In 2009, Arc Dream Publishing released the original Kerberos Club setting book, which presented a richly-detailed Victorian England with superheroes… or “Strangers,” as they are called in the setting. The book, which was powered by their One Roll Engine, garnered a lot of praise and several Ennie award nominations. Arc Dream soon began to port the setting to other game systems.
In 2011, they published the FATE-compatible version of the sourcebook. Written by Mike Olson, the book featured extensions to the FATE system to make it work better for superheroic gaming generally, and the Kerberos Club setting specifically. Its key innovations were the addition of power tiers (and a new dice mechanic to support them) and a simple point-buy system for custom-creating super powers. This variant, dubbed Strange FATE, was released under the OGL, similarly to earlier flavors of FATE.
In 2012, rpg.net user thecosmicgoose extracted the OGL content from the Kerberos Club PDF, excised the copyrighted images and other content from that, and released the “Strange Fate Slap-dash SRD.”
In 2013, Ross Payton, RPG writer and host of the Roleplaying Public Radio podcast, released his game Base Raiders, which employed the Strange Fate system.
In 2014, finally fed up that no one else had done it, I got a wild hair one Sunday afternoon, took the text from thecosmicgoose’s version of the SRD, stripped out all the formatting and the wonky extra newlines, edited it into Markdown format, and exported the Markdown back to PDF. Given that Fate Core had been released in the interim, I decided to freeze that version and use it as the basis to create a stripped-down version of Strange Fate’s modifications that will be compatible with Core.
And thus, here we are.