Building Fate's Edge from a Hospital Bed

Most of this project was dreamed up between blood draws and doctor's visits.

In 2025, I spent a lot of time in hospitals. Not the kind where you're in and out in a few hours — the kind where you get to know the night shift nurses by name. The kind where you learn which IV poles roll smoothly and which ones squeak. The kind where you have a lot of time to think.

I had a lot of time to think.

I'm a Senior IT Engineer by trade. Systems architecture is what I do. But when you're lying in a hospital bed, your body not cooperating, your mind does what it always does: it builds things. It finds problems to solve. It looks for systems that could be better.

The problem I kept coming back to was TTRPGs.

I've been playing tabletop games for decades. I love them. But I kept running into the same walls. The prep work was crushing. The cognitive load on GMs was absurd. The tools were either locked behind subscriptions or required accounts or collected your data. And if you wanted to run a campaign that spanned more than a few sessions, good luck keeping it coherent. The human brain can only hold so much.

I started sketching.

On a tablet, between tests. On a phone, in the middle of the night when sleep wouldn't come. On paper, when I could get someone to bring me a notebook. The core mechanics came first — the d10 system, the Boon/Story Beat economy, the 90-second play loop. Then the generator system — the Four-Suit framework, the region tables, the timer conversion. Then the architecture — how to build a system that was truly self-hostable, truly free, truly open.

I wanted to build something that didn't treat players like users. Something that didn't lock people out. Something that remembered what happened last session so you didn't have to.

The Amaranthine Core — the setting — came later. Thirteen regions, each with its own relationship to the Ninth Taboo and the Hollow's attention. Each with its own culture, its own rules, its own way of marking the boundary between the mundane and the strange. That was the fun part. That was the part I could escape into when the room got too quiet.

The first working prototype ran on a laptop in a hospital room. The nurse asked what I was doing. I said I was building a game. She said that was nice. She had no idea what I was actually building, but she was kind about it.

I got out eventually. The condition is chronic — it doesn't go away, you just learn to live with it. But I had something I didn't have before: a working system. A proof of concept. Something that actually ran.

I kept building. The AI GM bot came next — the thing that could actually run a session without a human behind the screen. The socket server, so people could play together. The web client, so anyone could open a browser and start. The integrations — Foundry, Roll20, Discord — so you could use the tools you already know.

I released it all under open source licenses. The code is MIT. The SRD is CC BY-NC-SA. The setting is mine, but I give away enough to play for years. No accounts required. No subscriptions. No one watching you play.

The project is called Fate's Edge. It's a narrative-first TTRPG system with an AI GM, a full VTT, and a living world. It's free. It's self-hostable. It's built to be hacked and shared.

And most of it was written in hospitals.

Why I'm Telling You This

I'm not looking for sympathy. The health stuff is what it is. I'm telling you because I want you to know: this project was built by someone who needed it.

I needed a world to escape into when my own body was failing me. I needed a system that didn't require massive prep because I didn't have the energy. I needed tools that didn't lock me out because I was already locked out of enough things. I needed something that remembered, because my own memory was unreliable.

I built what I needed. Then I gave it away.

That's the ethos of the whole project. It's not a startup. There's no Series A. There's no exit strategy. I don't want to sell it. I don't want to rent it. I want to give it to you and see what you do with it.

The full setting will have a price eventually — I need to eat, and I want to keep building. But the software, the generators, the core rules, the playable content? That's free. Forever.

No one is locked in. No one is locked out.

What's Next

I'm still building. The project is not done. It will never be done. That's the nature of open source.

Right now, I'm working on the documentation. The AI GM bot needs more testing. The setting needs more regions. The web client needs more polish. There's always more to do.

But the core is there. You can clone the repo, run npm install && npm start, and have a working system on your own machine. You can run a session with your friends. You can build your own adventures. You can fork the code and make it your own.

That's the point. It's yours now.

I built it from a hospital bed. But you can run it from a kitchen table, a coffee shop, a cabin with no Wi-Fi. You can run it without me, without a server, without permission, without paying a cent.

That's the gift.

If you want to see the code, it's at github.com/Chronophage-net/fates-edge-apps. If you want to read the setting, the Amaranthine Core is available in the repo. If you want to run a session, the README will get you started. If you want the bigger picture of how it's all put together, the dev portal is the place to start.

If you want to reach out, I'm at support@fates-edge.com. I'm slow to respond sometimes — the health stuff is still there — but I read everything.

The table is yours. I'm just helping you set it up.