Hook, Line and Sinker / Fate Duo in XOver | World Anvil
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Hook, Line and Sinker / Fate Duo

The objective of Fate Duo Mechanic is randomization of events to add in the "initially unexpected," allowing the players to have more creative responsibility for scene events. Importantly, this allows the GM to function more as a player, or - more accurately - both players to function as co-facilitators.   At the beginning of the Session, the players determine what their current objective is resulting in a Scene OR Session Aspect. Source of a session aspect can be determined by looking at a World/Campaign Aspect, unresolved Session Aspect, a Character's Aspect, or any combination thereof.   Say both characters has a Team benefactor who provides goodies... and jobs. At the beginning of the session, agree that you'll compel that aspect, and come up with a mission based on that Aspect. In this case, Mr. Benefactor has sent you Off to The City to find... someone. Fate Duo specializes in generating details as we go along. We now have our scene or session framework!   The first phase of creating scenes, sessions and scenarios is to generate the basic encounter, what has to happen next, and any possible twists or surprises. Writers call this method "Hook, Line, and Sinker." An alternate style is "Seeds and Hooks" which seems to be favored in World Anvil in their Plot templates.  
  • Hook: What's the draw? How do we get the character(s) involved in the encounter?
  • Line: What do they have to do to fulfill the hook and continue on their merry way?
  • Sinker: Or stinker, what complications pop up? Because rarely are things as they seem...
  The first two elements are necessary, but the last is optional - not every encounter or adventure element will have a Sinker, but the Hook and Line is pretty necessary.   Anything can serve as inspiration. One of the tools that I have available is "650 Fantasy City Encounter Seeds & Plots," 100 of which are available here. The key is to rephrase any encounter idea as Hook, Line, Sinker. Let's start an example.   The PCs are on a mission to retrieve Mr. X. The "650 Fantasy City Encounter Seeds & Plots" is consulted and they receive this result:   The PCs arrive at an over-visited shrine-city in the middle of a celebration attended by clerics from every corner of the land. All inns are full, it is forbidden to stay outside of the city and there is nowhere to stay. The mobs of homeless people are not kind to strangers either. How can the party survive the night?   So the elements are broken down like this:
  • Hook: "The PCs arrive at an over-visited shrine-city in the middle of a celebration attended by clerics from every corner of the land." They were sent here by their benefactor to find Mr. X.
  • Line: They need a place to stay for the night; they must survive the night.
  • Sinker: "All inns are full, it is forbidden to stay outside of the city and there is nowhere to stay. The mobs of homeless people are not kind to strangers either."
  The next step is to generate 1 to 3 Aspects which form the Event Seed.
  • Find and retrieve Mr. X during a city-wide celebration.
  • Survive a night inside the city walls amidst the unkind homeless.
  These aspect(s) are the Event Seed. Fate Duo convention holds that when a Seed is suggested by any player that it become "dramatically obligated," that is, you're not trying to figure out how to get out of the proposed storyline, but you try to figure out why your character(s) are actually in the story and actively attempt to build the story, ergo the Initially Compelled Aspect.   So we have our Event Seed. We proceed next to the Fate Duo Oracle.


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