I just ran a one-shot of FIST, and wanted to share some thoughts, pregens, and a custom character sheet.
FIST (Freelance Infintry Strike Team) is a very simple but fun paranormal action/adventure game written by B. Everett Dutton & Ripley Caldwell.
The setting is intentionally left vague; it’s set during the “second half of the twentieth century”. The players are assumed to be members of a private group called FIST, and are “uniquely equipped for covert and unusual operations.”
The basic rules are simple. It’s somewhat PBTA inspired. There are a few stats – Forceful, Creative, Tactical, and Reflexive. When a character has to do something, they roll a 2d6 and add the appropriate stat.
6 or less is a failure. 7-9 is a qualified success, 10+ is a total success. Unlike PBTA games, there are no specific moves for various actions.
Characters start off with two traits, giving them special abilities, and increasing some stats. Some traits are supernatural, some are skills.
FIST has a small but growing design community, and there are an increasing number of settings, adventures, and house rules available on itch.io. There’s currently an ongoing itch game jam called FIST Jam Ops III: Zine Month where people are designing new FIST material.
Dollhouse
For my one-shot I ran a one-page adventure called Dollhouse, published by Arcane Atlas games (PWYW over on itch.io)
The premise seems simple enough. The players have to enter a suburban house and retrieve a doll from a living room. The problem is that there seem to be multiple living rooms, and exiting one will bring you to a new version of the living room, referred to as a variant. Each variant grows stranger and more menacing as you go deeper into the house. Characters can exit through a window, door, or staircase, but will always end up in a new living room variant.
Also, retrieving the doll causes all sorts of havoc, which occurs in the form of random tables of events.
The branching nature of the house will (hopefully) confuse the players, but the simple flowchart design of the adventure makes it pretty simple for the GM to run.
The whole thing sort of reminded me of the movie Skinamarink, not in terms of plot, but in the tone of slowly increasing suburban dread.
When I ran it, only one player out of three survived, and was able to exit the house. Wounded, traumatized, but carrying a doll. Dollhouse is a lot of fun, and worth buying.
Pregen Characters
For my game I threw together a couple of pregen characters. I’m posting them here for anyone that finds them useful.
Character Sheet
As I’m fond of doing, I made my own custom FIST character sheets. They’re fillable, and allow you to import an image. I’ve made them in both A5 and half-letter sizes. I’ve added it to my ever-growing, poorly organized list of character sheets.
*** Update – Fixed a small issue with the A5 file. It was missing some fields.
Polyhedral Nonsense 