I’m running a sixties spy-fi game in FAE right now. It’s only a very marginal hack, being mostly by-the-book except for a new set of approaches. However, one of the characters does a ton of sneaking around and ambushing guards. I wrote some simple rules to make that a little more engaging.

The Map

Map out the facility in zones. These are what you’ll be sneaking through.

Approaches

Stealth isn’t limited to the Sneaky approach or an equivalent. A character could Quickly sneak past guards or Cleverly crack a lock.

Guard Enemies

Most enemy guards are represented as a single character for the whole facility. They’re basically a group of mooks as a single character. Give them the following:

• Two aspects
• Two things they get a +2 at
• Two things they get -2 at
• A stress track, long enough for all the guards in the facility

The Alert Level

The alert level measures how much people in the facility expect trouble. It starts at +2 to +4. Usually, all PCs sneaking around share the same alert level.

The alert level is used as the obstacle for:

• Getting through (overcoming) surveilled zones without being detected
• Overcoming locks and other such protections
• Creating stealth-related advantages

The alert level is used as the bonus for:

• Enemies Defending against surprise knockouts (which take only a single hit). If you’re only knocking out a single enemy, then an Attack only deals one level of harm, and the enemy goes down. However, if you’re ambushing a group Batman-style, you can deal multiple boxes of harm and take out multiple enemies.

• Enemies trying to Create security-related advantages against the PCs

Increasing the Alert Level

The alert level increases when you deal with problems in a hasty or incautious manner. In most cases, this is because you failed a roll which would draw attention (blackjacking a guard, cracking a lock, sneaking through a zone).

Instead of failing, you can choose to add +1, +2, or +3 to both your roll and the alert level. Narrate how you’re incautious, leave evidence, or so on. This bonus applies retroactively to your roll, but only to future rolls involving the alert level.

Being Detected

When you fail an Overcome or Attack roll against the alert level, then you gain the Noticed aspect, and the GM gets a free invoke on it. Plus, of course, you’re Noticed and people are likely to shoot at you.

You are not Noticed (yet) if you fail a roll and then choose to increase the alert level in order to succeed.

Usually, each character has their own Noticed aspect.

Escaping Detection

You escape detection by removing the Noticed aspect, either via an Overcome action or by another action that makes Noticed no longer makes sense.

A successful Overcome roll against the alert level reduces the alert level by 1, but can’t reduce it below +2.