Fateweaver's Quest

by Kris Schnee

  Fateweaver's Quest

  by Kris Schnee

  Cover art by Tithi Luadthong, https://www.shutterstock.com/g/tithi+luadthong.

  © 2018 Kristopher M. Schnee. All rights reserved.

  This work is based on Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition (found at http://www.faterpg.com/), products of Evil Hat Productions, LLC, developed, authored, and edited by Leonard Balsera, Brian Engard, Jeremy Keller, Ryan Macklin, Mike Olson, Clark Valentine, Amanda Valentine, Fred Hicks, and Rob Donoghue, and licensed for the author's use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

  Fate™ is a trademark of Evil Hat Productions, LLC. The Powered by Fate logo is © Evil Hat Productions, LLC and is used with permission. The Fate Core font is © Evil Hat Productions, LLC and is used with permission. The Four Actions icons were designed by Jeremy Keller.

  Contents

  Words of Fate

  1. Anomaly At Edda V

  2. Character Creation

  3. Clotho

  4. The Star

  5. Wind Shrine

  6. Monster Lair

  7. Toys

  8. Governor

  9. The Gathering

  10. Dragon Hunting

  11. Endgame

  12. Fateweaver's End

  13. Next Campaign

  Author's Note

  About the Author/Other Works

  Words Of Fate

  Some books in this genre ("GameLit" or "LitRPG") are based on a game rule system invented for the story. This one uses elements of a real one you can play: the "Fate" tabletop RPG. The rules are not always applied fairly or accurately to this book's characters, though! See the Author's Note for comments on that.

  Interested in the system? See the Fate SRD or download the core book. Also see "Fate Accelerated" for a simpler variant, and online and physical game stores for many Fate books and spinoffs. The specific rule variants used in this story are offered freely with no restrictions.

  Ratings and reviews are important to independent authors. Please consider rating this book so others can find it!

  1. Anomaly At Edda V

  "Captain, if there's a heavy radiation source out there then I'm not the best man for the job."

  Captain Jonathan Thorn always moved swiftly or not at all. Right now only his eyes flicked up and down as he floated above his command console. He was looking Miles Hochen over as if judging how much momentum the ship would gain by flinging him backward to Alpha Centauri. "That was an order, Hochen. As soon as we land, you go check on it. And take Callahan."

  Miles saluted. The Silver Hart wasn't military, but Thorn was, and he'd demanded full discipline. Miles retreated from the Command and Information Center, pulling himself hand over hand down a hallway lined with sweet potato plants. He floated swiftly toward the little infirmary to swallow a pill so that he wouldn't vomit in panic.

  The room had a little porthole that let him see dwarf planet Tafl, fifth and final world orbiting a red dwarf star named Edda. It was a dull rock speckled black and white, with just enough gravity that the Silver Hart could land on it rather than harpooning it. Even so, landing was going to be nerve-wracking. The ship was a long, flexible truss with the habitat at one end, construction gear in the middle, and at the other end, too close for comfort, a giant death-spewing fusion reactor. Miles had signed on with the understanding that he wouldn't be doing reactor maintenance. But now there was something leaking rads on the planet itself, and the captain had woken him up to poke at it.

  And he was wearing a red shirt.

  Miles steadied his breathing. He had to wear a spacesuit soon and he needed a calm stomach. No one else was around to help. He drifted out of the infirmary, down the hall of plants, and into the ship's main habitat.

  The large inflated cylinder was along the ship's axis, so its spin created even less gravity here than in the infirmary. Entering the room gave him the sense that he was dropping gently from the middle of the wall and onto the curved floor. It was always a little unnerving, but at least he wasn't alone now. Eva Callahan sat with her muscular legs hooked around a bench as she checked a spacesuit. She said, "Good morning, huh? He could have at least made coffee."

