The First

Forteana is all well and good and gameable, but there's plenty to be mined from the other side. The truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction, but it can provide more details. A case in point is Ancient Aliens Debunked, an enjoyable and thorough refutation of The History Channel Presents Giorgio Tsoukalos' Carnival of Hair. Responding to the claim that the ancient Incans often rediscovered their own far-flung abandoned colonies, implying (sayeth the Hair) that they possessed, and lost, some whiz-bang travel technology in the far-distant past, AAD points out that it was an element of the Incan state religion that they were the first civilization, created by the gods, and thus predated by nothing. So every time they found ruins of some other civilization that came before, whoops, that was us, totally forgot about that one, ha ha. Aside from the delightful irony of countering Ancient Space Brothers malarkey with a vast government conspiracy (an Ancient one, no less), the notion has an odd resonance, a mix of religious infallibility, willful ignorance and untenability that appeals to my heretical heart.

In a modern-day game, this could be a fairly straightforward Secret Of The Saurians arrangement, or your usual Atlantis gobbledegook. Fun times, but well-tread ground. Transposed into fantasy, it suddenly provides a rationale for dungeon-crawling and tomb-raiding beyond the usual Vast Troves of Improbably Abandoned Lucre. Heroic scholar-adventurers explore the goblin-choked remains of "abandoned" cities, defying both church and state (assuming there's a difference) to ferret out details of a world-spanning empire that They refuse to admit existed. In accordance with the genre, these details will inevitably give a shape to whatever force wiped out the lost civilization in the first place - and provide the only hope of preventing its return.

But, to me, an idea this bizarre seems to demand an alien mentality. And so:

2045. The Earth is overcrowded, polluted, exhausted. Humanity teeters on the brink of any of a dozen disasters. First contact happens (perhaps the hyper-pressurized aliens from the last post float up from the Marianas Trench) and we're able to communicate with them easily (cheating a bit, but what follows requires understanding, if not comprehension). They're friendly and offer to share their technology, in return for nothing more than the parts of our overcrowded world where human life is completely impossible. Their motive for this generosity is implicit in the name they give themselves: They are the First. They claim to be the oldest species in the universe, the original movers, created and blessed by God or the Universe or themselves to fill the worlds with life. They're classic generic sci-fi universe Precursors, and claim to have seeded Earth: Thus their helpfulness is less "friendly" than "paternal". Faced with such a claim, the world's governments simply accept the proffered evidence without much dispute; too much is at stake in the here and now to argue history. Aside from a few pockets of, to steal Johnny Nexus' line, "people who take 'made in the image of God' very seriously indeed", humanity more or less accepts the notion. After all, it's not like there's any way to prove it one way or the other.

And then, of course, there is. Some datum or other (DNA, an offworld ruin, a rogue individual of the First themselves) proves the First's claim to ultimate precedence, the bedrock of their worldview, is a sham. Now the players who have this MacGuffin need to decide whether alienating or even antagonizing a hyperadvanced starfaring species is worth the truth coming out.

I've spun a few frames off from that broad outline. Probably the silliest is be playing the tense negotiations with the First as English-style farce a la Blackadder or Fawlty Towers (Don't mention the fossils!), most likely ending with the First avuncularly chuckling from their many mouths and congratulating us on passing their test. "You had us real worried there, sport."

More seriously, the conceit lends itself to a vicious satire of the temporal power possessed by certain Close Personal Friends of God in the here and now, and the warping of society, law and ethics to accomodate them. At the low end, earthly governments could try to maintain a simple media blackout of the evidence, or lump the PCs in with the kooks that gather in every corner of the dying world. Racheted up, a government hit-squad could be dispatched to take out a group of scientists who in their blind commitment to the truth are willing to endanger the entire species, with the PCs taking either role. If it looks like too easy a choice, there's always the option of using the Majestic-12 style personal enrichment of the negotiating parties in place of a broader For All Mankind deal (though, they'll argue, some remnant of humanity surviving is surely better than total annihilation), or the aliens could start making demands, seeing as they have us over a barrel ("I'm pretty sure 'all' the children is a highball bid, we can talk them down."), or their help could enlist us in a broader galactic conflict against our will or without our knowledge. Any or all of which might still prove preferable to being abandoned to die out on a lonely world. Another point is whether the First are complicit in the cover-up: The players could follow a wild tangent from an Imago Dei militia about the First's mind control powers, only to find that the aliens are innocent and their real enemies have been human all along. Or maybe the reverse, since "man is the real monster" has whiskers on it by this point. Or it could be that there are no aliens, just some human group with a lot of resources, a flair for forgery, and a very long gameplan indeed...

Pushing further into the future (and lifting off as we do from the grime of conspiracy into a more idealistic truth and justice mode), the game could become a cosmic-scale Law and Order plot. Investigators from the Union of the First's Rediscovered Colony of Earth work secretly to reopen a case that's been cold for millions of years, building an ironclad indictment one piece at a time from proofs light-centuries apart. The climax comes in a courthouse scene broadcast to the whole populated universe, as the unimaginably ancient Grand Heirophant of the First breaks down under relentless cross-examination: "Yes! Yes! We did it! We found your precious Precursors, a handful of degenerates on a backwater world, and we killed them and took their technology. You don't understand, it had to be true, we had to be the most chosen, or everything we've worked for would collapse. We are a force for stability in a chaotic universe, but our calm comes from certainty. We needed certainty, and those...things were going to take it from us. We - I. I read the reports. I gave the command. I destroyed everything, everything but the tiny scraps those meddling humans found. I did it. I did it for the First, for the Union, for the whole universe, and I'm glad I did it!". Okay, maybe not quite to that melodramatic extent.

