Field Manual · Revised 1931
The card for the table, and the book for everything else.
If you read one thing
Say what your character does. If the outcome is uncertain, roll four Fate dice and add one skill. Beat the difficulty and it works.
You do not need to memorize this card. Ask, and someone will tell you.
The GM gives you five to start and may hand out more during play. Keep them visible; they are meant to be spent.
Only the GM gives out chips. You decide when and how to spend yours.
Every character has three. The label tells you how to use one.
Knacks are all upside. Nothing on your sheet will be used against you.
Get past something: climb it, pick it, read it, or talk through it. Most rolls are this.
Do something clever that helps. On a success, someone gets +2 on their next relevant roll.
Hurt someone. Damage is how much you beat their defense by, to a maximum of 3.
Free and automatic whenever you are attacked. It never uses your turn.
Setup is the fun one: cut the lights, kick over the crates, get behind him, shout his wife’s name.
Recover half of what is missing between scenes, and all of it between acts.
Some things cannot be punched, and some cannot be reasoned with. You will need each other.
Investigate reads the room. Empathy reads the person. There is no Intimidate—describe how you frighten them and choose the skill that fits.
Six skills on your sheet are blank. They roll at +0. You can still try—you are simply no good at it, which is why there are seven other people in the room.
If you read nothing else, read this.
Roll four Fate dice, add one skill, and compare the total to a number. Beat it and you succeed.
Chips buy another chance or a little edge. Grit and Resolve are how much you can take.
That is the entire system.
Everything after this page is elaboration. A table that knows only the paragraph above can play a full session and have a good time. The rest exists so that when a player asks can I do this, you have an answer ready instead of an argument.
The design leans hard in one direction: players should be competent and the world should be dangerous. Pulp heroes rarely fumble. They get overwhelmed, outnumbered, and outmatched, and then they do something clever. Set your difficulties so that skilled characters usually succeed, and put the pressure on volume, time, and cost instead.
Roll four Fate dice. Each shows +, −, or blank. Add them together for a result from −4 to +4, then add your skill.
Fate dice (also called Fudge dice) have two plus faces, two minus faces, and two blank faces. Most virtual tabletops roll them natively — look for 4dF.
The distribution matters more than the range. A result of zero is the single most likely outcome, and about three quarters of all rolls land between −1 and +1. The dice nudge; your skill decides. A character with Great (+4) in something is going to be great at it almost every time, which is exactly the promise the genre makes.
At the table. Kit is flying, so she rolls four dice and adds her Pilot of +4. She gets + − blank +, which is +1 on the dice. Her total is +5.
Numbers have names. Use them out loud — they are faster to say and easier to remember than digits.
| +8 | Legendary |
| +7 | Epic |
| +6 | Fantastic |
| +5 | Superb |
| +4 | Great |
| +3 | Good |
| +2 | Fair |
| +1 | Average |
| 0 | Mediocre |
| −1 | Poor |
| −2 | Terrible |
Player skills only ever run from blank to Great (+4). Everything above Great belongs to the world: an impossible climb, a locked vault, a thing that should not be in the room.
Pick a number before the player rolls. Compare it to the skill they are using.
Because the dice cluster around zero, difficulty relative to skill maps cleanly onto odds. This table is the most useful thing in the document:
| Difficulty vs. their skill | Chance | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Two lower | 94% | Formality. Consider not rolling at all. |
| One lower | 81% | Their specialty, under mild pressure. |
| Equal | 62% | The standard. Tense but fair. |
| One higher | 38% | Genuinely hard. Expect chips to come out. |
| Two higher | 19% | Needs help or luck. |
| Three higher | 6% | Reserve for the impossible. |
Notice what this implies. If you set every difficulty at a flat +3 regardless of who is rolling, Ossie punches through everything and Liang fails at everything, and both players stop enjoying themselves. Set the number against the person holding the dice.
When you have no idea what number to use: +2 for something ordinary that has gone wrong, +4 for something a professional would find hard. You will be close enough.
