This week, I’ve been doing some writing on the paranormal social workers game that I’ve been working on for a few years actually. This project has gone through phases in Savage Worlds Deluxe, Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, Cortex Prime, and now I’ve settled in with Fate Condensed.
This week I actually finally replaced the placeholder name of “Paranormal Social Workers Game” with the title Caretakers which I think has a pretty slick feel to it.
Earlier this year, I shared information about Bookerfield, Ohio, and Jones County through Week 2 and Week 3 of Lore24 before I fell off with the habit when I got busy. But the game has stuck at the back of my mind and I want to talk about some of the stuff I’ve been working on with it.
Rayme-Burton Building, 6th Avenue and Berry Street, Dayton, KY by Warren LeMay shared under CC-BY-SA 2.0
Adding More Social Conflict
At the core, it’s basically just vanilla Fate Condensed at this point. I’ve added the Social Conflict system from the Fate System toolkit because I really like the idea of the beliefs and instincts presented there forming the basis for a challege the players will have to clear without conflict, using skills like empathy and rapport to understand what’s going on and make it better for the client they are working with.
Decision to Leave Skills As Is (For Now)
At first I looked at further condensing or eliminating fighting skills altogether because “that’s not what this game is about” but then I thought about the sorts of conflicts they might find themselves in on the way to a client, or protecting a client, and decided to just leave the skills as is for now. That will be a decision I keep an eye on in playtesting with my group, whether Fight and Shoot are getting too much attention.
Delicious Moral Dilemmas
In addition to the Social Conflict rules from the System Toolkit, I am using the Moral Dilemma system from the Fate Horror Toolkit. Originally I was going to borrow the “Imperil an Aspect” system from the iHunt RPG. That system lets you set up a scenario where the affected party is stuck between a bad choice and a worse choice, like carefully setting up a trap and then just dropping it on them. I liked the having to choose between two bad choices and having to decide what the least bad choice among them is. When I read the Moral Dilemma rules, and how they play with the aspects and beliefs of the player characters and can be fought against at higher odds if they want to forge a secret third way that I didn’t think of ahead of time, that just sounded like a lot of fun. Honestly, I see social work and any sort of work with marginalized communities as an area where you’re going to have to make hard choices about what you can actually get done today and what has to be left to maybe get done tomorrow. This system seemed to give me a tool to get that vibe into the game.
Ability to Play as Supernatural Beings
Because this is Fate and because I’m liking other stuff I’m reading, like Anim’s Eureka Investigation Game which has a whole section on playing the monsters (like Hellboy), I decided I wanted to include the option in my game. And Fate made writing a rule to do so easy. It just costs an aspect and a feat. Write an aspect that lists what you are, and then spend one of your feats describing what that lets you do.
So maybe, I’m a Vampire Tax Accountant, and Because I’m A Vampire I Heal As Many Physical Stress Boxes As I Deal In Close Range Attacks.
Maybe not the most crunchy of rules, but I feel like it’s a good start. And it’s my own rule that I wrote into the game rather than just copying verbatim from an SRD, so it feels good to get it down, make this Fate Game my own a bit, and see how it plays.
Setting Basic Primer
Bookerfield is a moderately-sized town, sort of a rundown former industrial city, like Youngstown or Akron or Canton. Something smaller than the major cities we usually see in Urban Fantasy but large enough that you’d actually see social services. Because rural settings kind of lack those.
The players will all be members of Community Access to Special Care, a public-private non-profit agency providing services to the supernatural community beneath certain layers of obfuscation. I went along with a “masquerade” type urban fantasy setting, because I feel like these are abilities that the average person wouldn’t understand or accept and that that would cause the community to want to stay hidden. To avoid things like burnings and stakings and other terrible fates that we write stories about doing to the supernatural. In practice, I think there will also be some metaphors for other populations served by social work, like the parallel of vampires needing access to blood and substance abuse disorders causing people to need a supply of a certain drug.
To supply this care, CASC actually takes out contracts with county agencies to provide services like medical waste disposal or certain animal control services. That gets them their supplies without having to be overt about “we need to buy blood.”
Police in the Setting
A major antagonistic force in the setting is the Special Investigations Group, a multi-jurisdictional unofficial task force made up of police officers from around the county who have had run ins with supernatural forces. Their run ins have tended to be with desperate individuals who did present as a threat. This force kind of represents that human “I don’t understand it so it scares me” idea that causes these communities to try and hide in the first place. They’re inspired by characters like Rudolph from the Dresden Files or a bit like the early series Winchester Brothers from Supernatural. These are people who don’t understand something, and that scares them. In their own way, they are feeling as desperate about their place in the world and lashing out like some of the clients that players will be dealing with.
They are absolutely an antagonistic force to the goals of the PCs, but I also don’t want them to be cardboard cutout villains. Like I said, I want to have delicious moral dilemmas where maybe the antagonist actual has a point, but is going about it all wrong.
Next Steps
Right now, I have this basic information about the setting floating around my head. I’ve also got an intro scene involving players interviewing a potential client in crisis, who sees themselves as a monster and wants to take whatever action they have to to avoid hurting anyone. And that’s a ledge they need talked down from.
I have some spots in the city listed out with some basic aspects, but I also want to wait and do a Game Creation Worksheet with the players to fill in some of the holes in the setting with stuff that gets my group excited to play.
This game has literally been years brewing in my head and having it named and having 40-something pages of notes that should actually be a workable game to hand my players is really freaking exciting.
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