I’m terribly bad about posting game recaps, but I need to at least do a good job of tracking advancement 🙂

Last week we finished our four game. Our advancement history is as follows:

• Game One: Minor Milestone
• Game Two: Minor Milestone
• Game Three: Major Milestone
• Game Four: Minor Milestone

I’ll try to create a page with dates and better tracking. For now we just have this blog post.

Advancement Rules

Excerpted from Fate Core:

Minor Milestones

Minor milestones usually occur at the end of a session of play, or when one piece of a story has been resolved.

During a minor milestone, you can choose to do one (and only one) of the following:

• Switch the rank values of any two skills, or replace one Average (+1) skill with one that isn’t on your sheet.
• Change any single stunt for another stunt.
• Purchase a new stunt, provided you have the refresh to do so. (Remember, you can’t go below 1 refresh.)
• Rename one character aspect that isn’t your high concept.
• In addition, you can also rename any moderate consequences you have, so that you can start them on the road to recovery, presuming you have not already done so.

Significant Milestones

Significant milestones usually occur at the end of a scenario or the conclusion of a big plot event (or, when in doubt, at the end of every two or three sessions).

In addition to the benefit of a minor milestone, you also gain both of the following:

• One additional skill point, which you can spend to buy a new skill at Average (+1) or increase an existing skill by one rank.
• If you have any severe consequences, you can rename them to begin the recovery process, if you haven’t already.

Major Milestones

A major milestone should only occur when something happens in the campaign that shakes it up a lot—the end of a story arc (or around three scenarios), the death of a main NPC villain, or any other large-scale change that reverberates around your game world.

Achieving a major milestone confers the benefits of a significant milestone and a minor milestone, and all of the following additional options:

• If you have an extreme consequence, rename it to reflect that you’ve moved past its most debilitating effects. This allows you to take another extreme consequence in the future, if you desire.
• Take an additional point of refresh, which allows you to immediately buy a new stunt or keep it in order to give yourself more fate points at the beginning of a session.
• Advance a skill beyond the campaign’s current skill cap, if you’re able to, thus increasing the skill cap.
  Rename your character’s high concept if you desire.

Skill Columns

During character creation, you organized your skills into a pyramid. You don’t have to stick to that for character advancement.

However, there’s still a limitation you have to deal with, skill columns. This means you can’t have more skills at a certain rank than you have at the rank below it. So if you have three Good columns, you have at least three Average (+1) skills and at least three Fair (+2) skills to support your three Good (+3) skills.

This last Thursday we spent a session doing group campaign creation, which included the Lifepath exercise shown the this picture. We’re using Fate Core and Venture City Superpowers. Should be a great campaign!

Check out the campaign charter and campaign page.

Gaslight Heroes Lifepath (Click to Enlarge)