Compare the total to the difficulty.
This is the most important rule in the document after the dice, and it is the one most likely to be skipped by a GM in a hurry. A tie is a success. A failure is an offer.
When a player fails, do not simply say no. Offer the trade: you can have it, but here is what it costs. The cost should be real and it should be interesting — time, noise, an injury, an alarm, a broken tool, a witness, a debt.
At the table. Cordelia rolls to get across a gap between roofs and misses by two.
Bad version: "You don't make it." Now the scene has stopped and nobody knows what happens next.
Better: "You make it, but you go down hard on the gravel and the grapple line goes over the edge. You can hear it hitting the alley. Do you want that, or do you want to stay on this side?"
Succeeding with style is easy to forget and worth remembering, because it is your chance to hand out something free. A shortcut. A piece of information they did not ask for. A chip.
Every roll in the game is one of these.
Overcome — get past something.
Setup — help, by making the next roll easier.
Attack — hurt someone.
Defend — avoid being hurt or set up.
When a player describes something and you are not sure how to handle it, ask which of these four they are doing. Almost always the answer is obvious once you ask.
Roll against a difficulty to get past an obstacle. This is the default action and covers most of the game.
Picking a lock, climbing a wall, translating a tablet, talking your way past a doorman, finding the ledger in the filing cabinet, keeping the car on the road. If it is not one of the other three, it is an Overcome.
Do something that makes the next roll easier. Describe the action and roll against a difficulty. On a success, someone gets +2 on their next relevant roll.
This is the action that makes the game feel like an adventure serial instead of a series of attack rolls. Cut the lights. Kick over the crate stack. Get behind him. Yell his wife's name. Throw the coat over its head.
Track it with something physical — a coin, a token, a note next to the character's name. New players forget they have one, so remind them: "you've still got that +2 from Ossie, if you want it."
At the table. Ossie shoulders into a badly stacked wall of crates. That is a Setup with Physique — a Fair (+2) difficulty, since the stack was already unsound. He rolls a total of +4 and succeeds. The crates come down across the aisle.
The GM asks who benefits. Ossie says Cordelia, who has been trying to get to the office door. On her turn she takes the +2 and gets there.
Run the math and they won't. Two characters attacking is two chances to land damage; one setting up and one attacking is a single attack at +2. Two swings beats one good swing nearly every time. Setup only pays when the straight roll would probably fail — which is exactly when you want it used.
The +2 cap is what keeps this true. Do not let four players dogpile +8 onto one roll.
Attack: roll against the target's Defend roll. If you beat it, they take damage equal to the difference, to a maximum of 3.
Defend: roll to avoid it. Defending is a reaction — it does not use your turn, and you can do it as often as you are attacked.
Which skill defends depends on the attack. Physical attacks are usually defended with Athletics (dodging) or Fisticuffs (blocking, grappling, closing the distance). Attacks on the mind are defended with Nerve, or with Occult when the thing attacking is not a person.
At the table. A gunman fires at Vinnie. The gunman has Shoot +2 and rolls +1 on the dice, for +3.
Vinnie defends with Athletics +2 and rolls −1, for +1.
Three minus one is two. Vinnie takes 2 Grit. He had 4. He now has 2, and his player is starting to think about the chips in front of them.
Anyone who joins in and has at least Average (+1) in the same skill adds +1 to the lead character's roll. Helping uses your action. The total bonus cannot exceed the lead character's own rating.
Three people hauling on a jammed door, four people searching a room, two people carrying a lie. Teamwork is separate from Setup and the two can be used together — but that means two players have spent their turns to improve one roll, which is usually a bad trade unless the roll is critical.
Give up your action for the round to get +2 on every Defend roll until your next turn.
This is the escape valve for the character who has no business being in this fight. Liang in a gunfight, Ankhesen anywhere near a brawl. It lets a player do something useful with a turn they were going to lose anyway, and it keeps them at the table rather than unconscious behind a crate.
