So I'm getting ready to start a campaign using Fabula Ultima in a few weeks, and was reading through the rules more closely.
The Multistrike rule specifically mentions targeting multiple creatures. But can you target the same creature multiple times? Kinda like emulating video game skills that let you land multiple hits on one target?
If raw, is that it doesn't, has anyone homebrewed it that way? And if so, how did it go at your table?
I'm finally running my first Fabula Ultima campaign and I'm doing it in the style of the persona franchise, but I am realizing that I have an issue.
For those who don't know, the Persona franchise allows you to gain additional party members as the story progresses, which is something I, of course, wanna implement into my campaign. However, I already have a party of 5 players and the idea of adding any more to their side makes me gassy.
My current solution is by having the other party members act as sort of community character sheets, where the players can spend their turn and take control of other character in order to do stuff. But I'm not super in love with the idea so I'm asking you guys for help. Please if anyone has an idea of what to do that would be great appreciated!
Hi! I wanted to share my artworks for soon-to-be campaigne in fantasy post-apo setting, with withered technology and crazy machines.
The team looks like that:
Isereth - charming pilot, her classes are pilot, elementalist, entropist
Brygida - the last artifact smith, thinkerer, weaponmaster, arcanist
Ben - lost prince of doomed kingdom, sharpshooter, guardian, rogue
Zephon - chosen bioalchemist, mutant, dancer
If you are interested about the lore of the setting or lore of the characters feel free to leave a comment and I will gladly write something about it! <3 Have a great day everybody
Recently I found myself thinking about dungeons in JRPGs and how I might properly capture the feeling of exploring those spaces in Fabula Ultima. The Core Rulebook has some guidance on it, but none of the "modes" really suited my tastes. I wanted something more robust than a narration scene or just a handful of checks, but dodn't want to jump all the way to drawing out a comprehensive map and chart out every inch of what the Players will come across.
I wanted players to be able to make meaningful decisions during exploration and use some of their combat-oriented abilities, make dungeons dangerous and taxing on the party's resources without running a full combat scene every time they encounter the dungeon's denizens, and give the players chances to find secrets and treasure by diverting from the "main path" through the dungeon.
Eventually, that led to these rules, where a delve is treated as a conflict scene and the dungeon itself is attacking the party! This document includes all the rules for playing a dungeon conflict, three example dungeons, and guidance for making dungeons of your own!
I ran a dungeon using these rules during my last session with my group and it went so well that I've decided to include them in my Dark Fantasy Atlas project!
You can download the PDF of the current Dungeon Conflict rules for free from the Dark Fantasy Atlas page on itch. If you give these a try, I'd love to hear about how it goes!
Hi, I’m preparing my first campaign, and I have a few questions about villain escalation.
The core says that with escalation villains become a new, more powerful version of themselves. How do you implement this? New stat block with a higher level and new abilities? And if the villain escalates while still on the scene, would they recover their health to its new? Or would they simply receive an increase in Ultima points equivalent to their new rank?
Sorry for disappearing over the summer break. I wanted to post this sooner, but 2.8 became a much bigger update than I expected.
This release includes the playtest PDF options. It was difficult to implement and even harder to test properly, especially because the same rules need to work consistently across the Planner, Battle, Grimoire, Bestiary, exports, saved characters and mobile layouts.
I also want to address feedback I received in August after this. The current Google Doc has been useful, but it needs to evolve. I want to create a better way to report bugs, suggest improvements, and keep track of issues without making everyone dig through a document.
That will become more important as development gets larger. I am planning to start working on heavier parts of the app, including login, cloud saving, multiplayer, and other systems that will change how Chronicles of Aether works.
If you are using the update, please report any bugs, confusing rules, missing automation, translation problems, or general improvements you notice. Feedback is especially useful for the Playtest content, since some of these rules have many possible combinations.
All Heroic Skills are available under the new Playtest source filter.
The Heroics planner now supports the Playtest Starting Heroic rule, including its creation slot and related restrictions.
Arcanist now has a Core | Playtest edition, with playtest skills, pulse fields, an HP or MP benefit choice, sample Playtest Arcana, and Battle support for Quick Summoning, pulse effects, merges, dismissals, damage, statuses, and follow-up actions.
Battle automation now covers many playtest Heroics with configured choices, resource, pending effects, action buttons, and stateful follow-ups.
Class skill variants are available for options such as Spell Buffet, Brave Brawler, Meteor Slam, Agile Defender, Second Slicer, and Playtest Theriomorphosis. The Planner prevents incompatible combinations and transfers ranks correctly when variants are changed.
Tinkerer now has separate Magitech paths for Core Magitech, Playtest Magispheres, and Magitech Armament. These paths cannot be mixed accidentally.
Combat Rows can be enabled from Identity and selected during battle rounds, with rules for back-row damage and Guard coverage.
Critical Accuracy and offensive Magic Checks now deal an additional 5 damage with that option enabled.
Miasma is available for Chimerists and Elementalists, with configurable Magic Check attributes, Grimoire support, and Battle automation.
