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 Fate Accelerated campaign in the wood outside Athens. You are one of four Athenians on the edge of Shakespeare's comedy — a palace maid, a carpenter's apprentice, a hedge-witch's daughter, a merchant with a cart of wedding silk — and tonight Puck mistakes you for the lovers. The love-juice is already flying. The wedding is in four days. The frost is on the roses in high summer, and only the fairies know why.

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CreatedAug 10, 2026

UpdatedSep 2, 2026

The Premise

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

Athens under Duke Theseus, four days before the 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.

You are not one of the lovers. You are a palace maid who carries Hermia's letters, or an apprentice who cannot stop improving the play, or a hedge-witch's daughter the fairies owe, or a merchant whose fortune rides on a wedding that may not happen. Then Puck comes through the thicket with a pot of love-in-idleness, mistakes you for someone else, and the night stops being about anyone else's story.

By dawn everything tangled can still come right — if the fairy feud is mended, if the blessing falls, if you are still yourself when the sun comes up. The wood is generous that way. It is also the wood.

Fate Accelerated runs it: you describe how you do a thing, not what your character sheet says you have, and your own worst trait pays you money to make the night worse. Four ready-to-play Athenians, twenty characters from the play, and the whole of the fairy wood are already built and waiting.

Glimpses

Author's note

The four Athenians are original — Corax, Dione, Phyllis and Xanthos exist nowhere in the play, and they are built to stand at the edge of scenes Shakespeare already wrote rather than to replace anyone in them. The lovers, the mechanicals and the fairy court keep the text's own words and motives wherever the play supplies them. Where it is silent — what a servant's evening looks like, what the fairies charge for a favor — the gap is filled in the play's spirit and marked as invention rather than passed off as canon. The stunts, extras and consequences are straight Fate Accelerated; the love-juice needed no adapting at all. Based on the Fate Accelerated Edition and Fate Core SRDs by Evil Hat Productions, used under CC BY 3.0 — the full notice is in Licensing & Attribution. The play itself is public domain.

Inside the World