OriginalbarbasSep 11, 2025
Back in 2010 a group of friends gathered to do what, to this date, has been the most ambitious TTRPG campaign I have ever GMed. It was also my first time GMing and my 3rd or 4th TTRPG session. In our mad delirium we gathered 3 GMs and 7 players. After one year of prep we started what became one of the most intense, epic, time intensive (we were all at uni) and weird campaigns I have ever witnessed.

The year was 1868 and the place was a wee fictional town in Japan called Fuyuki. In it, three families of magi gathered to perform a ritual to summon an omnipotent wish granting device, the Holy Grail. In order to gather the required energy to "kickstart it" (fill it) seven magi summon the spirits of seven heroes from the past, present and sometimes the future, and battle until one pair of magus and heroe remains. It is to this final pair that the Grail will grant their wishes. As summoning the heroes is a very complex process, they are simplified to one aspect of their lives and set into classes. An expert with the sword may be summoned into the Saber class and so on. This Holy Grail War was the second of its kind, and the first to include additional magi to fill the seven. At the end, there can be only one.

The PCs were magi and they summoned heroic spirits and, at least on the onset, it was a battle royale.

If this summary feels familiar, it is because it was based on the world of Type-Moon and, in particular, the Fate series. Each of the DMs DMed at least once a week, during 10 months. It was a logistical nightmare and it was tons of fun.

Now, in the year 2025 I have been convinced to, once again, set the stage for another Holy Grail War. I would be the only DM, there are at least 7 people interested in playing and we are all working adults. I will be sharing here the prep I do for the campaign (which I will divide into seasons of two months, two or three months of other things, another two month season and so on), my notes, tips and, when it finally begins, what my players do.

It is going to be a nightmare. It is going to be great. It is going to be an experience. Come with me in this journey into madness.

#TTRPG #FateNB #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse
Show threadOriginalbarbasSep 19, 2025
2/n So, after a week too full of work, I have some time now to continue writing about my upcoming Holy Grail War campaign. I don't think I will disclose much about the plot and setting yet, but I will offer some broad strokes about the foundations of it.

1. It is going to be set after the 5th Holy Grail War and the Dismantling War. The year is going to be either 2018 or 2026, as it is going to be set in the US during... ahem... the Trump dictatorship administration. Yes, this is an important part of the plot.

2. It is going to be set up at Grand Island, Nebraska. I am not from the US, I mainly chose it because it the name of the place sounded cool and I needed an "isolated" place to set up the Holy Grail Wars.

3. Indeed, there are going to be multiple Holy Grail Wars happening simultaneously. The players think they are going to participate in one, and don't know about the other two. As there may be up to 9 players (some other friends wanted to play too), there will be... 23 Heroic Spirits, give or take.

4. I am going to use a system based on OSR philosophy (mainly Into the Odd, as it is the one I am most familiar with), the previous campaign we played and some PbtA elements (mixed with some FitD elements such as clocks and factions and so on).

Today I am going to run an alpha test where I will introduce some of the players to the setting, show them what kind of Heroic Spirits they can summon (inspire them in a way), give them a glimpse on the lore of the actual campaign and test the system. In-game it will actually be a test run by one of the organisers of the Holy Grail War, a Nazi-vampire magus who will kidnap people from the streets, use Nazi medicine/vampire magic to have them summon Heroic Spirits and have them navigate an underground daedalus (she will have summoned actual Daedalus to build it) with ghouls and other vampires to test how the Heroic Spirit summoning went. That is why, even if the system is not working well and there are things missing, it can be explained in-game too, hahaha. Also, none of these PCs are expected to survive due to reasons.

Tomorrow I will probably write another post about how the system actually works and the day after an post-mortem of the test. We will see.

#TTRPG #FateNE #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse
Fuyuki Holy Grail War

The Fuyuki Holy Grail War (冬木の聖杯戦争, Fuyuki no Seihai Sensō?), also called Heaven's Feel (ヘブンズフィール, Hebunzu Fīru?),[1] is a Holy Grail War ritual established in the 1800s in Fuyuki City, Japan, and a central element of the Fate series since its first installment, Fate/stay night. Established by the Three Founding Families of Tohsaka, Matou, and Einzbern, the magical community at large knows it as a competition to win a Holy Grail. Seven magi are chosen by the Grail as Masters and, with...

TYPE-MOON Wiki
Show threadOriginalbarbas
3/n It took me longer than I thought, but today I regained enough energies to think about this properly. So, this Friday I had run an alpha of both the system and the actual campaign for a couple of friends. I have some thoughts on the session. Here we go!

1. My idea of making it a dungeon crawler was not as ideal as I thought. At least if they summon the Heroic Spirits at the very beginning. The HS are quite powerful by design, so they take away the tension of exploring a maze full of danger. Thus, next time the summoning will happen after the maze. The players liked the daedalus (created by Daedalus and with the Minotaur in it), so I will prepare a similar trial for the next beta.

2. There were not so many opportunities to use the Mages' abilities. The abilities, skills and character creation were decent enough, but the HS made these redundant. So, for next time there will be more emphasis on preparing useful skills for the magus. I plan to also write a post on this topic, as it will help me organise my thoughts.

3. The system still needs refining. The sessions of the final game will be different, closer to a marathon (each session will cover a few hours, if it is similar to the previous one we run), while these tests need to cover a lot of ground by design (even if in universe it is only a few hours), so while keeping the sessions short, I will need to prepare good testbeds for the system for longer periods between rests. I will go into more details on the system soonish, but essentially the next beta will have some overhaul. Hopefully I will have a post on this ready by sometime next week, with the improvements I have thought.

