Tabletop Game / Fabula Ultima

This is your world, this is your story.
Make your choice and fight for what you believe in.

Fabula Ultima is an award-winning tabletop role-playing game, designed by Emanuele Galletto and published by Need Games!, which released in October 6, 2022.

The game is a love letter to JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. It tries to capture the style and feel of such games, translating it to the tabletop format. Larger-than-life heroic characters work together to overcome fearsome villains and save the world, using the power of their martial skills, magical abilities, and their bonds with one another. There is no default campaign setting, as the book places special emphasis on collaborative worldbuilding: everyone is expected to contribute something to the game's world at the start of the campaign, and players can further flesh out the world and its people as the campaign unfolds.

Characters have four main stats: Dexterity, Insight, Might, and Willpower. Each is represented by a single die of varying size, with a bigger die meaning a better value for the stat. The central mechanic is the Check, where a player rolls two of their relevant stat dice, adds the total together, and compares it to a target number. If the result is greater than or equal to the target number, the Check succeeds. Otherwise, it fails.

A free introductory adventure, Press Start, is available on the Need Games! website, along with several free supplements. The core rulebook is available on DriveThru RPG. A splatbook, Fabula Ultima Atlas: High Fantasy, was released in August 11, 2023. It is available on DriveThru RPG here.

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Fabula Ultima provides examples of:

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• Action Bomb: The Grenado enemy explodes when it dies, dealing fire damage to all other creatures present unless the blow that killed it dealt ice damage.
• Action Initiative: At the start of combat, the players roll initiative as a group check to determine if their side or the enemies' side gets to go first. Once this has been established, the two sides alternate every turn: one of the players takes a turn, then one of the enemies, then another player, and so on until the end of the round. Beyond that, all the characters on the same side can act in any order during a round.
• All Deaths Final: It is borderline impossible to resurrect the dead in this game. No playable class has the power: the closest you can get is the Hope spell, which is limited to reviving the unconscious. The only ways to bring the dead back to life provided in the core rulebook are a pair of unique magical artefacts: one must be ingested pre-mortem and brings you back as an intelligent undead once you die; the other is destroyed forever upon being used to resurrect a single person. This was a deliberate choice by the game's designers to make player character deaths meaningful. Conversely, a PC can't die unless they've accepted their death and made a Heroic Sacrifice - otherwise, they take a nonfatal consequence.
• Ant Assault: Bombard Ants are human-sized ants which can spray a dazing liquid from their abdomens and burrow into the ground to defend themselves from attack. They are functionally mindless and have a weakness to fire, so much so that they are described as both "flammable" and "explosive" (which has no bearing on gameplay).
• Anti-Air: The Elementalist's Soaring Strike spell forces a flying enemy struck by it to land, exposing that enemy to attacks from melee weapons.
• Anti-Armor: The Weaponmaster's Breach skill lets them forgo inflicting damage with a melee attack in order to destroy the target's equipped armor or shield instead.
• Anti-Debuff:
  • Any character can spend two Inventory Points to produce a Tonic which cures one status effect.
  • Villains can cure themselves of all status effects by spending an Ultima Point.
  • The Fury's Indomitable Spirit skill lets them cure themselves of a single status effect when they spend any Fabula Points.
  • The Spiritist's Cleanse spell cures up to three creatures of all status effects, while their Reinforce spell makes up to three creatures immune to a specific status effect for the remainder of the scene.
  • The Symbolist's Symbol of Flux can make its bearer immune to one of four status effects while it lasts. It can also invert this trope by removing the bearer's immunity to that status effect and preventing them from regaining it until the symbol is destroyed.
  • The rare sword Excalibur gives its wielder immunity to all status effects.
• Anti-Frustration Features: An alchemy Tinkerer's potions have randomized targets and effects, both determined by rolling a d20 and consulting a table. To avoid an undesirable outcome like hurting your allies or healing your enemies, the effects table has two "Any" results—one which heals the potion's target by a small amount, the other which inflicts a low amount of poison damage to them—which can always be taken regardless of what you rolled.
