I’ve been thinking about making a FitD hack for a while now after getting back into Blades. I’m personally just interested in getting my feet wet with game design, and I really love the FitD system. So I’ve been toying around with a couple ideas in my head to try my hand at, even if it only ever amounts to amateur work. That being said, what do you folks think of a FitD game utilizing the SCP Foundation world lore?
Here are my kinda high level ideas for how I would approach the hack:
Crewbooks > Organization Sheet - The party would select which organization that they wish to be a team for. The Crew Advances would represent skills that the organization they work for have passed along, while Crew Upgrades would be access to more permissions from the organization. These are the ideas I have for the organizations:
The Foundation - This would be the ‘default’ organization (similar to how Shadows are the ‘default’ Crew). This specializes in, well, Securing and Containing anomalous artifacts, individuals, or phenomena for the purpose of Protecting earth.
The Serpant’s Hand - This organization goes out to Secure individuals for the individual’s own protection against other Organizations/Factions. They Contain artifacts or phenomena to study and understand them.
Unusual Incidents Unit - A subsection of the FBI. It would very much play like an X-Files type of unit who seek to explain the unexplainable.
Global Occult Coalition - This is a big enough part in the SCP lore that I feel would need including, but unfortunately I think it occupies a very similar space to the UIU above.
Chaos Insurgency - This militaristic splinter group that traces its origins to the Foundation would seek to Secure and Contain artifacts and individuals in an attempt to weaponize them.
Marshal, Carter, & Dark - Finally, this organization seeks to profit (or more to gain and maintain power) through unusual artifacts and phenomena.
Factions > Groups of Interest - Factions in this game would largely be similar to that of Blades in structure, except of course that there isn’t a map of Duskwall to advise which group would operate in which area. The Groups of Interest in the SCP lore are largely global in scale, and as such they would be likely enough to pop up in any given area. I would still assign them a Tier, and the player’s team would gain and lose status with them. Since the various GOIs have established relationships in the SCP lore, the starting status with these groups would be set by the Organization, and could be shifted up or down by player choice (instead of all groups starting at 0 and moving up or down by player choice). Having -3 Status with a GOI is likewise handled differently (see Acclaim below).
Scores > Cases - The party selects their cases by their interest in them rather than being specifically assigned cases by the Organization. These retain the same structure as a Score but lead to some changes with Heat, Rep, and Coin.
Heat & Rep > Acclaim - The team scores an amount of Acclaim based on the size of the Case they take on. This is used to advance to the next Tier in the Organization. If the Case goes sideways and the team doesn’t deal with it well, their Acclaim drops. Having -3 Status with another GOI decreases Acclaim simply by that GOI showing up (which they likely will unless the PCs take actions to keep their involvement hidden). Finishing a Case with negative Acclaim will cause the PCs to lose 1 downtime action (instead of being at War with a Faction) in addition to reducing their total Acclaim. Acclaim rolls over, meaning a team can lose Hold or Tier when a job goes poorly.
Coin > I’m not entirely sure yet - Coin is definitely an important part of Blades, and as such if I remove it there will be a whole lot of stuff to factor in and handle. As of right now I haven’t come up with a terribly good idea for what (if anything) to replace it with. Making money from going off and dealing with paranormal threats doesn’t quite fit with most of the Organizations involved.
As for Actions, and Downtime, I would of course change these to suite the game world, but I don’t imagine that they’ll be too radically different from that of Blades itself. Playbooks likewise would be built up around the types of daring field agents that go out and deal with existential threats on a regular
Touchstones: SCP-wiki (obviously), X-FIles, and d20 Dark Matter.
So, do you folks think that this is a decent start to an idea, or would my efforts be best spent elsewhere? Would you be interested in an X-Files like hack of Blades that deals with paranormal problems and globe spanning groups? Do you have ideas that I completely missed and need to reevaluate?
I am only tangentially familiar with SCP Foundation, but add one to the Piqued Interest tally on my behalf.