  "I know," said Miles. He rubbed at the sore, pockmarked spots on his pale skin where he'd had various tubes and wires hooked up to him until an hour ago. The Hart was eerily silent but for the hum of machinery. All around them were the sleek, frigid cryotubes in which they'd crossed the void. Of the 200 assorted crew, 195 were still frozen inside the things, which lined this room and several of the other pressurized compartments. Occasionally a capsule failed. "I'm glad you made it."

  Eva hadn't bothered putting her shirt on yet and wore only the modest shorts and bra permitted for icy sleep. She smiled while looking down at her suit's gloves. "You too. But do you remember what happened before we went into stasis?"

  Miles blinked, stunned. Before leaving the Centauri system, and after all the prayer and ritual and fortune-telling that went with launching a major royal construction mission, Miles and Eva had set up a game in the galley. Not strip poker (her first suggestion, half-serious) or chess or a video game, but "Fate".

  Fate was one of the old storytelling games played with dice and writing tablets, an oddity from the early computer age. Eva had made the game interesting despite it being so primitive, because she knew how to create adventures with just a few rules and her words. The fantasy campaign went on for several sessions in the days when they'd just left orbit and much of the crew was still awake. The trouble was that Eva had wanted to get in a last round before sleep time, but Captain Thorn had made a surprise inspection and chewed them out for "gambling".

  "I already printed a new set of lucky dice," Eva said, and carefully held out a set of four unusual plastic cubes. Instead of numbers they had a "+" on two sides, a "-" on two, and nothing on the others. "He even said mine weren't 'regulation dice', as though there were an approved type for sinful wicked gambling aboard his ship."

  Miles said, "Are you saying he thawed us early, and picked us to check out this anomaly, because he's ticked at us for supposedly breaking a rule decades ago?"

  "Yeah, well, he had plenty of time to sleep on it. And I guess he's got backup chemists and engineers if you or I get eaten by space monsters."

  Miles tried to laugh at that. "Don't give the Maker any ideas. Got my suit?"

  "Yours is wedged against that locker. Are you okay with doing this, Miles?"

  "I haven't got a choice. The suit is rad-shielded and we've got the drones." There'd been too much signal interference to steer them effectively from orbit, but from the surface humans could hopefully use the gadgets from a respectful distance. "We'll check out whatever the anomaly is, rule it out as harmless, then move on with the construction mission we signed up for."

  A computer voice echoed through the ship. "Landing burn in ten minutes."

  Miles and Eva floated aft to the main airlock and readied their suits and equipment. The Hart stopped rotating, removing any sense of gravity at all. Then an engine burn pushed them against the aft wall, creating some frightening shuddering. After the long, low roar ended, all was still except for their own gentle low-gravity bobbing and a loose strap on Eva's suit, which Miles reached out to fix. "Let's go," he said.

  * * *

  "The first humans on Tafl! Want to roll and see who gets in the First Words?" Eva grinned through her faceplate.

  "Did you seriously bring your dice here?" The airlock was depressurizing even now.

  Captain Thorn broke in on the shared radio channel. "Cut the blasted chatter!"

  Eva switched to the suit-to-suit channel. "Stuffed them in here for luck," she said, patting the suitcase
that held her drone antenna and computer. "Can't roll them well in this gravity. But seriously, you want the honor of the First Words?"

  In a way, Thorn had done them an honor by sending them to Tafl's surface before anyone else. It was against policy, and terrible luck, for any authority figure to dictate what the first explorer said on a new world. It was also customary to make the Words something respectful. Everyone knew of the day that a disgruntled spaceman engraved into history the words I banged Captain Robinson's sister and several murders ensued.

  Miles shook his head. The outer door opened onto the mottled world's surface, twenty meters below them. He'd once been afraid of heights, but one got used to them in his line of work. He looked back worriedly toward the ship's reactor and saw that its shield canopy had extended, keeping him out of its line of sight. They lowered some small crates, then each gripped a cargo cable with one hand. They jumped out to let gravity tug them down.