• Anti-Regeneration:
  • One application of the Commander skill King's Castle stops everyone, friend and foe alike, from recovering HP and MP until the Commander's next turn.
  • Downplayed by the Symbol of Despair, which halves the HP and MP that the marked creature recovers from any healing effect.
• Apocalypse Maiden: Any character with the "Ruinbringer" quirk is destined to bring a terrible evil into the world, whether they wish to or not. Mechanically, this quirk prevents the character from dying until the evil manifests, and effectively sets a doomsday clock over the party's head, since they will inevitably have to fight this thing when it arrives.
• Attack Reflector: The Mirror spell protects its recipient from one offensive spell by turning that spell back on its caster.
• Auto-Revive: If the Necromancer hits 0 HP while they have at least one Grave Point, they won't fall unconscious. Instead, they will sacrifice all their Grave Points and recover health proportional to the number of Grave Points they just lost. They can only do this once per scene.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: The Loremaster's Quick Assessment skill lets them instantly deduce the strengths, weaknesses, and/or traits of a single enemy at the start of a combat.
• Barred from the Afterlife: The artifact Soulrend can be used to ritualistically cut a dead person's spirit off from the flow of the stream of souls, potentially condemning them to wander the world of the living forever. It can also result in a gradual Cessation of Existence for the victim.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: The Cockatrice is a chickenlike monster whose peck can either turn living creatures to stone or inflict poison damage.
• The Beastmaster: The Wayfarer's Faithful Companion skill gives them a 5th level NPC companion. This could be some sort of animal, or it could be something more esoteric like an elemental or a magitech construct. Whatever form it takes, the Wayfarer can command it to fight on their behalf.
• BFG: The strongest firearm in the core rulebook, Calamity, is a two-handed weapon strongly implied to be some sort of magical bazooka.
• BFS:
  • The artwork for the Darkblade class depicts a female knight wielding a massive sword. Its blade is about as wide as her torso, and from tip to pommel the weapon is longer than her entire body. The Press Start adventure uses this artwork to represent Lavigne Fallbright, who wields a greatsword as her main weapon.
  • The High Fantasy sourcebook has "Protector Greatswords" as an example custom weapon category. These swords are so massive that the game treats them as ranged weapons, meaning they can strike flying enemies from the ground. They also provide a passive bonus to the wielder's Defense and Magic Defense, implicitly because the blade is broad enough to double as a shield as it's being swung around.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The core rulebook's bestiary has several flavors of giant bug for a GM to throw at their players.
• Black Mage: The Elementalist is a magic class which focuses on blasting enemies with spells drawn from five of the game's elements, and they can learn skills which increase their spells' accuracy and lethality.
• Blinded by Rage: The Enraged status effect lowers the target's Dexterity and Insight by one die size each. This not only makes it harder for them to succeed on Checks involving those skills but also reduces their Defense and Magic Defense, making them easier to hit overall.
• Blob Monster: The Mellow Ooze and Static Ooze are a pair of round gelatinous creatures. The former is classified as a Monster while the latter is classified as an Elemental, and both resist physical damage due to their gelatinous natures.
• Bloodsucking Bats: The Vampire Bat enemy is an oversized bat with a taste for human blood.
• Bloody Murder: In her first phase, Carmilla the vampire can attack with swords made of blood. She loses this ability in her second phase but gains a "Bloodchill Wave" spell that inflicts ice damage to her targets.
• Blow You Away:
  • One of the game's elemental damage types is air damage, which tends to involve blasting targets with wind. The Elementalist and the Tinkerer can inflict this damage, as can the Mellow Ooze, the Nymph, and the Dragontrap.
  • The Vortex spell is a defensive spell which surrounds the caster with a whirlwind that deflects enemy projectiles, increasing their defense against ranged attacks.
• Break Them by Talking: The Orator's Condemn skill lets them inflict status effects and Mana Burn on an enemy just by rebuking them.