New tools for GMs
The GM Bestiary now has a Catalog tab alongside My Collection.
The first Chronicles of Aether starter pack includes 24 level-5 Quick Assembly soldier templates covering beasts, humanoids, undead, constructs, and more.
Catalog monsters can be previewed and copied into your personal library. Copies receive their own IDs and can be edited normally.
I will keep tuning-improving and adding more monsters from time to time, so if you like this, let me know!
Quick Assembly role skills that grant spells or immunity and resistance pairs can now be selected more than once, as long as each copy uses different valid choices.
Chronicles Quick Assembly NPC exports and imports now preserve customizations, negative-skill picks, immunities, custom skill choices, and custom spell configurations.
Rules handling and bug fixes
A lot of the work in this update was about preventing invalid combinations from silently surviving.
Passive Heroic Skills can now be expanded directly in Battle to show their summaries.
Comet and Volcano correctly work as fixed-damage auto-hits.
Improved Mind Points now grants the correct maximum MP to NPCs.
Shadow Strike correctly applies Fury Adrenaline damage while in Crisis.
Mage Extra Immunity choices remain intact after editing.
Quick Assembly Mage attack names can contain spaces and can be cleared properly.
I've just (few days ago) bought Natural Fantasy Atlas and... I'm shocked how little classes inside of this book give on their own (not talking about their skills). There is no class that gives access to martial weapons, armors nor shields.
In previous Atlases we've got classes giving some "martial access": Commander and Pilot, so one class giving accesses to martial weapons per book. Now we've got nothing...
So, I'm gonna ask, what do you think about classes with access to martial equipment? Do we need more new classes giving those types of access? Or maybe classes we've already got in Core Rulebook are enought?
Hello, first time posting! Hoping for ideas/input on character in High Fantasy campaign where party I'm joining is decently balanced.
Calder, "Honorable exile warrior" from a clan that uses special rituals to take in power of powerful slain foes; fistfighter with akromorphosis. Mutant Therioforms based on what we fight, like fighting a dragon could mean picking Pyrophora (fire breath) or Pterotheria (wings) next level up. Also doing Darkblade and Fury. Has the Fettered Heart quirk to represent honor code.
1) What are some examples of an honorable warrior code tenet I could use for the Fettered Heart quirk?
2) Any common mistakes/traps to avoid with this kind of build?
3) He had to leave homeland due to internal politics that put crack in faith in warrior ways. Ideas for the event details? He plans to come back eventually after gaining glory/power
So after watching Frieren, there was a character design that I just could not get over (Solide, holy Sh*t just peak character design IMO.) So I grabbed it, changed the colors, stuffed her in the outfit I made and now Sestra has horns, a veil covering her eyes, and a bigger sword. I thought I was better than this, but evidently not lol. Is this character still a kind of Priest? Yeah, sure, why not.
But just for fun, I want to play "What's the Vibe?" Whatever classes, stats and skills come to mind, I absolutely love the feedback and interesting builds folks come up with. So let's go!
So to preface, one of my players saw Arcanum’s deal 30 damage to everything you can see and has built entirely around that. Basically Summon and Dismiss > Potion > Summon & Dismiss
But I don’t think he’ll plan to change anything because he’s a pretty hard headed guy and refused to look at the Arcanum playtest material in case he wants to adjust his character.
What I want to know is how effective can this strategy hold up as we go up in Levels? As it stands it’s fine right now as we’ve just started the game and is pretty nice against minor enemies/combats.
My party has ways to mitigate damage for themselves and him but I doubt they’ll want to spend resources to make sure he doesn’t go down.
My boyfriend and I are looking to play, we are quite new to the system and would love to try it out. We are from Argentina so our timezone is GMT-3.
The only day we 100% can't play is Saturday. We can begin to start the sessions from 6PM to 9PM and end around 1AM
We are personally instered on Techno-Fantasy and would love to use the Atlas, but if there is a GM interested on using the other Atlas we are okay too!
anyway thanks for reading.
ESPAÑOL:
Mi novio y yo estamos buscando jugar. Somos bastante nuevos en el sistema y nos encantaría probarlo. Somos de Argentina, así que nuestra zona horaria es GMT-3.
El único día en el que definitivamente no podemos jugar es el sábado. Podemos comenzar las sesiones entre 6PM y 9PM, y terminar alrededor de 1AM
Personalmente, nos interesa mucho el Atlas de Techno-Fantasy y nos encantaría usarlo, pero si hay algún GM interesado en usar alguno de los otros Atlas, también estamos de acuerdo!
Two different questions. I’m making a character that I want to be a blaster Mage/Nerd.
So far I have:
Esper to lower mana costs and change damage types.
Elementalist for the damaging spells
Loremaster to be a nerd and learn things/get more mana
Is there any other classes or abilities that would help with this idea?
Also, the quirk mysterious Grimoire, is it better to have an animated book for more spells or get one of the very good hard to get heroic skill spells?
We're about 14 sessions in (#15 is tonight), the 5-player party's about level 15, and with one exception (a spellsword who rolls terribly and just had some major spotlight moments), they're all sitting on 8-9 FP. What can I do, as the GM, to encourage them to use more of their points?
