Updates to the Fate policy
Recently, there have been grey areas regarding content that has appeared to make otherwise Fate-locked content eligible for inclusion on the wiki. For example: the Rusty Census-Taker's Badge affecting 40-Masquing Companions, the Temple Club Access Code, and the Great Bone Market Crash of '98 granting the Five-Pointed Ribcage to a select few players, when it would otherwise only be obtainable via the Premium Story Upwards.
I emailed Failbetter to get clarification on these issues, and on what their policy is regarding nominally Fate-locked content on the wiki in general.
Their response is as follows:
It is fine to share all these. They are all permissible on the basis that this content was made intentionally free to someone at some time. (We say 'intentionally' here to distinguish from Fate content that might have been somehow released to some players through a bug; in the latter case, I imagine we might want to still consider it Fate content from a wiki perspective.)
Because these were intentionally free, the narrative v. mechanical question is negligible here.
Where narrative v. mechanics does arise, it's in the case of, for instance, recording on the wiki the mechanical functionality of bones available only from Upwards (for instance, I believe the Pentagrammic Skull is still available only that way). We do not mind having these sorts of mechanical features recorded in wiki tables, but we would not want you include the fiction associated with these objects. Our view is that reporting the functionality of a bone gotten from a Fate story is actually positive rather than negative from a marketing perspective and does not undercut our business.
There are two important points in this response:
- Fate content that was intentionally made available for free, even for a minority of players (e.g., the Bone Market Crash of '98), is expressly permitted by Failbetter.
- Inclusion of the mechanics of Fate-locked content on player guide pages (e.g., the effects of the Pentagrammic Skull when applied to a skeleton, or the factors that affect July on the board of the Great Hellbound Railway) is also permissible.