  Eva landed first as planned, rose gracefully from her crouch, and took the required one step. The land around them was flat, the basin of some relatively new crater that had wiped out eons of previous ones. Its patchy black and white stone reminded Miles of a chessboard. Eva intoned over the public channel, "The game is afoot!"

  "Fair enough," Miles said privately. "Certainly better than This planet brought to you by the cool, refreshing taste of -- followed by the sound of a punch to the head."

  "Your move."

  He shuddered as he looked along the desolate plain. The unknown radiation source was kilometers ahead, over the horizon, but he imagined it burning his eyes away even from here.

  He took a sample of the stony ground and fed it into a scanner. Eva peered at her computer and said, "We'll need the actual geologists awake to confirm it, but this data matches the orbital scan so far. Mining should work as planned, once we confirm the surface is safe."

  Miles nodded. He set up the scooters and they wheeled away from the ship. For distances of a few kilometers, a little two-wheeler with inflated tires and a motor was the best way to travel, even if it tended to make them bounce and glide with every bump. Walking in a spacesuit meant for airless worlds wasn't easy. On their scooters the pair cautiously rolled ahead, until Hart was just a line in the distance. Miles kept checking the radiation readings. Here was a good place to stop. He reported in to Hart and gestured for Eva to get out the kangaroo drones.

  She unfolded the two robots to have them hop along the ground, wandering in the anomaly's general direction. "Seems like a pinpoint source," she said. "The electronics are holding up without much of that interference we had from orbit. Maybe a small but rich pocket of uranium ore? That could be useful." She deployed a little flying robot too, one that could stay aloft with only puffs of compressed air.

  The miniature planet was oddly warm for its size and had a magnetic field, suggesting a molten core. "Strange geology here, but I don't think that stuff is ever lumped into one spot."

  "Oh sure. There was this one freakishly dense deposit on Earth that got used for the first fission bombs and..." Eva glanced back at him as he winced in fear. "Never mind."

  The little robots bounced generally toward the source, mapping the radiation field. She said, "It's not as intense as the first readings, but I'm getting static. We should move up. It's safe."

  He said nothing, and let them advance another 500 meters. Eva checked her signals again, then said, "What do you make of these readings?"

  Miles looked at her computer tablet. The screen showed a triangle of plain white stone about four meters across and ringed by six boulders. "That's weird. Why didn't we see it from orbit?"

  "We weren't looking for geometric patterns. Failed our perception roll." They both fell silent as they sent the robots to inspect the area more closely. "And the radiation is lower here than in the immediate area around it."

  "A hole in the field? Let's get a full-spectrum scan."

  Eva nodded. "Here's what it looks like in UV and IR."

  The view flickered to a surreal color scheme. There was a white triangle on the ground as before, but now... now there was an intricate design around it. Angular marks like circuitry decorated all of the surrounding ground and formed a hexagon with lines pointing inward at the triangle. The boulders were covered with corkscrew designs.

  Eva swore. "I don't even want to say it, but that looks..."

  "Artificial?"

  She nodded and he heard her swallow a lump in her throat.

  Captain Thorn radioed in, distant and tinny despite the relay satellite overhead. "Report."

  Eva whispered over the local commlink. "Miles, he'll order us back and send others! Maybe take the glory for himself! We have to check this out in person."

  The blood drained from his face. He suspected the same thing as her, that they'd really found something alien after humanity had been through so much disappointment and so many hoaxes. "But it's through a ring of death," he said.

  "No! The rads won't hurt us if we just pass through quickly. But we have to move now!"

  Thorn said, "You will update us on your status immediately."

  Miles looked at Eva's pleading face, barely visible through the visor. Her logic was right, from the standpoint of wanting to go poke the dangerous thing, which was more or less how humans had gotten past the savanna days. He forced himself not to stare at the faintly clicking rad meter on his scooter and said, "I'll be behind you."

