In a recent game of Agents of Oblivion, the players briefly fought with an extra dimensional entity, codenamed 'Starchild' by the people who had captured it. It wrecked part of the town they were in before they took it down, and the form it took was of a giant floating sphere of strange dark metal, surrounded by a semi-liquid shell of more natural metals. It hovered slowly over the area, magnetically eating metal objects all around it and shrieked endlessly.
In essence, it was a lot like an angel from Evangelion. The players recognised this and liked it, and after watching a few animes recently while developing a plot for Camelot Trigger (an excellent Fate setting in itself), it's inspired me to create a setting for Fate. Currently, it has the working title of Persongelion, because it's a mixture of Persona and Evangelion at it's heart, but that name I admit sucks and will be changed. Also, other inspiration comes from Pacific Rim, Star Driver, Aquarion EVOL and Attack on Titan, but I'm not adding more bits to this portmanteau, it's bad enough. Anyway...
Background
"Among humanity, some have a gift. Some say it was the first attack that gave us this gift, that something in us changed that day. Others say we always had it, and the attack just helped us to realise it. But who cares right? Because all anyone ever wants us to do now is fight."
In 2155, humanity was experiencing an unprecedented era of world peace. Fighting and hostility weren't gone of course, countries argued and threatened same as they always had and rebels or 'freedom fighters' cropped up in the less stable parts of the world, but war, fighting on a mass scale, had ceased for the moment.
And then a new enemy appeared and it came from the stars. At first, it hid from us, disguising itself as a meteorite entering Earths atmosphere just above Chicago, but as soon as it was close enough to the ground, it revealed itself and began it's attack. Accounts differ over what it looked like, as not many could get close enough to the creature without being attacked, but most were convinced it was sentient in the way it moved, destroyed, killed. Some say it was just a shape, a sphere with limbs made of concentrated light that cut through stone. Others say it had a face and many arms, and crawled close to the ground, eating people. Others saw nothing but a pillar of consuming fire.
In less than a day, the centre of Chicago was a wasteland. The military responded with all the force it had and didn't make a dent in it, only managing to draw it's attention and cause another bloodbath. But then help arrived from an unexpected source.
Survivors from the attack, huddling together and hoping to avoid it's attention, suddenly found themselves with a new inner strength. Barely understanding how, they focused the strength, giving themselves psychic constructs of armour and weapons, new bodies essentially to guard the old ones, and stood up to take on the creature. Several of these brave individuals perished in the conflict but not before the remaining people tore the beast open and crushed whatever passed for it's heart. The first fight was over but a war was starting.
Concept
PCs play gifted humans, people with a psychic ability to form new bodies from psionic energy. Their real bodies rest inside the new one and they literally become the larger form, to fight with the aliens who are now invading Earth.
Because it's Fate, this gives a lot of scope for what PCs would be capable of. Want your character to be a survivor from the ruins of Chicago? You can. Want them to be the presidents daughter? Go for it. Want your character's other form to have a massive bio-tech cannon for it's left arm? Definitely. Fate's a very customisable game so any concepts are possible.
What's also good is that I can leave most of the setting up to the players. If one player takes an aspect that they are working for the government, then the government now has an agency devoted to using these gifted individuals. If they prefer to be more like secret superheroes, then there's no formal response to the gifted yet. If they want to be hiding in fear of public response, the gifted are feared and hated now. It's up to them.
The origins and form of the invading force is also left deliberately vague. Are they aliens, demons (or angels), a new weapon from earth gone mad or something stranger? That'll be decided in play based on what the players do to fight them. It also lets me come up with some truly bizarre monster concepts if I need to.
Ideas so far
Like Camelot Trigger, don't have different stats for the psionic bodies, just have the same stats on a different scale. If you have 4 Physique as a person, you have it in your other form too. Naturally, scale is important here as what can mince you easily in human form (sustained gunfire, tank shells or a building falling on you) might graze your larger form. A GM would have to be flexible on that.
Unlike Camelot Trigger, I won't have aspects for different parts of the other form, that idea mostly works for Mecha, but I will have a single aspect for each player that represents a psychic power they possess, in addition to taking on the giant form which has a more powerful version of that power. So if you have telekinesis and can lift 50lb of weight, then your giant form can lift a battle ship. If you have pyrokinesis and can throw a fireball, so can your alternate form, just a much bigger one. And so on.
I might have to rethink the skills a little, but skills and stunts otherwise will work exactly the same as Fate Core. Not all combat will take place on the giant scale and there won't be just combat, so there's still plenty of reasons to choose other skills too.
Let the players choose the location: I don't care if it's Tokyo and they're all highschoolers or it's the Pacific and they're all soldiers from various governments. I only set one condition: it has to be urban, because giant monsters fighting on an open field isn't going to be that interesting compared with ducking in and out of skyscrapers and hurling cargo ships at each other. Collateral damage? Hell, I might invent rules based around it!
