There are a few tried-and-true ways to unite a group of players. You can have them create shared backstories for their characters; have an arrogant villain kill off a beloved NPC; announce you’re suddenly “rolling your dice behind a screen, no reason, stop asking”, or you can give the PCs a base of operations, some humble hex to call their own.
HANDCASTLES* provides a new game mode, suited for longer campaigns or mini-campaigns. First, the group selects a base of operations. But rather than the standard secret agent safehouse, they can pick anything from a Pocket Reality to a Digital Anomaly to an Animal – Dragon, Baba Yaga’s cottage, anything large enough to provide shelter.
Next comes “CHOOSING MISSIONS”, with the GM generating three missions and allowing FIST ops to select their own. Each mission has a Timer, or how long it will remain available, a Yield, ranging from labor to materials to tech, and an Externality, the cost of putting off completing a mission until it’s too late. This is great stuff, offering players hard choices, and reminds me a little of X-Com. Finally there’s a section called “IN BETWEEN MISSIONS,” on how to spend Yield on various upgrades (ranging from a damage increase to a passive source of income generation).
The layout is clean, with good use of artwork that fits right in with FIST’s schematic aesthetic. At only seven pages, it almost leaves you wanting more – but subsystems are best handled with brevity, especially in a game as rules lite as FIST.
I can’t think of any reason not to use this, other than you’re running a single one-shot. My only concern was perhaps some of the Infrastructure might be too powerful, but then I realized HANDCASTLES self-regulates with Externality. (Failure to solve a mission could result in a raid that destroys some of your Infrastructure, and you can’t solve every mission.) This push-and-pull, with no upgrade guaranteed to last forever, was the final element that convinced me to run HANDCASTLES as soon as humanly possible.
*Obligatory +1 Star for having a Dad Joke in the title.