The Champions
Fabula Ultima
By Emanuele Galletto
1 Oct, 2024
Emanuele Galletto1’s 2023’s Ennie-award-winning Fabula Ultima is a level and class-based tabletop (in Japanese vernacular, “table talk”) role-playing game. Fabula Ultima’s2 goal is to emulate the techno-magical worlds of Japanese role-playing computers games (JRPGs) like the Final Fantasy series3.
What do these games have in common? Fabula Ultima’s eight pillars, common to all its settings are: ancient ruins and harsh lands, a world in peril, clashing communities, everything has a soul, magic and technology, heroes of many sizes and shapes, it’s all about the heroes, and mystery, discovery, and growth. Basically, decent people doing good in a dangerous world and having it mean something.
Normally, I would wait until I had the hardcopy in hand to review the game. My enthusiasm overcame my executive functions and I splurged on the PDF version of the game.
The first thing I noticed when I headed to DriveThru after a friend recommended Fabula Ultima was the very reasonable price. The second was the eye-catching cover and slick interior art4. The third, which should in no way be remarkable and yet somehow is, is the PDF’s layout, which is clearly designed to be as easily readable on laptops as tablets. I’ve read the rules several times, but my eyes are not bleeding nor do I have a headache. The character sheet is also nicely designed.
On a related note, the detailed core book steers between the Scylla of assuming the audience is exclusively veterans and explaining so tersely that newbies are lost, and the Charybdis of assuming that the audience is newbies and explaining so much that bored veterans bail. The text is usefully cross-referenced, the table of contents is very detailed, and the index is acceptable.
There are said to be three modes for TTRPGs: gamist (goal-oriented), narrativist (story-oriented), and simulationist (emulation-oriented). At first glance, Fabula Ultima seems to be heavily narrativist, with sufficient gamist elements to encourage players to adhere to JRPG tropes. I would argue that it is also a simulationist game. It’s just that what it is simulating isn’t reality or reality + magic or reality + super-science, but the world-logic of JRPGs5.
I prefer skill-based games like Basic Roleplaying, Dragonbane, Runequest, Traveller, and others. In general, I am cool on character-class-based games (where each character is defined by their profession and each member of the profession is much like another) and level-based games (where advancement occurs in quantized steps). Fabula Ultima doesn’t really have skills (although it has something called skills, they’re more knacks); it embraces both character classes and levels. Also, the world building is explicitly collaborative6 and although I am in no way a control freak, I prefer to determine every element of homebrewed settings myself, from the Fine Structure Constant to the colour of pixie farts. Logic says that I’m a bad fit for games like Fabula Ultima, yet here I am writing a rave review.
One reason is Fabula Ultima’s implementation of classes and levels, in particular its embrace of multiclassing. Every character belongs to multiple classes (two to three at the beginning). Each new level imbues the character with a new neat thing that one of their character classes can do. Customization isn’t just easy, it’s hard to avoid.
The mechanics appear to be easy to understand and easy to implement7, with some amusing twists I will get to later.
The core book on its own is sufficient to create characters, spin worlds, and run lengthy campaigns. However, the game is lavishly supported.
Gamers on a limited budget will be relieved to hear that the line (at least in PDF) is very affordably priced; the current line can be purchased in whole for less than the minimum buy-in needed to play 2300 AD. As well, there’s lots of free support material offered and a thriving community of players out there.
[Added now that I have physical copies]
The core rule-book is nicely designed, with coloring on page-edges to facilitate finding sections. The book even has a proper dust cover. As well, each book comes with a QR code for a free PDF so if you’re planning on getting both formats, buy the paper.
Fabula Ultima is available in various formats here (DriveThru), here (Studio 2), and here (Mophidius).
As for the rules themselves:
TTRPGs are inherently Lamarckian. Cool ideas from one game find their way into other games. In this case, the author documents the games that influenced his design. Atsuhiro Okada’s Ryuutama, published by Kotodama Heavy Industries, was a strong influence.
Introduction
This explains what table talk roleplaying games are, the nature of this TTRPG in particular, the foundation on which it rests, the role of game masters, and the role of players.
Game rules
Although there are twenty-five-part subsections detailing the game mechanics, the essentials are pretty straightforward. Characters have four attributes (Dexterity, Insight, Might, Willpower), each of which has an associated die, whose starting value will range from a six-sided die at the low end and a ten-sided die at the high end8. Tests generally involve rolling two attribute dice, applying modifiers, and seeing if the result is equal to or exceeds a target threshold.
Some of the design choices had me scratching my head. For example, aside from melee versus ranged attacks, distance isn’t a thing. If two characters are in the same scene they can interact (unless one is airborne and the other is not). Then I remembered the point is to not to model reality with fantastic overlays, but to simulate how certain computer games work.
Dice manufacturers will be pleased to know that the dice rolling app on my phone cannot handle rolling two dice of differing types. Math rocks rule!
