#beans (experienced player who got me into the game) said 'Your character is such a mess. I love them' and yeah. shes a mess but i love her

[uniquezombiedestiny]

🖊?

oh hey. dusts this off. i have a new oc to write about :)

ive started playing fallen london recently so: say hi to maethyl fallow! a "devious and watchful individual of mysterious and indistinct gender." she also forgor (most of her lore is based around forgetting - her backstory is that she got lost in a cave of irrigo, an eldritch color that makes you forget when you look at it for too long.)

their story begins in fucking prison <3. all she knows is that her imprisonment is unjust - and, more importantly, inconvenient. so! they and an unlucky devil make their way out and become friends. she discovers that she's here in london for the wonder of the place - she has a lot to relearn, after all. on their escape, the devil leaves, but they're still friends :)

she decides to go to spite, one of four cities of fallen london. this is a place all about stealth, full of crime - mostly pickpocketing. they spend their first week or two here homeless and lost, doing both a lot of courier jobs and a lot of theft. i eventually learn how to travel (attributed to her memory loss of the world around her), and also get a home. yay!

after some mysterious communication with a benefactor, plus accessing the shops, she finally has better clothing than a prisoner's outfit. a maid outfit (and some shiny shoes!). this decreases their shadowy (stealth) stat but it was hilarious so i did it anyway

after some more stealing, a few courier jobs, and meeting a rat in her rented attic room, she makes her way to the carnival. she does just a little more theft, got her fortune read, and went to the mirror area. big mistake.

editing note: hey, this was right! she went on a journey to nightmare hell, and found plenty of mushrooms in her bath. the newspaper and poetry ones are kinda unknown, but the journalist storyline may fufill those.

for context: mae's discovered the joy of promenading - in the crowds of spite, a new location, you can go on trips and try stealing from various people. here, mae steals from a prison guard, gaining nightmares 1. she's also stabbed by jack for trying to steal from him (it was a like 20% chance), gaining wounds 2. hooray!

she looks into a mirror of nightmares, and upon looking closer due to the lack of a reflection, falls straight in. she is now in a world of madness, where all is red and gold and her nightmares increase to 8, described as "raving" (and right below "THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE COMING," at 7).

bitch, you are trapped in the nightmare dimension.

anyway, it's like a hotel. they have rooms to stay, food and drink to serve, and other places for guests, reception, etc.. while mae has become paranoid, haunted by her nightmares in the form of encroaching mist in the corner of her eye, the guests are just as insane as she is. somehow, she cant help but find them welcoming, and has a few good interactions with some of them.

notably, without anything else to do (see: i was impatient), mae basically waterboarded herself for a day or two. you're able to drink from the fountain in the lobby if you like, which can decrease your nightmares stat. failing this will knock down your persuasion stat, though.

guess who reached 0 persuasion (but hey, nightmares 6!)?

after becoming a donkey a few times, she eventually stops waterboarding herself to find that she has forgotten how to speak and think properly, let alone eloquently. she does still converse with the guests a few times, but she's pretty much talking like a kid now.

during all of this, i also draw cards for some other interactions, among them being: met a white cat a few times, a lizard appeared in her room twice, fungal infestations in the bath, and the view outside her room being various things. she's been wanting to speak to the manager since day 1, damn it. and speaking of drawing, i also drew some art of maethyl gone mad!

although the guests (and water) are awfully convincing about how this place is better than fallen london - i mean, the red and gold is quite pretty, and the service is great, too - she eventually looks out of her window one last time before finding herself awake in her room. she's probably spent ~2 weeks in there. they are themselves again! as their nightmares stat dropped and mae became less paranoid, a melancholy took it's place, though (she just has melancholy 1).

well, on she goes. more promenading ensues, a few cards are drawn, and she regains some stats from the rat she talked to. she also befriends an urchin kid.

eventually, on intercepting courier routes, she snatches a brown letter containing blackmail on a journalist. he sells it for something more practical - the heartless route, where they gain 2 heartless (a quirk, similar to melancholy).

(steadfast is gained later - subtle is from drinking some healing stuff from a bottle and following the instructions exactly. this is what brought her wounds down to 1.)

later, she meets that same journalist, and does a few jobs for him with her stealthiness. she then tracks him down, growing suspicious, as his newspaper's never shown up anywhere, and what use does he have for the info she's getting? he's found doing some boring stuff, but she does overhear him at a bar, talking about his clients and other things, that basically proved mae right. she's then contacted by a different journalist for a different newspaper - she gets some findings, but what use do they have for this, either? in the end, she tracks both of them down to a fighting ring, where they laugh about their dimwitted employers... among other things (i forgor). she learns their secrets and plans to use the knowledge somehow, rather than blackmail them for money.

in the meantime, she's had a drink with someone, having a toast to the cheery man, ruthless but a man of his word. here is where she gains 2 steadfast!

she's currently area-diving, planning an escapade through the lower stairs for valuables. it's not done yet, though.

and that's all for her so far! personality-wise, they're quite eccentric, with a few friends both animal and human. they're outgoing and friendly (or at least polite), but their voice has an eerie quality to it that may turn some people away. they struggle with their words sometimes, too.

beyond that, though, she's quite stealthy, adjusting well to spite. she's even become a bit heartless, disconnected from those around her. honestly, that nightmare realm trip may have affected her more than it seems.

behind all of it, though, is... an odd melancholy. like the fog of her dreams that not even she can see through. perhaps it's something she's forgotten.

we all got that home with an indescribable sadness /ref

[vaingloury]

Even more disparate thoughts on Fabula Ultima

Belated write-up: I finally got the chance to bring this game to the table last month...