Do not call for a roll unless failure would be interesting.
This is the most common mistake new GMs make and it costs more table time than any rule in the book. If a character with Contacts +4 wants to find a man who knows about the docks, he finds him. If Liang wants to read a Chinese inscription, he reads it. If Ossie wants to lift a crate, it is lifted.
Roll when there is a clock, an opponent, a risk, or a cost. Otherwise narrate the success and move on. A high skill should feel like permission, not like a better chance.
| Skill | Covers |
|---|---|
| Athletics | Run, climb, leap, dodge. Rooftops, fire escapes, chases on foot |
| Fisticuffs | Fists, brawls, grappling, chair legs, anything swung |
| Shoot | Pistols, rifles, tommy guns, thrown objects |
| Physique | Lift, endure, break, loom |
| Prowl | Sneak, hide, tail someone, locks, pockets, sleight of hand |
| Pilot | Anything with a throttle — cars, trucks, boats, aircraft, airships |
| Science! | Build it, fix it, jury-rig it under fire, patch a wound, explain the impossible |
| Lore | History, languages, archives, antiquities. Who made this, and when |
| Occult | Recognize it, resist it, bargain with it. Casting requires a Knack |
| Investigate | Notice, search, deduce, read a scene |
| Empathy | Read a person, spot the lie, cold reading, know what they want |
| Contacts | Who you know — street and society both |
| Charm | Be liked, be believed, command a room, perform |
| Deceit | Lie, con, disguise, bluff |
| Nerve | Hold it together, resist fear, stare him down |
| Resources | Money and what it opens |
Every character rates ten skills and leaves six blank.
The pregenerated characters are already built. If someone wants to make their own, this is the shape.
A blank skill rolls at +0. You can still try. You are just no good at it.
Blank is not a prohibition — it is a statement about who this person is. Dez has blank Occult, which means every time the impossible turns up he is rolling four dice and nothing, and that is both funny and true. Ossie has blank Deceit and physically cannot lie his way out of anything.
Do not soften this. The blanks are what make the party need each other, and a player who discovers their character genuinely cannot do something will hand the spotlight to someone who can. That is the game working.
Footprints, ledgers, the scorch on the doorframe, the thing that is missing from the shelf — Investigate. Whether the man telling you about it is lying — Empathy.
Loom over them with Physique. Stare them down with Nerve. Be grand and terrifying with Charm. Name somebody frightening with Contacts. When a player says "I want to scare him," ask how, and the skill answers itself.
The GM gives every player five chips at the start of the session and may give out more during play. Only the GM gives chips.
A player may spend one chip to:
Hand them out as physical tokens if you are at a table, or as a visible count if you are online. The pile needs to be seen — a currency nobody can see is a currency nobody spends, and the single most common failure mode with new players is finishing the session with five untouched chips and a character who never did anything remarkable.
There is no automatic income mechanic after the opening five. The GM hands out chips at their discretion and should do so often. Good reasons:
Give one out in the first ten minutes of the session, loudly, for something small. It teaches the whole economy in one gesture and it tells four nervous people that this is a game where you are rewarded for trying things.
Players never take chips from the supply. The GM decides when to award one and hands it to the player.
A player may still offer a flaw or make the reckless choice. If the GM thinks the moment deserves a chip, the GM awards it. The player does not pay themselves.
A reroll is declared after the dice are read. Roll all four dice again and use the new result, even if it is worse. The +1 option works the other way around: it must be declared and paid for before the dice are rolled.
Each character has three Knacks. Every Knack is one of three shapes, and the shape tells you how to use it.
Knacks replace both Aspects and Stunts from standard Fate. They are all upside. Nothing on a character sheet in this game will ever be used against the player who wrote it.
A Knack marked always or spend 1 does not need a roll unless the text says so. That is the point of them — they are the moments where a character simply gets to be the thing they are.
Several Knacks are written as questions the player asks you: I Have Read About This, My Father's Notes, Let Me See That, I Know What You Want. When one of these fires, you must give a real answer.
