Player's Handbook · Chapter 1

Proactive, Competent, Dramatic

You play someone worth telling stories about: good at what they do, driven to act, and carrying a life complicated enough to be interesting. Fate has no classes and no levels. Who your character is gets written on the sheet as aspects — short phrases like Eyes and Ears of the Duke's Palace or The Law of Athens — and those phrases are the engine of the whole game. They make you better when they help. They make trouble when they don't. Both directions pay.

How a session runs

The GM frames a scene and tells you what's at stake. You say what your character does — in the fiction first, always. Most of what you attempt simply happens, because you are competent people. Dice come out only when the attempt is dramatic and failure would be interesting, and every roll in the game works the same way: four Fate dice plus one approach, read against the Ladder.

What to expect

Failure is a fork, not a wall. A failed roll never means "nothing happens." It means trouble: you get it at a serious cost, or the situation gets worse in a way that matters. The story always moves.
Trouble is currency. When one of your aspects complicates your life and you play along, you get paid a fate point for it. Fate points buy the bonuses that win climactic rolls. A character who never gets in trouble goes broke.
You can lose without being lost. Getting hurt is a resource decision, and when a fight turns against you, you can concede — exit on your own terms, keep your character, and get paid for the trouble.

Where things live

The complete rules sit in the Rules folder, starting with @Missing file. During play, keep the @Missing file at your elbow — the four actions, aspects, the Ladder, and getting hurt, one tab each. Character creation takes one good conversation, and it is next.

Manual updated Aug 10, 2026.

Fate Accelerated Edition

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A playable Fate Accelerated campaign built from A Midsummer Night's Dream: one night, one wood, three tangled couples, and a wedding in four days. The complete FAE engine rides along — aspects, fate points, six approaches, stunts, stress and consequences — now stocked with Athens, the fairy feud, Puck's love-juice, and four ready-to-play original characters. Based on the Fate Accelerated Edition and Fate Core SRDs by Evil Hat Productions, used under CC BY 3.0.

Crafted by

@Dungeons_N_Drafts_DM

Messages

Plays

Likes

160

Files

Versionv1

CreatedAug 10, 2026

UpdatedAug 14, 2026

Fate Accelerated — Shakespearean Comedy

One night. One wood. And a wedding in four days.

Athens under Duke Theseus, four days before the duke's wedding. The law is absolute, the frost is on the roses, and the wood outside the gates is full of fairy mischief — a quarrel between Oberon and Titania that is rotting the seasons. Players take original Athenians on the edge of the play — a palace maid, an apprentice to the mechanicals, a hedge-witch's daughter, a merchant with a cart of wedding silks — and get swept into the night when Puck mistakes them for the lovers and the love-juice starts flying.

The complete Fate Accelerated engine rides along: characters whose stress boxes, refresh, and approach ratings compute themselves from the standard rules; aspects with invoke and compel guidance; the six approaches as linked files; stunts, extras, consequences, zones, scenes, and campaign frames. Four act-by-act scenes, twenty NPCs from the play, five signature extras (Love-in-Idleness, the Ass's Head, Pyramus & Thisby, the Changeling Boy, the Fairy Blessing), and four ready-to-play pregens demonstrate every moving part.

Based on the Fate Accelerated Edition and Fate Core SRDs by Evil Hat Productions, used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 — see the Licensing & Attribution file. The play itself is public domain.

Inside the World