...for all of one session. 

That’s one more session than most of the indie ttrpgs I own. Still, I bought a physical copy of the rules and I’m a bit disappointed to see it become yet another art book in my collection.

This post isn’t really a review or a judgement of the game’s quality, just some thoughts on why my group bounced off this game after one session and why it might not work for other tables like mine. This also isn’t in response to it winning the Ennie, I just couldn’t find the energy to write this sooner.

Praise first: The art’s great. I know not every project can afford consistent, original art but Fabula’s illustrations do a lot of the heavy lifting (not to say the written material isn’t also solid) in getting you interested in the game and imagining all kinds of characters you might want to portray. The game avoids stock dungeon fantasy classes with unique classes that don’t feel gimmicky for the sake of avoiding dungeon fantasy classes. Class abilities interact with each other, prompting teamwork. I really like the identity/theme/origin section of the character sheet because I’ve been in one too many games where the players want deep character drama but put the work of planting the seeds for that drama on the GM instead of themselves.

But now the criticisms.

This is not a game for the simulationists. Maybe that was obvious to others from the marketing blurbs, but I saw “J(T)RPG” and got excited thinking about how my character’s pockets were going to be overflowing with Mana Potion x99 in preparation for all the boss lairs we were going to be raiding only to be met with a Schrödinger’s inventory system (if you need an item, you just have it (within reason) except for HP/MP potions, which you can only hold a single digit number of) and a GM section on dungeon crawling that can be summed up as “Yeah, maybe don’t?”

My experience with video jrpgs is pretty synonymous with dungeons, random encounters*, and Mana Potion x99s, so not having those things makes me feel naked here. This is going to be a boon to groups who beg for bags of holding in D&D and find playing anything that’s not “the main story” in ttrpgs to be tedious. I get that Fabula wants a more cinematic experience, with the minutiae of adventuring relegated to happening “off-screen”, but without bean-counting to slow things down between set-pieces (Fabula cut the detailed overland travel rules in its conversion from Ryuutama, if you want travel scenes, just freeform rp it baby) I’m left underwhelmed with the remaining two game modes: combat and cutscene.

(*As a side note, Fabula does have random encounters. However, enemies matched to the party’s level can hit fairly hard, thus more than one encounter a travel day would be brutal in a mismatched tone kind of way. From this, I can assume that encounters are supposed to be few and scripted, keeping in line with the aforementioned cinematic experience. GMs experienced with multiple games will notice this but I’m curious about groups coming directly from video games or D&D. Tangentially, Fabula has an Appendix N, listing several games that are heavy on the dungeon/ multiple random encounter/ resource management trifecta. In hindsight, it finally dawned on me that Fabula doesn’t really simulate jrpgs, rather it simulates media inspired by jrpgs.)

This is also not a game for those of us who don’t run games in the small theatre company sort of way, that is to say your games don’t have a route scripted out in advance like three-night play or a television miniseries, where you gotta hit all the plot beats in sequence. When I said cutscene earlier, I meant it literally. The game wants the GM to interlude the narrative with visions of the campaign’s BBEG getting closer to their goal, enemies do that thing from video games where they can escape a fight you were winning because plot armour (which I find funny rather than frustrating, although that leads me to my actual frustration:). This all assumes that the GM has a grand, linear story to tell. Like the random vs scripted encounter thing, this isn’t addressed explicitly from what I can find in the rules. It’s just assumed you’re running this game because that’s your GM style (it is not my GM style). Lightning round of a few more things my group didn’t like:

Economy: I’m not sure how (much) to distribute money in this game. Because Fabula prefers that you didn’t dungeon crawl, you’re not finding money in chests. Turn in twenty bear asses maybe? Do you even need much money (if you’re not playing a Tinker)? Goods and services are dirt cheap, and most things don’t actually have to be bought. Rare weapons can just be dropped by enemies...

The Starter Scenario Boss: I’m willing to concede that I maybe just ran it wrong but the party didn’t stand a chance despite me nerfing the boss duo’s HP and damage. Also combat ranges aren’t a thing in this game, which I think contributed to the difficulty: the enemy can freely use close range attacks on targets they aren’t standing next to (again, “just freeform it”; they somehow run one football field in a few seconds...).

You Can’t Die: Again, I think this is going to be a boon for a certain type of group but mine felt like the risks weren’t real if you can’t die. I’ve already seen the defence of “just use a different consequence that isn’t death” but our characters found themselves in situations where things wouldn’t make sense if they didn’t die without the help of insane levels of deus ex machina.

I’m usually in the “play another game” camp but rather than trying to tailor Fabula to what I find fun, it’d be easier to just take the theme and bond mechanics from this game and graft them onto Pathfinder 2 or something.