This is a load-bearing obligation. The whole reason these were written as pulls rather than pushes is that a player declaring facts can wreck your mystery, while a player asking questions cannot. In exchange, you owe them useful information — not a fragment, not a tease, not "you get a feeling."
At the table. Liang spends a chip on I Have Read About This and points at a symbol stamped into a crate lid.
Weak answer: "It looks old. Possibly European."
Correct answer: "It's a shipping mark from a Bremen forwarding house that went out of business in 1919, and the reason you know that is you spent four months in 1923 buying a library back from them. Someone is still using their stamps."
If you genuinely have nothing prepared, invent something and write it down. It is now true, and it is now your problem in a good way.
Every character has two pools.
Grit = 3 + (Physique + Athletics) ÷ 2
Resolve = 3 + (Nerve + Occult) ÷ 2
Round fractions down. Blank skills count as zero.
Grit is physical: bruises, cuts, exhaustion, the wind knocked out of you. Resolve is everything else: fear, horror, humiliation, the slow pressure of a thing that should not exist standing in the room with you.
The split is the point. It means there are threats in this world that Ossie cannot punch and Liang cannot out-argue, and it means the boxer and the medium are genuinely good at different kinds of danger. Use both. A session where only Grit ever moves is a session that could have been run with one pool.
| Character | Grit | Resolve |
|---|---|---|
| Kit Mallory | 5 | 4 |
| Ankhesen-tawy | 3 | 6 |
| Liang Jingxu | 3 | 4 |
| Vinnie Fiorello | 4 | 3 |
| Opal Sunderland | 3 | 5 |
| Dez Halloran | 4 | 4 |
| Ossie Kowal | 5 | 4 |
| Cordelia Ashcombe-Reyes | 5 | 4 |
Damage equals the attacker's total minus the defender's total, to a maximum of 3.
Mooks deal flat damage: 1, or 2 if armed. Only named antagonists roll for the difference.
The cap exists to stop a single unlucky exchange from taking someone from full to zero with no beat in between. A margin of 5 happens; a character dropping instantly because of it is not a story, it is arithmetic.
The mook rule is a workload decision and it matters more than it looks. In a fight with six gunmen you are otherwise rolling six attacks and comparing six margins every round. Flat damage turns that into "he hits you, that's 2" and keeps the scene moving at the speed of a serial.
There is no equipment table. Cover, a heavy coat, a crate to hide behind, a door between you and it — these are Setups, or they raise the difficulty of shooting you. Handle them in the fiction. Do not build a subsystem.
Grit at zero: you are out. Unconscious, pinned, bleeding, dragged away. If the fiction is lethal and the table has agreed to it, dead.
Resolve at zero: you make a bad choice. You are still awake, still in the scene, still able to act — you have simply broken, and you do the thing you would not otherwise do.
The asymmetry is deliberate. Physical defeat removes you from the scene; that is what physical defeat is. Emotional defeat should keep you in it, because a player sitting silently for twenty minutes is a player who has stopped having fun.
The player and the GM decide together, and the GM has the final say. Aim for something that costs the group, not something that humiliates the character:
At the table. Liang has 4 Resolve, blank Occult, and has been in a room he does not believe in for three exchanges. He hits zero.
The GM offers: "You've spent your whole life being the man who knows what things are. You don't know what this is. You put the notebook down in the middle of the floor, and you walk out, and you keep walking, and you're on the street before you can explain to yourself why."
Liang is out of the scene, but he chose to leave, and he will be there in the next one with something to prove.
Between scenes: recover half of each missing pool, rounded up.
Between acts: recover everything.
This is the dial that sets how dangerous the session feels, and it is worth understanding what you are choosing. Full recovery every scene makes damage weightless and every fight a fresh start. No recovery at all turns a three-act evening into a death march that Ankhesen at 3 Grit does not survive. Half between scenes and full at act breaks does both jobs: damage carries, but the act break is a genuine reset with a mechanical heartbeat you can feel.
