Anatomy of a Fabula Class
When I spoke before in my other post about characters in Fabula Ultima, Strategic Simplicity, the vast bulk of a character's complex elements, and thus the combat, is derived from the character classes in the game.
When creating a character for the game, you begin at level 5, which is already a pretty large departure from your standard Dungeons & Dragons styled game. It is then not only advised, but actually demanded, that a character spend these levels across two, but no more than three, classes from the selection made available. In this way, multiclassing is not only an option, but a core component, of the process. You are blending together multiple sources of power and abilities in order to create your own unique expression of a hero. Across the potential 50 LEVELS (!) your character can achieve, in play, you will be expected to be constantly picking and choosing, mixing and matching, until you wind up with some strange mutant all your very own.
But what do these classes look like?
Let's take this class for an example.
Did I mention the art direction in this book is top tier? Because it absolutely is.
The text tells us, "An Elementalist has learned how to channel the souls that flow within the basic elements of creation: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water." To this end they're you're nukers, but can also inflict negative status effects and so on.
Next we are presented with this:
I love the addition of character prompts here, posing questions to the player of how they learned their magic, and how they feel about it. Asking to even define what your magic looks like and how you might have been made to use it in the past before we even get to anything remotely mechanical.
Then it tells us that for taking even a single level in this class, you get to permanently increase your maximum MP by 5, and you gain the ability to cast rituals (which is a very PbtA form of free form magic that allows you accomplish an almost limitless variety of noncombat effects, as long as you can reasonably explain how you would accomplish the task within the paradigm of your style of ritual magic. The ritualism domain, in this case, focuses on extracting magic from an object and sensing or interacting with raw unshaped magic for instance.)
Only after all that, are we met with the laundry list of skills, which looks like this:
Here we get a good look at the way skills are constructed and notated, as well as some of the symbols used in the game. Elemental Magic, for instance, shows us the lightning bolt symbol that indicates Offensive abilities, as well as showing which of the original 4 stats in the game are always used to cast offensive spells. We also see in the name line (+10) which indicates the number of times you can choose to take that particular skill from the list, gaining new spells each time you do so. (And at this point I think it is worth noting that you can never take more than 10 levels in a given class. Once the 10th level is taken you have mastered the class and learn a Heroic Skill for the class, but after that you have to move on to something else.)
We also get to see the use of SL, which in this game stands for Skill Level, showing how some skills contribute to checks numerically based on how often you've taken them (And yes, I do keep wanting to read SL as success level, because of other games, and this has tripped me up in my reading more than once I admit.)
And finally, we can also see that Elementalists even have the chance to learn an additional style of Ritual Magic if they so choose, and this isn't even all of the skills available to this particular class! And further this only one class of many, all of them having these robust suites of options!
What this allows us to see is that the depth that might be seen as absent elsewhere in the game has simply been moved into the construction and application of your character's combat ability. The blending of numerous classes and abilities to create something special, where ideally no two player characters should be anything alike.
And this is just in the player facing material.
Later on in the book, in the Game Master's section, we're presented with little helper boxes for every character class in the core book. Questions to consider and things to ask your players to get the creative juices flowing. For our aforementioned Elementalist, it looks like this:
Again, we see a useful prompt here about combat design and how to let a player that has chosen Elementalism as a core of their identity shine, but we also get a serious role-play and world building question to pose to your player as well. I simply love how the author of this game manages to constantly weave the fiction first nature of the storytelling throughout the entire book, even when discussing things that might seem to be relevant only to combat.
And this is just one of many. I mentioned it before, but with access to the corebook, the necromancer from the website, and all the available playtest material, the game features a whopping 27 classes to date to draw from. I think it makes for a very satisfying method of character creation, not unlike assembling your own homebrewed kitbash out of lego.
I really look forward to see how the characters my players have built wind up taking on the world with the Classes and Skills they've chosen.
