Bundle of Holding: Fate Worlds and Toolkits

Let’s just dispense right away with any pretense of being neutral or unfazed by this bundle. I’m stoked about this bundle! FATE is a really good system and Evil Hat has done a fantastic job at building out a fantastic range around it. This bundle will get you most of the items from the range.

The first tier of the bundle will set you back $9.95 and will get you everything you need to play FATE. Take note, Humble Bundle. Oh, take note…

There are three versions of the FATE rules. It comes in the standard core edition, as well as an accelerated and condensed edition. I’ve not tried the condensed version yet, but I’ve played the Core and Accelerated versions, and have loved both. The core rules are very flexible, but there’s no pre-set setting information included in the books. This means that these otherwise solid books are, thematically, very dry.

That’s where the Toolkits come in. These are guidebooks for creating your own settings for FATE. The toolkits include:

• System Toolkit
• Adversary Toolkit
• Horror Toolkit
• Space Toolkit
• Accessibility Toolkit

There’s a ton of content here to help you hack the system to really suit the sort of game you intend to run. I like that Evil Hat encourages you to make the system your own and tweak it as necessary. The ability to do this is a big part of the appeal of tabletop RPGs, and it’s cool to see a company embracing this.

The value of this first tier is pretty fantastic.

The second tier is priced at a threshold. At the time of writing, that price is $35.30, which will get you the following items in addition to everything from the first tier:

I actually have most of these books in physical form and I really rate them. There is one thing that sticks out as a bit disingenuous, though. The bundle of 45 FATE Worlds of Adventure books is listed as being worth $188. That sounds great, but it’s not quite true. If you head on over to DriveThruRPG, the FATE Worlds titles are all actually listed as Pay What You Want. This means that you can take them for free, if you wish. I’m definitely not saying you should, but it makes the listed price of $188 a bit tenuous. That said, the FATE Worlds book are really cool, each containing a self-contained mini-setting to use with the game.

of the remaining books, there are a few real highlights. FATE of Cthulhu is a full, FATE-based game set in the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. Shadow of the Century is a successor to the classic Spirit of the Century. Whilst Spirit was set in the pulp era of the 1920s, Shadow is set in the halcyon years of the 1980s.

The other books are good as well, but these are the ones I am most likely to actually play, along with some of the cool concepts in the FATE Worlds selection.

Even taking out the dubious $188 that the bundle page claims you would pay for the FATE Worlds books, this is still a really good deal. The baseline bundle, at less than $10 is a fantastic entry point into the system and gets you everything you need to play, as well as tools to help you develop your setting. The full bundle does cost a lot more, at a little over $35, but is really good for GMs intending to use these settings and system modifcations in their own games. I’d heartily recommend either tier of this bundle. If I didn’t already have most of the books, I’d likely splash out for the whole thing.

You can click here to visit the bundle page over at Bundle of Holding.