At the table. Ossie ends the warehouse fight with 2 of his 5 Grit. He is missing 3, so he gets 2 back — half of three, rounded up. He starts the next scene at 4.
At the end of the act, he is back to 5.
Sketch each action scene as three or four named areas. You can reach anyone in your own zone. Moving to an adjacent zone is free, in addition to your action — unless something is in the way, in which case moving is your action and needs a roll.
No grid, no measurement, no counting squares. A warehouse might be: the floor, the catwalk, the office, the loading dock. A rooftop chase might be: this roof, the gap, that roof, the street below.
Zones do three useful things at once. They tell players what is reachable, they make the environment a source of Setups, and they let you say "you can't get there this turn" without an argument.
Guns reach into adjacent zones. Fists do not.
When you describe a scene, name three to five features that can be used. Not scenery — tools. Each one is a Setup waiting for a player to notice it:
Say them out loud during your establishing description, then say them again when the fight starts. New players do not think to ask what is in the room; they think about what is on their sheet. Naming the crane pendant, the knife switch, and the acid tank is how you get them looking up.
All the players go, in whatever order they sort out among themselves. Then all the enemies go. Repeat.
No initiative rolls and no math. It also has a quiet benefit for a nervous table: a player who is not ready can let someone else go first at no cost, which removes the worst moment in a new player's evening — being put on the spot before they know what their options are.
Defending is a reaction and does not use your turn. You defend as often as you are attacked.
Set the zones. Name what is usable. Players go, then enemies. Repeat until one side is out or gives up.
Three habits will do more for your fights than any rule here:
Describe the hit, not the number. "That's 2 Grit" is bookkeeping. "He catches you across the jaw and you go down on one knee in the oil — that's 2" is a fight. Say the number last.
Let mooks go down fast. One good hit finishes a gunman. The fun of a pulp fight is volume, not durability, and a fight where every thug takes three rounds to drop is a fight that has become a chore.
Give the enemies a goal that is not "kill them." They want to escape with the crate, or reach the telephone, or hold the door for ninety seconds, or get the boss out the back. The moment the enemy has an objective, the players have to make choices about what to stop, and the fight becomes a scene.
Do not build NPCs like player characters. It is a waste of your evening.
Two or three skills at Fair (+2). Everything else at +0. 1 Grit, 1 Resolve. They deal flat damage: 1, or 2 if armed. No Knacks.
Gunmen, guards, cultists, dockhands, the four fellows in the back of the truck. One good hit takes one down. Write them as a group — "six of Maranzano's men, Fisticuffs +2, Shoot +2" — and never track them individually.
For a crowd, treat four mooks as a single unit with 4 Grit that acts once per round. Damage spills over: a 3-damage hit takes down three of them.
One skill at Great (+4), two or three at Good (+3), the rest at +1 or +0. 4–6 Grit and Resolve. One or two Knacks. Roll for damage like a player.
The lieutenant with the tommy gun. The professor who will not stop the experiment. The society hostess who knows exactly who you are. These are the people worth a real exchange of dice.
Give every named antagonist a want and a line they will not cross. Both are more useful at the table than any number on their sheet.
Build as a named antagonist, then take one of these: 8–10 in the relevant pool, or immunity until a condition is met.
The second option is almost always better. A thing that cannot be hurt until the players work out how is a puzzle; a thing with a huge pool is a slog. Cut the power. Break the circle. Speak the name. Get it into the daylight.
Whatever it is, it should attack Resolve and it should not be attackable at all. It is not a monster in a room. It is pressure — a difficulty that keeps rolling against everyone present, exchange after exchange, while they try to finish what they came to do.
A pressure of +4 against a character defending on Nerve +3 averages about 2 damage per exposure. Ankhesen can stand there three or four times. Vinnie breaks in two. That difference is the scene.
Anyone can roll Occult to recognize a seal, resist something wrong, or notice that the sums do not add.
