Anyone familiar with my work and online presence in prior years knows that I’m a big fan of the Marvel Super-Heroes Adventure Game (aka “Marvel Saga”) from TSR/Wizards of the Coast. I think it was the best iteration of the ill-fated SAGA game engine and a pretty awesome superhero RPG to boot. Elements of it were certainly inspirational in my later work, particularly ICONS.

Which brings me to the idea of FATE and the Marvel “Fate Deck”. Before I started using Plaintext and Dropbox on my iPhone, I jotted the following down in one the various beat-up notebooks I carried around:

FATE Aspects & the Fate Deck

Discard the standard trump rules from Marvel. In their place, characters have aspects, from “The Strongest One there Is!” to “Friendly Neighborhood Web-Slinger” or whatnot. This can include relationships, origins, nicknames, and all of the usual range of different aspects in FATE.

Tagging an aspect allows a player to flip an additional card from the top of the Fate Deck and add it to any played cards for an action. The player can also choose a trump suit; if the flipped card is of that suit, flip the next card, and so forth until a card not of that suit comes up. All flipped cards are added together for the action.

The Narrator can choose to play a card from the Doom Pool at any time to compel one of the player’s aspects. A player can choose to ignore this by discarding a card from his hand, but the discard also goes into the Doom Pool (along with the original Doom Card). Players can also choose to impose temporary compels or setbacks on their own characters in order to empty out the Doom Pool; each setback removes one card from the pool.

Players tagging their characters’ aspects requires only a suitable description of how the aspect applies to the given situation. Tagging other characters’ aspects may also require an action to learn of the aspect, or an action to apply a temporary aspect—like “Blinded” or “Angered”—to that character.