  Miles spoke to the ship. "Hart, scout party. We're mapping the area and see a possible ore deposit. We have some readings we need to confirm at close range. More details shortly. Out."

  Eva leaned close to give him an awkward, silent hug.

  She drove ahead and Miles followed, trying to keep pace. He shuddered as his rad-meter rose but then it rapidly fell again, putting him inside the dangerous ring. Ahead lay the triangular site he'd seen onscreen. He whistled. "What are you going to do, though; knock?"

  Eva's eyes lit up. "Yes. Yes, I am." She hopped off of her scooter and scanned the area with her camera, then approached the ring with one hand outstretched. "We come in peace! Is anyone home?"

  Miles tensed, wanting to run after her. She actually walked onto the triangle and crouched, feeling it with her gloved hands. "Friend. Open sesame. Heh, got any other magic words to suggest?"

  Miles stepped closer. "You're reading a lot into this. If it really is artificial, maybe we've just found a monument. We've become the first to see this; now let's go back and report."

  She looked up at him and said, "What if it really is a door? Wouldn't you want to be the first to open it?"

  Before he could answer, the ground rumbled. Earthquake! he thought. "Eva, get away!"

  She jumped, which launched her into the air in his direction. Miles ducked. He grabbed her computer pad and patched into the bots' UV and IR view, just in time to see the lines on the ground flicker and shift. Then the triangle shattered from the center. Dozens of fragments sprayed outward like a swarm of bees, coming straight at him and Eva.

  "Run!" he said. "Hart, this is Engineer Hochen, and there's a swarm of machines or something! Requesting emergency aid."

  "Say again?" said Thorn through heavy static.

  Eva landed but stumbled. "Aliens!" she explained.

  Something struck Miles' back and a pressure warning flickered in his display. He called out for Eva to duck. A pinpoint of lightning seared through his suit and made him collapse. He landed slowly on the mottled ground of Tafl, convulsing, and blacked out.

  2. Character Creation

  Miles woke in darkness. Open space, no stars, and his helmet was missing! He panicked and flailed, but there was somehow air here. He drifted, shouting, seeing nothing, until words appeared. They floated in front of him as though projected on a screen, white on black:

  [Congratulations, human. You have been chosen.]

  "Huh?!"

  The words rippled and reformed to say: [Let us play. Describe your character.]

  Miles gaped. Either he was dead
or hallucinating, or an alien force was talking to him as though for some bizarre job interview. "Who are you? What's going on?"

  [Perhaps we are not being clear. We have not seen your kind before, human. We will examine you, by playing with Fate. What are your aspects? What skills do you choose? Here is a list of the available options.]

  A list of thirteen skills appeared, saying:

  [Athletics

  Charm

  Craft

  Healing

  Magic

  Melee

  Mind

  Notice

  Ride

  Shoot

  Stealth

  Survival

  Toughness]

  Miles was stunned. "You are... aliens studying humans, using the rules of a game?"

  [We require structure. Your documents provide an interesting one.]

  "Documents. Then you've read files from our computers." He blinked. "Eva's computer! You got the rules from there! Where is she? Is she all right? What about the others?" He winced as he realized he shouldn't have mentioned the rest of the crew. If he was still alive and sane, then he was in the clutches of dangerous creatures who might want to "play with" everyone else on the Hart.

  [Create a character, human.]

  "Where are you? Show yourself. We mean you no harm."

  [We will not reveal ourselves, at this time.]

  A table rippled into existence in the void, looking like a hand-drawn piece of furniture brought to life. A sketch-like floor appeared beneath it, along with some paper documents seemingly glued to or drawn on the table. They listed the skills again and told him:

  [Rules for this campaign:

  -One skill at 3, two at 2, three at 1

  -Three aspects (descriptive phrases)

  -Physical endurance determined by Toughness, mental/magical endurance by Mind

  -Stunts earned during play]