The Essence of Fate
Fate Condensed is a compact, stand-alone version of the Fate Core System streamlined for clarity and ease of reference.
Fate Condensed gives you easy-to- digest rules in as few pages as possible, letting you get to the table and roll the dice, fast. It includes a few simple refinements to the Fate Core engine honed over a decade of active play and development. And best of all, it’s 100% compatible with every one of our 90+ Fate products already published.
Fate veterans will appreciate the concise layout, minor refinements, and additions to Fate’s rules (see below for the details).
New to Fate? Fate Condensed can drive any game, any scenario you can imagine. Unleash your creativity! Fate’s flexible rules make it easy.
You can adapt your favorite movie or tv series, or create an original world uniquely tailored to your group. Players populate that world with proactive, capable characters leading dramatic lives. The Game Master challenges them with crises tied both to the world and to their personal troubles.
Fate Condensed gives you the flexibility and power to bring your vision to life!
Refined. Streamlined.
Fate Condensed.
What’s new?
Inside Fate Condensed, you’ll find:
- One-point stress boxes to help reduce player confusion. (Don’t worry, you can still use Fate Core stress if you want!)
- Skills no longer determine turn order. Instead, the story determines who goes first, and the active player chooses who goes next.
- We’ve improved advancement, eliminating significant milestones and finessing major milestones to compensate.
- Active opposition is no longer separate from the defend action.
- Fourteen pages of optional rules to make building your own custom variant of Fate easy. These options give you rules for countdowns, scale, extreme consequences, methods to make your Big Bads bigger and badder, and more.
Open Licensable.
For game creators, the text of Fate Condensed is available for development under an open license. Its low word-count means it won’t bust your budget when creating your own stand-alone game Powered by Fate. See https://www.faterpg.com/licensing/ for details.
Choose your Fate!
- Looking for an in-depth walk-through of the system? Fate Core contains copious examples and under-the-hood design philosophy.
- Want beginner-friendly, streamlined play? Check out Fate Accelerated, designed for speed.
- Seeking a tight, refined, wallet-friendly rules reference? Put one (or more!) copies of Fate Condensed in easy reach, break out your dice, and start playing.
Whatever way you want to play, there’s a Fate that’s right for you!
Download Fate Condensed!
Download now at DriveThruRPG or itch.io
Game Information
Number of players: 3-6
Age of players: 12+
Length: 2-6 hours
Type of Game: Roleplaying Game
Languages Available: English
Suggested Retail: $8
Release Date: November 2, 2020
Availability: Check here
Game Designers: PK Sullivan, Lara Turner, Fred Hicks, Richard Bellingham, and Sophie Lagacé
Is there a character sheet yet?
Ty: there is indeed.
https://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Fate-Condensed-Character-Sheet.pdf
Yeah, the character sheet is in the PDF and as a separate file when you get the game.
Is this going to be available in print? I’d love to support my FLGS.
Given that we’ve done two revision updates to it in the past three weeks, it’s too early to send it to print. That’s on our eventual radar, it’s just premature.
I love this! All the compactness I loved about FAE, with just enough of the dials I like to tweak explicitly included.
Being fully aware of the pagecount limitation, I’d like to make a humble request for one more inclusion into the optional rules: namely the *reduced version* of the **Consumables** from the Horror Toolkit (p.96-98) as an alternative way for keeping tabs on equipment/resources (like depletion of supplies, wear on gears, fluctuating sanity/wealth/power/mana).
Thanks for the work and effort put into this iteration of Fate!
With apologies, we’re unlikely to add those. You can always use them as given in FHT tho!
It is hard to figure out what has changed since last revision update. Do you have a change list?
Yup; it’s posted in the product comments on DriveThruRPG.com and in a devlog on evilhat.itch.io each time I post a new revision. Look at the bottom of https://evilhat.itch.io/fate-condensed for all the changelogs posted to date.
Luckily I did a search on FATE tonight or I wouldn’t even realize there had been an update to the core system! Will FAE be getting an update as well, out of curiosity?
I ask this knowing that FAE IS Core with a different skills system. To clarify my question, would Condense breed an offshoot FAE style like core did?
No, and I’d be pretty upset if it did, just like I was with FAE, which is not an offshoot. Fans do Fate a disservice every time they treat it like it’s something different.
Are there any near term plans to print hardbacks or paperbacks of this? (FATE hardcopy books are a popular holiday gift around the Atlanta RPG scene).