Nobody can perform magic without a Knack that says so.
This split is what keeps the setting's promise. The weird is real, it is out there, and any character might stumble into it and have to cope — so Occult belongs on everyone's sheet as a defense and a recognition skill. But there is no wizard at the corner store. Two of the eight can actually do anything, and both of them are slow, formal, and conditional about it.
When a player without a casting Knack asks whether they can try the ritual anyway: no. Not as a difficulty, as a fact. Hand it to the character who can.
Assume nobody has read anything. Everything below is designed to be taught during play rather than before it.
Say exactly this, and then start:
"When something's uncertain, you roll four dice and add a number off your sheet. I'll tell you what to beat. Beating it is good and tying is good enough. You can spend a chip before a roll for +1, or afterward to reroll — but you have to keep the second result."
That is enough to play for two hours. Introduce Setup the first time someone describes something clever. Introduce Grit and Resolve the first time someone gets hit. Do not front-load.
Ask which skill they want to use, don't assign it. "That sounds like Prowl — do you want to try that?" teaches the sheet without a lecture.
Say the difficulty out loud before they roll. "Beat a 3." It makes the dice legible and lets them decide about chips with information in hand.
Prompt the blanks. When someone with blank Deceit tries to lie, say so kindly and let them do it anyway. Finding out you are bad at something is more fun than being quietly protected from it.
Give the first chip early and loudly. Ten minutes in, for anything. The whole economy is taught by one person watching another get rewarded.
Rules you should simply ignore in a first session if they are causing friction: the Setup expiry timer, the teamwork cap, exact zone adjacency, and half-recovery arithmetic. All of them are balance tools for a table that has learned to push. A table that is still finding its feet is not pushing on anything.
Instead of side-based turns: the GM says who goes first, and whoever just acted picks who goes next. Everyone acts once per round.
The trap — and the reason it is good — is that players front-load and pick each other, which means the last player has nobody left but an enemy, and that enemy picks another enemy. The whole opposition acts in an unbroken chain at the end of one round and the start of the next.
Excellent for an experienced table. Do not use it with first-timers, who will read the chain as unfairness rather than as the consequence of a choice they did not know they were making.
Before the dice hit the table, a player may declare that they lose. They dictate how they lose and what it costs, they exit the conflict, and the GM gives them two chips. They cannot concede and also win.
Excellent noir, and it replaces the injury system this game cut. Left out of the first session on purpose, because it is one more thing to explain and it only becomes valuable once players know enough to fear losing.
If you continue past one session, this is the first thing to add back. A wound is a named injury written on the sheet that absorbs a big hit in exchange for being true afterwards. It is where the weight goes once the table can carry weight.
Roll 4dF + skill. Beat the difficulty.
Outcomes. Below: fail, or succeed at serious cost. Equal: succeed at minor cost. Above: succeed. Three or more above: succeed with style.
Actions. Overcome (get past it). Setup (+2 to someone's next roll, no stacking). Attack (damage = margin, max 3). Defend (reaction, free).
Teamwork. +1 per helper with the skill at +1 or better, capped at the lead's rating. Uses their action.
Full defense. Skip your action, +2 to all defenses until your next turn.
Chips. The GM gives each player five to start and awards any more. Spend one to use a spend 1 Knack, reroll a check and keep the second result even if lower, or add +1 before making a roll.
Grit = 3 + (Physique + Athletics) ÷ 2, rounded down. Zero: you are out.
Resolve = 3 + (Nerve + Occult) ÷ 2, rounded down. Zero: you make a bad choice.
Recovery. Half the missing amount between scenes, rounded up. All of it between acts.
Mooks. Two or three skills at +2, 1 Grit, flat damage of 1 or 2.
Named. One skill at +4, a couple at +3, 4–6 in each pool, roll damage normally.
Difficulty. Their skill −1 to show off. Equal for tension. +2 when they need help.
Turn order. Players, then enemies.
Don't roll unless failure is interesting.