• Cactus Person: Cactrolls are large, ambulatory cactus creatures. They are stated to be nocturnal and territorial, and they can dispatch intruders by pulling them into a spiny hug, spraying them with needles from afar, and sucking the moisture out of their bodies with magic.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": If the bestiary is any indication, wolves are called "howlers" in Fabula Ultima's universe.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The sun bear is indeed a bear, but it otherwise bears little resemblance to the real-world animal. Real sun bears certainly can't communicate telepathically or burst into flame to empower themselves when their health gets low.
• Cap: The maximum level a player can reach is 50, while the maximum levels they can invest into any one class is 10. The number of unmastered (i.e., not at level cap) classes a character can have at any one time is capped at 3, meaning you cannot start leveling a fourth class until you've maxed out one of the three you already have. NPCs, meanwhile, have a maximum level cap of 60.
• Cards of Power: The Ace of Cards owns a mystical card deck which is the source of their powers. By drawing cards from this deck and playing sets analogous to poker hands, they can produce magical effects which benefit their allies or hinder their enemies, with the precise effect depending on the set, suits, and values of the played cards.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The Darkblade's Shadow Strike skill lets them sacrifice some hit points to make a powerful melee attack infused with dark energy.
  • The Spiritist's Vismagus skill lets them spend HP instead of MP to cast spells, with certain restrictions. The HP cost is twice the spell’s normal MP cost, they can only do this if they don't have enough MP to cast the spell normally, and they cannot do this to cast a spell which heals the Spiritist themselves.
  • The Heartbreaker heroic skill lets you sacrifice half your current hit points to deal 10-30 extra damage on a single-target attack against an enemy with which you have a Bond.
  • The Birth Of The Cruel heroic skill lets you inflict Maximum HP Reduction on yourself to reanimate a dead NPC as an undead minion.
  • The Grand Summoning heroic skill lets an Arcanist spend half their current HP, and a Fabula Point, to summon an Arcanum to fight alongside them as a powerful independent entity.
• Casting a Shadow: "Dark" is one of the game's elemental damage types. Classes which can inflict this damage include the Darkblade and the Entropist.
• Charged Attack:
  • If a Sharpshooter with the Hawkeye skill takes the Guard action, they can choose to have their next ranged weapon attack deal extra damage.
  • The Flame Dragon gets a stacking bonus to the damage inflicted by the next use of its Breath Weapon every time it takes 30+ damage from a single source.
• Chess Motifs: The Commander class's skills are all named after chess pieces, befitting their nature as a tactician.
• Chest Monster: Mimics are shapeshifting monsters which can disguise themselves as inanimate objects. The artwork depicts one which has disguised itself as a chair, with its mouth ready to bite down on anyone who sits on its cushioned seat.
• The Chosen One: Any character with the "Glorious Fate" quirk is destined to save the world from a grave threat according to an ancient prophecy. Such characters can try to act in accordance with their prophecy or defy it, with different mechanical effects for each choice.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Demons are born of human thoughts and beliefs. Even the dark thoughts of a single person are enough to spawn an imp, and the High Fantasy sourcebook suggests that the very gods of your campaign setting may be powerful demons spawned from widespread belief in a religion or state propaganda.
• Class and Level System: The core rulebook includes fifteen classes. Each time a player character gains a level, they invest that level in a class of their choice, gaining one of that class's associated skills. Multiclassing is enforced: all characters start at level 5 with their levels distributed between two to three classes, and while the level cap is 50, a character can't invest more than 10 levels into a single class (which "masters" that class). You also can't have more than three non-mastered classes at any one time, so a character can't have levels in every single class.
• Close-Range Combatant: The Weaponmaster class. Their skills focus exclusively on melee weapons and melee attacks, allowing them to do such things as strike multiple enemies with a single attack, shatter an enemy's armor, inflict status effects or Mana Burn in lieu of damage on a successful attack, and otherwise be better at melee combat than anyone else.
• Counter-Attack: The Weaponmaster's Counterattack skill, which lets them make a free melee attack against an attacking enemy if that enemy rolled an even number on their accuracy check.
• Counterspell: The Magic Guard heroic skill lets a Guarding spellcaster negate an enemy's spell as it is being cast, causing the enemy to waste its action and its MP.