Regarding Coin: It may be productive to take a look at how @Sean’s Vigilantes supplement for BitD tweaks that part of the economy. The gist: scores/missions earn Rep instead of Coin, and crews/teams can spend Rep as well as Coin for downtime actions.
In the case of Vigilantes, the in-fiction premise is that the PCs are generating relationships with the people they are protecting; Rep as a currency represents favors, gifts, and the like provided by a grateful and/or like-minded community. Translate that to the networking, politicking, bureaucratic navigation, and ladder-work endemic to large organizations, and you may not have to alter the mechanical economy as much as you fear.
I’m in favor of the idea, and was actually considering doing something similar but setting shifted (to fantasy, because magic is a great equalizer.)
I do think you will have an interesting time if players each control one individual agent. Most SCP first encounters tend to be horribly and randomly lethal or at least permanently debilitating. Not sure if you would want to tone that down (I roll to Resist being trapped in an inescapable extra-dimensional space) or have the players just control multiple agents and just grind them up they go (like Paranoia.)
Also, if the players are going to control research staff at SCP, or be in other groups like Chaos Insurgency, you will also have to think of the gameplay ramifications of some of the SCPs (such as instantly removing all Harm for free, making someone a genius in a subject, or giving them access to a weapon that can kill anyone who looks at it.)
Oh, removing Coin and filling that mechanical role with Rep is a great idea!
Vigilantes still has Coin and requires it for gaining Tier, so I hadn’t considered incorporating elements into this idea yet. Now that you mention it, I think that there’s some playbook advances for Vigilantes that I could probably incorporate into the core rules of this idea. Spending Acclaim on extra DT actions, or bonuses to DT rolls seems like it would make a whole lot of sense. By taking extra time to work on side projects or pulling in favors for said projects would slow down the team’s progress within the Organization.
You’re absolutely right about the expendability of characters in the SCPverse. I’ve always had the sensation that that is a major contributing factor to why I haven’t seen much in the way of a TTRPG picking up on the lore (TTRGPs often involve the protagonists succeeding, whereas a lot of SCP stories involve a lot of death and failure). I’m thinking that to solve that these three options would be best:
Cohorts a-plenty - D-Class personnel (or their equivalents in the other Orgs) could be a special cohort type that each Org starts with. They automatically gain +1 scale, but take -1 quality. Healing this cohort would likely be easier than healing other cohorts.
PCs die… a LOT - One sensation I get from BitD is that it’s common (or at least far more common than most games I’m used to) for a character to die. The continuation of the Crew shifts the focus enough to make that a lot more tenable than what I’m used to, so letting PCs die frequently might be an option that works.
Just lower the lethality - This is currently my favorite option. Like you suggested, PCs can still Resist consequences. A lot of the terrifying lethality of skips can still be shown by narrating the consequences of the SCPs and then leaving it to the players to resist those consequences (or more appropriately to dodge them). This brings up a good point to consider in that I might tune the Attributes to evoke more of an image about avoiding danger than specifically resisting it (and may even call that dice roll an Avoidance roll instead of Resistance).
You definitely have a great point that the SCPs with some fundamentally game changing effects will need to be considered. I was definitely planning on filling up descriptions and explanations of mechanics with references to them (e.g. instead of referring to fighting a demon with the discussion on zero effect, I was going to use 682).
Thankfully Thaumiel class SCPs are less common, and often have narrative reason for being inaccessible most of the time. Creating a modified version of the Acquire Asset action will be how I think I’ll handle getting useful SCPs. Then I’ll spill a lot of ink for the GM on how to handle them, with specific example SCPs.
going all BoB might be a good way to combine 2 and 3 - assignable squads of lower-ranked (and maybe D ranked?) agents, supervised by one or two senior agents, so the players could switch to a squad-person if their characters die horribly or “go missing” in a potentially lethal way.
Hey, I know I’m late to this party but how did this wind up going? My group is playing a campaign in the SCP universe using the system from the game Monster Of The Week. It’s pretty good but it’s totally off rails and only tangentially like what a FitD take on that world could be. I’m really interested because our GM, schooled as he is on all things SCP, is thinking of swapping systems.