Finally, if you have the kind of players who prefer exchanging viewpoints to exchanging bullets, there's the option of playing trained xenotherapists, walking on eggshells as they try to ease the First into their new, less-central role in the universe without triggering civilizational collapse.  Drag out some Asimov's Foundation or the even weirder post-scarcity stuff, and ask the extraterrestrials to lie down on the couch. The fate of two species rests on the most hidebound beings in known space accepting a truth that breaks them to the core. Let's talk about it.

Agents of FATE: Sideline

So we're back to Agents of FATE, which now stands for something other than Fancy Acronym; Totally Empty. The Agents will be working for the Fictive Attachment for Tactical Espionage, with credit going to IRL friend Greg and the mysterious internetty Chris¹ in 3-to-1 measure.

Shuter and Laskey

I'm also wild about Chris' idea to have FATE be presumed fictional within the context of the setting². A series of books seems too low-key, though, and besides, nobody reads any more. I'm running with the notion of a syndication-length TV series, made with obviously low production values and sold on the cheap to cable channels with a lot of dead air to fill. This series, "Agents of F.A.T.E." ³, follows the adventures of F.A.T.E. superoperatives Clarinda "Blackbird" Shuter and Hank "Depthcharge" Laskey, and mixes vaguely accurate, fragmentary descriptions of the real FATE agency and its modus operandi with plentiful disinformation, ridiculousness, terrible acting, yawning plot holes, and baffling breaks with the tone, setting and style of the series in general⁴. FATE ensures that the show is aired in slots which maximize peripheral awareness; most people have had an episode of "Agents of F.A.T.E." playing in the background at some point in their lives, but couldn't tell you the plot to save their lives. Of course, there are also the fans, collecting minutiae and merchandise and maintaining wikis, fansites and the annual AoFCon in Atlantic City. As far as the mundane world is concerned, claiming to work for F.A.T.E. is the equivalent of saying you're with the X-Files - or, considering the chintziness of the show, the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. That F.A.T.E. uses the same fictionalizing tactics within the show's continuity just makes evidence about the real FATE all the more unbelievable⁵.

There's some fun to be had here. While real FATE missions are deadly serious, carry the potential for betrayal at any moment, and often involve weighty decisions that can change the course of world events, the show is a goofy bit of CG-heavy pap in which the chemistry-free will-they-or-won't-they between Shuter and Laskey is given precedence over any possible consequences of a mission⁶. PCs who try to invoke the agency's name will be presumed cosplayers or worse. After a particularly harrowing or betrayal-ridden mission, I could switch it up and run a game in the morally duochrome metafiction of F.A.T.E. - Perhaps as the heavily fictionalized but sole remaining record of an early FATE operation with relevance to the FATE group's next assignment.

... Then again, this kind of over-the-top doesn't really mesh with the life-or-death, trust-no-one mood I originally set out for with FATE (Well, to the extent that I set out anything - Greg Stolze, eat your heart out⁷). It's a neat idea, but it'll take a lot to make it work right. I think I'll try and clever up some actual mechanics first, and maybe take another stab at it afterwards.

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1. I've known a lot of Chrises in my time, so you'll forgive me if you know me IRL but I can't identify you from ten sentences. If you're a total stranger, well, thanks for reading my blog and contributing to this thing of ours. You're a rad dude.
2. I have a total boner for secret agencies maintaining their secrecy by loudly declaring themselves fake, as obliquely hinted by the MALARKEY¹ designation in the Changeling Cold War setting I posted back in the hoary mists of around this time last year.
1. Which is, natch, more or less a lock stock and barrel steal from Charles Stross' A Colder War, in which ultimate top secret materials are marked BOOJUM. Oh Charles Stross, you were pretty okay before you started running your mouth about the singularity.
3. Note the ellipses - their presence distinguishes between the fictional F.A.T.E. and the real FATE. 
4. The latter two are exemplified by "Operation Daggerblade"¹, the episode where Laskey "retrogresses" into a literal goblin and vanishes into the New Jersey Pine Barrens as Shuter weepily bemoans his "incurable" condition. He is back to normal in the next episode and no explanation is ever provided.
1. And yes, all the series episodes have titles like this.
5. Annnnnd I do believe my secrecy-through-fictionalization boner just went fractal.
6. The continuity is intentionally and irrevocably mangled: For example, other events of "Operation Daggerblade" are often referenced in later episodes, but never the 'goblinization', leaving its status in canon a source of constant flamewar. FATE did this intentionally, as the canon arguments keep the fanbase occupied and off the trail of the real organization.
7. Stolze bemoaned how other writers for Unknown Armies had written material that contradicted certain rules he thought the setting required, while acknowledging that he never actually made those rules explicit. Here, I've managed to do the same thing to myself.

Scene at a Nexus of Dimensions

"So what do you call mine?"
"6338-Gray"
"Yeah, yeah, but what do you call it? Like, there's Anti-Earth and the Gorilla World and, you know, the one with the Nazi Crab-men..."
"Der BrachyuReich."
"Yeah! So what do you call it?"
"... the Craigiverse."
"Fuck off."
"No, seriously, the Arbiter who visited apparently met like a dozen guys named Craig in the three days he was there. It seems to have made an impression on him."
"Bullshit. Can we get a do-over?"
"You may have noticed we have all of the infinite multiverses to catalogue."
"Yeah, but you told me you have infinite other Nexuses helping you."
"That only divides it into smaller infinities, which are by definition still infinite. No do-overs."
"Shit, I can't believe you make decisions for such stupid reasons."
"Hey, when the Craigiverse invents dimensional travel, we'll talk."
"... Total bullshit."