• Creepy Centipedes: The Cutterpillar is a large centipede with poisonous mandibles and an armored exoskeleton which makes it impervious to physical attacks when it curls up into a ball.
• Critical Failure:
  • If you roll two 1s during a check, you get a fumble. You fail at whatever you were trying to achieve, though the game awards you a Fabula Point as a consolation prize.
  • Rolling a 1 on the Gamble spell produces its worst possible effect: you lose half your current health and mind points.
• Critical Hit: If both dice land on the same number during a Check and the number is 6 or higher, the result is a critical success. You not only succeed on what you were doing, but you can also create an Opportunity which is beneficial to your allies, detrimental to your enemies, or both.
• Critical Hit Class: The Frenzy skill gives Furies a greatly increased chance of achieving a critical success when attacking with brawling weapons, daggers, flails, and thrown weapons.
• Critical Status Buff: Several classes have skills which confer some benefit while the character is in a state of Crisis (i.e., at half HP or less).
  • The Darkblade's Dark Blood skill makes them resistant to dark and poison damage, while their Heart of Darkness skill lets them establish a Bond of hatred toward a hostile creature once per scene.
  • The Fury's Adrenaline skill makes all of their attacks inflict extra damage while in Crisis.
  • The Arcanist's Emergency Arcanum skill greatly reduces the MP cost of summoning an Arcanum while in Crisis.
• Cute Slime Mook: The Mellow Ooze and Static Ooze are a pair of cute, low-level slime creatures with rotund bodies and perpetual cat smiles. The former is a naturally occurring Monster which can heal its allies by doing a magical dance, while the latter is an artificial Elemental which can zap foes with electricity.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff:
  • One application of the Weaponmaster's Breach skill makes the target take extra damage from the first attack to hit them before the Weaponmaster's next turn.
  • The Entropist's Anomaly spell temporarily turns its target's elemental immunities and absorptions into vulnerabilities, meaning that something which would normally would not hurt them will now hurt them a lot.
  • The Symbolist's Symbol of Weakness gives its recipient a weakness to one of the game's eight elemental damage types, making them take 5 extra points of damage whenever they get hit with that damage type. Their Personal Touch skill can also make an enemy marked with one of their symbols take extra damage whenever it gets hurt.
• Dance Battler: The Dancer class, naturally. Their whole schtick is performing magical dances that can empower themselves or hinder their enemies, and one of their skills makes their weapon attacks and offensive spells more powerful if they attack while dancing.
• Deadly Gaze:
  • The Hexeye has two harmful gaze-based abilities. One is a spell that inflicts status effects to the victim. The other is an attack which inflicts dark damage and reduces the number of actions the target can take on its next turn if it was suffering from one of the aforementioned status effects.
  • Echidnas have a Cold Glare attack which inflicts ice damage and prevents the victim from taking the Objective action on their next turn.
• Defend Command: The Guard action gives its user resistance to all damage until their next turn and can also be used to cover an ally so they can't be targeted by melee attacks.
• Dem Bones: The Undead species contains several types of reanimated skeletons for players to fight.
• Disc-One Nuke: The Comet and Volcano spells are immensely powerful offensive spells which can be obtained by mastering the Entropist and the Elementalist, respectively. Depending on how you've built your character, you can obtain either spell by level 11.
• Double-Edged Buff: Some of the Commander's skills produce effects that are beneficial, or harmful, to friend and foe alike. For instance, the Bishop's Edict skill can either make anything that costs MP more expensive, or make anything that deals damage hit harder.
• Draw Aggro: The Dancer's Peacock Dance forces one enemy to target the Dancer with their next attack or offensive spell.
• Easy Exp: The player characters automatically get 5 free XP at the end of every session, plus whatever amount they earned during that session. Since players only need 10 XP to go up a level, this means the party will level up every other session at most.
• Electric Jellyfish: The Hydrozoa is a flying jellyfish monster which can shock prey with its electrified tentacles.