Player characters can affect outcomes by expending Fabula Points. The villains have Ultima Points. Fabula Points can be earned, whereas Ultima Points are a non-renewable resource. Once the villain is out of Ultima Points, they are reduced to NPC status9… unless they transcend their limitations and become villains of even greater scope.
Having played with the combat rules a bit, it seems that numbers will count for more than comparative power-level. Each character has a limited number of actions per turn and if one side has more actions than the other, they can quickly overwhelm their opponents. It might be safer for three 5th level adventurers to face off against a 20th level foe than four 5th level guards.
Something I’ve not encountered in other TTRPGs: the GM can opt to act out cut-scenes in which no player character takes part, to provide foreshadowing.
The bit that jumped out at me involves character death. Losing all of one’s hit points has serious consequences, but there is no character death unless the player chooses for their character to die, and then only if the death would be thematically appropriate and suitably dramatic. Every player character gets their own swan song.
Press start
This section covers world and character creation.
Unlike most other TTRPGs, world creation is a collaboration between game master and players. This means GMs can only start plotting the campaign after session zero. It also means that most campaigns will be homebrews, a throwback to early days of roleplaying.
The character creation has eight steps: select identity, theme, origin, classes, attributes, calculate derivative attributes, purchase starting equipment, and describe the character. While there are only three available attribute arrays available (Jack of All Trades, Generalist, and Specialist) the other elements of character generation, in particular the way character-class mix-and-matching works, provide a vast range of permutations.
As previously mentioned, this is a level-based game. Each time a player character advances a level, they gain a new class-related ability of their choosing, either from one of the classes to which they already belong or a new one10. That’s nothing new. What is remarkable is the speed at which characters advance: one level every session or two. As this is a game with a maximum level, campaigns would seem to have built-in finite durations. That maximum level is 50, so we’re talking a year or two for campaigns played weekly.
The argument for the Specialist array is that one will be superlative in things pertaining to one’s two best stats. The argument against is that one will suck immensely at activities pertaining to the other two. Either Jack of All Trades or Generalist seems to be safer… but if adventurers wanted the safe choice, they would stay home11.
Game master
A ten-part discussion of the issues GMs need to bear in mind in order to manage fun and rewarding campaigns.
This isn’t terribly long, less than sixty pages, but it manages to cram in quite a lot of useful information.
Bestiary
A sampling of creatures and NPCs to throw at the player characters.
There’s a whole section on plant-based creatures. Are plant creatures a big thing in Japanese RPGs? Is there something about Japanese botany of which I am unaware?
There is a fair assortment here (eight categories, each with several entries), on top of which there are customization guidelines to provide even more variety.
1: Fabula Ultima credits are:
Game Design, Writing and Development: Emanuele Galletto
Art Direction: Emanuele Galletto
Cover: Artist Moryo
Interior Artwork Artists: Christian Benavides, Lorenzo Magalotti, Moryo, Susu Nonohara, and Catthy Trinh
Pixel Artwork Artists: ExtantLily, Emanuele Galletto, Ben Henry, and Sascha Naderer
Damage Icons: Artist Lorc
Publisher: Nicola Degobbis
Chief of Operations: Marco Munari
Producer: Matteo Pedroni
Editing: Courteney Penney
Sensitivity Reading: Marta Palvarini
Graphic Design: Emanuele Galletto, Marco Munari, Erica Viotto
Proofreading: Emanuele Galletto, Marco Munari, and Alberto Orlandini
2: Fabula Ultima does not lend itself to two-letter abbreviation, so I will be referring to it as Fabula Ultima each time.
3: If you are unfamiliar with Japanese computer role-playing games, consider buying Aidan Moher’s Fight, Magic, Items.
4: In addition to the detailed colour art, icons for various items are 16-bit pixel art, which amuses me.
5: If I had to compare Fabula Ultima to a moderately obscure webcomic cancelled in 2019, and apparently, I do, it would be Rob Balder’s Erfworld, whose setting’s natural law was that of turn-based wargames.
6: The trick to GM and player collaboration on worldbuilding may be figuring out how to coax players, used to having the setting created by fiat, into actively participating in worldbuilding. Improv workshop methods may port over nicely.
7: I am guessing that this game would be easy to play… guessing because I have not played with it very much. Rave reviews are easy to find online, but I haven’t found any Fabula Ultima game sessions on YouTube (one way to see how it works in practice).
8: The game also uses twelve and twenty-sided dice. “But standard dice sets have four-sided dice as well. What do we do with our d4s if they play no role in the game?” Scatter them on the floor to test player alertness. Give them extra Fabula Points if they avoid all of them.
9: Which, I cannot help but notice, is exactly how Scooby-Doo villains work. The kids can’t catch the bad guy, only snoop, inconvenience, and run from the villain, until suddenly at the end it’s trivial to catch and unmask them. The moral: hoard those Ultima Points.
10: Choice of new class-related abilities is subject to some restrictions that I won’t discuss here, except to say it is mathematically impossible to have skills from more than seven classes.
11: Until the Big Bad’s army invades and burns the adventurers’ bucolic village to the ground. If you don’t seek adventure, adventure will seek you.