4. As the alpha (and future tests) was canon, they actually killed an important NPC, so I need to expand the lore and also adapt some stuff. Which is nice, this way I have "an excuse" to start working on the finer details of that and I can go at them bit by bit. I will write about this once I have more details sorted, but I plan plenty of surprises for my players.

5. They liked the Heroic Spirits, the Magus creation and the session, so all in all it was good. I will likely write another post on how I choose the HS for the betas and what I want to test with them.

This is all for now, they liked it, we all had fun, I was able to sort out what worked, what didn't and some things are still not clear. The next one will probably in a couple of weeks. Or this Friday. Who knows?

#FateNE #FateStayNight #Nasuverse #TTRPG
Sep 21, 2025 at 7:54pmWeb
Show threadOriginalbarbasSep 22, 2025
4/n As my brain is mostly fried for work right now, I will write some bits and pieces on the mechanics of the system I devised for this campaign. This will be a mix of TTRPG system talk, TYPE-MOON's parameter and skill system and my reasoning on the why's and how's. As a disclaimer, I am a physicist and I like nerding about TTRPG systems but... I am no theoritician nor I enjoy coding particularly so, for lack of a better term my reasonings for my decisions are, for better or worse, based on experience, vibes and some statistical theory. Without further ado:

On TYPE-MOON's parameters and skills. Due to lore, the Heroic Spirits of the setting (and other characters, if needed) have stats and skills, actually "inspired" by TTRPGs. There are six parameters (or stats): strength , endurance, agility, magic power, luck and Noble Phantasm. There are also skills, like Riding, Charisma or more exotic ones. The skills can be divided into Class Skills or Personal Skills. As with the parameters, the skills have a rank from F (not normally used, but I include it here for ease of maths) to A, with the possibility of having higher values like F+, A+, A++ and others.

My current design. The system is a mix of OSR design elements (the parameters and rolls), PbtA elements (the skills, the use of boxes) and FOrged in the dark elements (clocks and other things I may incorporate later). I divide the parameters into Heroic Spirit parmeters and Human ones, with the former better than the latter. In practice, it is a scale from 1 to 10, with Human F as 1 and HS A as 10. HS F equals Human C. As of now, the system is a "roll under" system for saving and a "roll above" for actions, with no "roll to hit".

The parameters are used for Save Rolls and to determine the number of boxes (given by the rank, F is 1, A is 6). The difficulty target numbers are calculated by the number times 3. So Human B is 15 and HS A is 27. As of now, the system borrows a bit from the Cypher system as a Human can only attempt Human A actions, as the target number there is 6 x 3 = 18 (on a d20). I still need to think some bits about this, but it is what I have right now. Do I want to implement a way to lower the difficulty "spending boxes" or any other way? I still don't know😅.

I want the skills to also have ranks, but I need to think about how to implement them. A rank provides the effectiveness and the cost at the same time? Or is the cost (number of uses) separate?
Parameter Rules

Parameter Rules (パラメータールール, Paramētā Rūru?) are a set of rules for representing the relative power of each item ranked by letters under different systems, translated into specific parameters "for no particular reason."[1] There are five main ranks, E, D, C, B, A, that each have a quantifiable number assigned to it. Considering "one" to be a "normal value", E is equal to "ten" and it increases by ten incrementally until reaching "fifty" at A.[1] A is the highest normal rank, but there is an...

TYPE-MOON Wiki
Show threadOriginalbarbasOct 6, 2025
5/n Time for another rant on the beta of my incoming Holy Grail War campaign! So, to summarise:
1. Seven Magi summon seven Heroic Spirits and sacrifice them in order to fill a wish-granting device (the Holy Grail).
2. Only one pair may remain at the end, their wish will be fulfilled.
3. It is organised in Grand Island, Nebraska, by some magi of the US government.
4. Set in 2025/2026.

Up to now, I have done two different prequels of the campaign, focusing on both the narrative and the mechanical aspects. On the plot:

On the first beta, the PC were random Magi abducted from the streets and forced to participate in a mini-Holy Grail War. It ended badly for everyone involved*, except the PC, who survived.

In the second one, a squad of CIA Magi infiltrated a (fictional) abandoned shopping mall that the (now defunct) organiser used to store relics. Only 2 out of 4 PC survived, one was corrupted due to the influence of the HS that she summoned (it was supposed to be Caster, but a glitch happened and it was a Foreigner with the essence of Shub-Niggurath instead) and the other one is now a rogue agent. There were four vampires (high ranking Dead Apostles) in the mall, three of them ended up corrupted too (one of them was a possible PC, more on that in a post about creating the characters).

The second session went much better than the first one, summoning the HS at the end was a good choice, as it ramped up the tension during the session (the vampires running amok on the shopping mall felt like Terminator-like entities, as they should) and the fact that on the randomly distributed backgrounds of the PCs and NPCs there were some that hinted at backstabbing kept a nice paranoia feeling on the team. Very deltagreenish, hahaha.

It set up nicely some factions and NPCs for later use and mechanically the improvements to the system felt like good additions. I may do a post on these later, but I will probably just prepare new improvements, test them and, at that point, write about the full thing.


*They killed one of the organisers of the HGW, so... now there are no "experts" running it and it will get even more out of control.

#FateNE #FateStayNight #TypeMoon #TTRPG #Nasuverse