• Elemental Embodiment: Elementals make up one of the game's NPC categories. They are described as "tangible manifestations of the great forces of nature" and are universally immune to poison damage and the poisoned status effect. The category includes clear embodiments of the elements like the Cragboar and the Grenado, nature spirits like Acorn Pixies and Nymphs, and more abstract things like the Chaos Shard.
• Elemental Powers: The game has nine elemental damage types: physical, air, bolt, dark, earth, fire, ice, light, and poison. There is also typeless damage, which is comparatively rare.
• Enchanted Forest: One of the High Fantasy sourcebook's sample locations is the dark forest Artemis, a dense and ancient woodland home to sinister supernatural forces.
• Enemy Scan:
  • Players can use the Study action to learn detailed information about an enemy during combat. The higher the result of the Check, the more info they'll learn. If a Loremaster with the Flash of Insight skill gets at least a 13 on this Check, they can ask the GM up to three questions about the creature being studied, and the GM must answer them truthfully.
  • The Quick Assessment skill lets a Loremaster spend MP at the start of a conflict to learn the traits/elemental affinities of one or more enemies. Every 5 MP they spend this way nets them one piece of information, such as a specific enemy's affinity to fire damage.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Entropists are mages who draw their power from the churning chaos beyond the stars to cast spells which manipulate probability, distort time, drain life, reflect magic, and blast foes with pure darkness.
• Escape Battle Technique: The Rogue's See You Later skill lets them spend a Fabula Point to immediately get the hell out of the current scene. They can then reappear in a later scene to wow their allies with the details of their miraculous escape.
• Evil Overlooker: The core rulebook's cover art depicts a demonic figure looming large in the background, sneering at the group of heroes in the foreground.
• Excalibur: The core rulebook includes Excalibur as one of its sample rare sword weapons. It's a two-handed sword that inflicts light damage and gives its wielder immunity to all status effects.
• Expy:
  • The core rulebook's bestiary includes the Grenado, a living fireball which looks and acts almost exactly like a Bomb from Final Fantasy.
  • The Darkblade class takes clear cues from Final Fantasy's recurring Dark Knight job, being warriors who sacrifice their own hit points to perform powerful dark-elemental attacks. The class's artwork even depicts a knight in black armor wielding a massive and sinister-looking greatsword, much like Final Fantasy XIV's iteration of the Dark Knight.
  • The Hexeye is a dead ringer for the Final Fantasy franchise's recurring Ahriman/Angra Mainyu/Floateye enemy, being an Oculothorax creature with wings, tiny legs, and a Deadly Gaze.
• Extra Turn: Elite- and Champion-rank enemies get to take multiple turns per round. Elites can take two turns per round, while Champions can take as many turns as the number of Mooks they're meant to replace.
• Fallen Princess: One of the Press Start adventure's premade characters is Lavigne Fallbright, a princess who lost her family and homeland to the invading empire of Elonia.
• Feed It with Fire: Some enemies can absorb certain damage types, meaning that hitting them with those damage types will heal them instead of hurting them. The Static Ooze and the Lightning Wheel both absorb bolt damage, for instance, while the Spikeflake absorbs ice damage.
• Fight Like a Card Player: The Ace of Cards class uses a stripped deck of playing cards to represent its abilities. The player draws cards from the physical deck, the character spends MP to play sets of those cards from their hand, and the set, suits, and/or values of the played cards determines what happens. This is meant to represent an in-universe deck of Cards of Power, which the Ace of Cards uses to work their magic.
• Fish out of Water: The "From A Distant World" quirk lets you play a character who is profoundly out of place in the campaign's world, whether they hail from a different era or come from another world entirely. This out-of-placeness allows the character to Screw Destiny to a degree, letting them gain and spend Fabula Points more frequently.
• Fixed Damage Attack:
  • The Arcana that have damage-dealing Dismiss effects always deal a fixed amount of damage to all targets.
  • The Comet and Volcano spells inflict a high amount of fixed damage to a single enemy. If these spells are used against multiple enemies, each target takes a slightly lower amount of fixed damage.
