What is Faith Corps?

No I didn't mean Fate Core, which is an awesome tabletop rpg system. I mean Faith Corps, which is also an awesome tabletop rpg system - based on Fate Accelerated and Cortex Plus.

The system we call Faith Corps debuted in the Kickstarter-funded Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors RPG in 2015. It was developed by Cam Banks and Amanda Valentine, who happen to know a thing or two about rpgs, particularly Fate and Cortex and all their variants. I was getting ready to create a supplement to the Cortex version of the Demon Hunters Roleplaying Game, published by Margaret Weis Productions, but kept running into dated issues. The canon had evolved, and it started to make more sense to just create a new edition than to create a supplement to a book that was pubished back in 2008. So I pinged Cam Banks and asked if he'd be interested in designing a new game system for me. :) I think there was a "hell yes" somewhere involved.

Cam knows the world well and he asked me what I wanted the system to be able to do. Here was my list (in no particular order):

• Be able to create a character in about 5 minutes
• Have the feeling of character power analogous to going from Level 1 to Level 20 and back again in the same session. Essentially being able to do epic things when the conditions are right, but the consequences can still be super deadly.
• Have a story narrative exchange economy like the Plot Point system in Cortex. I love the free-form ability to create things as a player that wouldn't normally fit into any rules.
• Make failing fun.
• Roll a lot of dice, because rolling a lot of dice is fun.
• Use normal/polyhedral dice, so everyone can play.

And frankly I think he and Amanda nailed every single one. The choice was to basically use Fate Accelerated and change the bonuses or ratings to dice. We use the same set of approaches as Fate: Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, Sneaky. Each approach gets a die rating, assigning the following array however is appropriate for the character: d10, d8, d8, d6, d6, d4. 

In place of skills or classes or whatever, we have disciplines. For player characters these are: Combat & Tactics, Covert Ops, Mystic Arts, Research & Development, Social Engineering, and Fringe. You pick 3 to put dice in, and the rest are treated as d4. The die ratings are d10, d8, and d6.

Next you create aspects for your character, just like in Fate. And you also create stunts. To provide the economy piece, he ported over the doom pool idea from Cortex Plus, and we call it demon dice. They're a temptation. A way to cheat with an immediate consequence. The player, after they've rolled and found out the result, can use demon dice to change the result. They're d6's, and they can add up to 3d6 on any particular roll. If they roll a demon die, the DM gets a demon die for their pool. Demon dice are always replenished every round.

Like with Fate Points, we have Faith Dice. These are d6's, and used to invoke aspects. 

There are no compels in Faith Corps. Instead players can use the Create an Advantage action to discover their opponent's Trouble aspect or conditions and invoke them to use against their opponent. They can create free invocations using this aspect too, once the aspect is known, for future use.

Instead of stress and stress tracks, we have hits and conditions. Hits are like stress. If the player attacks their opponent, and the attack roll is higher than the defend roll, the difference is how many hits this opponent takes. They have condition boxes to soak these up. A mild condition soaks 5 hits, moderate 10, and severe 15. 

I won't explain all the rules, you can buy our book for that! It does really play very similarly to Fate, using polyhedrals instead of Fudge dice, and a few other tweaks. The good news I have found with it is that it's fairly easy to convert Fate material to Faith Corps. 

Currently there is no setting-neutral version of the rules. An SRD has been talked about, but carving out the time has been a slog. This blog is meant to provide ideas around using Faith Corps, and releasing free materials for it.

I also have a Patreon where I'm creating content for Faith Corps that includes adventures for the Demon Hunters: A Comedy of Terrors setting, and adapting the rules for other settings. I am a huge nerd for 80's Saturday morning cartoon settings, and the first one I'm working on is He-Man. That'll be in the next post.

We ride!