtful. Very useful. Thank you all.