• Flight: Some NPCs have the Flying skill, which prevents them from being targeted by melee attacks from non-flying opponents. Players can get in on this action by taking the Flight quirk.
• Floating Continent: One of the sample locations described in the High Fantasy sourcebook is Seraphim, an entire city and its surrounding landscape which float above the clouds thanks to ancient magic.
• Flying Face: The Lightning Wheel is a demon which resembles a skull made of electricity, floating at the center of a wooden wheel.
• Flying Seafood Special: The Thornfish and Thornshark are oceanic fish classified as flying enemies.
• Fog of Doom: A life-draining Mist fills the streets of Seraphim, forcing the city's inhabitants to wear masks for their protection whenever they go outside. Its source is a mysterious device called the Mist engine. Shutting it off would get rid of the Mist, but it would also make the floating city drop like a rock.
• Fountain of Youth: The Chalice of Youth from the High Fantasy sourcebook. Drinking any liquid from this magical artifact rejuvenates you and restores you to your physical prime, though the transformation wears off after a few days. Worse, the Chalice is an Artifact of Doom which subtly corrupts your mind with every use.
• Fragile Speedster: The Rogue has no proficiency with martial armors and is one of the few classes that don't increase your HP or MP when you first acquire it. In exchange for this frailty, they get skills which make them harder to hit while they aren't wearing martial armor, let them act before anyone else at the start of a combat, and let them safely escape from any encounter.
• Freeze Ray: The Freezing Shot is a rare ice-elemental gun which inflicts the Slow status effect to whatever it hits.
• Full-Boar Action: The Cragboar is a powerful and dangerous Elemental which resembles a gigantic boar made of living rock. It is an irritable and destructive creature fond of charging enemies and goring them with its rocky tusks.
• Glamour Failure: Mimics can disguise themselves as practically anything, but the disguise always has some flaw which gives away their true nature.
• Global Currency: Zenit. No matter what sort of world your group comes up with or where their characters go, their zenit will always be good.
• God in Human Form: Apate, the tyrannical Masked Queen of Seraphim, is actually the city's patron goddess Aletheia in human form. How, and why, she ended up as a mortal is left for the GM to decide, but the mask Apate wears is apparently what keeps her in this state: destroying the mask will restore her to godhood.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The floating city of Seraphim is ruled by Masked Queen Apate, a capricious tyrant feared by all her subjects.
• Golem: Two types of golems are featured in the core rulebook's bestiary. Bronze golems are clockwork magitech constructs which protect their masters' property with blasts of air and metal fists. Forest golems are wooden constructs animated by witches and druids to guard sacred sites, and they possess formidable magical powers in addition to great strength. The latter is more powerful than the former in almost every respect.
• Great Big Book of Everything: The High Fantasy sourcebook has the Emarillion, a magical artifact that contains the history of the entire universe—from the beginning of time all the way to the present moment—within its self-updating pages. Good luck parsing all that information if you get the chance to read it.
• Hack Your Enemy: A Tinkerer who specializes in magitech gadgets can use their Magitech Override ability to seize control of a single enemy construct for the remainder of the current scene. They will lose control of this construct if they try to override another one, or if they or their allies attack it.
• Handicapped Badass: One of the sample villains in the High Fantasy sourcebook, Eileen the Pirate Queen, is missing an eye and an arm. These handicaps won't prevent her from kicking a low-level party's ass with her revolver-harpoon.
• Healing Hands: Given the nature of this game, there's a lot of ways to heal your allies.
  • The Dismiss effect for the Arcanum of the Oak restores a large amount of HP to the Arcanist's whole party and cures them all of poison to boot.
  • The Orator's Encourage skill restores health to a single ally who can hear and understand them, and also buffs one of their attribute dice.
  • The Heal spell, as its name implies, restores a big amount of health to up to three creatures. The Healing Power skill lets a Spiritist use any spell which targets their allies to restore HP.
  • Tinkerers, depending on their specialization, can craft health-restoring potions or build a magisphere which duplicates the effect of the aforementioned Heal spell. They can also take a skill which makes these health-restoring items more effective.
