Hi! How well do you think BC would work for running a Persona game?
I think it would work well, but first you'd have to think about whether you want to keep the regular setting's magic level: Is occult science public knowledge, is Occultar Academy an occult science school, how well-understood is it, are there occult sciences that don't involve Personas, etc.
If you do run with the basic setting, Personas are one branch of science among many. It can still be a non-public power you use in secret, but your character might still be able to use cybermancy or occultech or the Five Rings or whatever occult science they know.
If you want something more like a typical Persona adventure, you'd have to nix the occult science. That's fine—Occultar becomes a school for exceptional students. Or you could have occult science be something that exists but isn't well known yet, and have Occultar be run by something like the Kirijo Group (in Game Over I'm adding one faction, the Arc Zaibatsu, that could pretty much fill in for them). BCult is set in the late 21st century so you could even set it in modern times and make it like a prequel!
Other than that, you should be good. Ancient Ones could be replaced by/a stand-in for end bosses like Nyarlathotep, Nyx and Izanami, though AOs don't have stats so you might need to whip something up if you want them to be fought directly. Muvians and all the other monsters could also be Personas, probably.
Anyway, that's all story stuff. For mechanics, you'll need to work out how to do Personas in Fate. Personally what I'd do is have each Persona be represented by an aspect or two and a stunt that has something to do with their main power, then have the character use their own approaches to take actions through it. The Persona would also use the character's stress track.
I'd also recommend giving characters a Tarot aspect, maybe even replacing the Talent. Talents are designed to define something important about the character that can provide clues (for example, the sample character Isaac Carver is an Occultech Inventor, so if he's involved you'll see a lot of occultech in the plot). In a Persona game your Arcana is what's important, so I'd swap Talent: Occultech Inventor for something like Arcana: Magician, for example. You could even make more detailed Arcana aspects that zoom in on the character a little, like Magician: The Ladies Will Love My Machines!.
Talents have a special power—1/scene, you can spend a fate point and invoke your Talent to flip a dice roll (so [+] becomes [-], and vice versa), provided you can explain how you use your Talent to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. If Arcana replaces Talent, your Arcana power would be used when you're doing something that fits your Arcana (so Magician would be using Fire magic, hitting on people and killing your love interest). Or you could drop that power and say your Persona is the power you get instead. Or you could replace a different aspect with your Arcana, whatever. This is all just a suggestion, mind.
Basically, yeah, it's doable. It's something I've been thinking about - a lot of the Summer Survivor stretch goal is Persona-inspired, even, so there's a good chance there'll be alternate rules for a Persona game somewhere in the stretch goal packs. In the meantime, once I put the core book out there you should be able to use that and this post to smash together a Persona game!
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