Why We Built Our Own Engine at Open Almond Studios
When Open Almond Studios first began publishing games, we built on the Fate RPG.
That choice wasnât accidental. Fate is flexible, narrative-first, and generous to player agency. It gave us the freedom to explore character, theme, and consequence without drowning in subsystems. For a long time, it served us well.
But the more we leaned into stories about faith, endurance, and moral weight, the more we felt a quiet resistance in the machinery beneath our feet.
Fate could describe the stories we wanted to tell.
It just couldnât carry them.
This post is about how we discovered that gap â and why it led us to build the Integrity Engine.
Where Fate Took Us â and Where It Couldnât Go
Fate excels at momentum. Characters are competent, resilient, and defined by what they choose to emphasize in the moment. Consequences exist, but they are designed to be negotiated, reframed, and eventually cleared. The system is optimistic by design.
That optimism is a strength â until you start telling stories where endurance matters more than momentum.
At our tables, characters kept surviving things that should have changed them. There was a sense of awe and adventure, but not of real morality.
The story said, âThis choice matters.â
The system quietly replied, âFor now.â
That dissonance kept growing.
We werenât interested in punishing characters or grinding them down. But we were interested in something Fate didnât model well: the idea that faithfulness increases responsibility, that growth expands the surface area for suffering, and that some things leave marks even when you survive them. Morality holds weight that Fate Points canât buy.
So instead of forcing Fate to bend further than it wanted to go, we asked a different question:
What if the engine itself treated pressure, weight, and endurance as first-class concepts?
That question marked the beginning of our transition.
Letting Go of Familiar Solutions
The hardest part of leaving Fate wasnât technical. It was philosophical.
Fate is elegant. Familiar. Well-understood. Walking away from it meant walking away from solutions we already trusted. It meant giving up language, structures, and expectations that players recognized instantly.
But it also meant freedom.
We stopped thinking in terms of stress tracks and consequences and started thinking in terms of strain and weight.
- Pressure became the friction of the moment â what presses on you now.
- Burden became what remains â what must be carried.
- Scars became identity-level change â not penalties to remove, but truths to acknowledge.
Pressure passes. Burden must be carried. Scars tell the truth.
Those werenât just thematic phrases. They became mechanical commitments.
Reframing Attributes as Points of Failure
In Fate, skills and stunts primarily answer the question: What are you good at?
In the Integrity Engine, Pillars answer a different one: Where do you break?
Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength arenât just domains of action. They are domains of endurance. Each Pillar has its own pressure track, its own burden track, and its own way of collapsing.
A collapse of Strength looks like injury.
A collapse of Mind looks like fracture.
A collapse of Heart looks like hardening.
A collapse of Soul looks like a crisis of conscience.
One of the most important departures from Fate was this: collapse doesnât happen when a track fills â it happens when it overflows. That single rule preserves agency at the brink. It gives characters one last moment before everything gives way.
When collapse happens, the character doesnât vanish. They survive the scene. But the collapse becomes a Scar â a lasting mark that shapes future choices.
And crucially, the player defines what that Scar means.
The engine provides structure.
The player provides meaning.
Growth, Turning Points, and Why We Split Advancement
In Fate, advancement is clean and flexible. In practice, we found ourselves wanting two different kinds of change â and trying to force them into one track.
So we separated them.
Growth represents learning, healing, and adaptation. It happens often. It allows skills to improve, burdens to clear, and truths to be refined.
Turning Points are rarer. They mark identity-level change: moments of faith, failure, or decision that reorient who a character is becoming. Turning Points increase capacity â but they also increase the weight that capacity must bear.
Growth shapes how you walk. Turning Points decide who you are.
That distinction didnât exist in Fate. We needed it.
Cooperation Without Free Power
Another quiet friction we encountered in Fate was cooperation. Helping is easy, often free, and frequently optimal. Over time, that erodes tension.
In the Integrity Engine, helping always costs something. It takes your action. It exposes you to pressure. It may put you in harmâs way.
Helping doesnât increase another roll. It changes the field. It creates position. It carries risk.
Leadership, guidance, protection, and sacrifice matter â but they are never free.
That wasnât a balance tweak. It was a values statement.
Faith as Structure, Not Flavor
Perhaps the biggest shift in leaving Fate was how we treated faith itself.
We didnât want faith to live in aspects alone. We didnât want it confined to stunts or special abilities. We wanted it embedded in how characters endure, recover, and change.
Grace became provision rather than currency.
Miracles became interruptions rather than tools.
Scars became testimony rather than punishment.
The Integrity Engine doesnât reward safety.
It rewards faithfulness under pressure.
Why We Built Our Own Engine
We didnât leave Fate because it failed.
We left it because we needed something it was never meant to be.
The Integrity Engine exists because the stories we wanted to tell demanded mechanics that could carry weight, preserve consequence, and honor endurance without cruelty. It exists because faith deserved more than theme â it deserved structure.
This wasnât the fast path. It wasnât the safe path. But at Open Almond Studios, we believe the long way around often tells the truer story.
Thatâs the journey from Fate to Integrity.
And thatâs the engine we chose to build.
âčïž Check out our Prototype Character App and Character Sheet below.