  • The Calm tone makes a Chanter's verse restore HP (or MP, depending on the chosen key) to each of its targets.
  • The Queen's Gambit skill allows a Commander to restore health to a single ally who can hear them as a follow-up to a weapon attack.
  • The Dancer's Unicorn Dance restores health to the Dancer and an ally with whom they share a Bond.
  • The Hope spell, which can only be obtained by mastering the Spiritist class, revives a surrendered creature and restores them to half their maximum HP.
• Heal Thyself:
  • Any character can heal themselves or an ally by spending 3 Inventory Points to pull out a health-restoring Remedy or an MP-restoring Elixir.
  • The Fury's Withstand skill restores some HP to them whenever they take the Guard action, and their Indomitable Spirit skill can be used to recover HP when they spend Fabula Points.
  • Some NPCs can cast the Lick Wounds spell, which heals them for an amount proportional to their level.
• Hellhound: The Shadow Howler is a demon which resembles a monstrous dog or wolf.
• Herd-Hitting Attack:
  • Some weapons have the Multi property, which allows you to strike multiple targets with a single attack. The Sharpshooter and Weaponmaster can learn skills that bestow this property on any ranged or melee weapon they wield, respectively, or enhance it if it's already present.
  • Some offensive spells can be cast on up to three targets at once, such as the Elementalist's Fulgur spell or the Spiritist's Lux spell.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A player character that has fallen to 0 hit points can choose to sacrifice themselves instead of suffering a Non-Lethal K.O., achieving some great if not borderline impossible feat at the cost of their own life. Since the game ascribes to all deaths being final, there is generally no coming back from this, so the rules encourage the player to go hog-wild in their character's final moments.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Sharpshooter's Crossfire skill lets them force an enemy's ranged attack to fail, implicitly by shooting the enemy's projectiles out of the air before they can hit anything.
• Injured Vulnerability:
  • Magitech Soldiers lose some of their damage resistances while in Crisis, making them easier to bring down.
  • Player characters with the Flight quirk lose the ability to fly while in Crisis. NPCs with the Flying skill likewise get grounded while in Crisis.
• Insectoid Aliens: The Hivekin are a race of humanoid bees.
• Item Amplifier:
  • The Tinkerer's Potion Rain and Secret Formula skills. The former lets any single-target healing potion they craft affect multiple targets at the cost of halving the amount of HP/MP it restores. The latter makes their crafted potions and magispheres restore more HP/MP or deal more damage.
  • The Alchemusket is a rare gun which makes any potion crafted by its wielder more potent, making them deal extra damage or restore extra health.
  • The Butler Uniform and Maid Uniform are a pair of rare armors which enhance the potions and magispheres crafted by the person wearing them. The former makes these items restore more HP, while the latter makes them restore more MP.
• Item Caddy: The Tinkerer class. All but one of their skills relate to consumable items in some way, allowing them to craft unique consumables on the fly, use consumables more frequently while in Crisis, and make their unique consumables more effective in various ways.
• Last Chance Hit Point:
  • Mastering the Guardian class allows you to take the Unbreakable heroic skill, which lets you withstand an attack that would knock you out with 1 HP once per scene.
  • Any creature marked with a Symbolist's Symbol of Rebirth can sacrifice the symbol to prevent damage from reducing them to 0 HP, bringing them down to 1 HP instead.
• Life Drain:
  • The Darkblade's Agony skill lets them recover small amounts of HP whenever they deal damage to an enemy with whom they have a Bond.
  • The Entropist's Drain Vigor spell deals dark damage to an enemy and restores HP to the caster equal to half the damage inflicted. The NPC spell Life Theft (and its many variations, like the Cactroll's Moisture Drain) is functionally identical to this, just with a different damage type.
  • When a Tinkerer applies the Vampire Infusion to a successful attack, they can recover HP (or MP) equal to half the damage it inflicted.
  • Some rare weapons restore 5 hit points to their wielder whenever they damage one or more enemies, such as the Cultes des Ghoules or the Gourmet Cutter.
• The Lifestream: One element common to all Fabula Ultima campaign settings is the stream of souls, from which all souls originate and to which all souls return when they die.
