COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

FATE + FICTION By Gary E. Weller

is our line of original and
I woke. The room was unfamiliar. It was all too bright. My head hurt.
classic short stories.
Situations, characters, and ‚John,‛ the warm and soothing voice came from somewhere, ‚you’re in
other elements from the Sioux Falls General Hospital. There was an accident.‛
story are expressed as That explains the strange smell and the bright lights. How did I get to
Fate RPG Aspects. Read Sioux Falls? Who’s John? My jaw and throat hurt as I tried to put words out.
and enjoy the stories on ‚Take it easy, John.‛ Her face came into view. It was soft and worn. She had
their own, then mix the been at the job for years based on the crow’s feet around her eyes. Freckles formed
Aspects you like into your an odd pattern on her face. Red hair that was slowly greying was tied back. Green
own Fate Core or Fate
eyes, pale skin, pinkish lips. I could easily love waking to her forever. I felt at ease
Accelerated game!
around her. I wanted to take the wrinkles out of her brow. I wanted to ease her pain.
She checked on me. Held my hand and seemed to understand that I wanted
to speak. She fed me something cold and soothing to my throat. I smiled and finally
ASPARAGUS saw her uniquely quirky smile. She was gorgeous. She was my personal beautiful
guiding angel in purple scrubs.
JUMPSUIT Liquid cooled, my throat gave way to my will. I took a deep breath that
We believe in literacy, rattled in my lungs and promptly coughed. New pain laced up through my chest as
curiosity, and creativity. if it were in a corset. A loud beeping came from somewhere. It was annoying and
Through these things obtrusive. The ginger in purple came around and tapped buttons on a machine that
individuals, societies, and was out of my view. Thankfully the noise stopped.
the entire world are
‚I told you to take it easy,‛ her face filled my field of vision. I wanted to fall
enriched and
into that face and bask in its warmth.
transformed. The Fate +
Fiction line was created to ‚A nov…‛ I started. The pain in my throat was terrible. I wrinkled my face
help uphold and promote around the pain and forced the words out. I needed to say them. ‚A novice revenges
these values. the rhythm.‛ My rasps came out softly, but I could tell she got the message.
‚John,‛ her mellow voice came as she stroked my forehead, ‚I don’t know
Building Better Worlds what that means.‛ I felt my eyes go wide. How could she not understand? This was
AsparagusJumpsuit.com important.
‚A novice revenges the rhythm.‛ My voice was stronger this time. ‚How
does each adjacent enthusiasm invest in its worst nostalgia? The trace experiments
over the royal.‛ She had to understand. My ginger angel in purple only smiled at
me.
‚Let me get the doctor, John.‛ I nodded. I wasn’t John, but she seemed to
think that I was. I let her think that if it got my message out.
Fate Core System ‚Below the foul arcade rages a travelled ploy.‛ I agreed with her. She left
Fate Accelerated Edition with a quizzical and concerned face draped over her soft features. If she didn’t
Copyright ©2013 Evil Hat understand the doctor must.
Productions, LLC. My head hurt, someone hit me in the back of the head when I was in the
All rights reserved.
warehouse. Why was I in Sioux Falls? Who’s John? Who got me to the hospital?
A new face came into view. This one had glasses and a mustache. Steel grey
Fate was originally
created by Rob Donoghue hair was close cropped. He was a smoker. He had smoker’s breath.
and Fred Hicks ‚Hello John,‛ the man said. ‚I’m Doctor Long.‛ He passed a bright light over my
eyes and checked the reaction. He was apparently satisfied with the result. ‚Tell me

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 Communication Breakdown Page 2 of 5