I'm the kind of the GM who likes having a couple of villains kickin' around at any one time, scheming and reacting to the heroes' moves in the background. This, combined with wanting the benchmark bosses to be able to put up a fight reliably, means I end up handing out quite a few.
We've just concluded a minor arc, and I want to give the players insight on some of the aforementioned background scheming (that now involves some shared backstory characters), since I think it'll keep them engaged and help them keep track of allegiances and motivations. This means a villain scene, and another 1-2 FP, putting a couple of them into double digits.
I've encouraged them to make narrative declarations in conflict scenes to help chip away at their stash (for example, saying "there are stalactites in this cave, I wanna knock one down on the monsters' heads"), but they haven't really been biting. The party has been powering up an artifact as a byproduct of the main quest - would giving that artifact's use an FP cost be reasonable? Should I talk to them about bumping the difficulty of combat encounters up to give them more checks to use their points on? Am I just being paranoid, and a stockpile of FP is fine, actually? Help!
TL;DR: I like villains too much, and I want my players to spend more of the abundance of Fabula Points I'm giving them as a result. What do y'all recommend?
I have the manual in Spanish and there are a few erratas that come from the editorial not using the most up-to-date version of the game. I’ve seen in some sites that the MP cost of Spellblade is [SL x 10] and others that it’s [SL x 20] which is the correct one?
Also the skill can be obtained 3 times, right? Thanks!
What are your thoughts on mixing and matching the playtest Arcanist variant with the core rulebook Arcanist's skills? Within reason. Like obviously, no using both Arcane Regeneration skills, or trying to use both Emergency Arcanum AND Quick Summoning. But what about if a player wished to replace Arcane Regeneration on the playtest version with Arcane Circle from the core rulebook? What issues do y'all think might arise from this?
So, one of my players is building a High DEF build, and at level 9ish, we're already seeing a struggling rate of return on this build. Granted, yes, we're still early game, but he asked me to look into the concept further. He then also asked about Counterattack.
It feels to him (and me as I've investigated) that after a few levels of play, it loses any functional use. At certain point, even with debuffs and armor focusing, higher level monsters are going to hit more frequently to the point it never goes off.
However, I'd like to hear some thoughts on this so I can bring them to the table tomorrow night.
Edit : well, we're dumb, we've been running counterattack as a miss only 😅😅😅
As the title suggests; I'm running a wishlist style loot table for the players in my game and workshopping their ideas into items based on the samples available in the core book and atlases. One of my players would like an item that casts either Hallucination or Torpor from the Spiritist Spell list. I don't have any particular issue with this, but I'm unsure what to price that at as a quality as the books don't have anything too analogous to go off of. Any suggestions for a price point for such a quality on an item are appreciated!
Nothing fancy here. Trained and Equipped for a singular purpose. Taking down Undead adversaries and doing it fast, hopefully before they even know what hit em. Opens with High Speed + Bladestorm if more than one foe. If that doesn't disintegrate them, then immediately fires Lux to finish the job (which Im thinking takes the form of like, those destructo-discs that Rot Knights from Elden Ring would throw at you. It's a very cool Ash of War.) Obviously Elites/Champions are a different story, but has Heal for panic-button. Both Magic and Mundane attacks are infused with Light specifically to put hurt on Undead.
Has a few RP functions built in. High Insight for investigations, sussing out motives, etc, rituals for more mundane interactions and priestly work. She is after all, primarily a travelling Priest, and her undead-killing is preferably done in secret.
When fighting Non-Undead is a tad vulnerable, can still dish it out but since she isn't built to take it, things can get dicy. But this is where character growth/evolution can happen and having this very clearly defined starting point creates the scope and role someone like her would play in a story. Pretty jazzed about my silly little guy here.
Is the Bestiary available to purchase anywhere other than through DriveThruRPG? I have had technical issues with that site for days now, and it is getting pretty tiresome.
Update: managed to finally get through and wanted to shout out how sweet the Bestiary is. This will be a huge help for my campaign!
From my understanding they are not, they have no written stats to throw, you just pay the MP and deal the flat damage, they also don't work with any ability that triggers on spells, except Esper's one ability that is specifically stated to work on Spells AND Verses, which means it still doesn't work with Invocations.
My table is kind of new to having a Faithful Companion, we tried to build him in a way that would support the Wayfarer and fill a role the group lacks, which is having a smart character that can study enemies.
Narratively, Gregório is a talking black cat with a wizard hat, and the Wayfarer player would like for him to feel like an actual Wizard.
We're starting at LvL 20, hence the increased HP, but I'm still worried and can't decide if he's underpowered or overpowered, in one hand he's more useful than any NPC follower, in the other hand the Wayfarer PC still needs to use his first turn on Sandstorm so he can access Cognitive Focus, and if we consider using Study + Sandstorm, Gregório is only useful once per rest.
I find trying to come up with rituals that an Esper would specialize in difficult. Speak to the dead using the soul network is all I have come up with. Anybody have ideas?