Situation Aspects what’s going on.‛

You’re in Sioux Falls I was beginning to get frustrated.
General Hospital. There ‚A novice revenges the rhythm.‛ I urged my exasperation to not come
was an accident out. It did anyway. His face remained neutral. I could still take the stack of chips
Description
in front of him in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em. His poker face was horrible. The
tell was subtle. It was a slight twitch underneath the frame of his glasses that was
obvious before he moved them.
A novice revenges the
‚John,‛ he sounded concerned. ‚You’ve been in an accident.‛ I nodded in
rhythm
understanding. ‚You’re suffering from some sort of expressive aphasia.‛ He
Some sort of expressive
waited for me.
aphasia
‚The raining continuum runs before a breakdown.‛ I nodded to him. He
still didn’t understand. ‚How does each adjacent enthusiasm invest in its worst
nostalgia? The trace experiments over the royal.‛ The doctor only shook his head.
He was such a stupid ape.
‚The moon bounces before the liquor! The reserve unknown inspires a
joke. A criminal characteristic busts the radius.‛ The beeping on the machine
started again. It was inflammatory against my ears. The warehouse, didn’t they
understand that the warehouse held the answer?
Nearly seven billion lives were at stake and a simple doctor couldn’t
understand what I was trying to say. The device was going to go off. It was
inevitable.
‚A novice revenges the rhythm!‛ I urged them again. How didn’t they
understand? ‚The moon bounces before the liquor!‛ I made a fist in the air. There
were tubes in my arm. ‚How does each adjacent enthusiasm invest in its worst
nostalgia?‛
I struggled to get up. Strong hands held me firmly against the bed. I
looked over at my ginger angel. She had a look of concern. She was so beautiful.
I gave up. It was fruitless. The device was going to go unnoticed.
‚The merged antique completes the happening spigot. The soup orbits
under a flexible orbital. The angel suffers the converse sect.‛ The only reaction
was a look of pity.
I resolved that I would die on this backwater planet with these people.
The device would create the singularity and destroy everything around it. It
wouldn’t stop. Everyone was going to die if they didn’t escape.
‚A novice revenges the rhythm.‛ I tried again. It was no use. I felt the
tears well up in my eyes and didn’t hold them back.
‚Oh John,‛ my angel cooed, ‚It’ll be all right. I know it’s hard. We’ll get
through this.‛ I looked up to her and studied her face. I knew we wouldn’t get
through this. I let her think we would. It was the least I could do for her in the
short time we had.

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 Page 3 of 5 Communication Breakdown
About Communication Breakdown Character Aspects
by Berin Kinsman Who’s John
I hope you enjoyed Gary’s story. That would make me happy, and I know it would Whether he’s an
make Gary happy. Yet even if you didn’t, I hope you can see how even a piece of undercover alien, or a
fiction you don’t like can be mined for ideas, and ways that those ideas can be remixed delusion accident victim
and reimaged and used as material for your own Fate RPG game. who only thinks he’s an
undercover alien, the lack
Now let’s deconstruct the story, pick out some of the elements that are present,
of a confirmed identity can
and discuss ways that you might use those as possible Aspects in your own Fate RPG
be Invoked or Compelled
game. Understand that the following interpretations are only my interpretations, and
not the only possible interpretations. The object of Fate+Fiction is to help you learn in a number of ways.
how to mine stories for pieces and parts that you can adapt for your own purposes.
You’re in Sioux Falls
Let’s begin by trying to summarize the story. A man wakes up in the hospital, with
General Hospital. There
what we presume is a nurse hovering over him (she refers to another person as the
was an accident.
doctor, so we can assume she’s not an M.D.). She calls him John, but that’s not his
An established fact, no
name. He’s been in some sort of accident, which results in him speaking in
matter what’s really going
unintelligible gibberish. The hospital staff assumes it’s some sort of brain damage. In
reality, ‚John‛ is an alien trying to save the Earth, and the communication breakdown on.
is a result of damage to his translation device. I really liked that Twilight Zone-style
twist. A novice revenges the
rhythm
The Situations
Some sort of expressive
There are a few Situation Aspects that we can pull out of this story. These Aspects,
aphasia. Or a device
or something like them, can then be adapted to your own Fate game. Let’s take a look.
malfunction. Either way,
You’re in Sioux Falls General Hospital. There was an accident. That pretty he speaks gibberish.
concisely set up the current situation. It begs questions, which can be explored in an
expanded story, about why John’s in South Dakota and why type of accident. My first
thought was, if there’s an alien doomsday device that can destroy the whole planet,
there’s no need for it to be in a typical action-adventure location like New York or
Paris. You can just as easily blow up the Earth from the middle of nowhere, if the
device is that powerful.
A novice revenges the rhythm is a perfect Aspect to describe what the nurse calls
some sort of expressive aphasia and ‚John‛ thinks of as a device malfunction. But what
if it’s more than that? What if ‚John‛, who isn’t named John, really is John and the
brain damage causing the mixed-up speech also leaves him believing that he’s an
alien on a mission to save the Earth? Now we have a whole other story and a
completely different adventure should he decide to not give up, break out of the
hospital, and try to complete his task of getting to the warehouse and halting the
device.

The Characters
Now let’s examine the characters in the story. For your own Fate game you don’t
need to use these exact characters. Look at existing player characters and supporting
characters, and see who might fill the same roles in relation to the Situation Aspects.
Who might the relevant Character Aspects, or something similar, be appended to?
John is a character we don’t know much about, other than what he tells us. He’s
potentially an unreliable narrator. We can’t verify whether what he believes is actually
true. He certainly believes it, and whether we believe him or not gives us two separate
story paths, as described above in the Situation Aspects.

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 Communication Breakdown Page 4 of 5
Consequences My personal beautiful guiding angel in purple scrubs, aka the nurse, is described
Communication in a lot of loving detail, which also makes me think that John is an unreliable narrator.
He spends more time thinking about her than he does with completing his mission,
breakdown
and he seems to give in too easily to her requests to settle down.
A Consequence of the
accident is that the Let’s spin this out to sinister aims, then. Maybe she’s one of the bad guys, and she
character can’t speak knows how to mellow him out and keep him from pursuing his objective. There is a
coherently. This is truth device, and the people she works for planted it. Stop John from interfering, and she
whether it’s because the gets out of there at the last minute. This can spin out further to questions of who she
translating device is
works for, and who John works for, and why anyone would want to blow up a planet,
and what interest aliens would have in the Earth that they’d send an agent to save it.
broken, or John’s suffering
from aphasia due to Doctor Long is an extraneous character, in my opinion, unless there’s something
trauma. else going on not expressed in the story. The ‚guiding angel‛ could have been the
doctor and Long could have been cut, unless he has a purpose in an expanded story, or
Boosts there’s a reason the nurse isn’t a doctor (because she’s a bad guy?).
Translation device Consequences
Allows characters to speak Not every action has a clear or specific consequence, and sometimes we need to
and understand languages. dig a little bit to discover them within a story. Here’s what I found.
Communication breakdown is the result of John taking damage in the accident.
Whether it’s a device malfunction making him unable to speak, brain damage causing
aphasia, or a blow to the head causing him to think he’s an alien, these are all
Consequences of the accident, whatever it might have been.

Boosts
Boosts are another set of elements that don’t always make themselves explicit
within a story. It often takes some probing and a little bit of imagination to discover
something that could potentially provide a Boost in a Fate game.
The translation device gives you the ability to speak and understand languages.
The details of this can be worked out for your own game. Is it an automatic thing, a
fact established in the setting so you can ignore any sort of language barrier? Does it
give a bonus to a skill? Is it Stunt? Does it cover unknown languages, all known
languages, or just one language that it’s been programmed to deal with?

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 Page 5 of 5 Communication Breakdown
Asparagus Jumpsuit
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The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and is Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc
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Communication Breakdown
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abridgment or other form in which an existing work may be recast, transformed or adapted; (c) ‚Distribute‛ means to
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Fate Core System and Fate Accelerated Edition © 2013 by 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.
Fate+Fiction: Communication Breakdown ©2014 Gary Weller, Berin Kinsman. Authors: Gary Weller, Berin Kinsman.
Editor: Stefan Livingstone Shirley.

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