• Limit Break: The High Fantasy sourcebook introduces "Zero Powers", incredibly potent custom abilities that must be charged up (whether by spending Fabula Points, taking damage that isn't self-inflicted, or fulfilling a trigger of the creator's choice) before they can be used. Their possible effects include such things as unleashing a hard-hitting attack, giving your whole party resistance to all damage for a turn, casting a spell for free while having it inflict extra damage, dealing high elemental damage to all enemies, curing the party of all status effects while simultaneously restoring a large amount of health, and more.
• Little Bit Beastly: Several character classes have artwork depicting humans with animal traits. The Elementalist is depicted as a Cat Girl, the Guardian is depicted as a man with ram's horns, and the Spiritist is depicted as a woman with the ears and tail of a white fox.
• Long-Range Fighter: The Sharpshooter. Their skills focus entirely on ranged combat, doing such things as making their ranged attacks more accurate or more powerful, giving them the ability to fire extra shots with each attack, or letting them pull off trick shots that can intimidate foes or negate their ranged attacks.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • Fabula Points are a player-exclusive resource which can be spent to modify failed dice rolls by either rerolling one or both dice or adding a bonus to the check. Similarly, Villains can spend Ultima Points to reroll failed checks.
  • Tinkerers who practice alchemy determine the target(s) and effects of their potions by rolling two d20s and comparing each die to a table. If they invest more levels in this skill, they can roll up to four dice and pick which two they want to use, making it easier to get a beneficial result.

M-W

• Magic from Technology: A Tinkerer who invests enough levels into the Gadgets skill's magitech branch can create "magispheres", mechanical devices which each replicate the effects of a single Elementalist, Entropist, or Spiritist spell.
• Magic Knight: The enforced multiclassing makes it very easy to create a character who is both a powerful spellcaster and a skilled fighter.
• Magic Mirror: The Mirror of Appearances from the High Fantasy sourcebook lets its owner alter their own appearance in any way they please.
• Magic Music: The Chanter's main gimmick. Instead of casting spells, they work their magic by singing, playing, or otherwise performing special "verses" with variable effects and fluctuating MP costs.
• Magic Staff: The arcane weapon category includes several staves and rods. The rare ones tend to be Elemental Weapons and/or provide some passive benefit to the wielder's magical abilities. For example, the Caduceus makes any healing spell cast by the wielder more effective, while the Rafflesia Staff deals poison damage when used as a melee weapon and makes any offensive spell you cast also poison its targets.
• Magitek: Magitech is presumed to exist in any campaign world you come up with. The Tinkerer class can specialize in creating magitech gadgets, which allows them to craft magical firearms and spell-replicating "magispheres".
• Magma Man: The Volcano spell summons a wave of magma to crash over one or more enemies for heavy, resistance- and immunity-ignoring fire damage. It can only be obtained by mastering the Elementalist class and taking the Volcano Heroic Skill.
• Mana Burn: The Dragontrap's Numbing Gas spell and the Echidna's Brain Melt spell both deplete their targets' MP.
• Mana Drain: The Entropist's Drain Spirit spell depletes a chunk of the target's MP and restores half that much MP to the caster.
• Man-Eating Plant: The Pestervine and Dragontrap are carnivorous plants with toothy mouths and a taste for human flesh. The latter is big enough to swallow people whole, while the former needs to take bites out of them first.
• A Master Makes Their Own Tools: Tinkerers who specialize in magitech can spend 3 Inventory Points to craft themselves a "magicannon" on the fly. This firearm deals more damage and is more accurate than a basic pistol, and it can deal one of six damage types, chosen when the Tinkerer creates the magicannon.
• Master of the Levitating Blades: The artwork for Carmilla depicts her with half a dozen "bloodblades" floating in the air behind her, implying that she controls these weapons telekinetically.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The Necromancer's Birth Of The Cruel heroic skill is a self-inflicted version of this, letting you reanimate a single dead NPC as an undead minion at the cost of reducing your maximum HP and MP by an amount equal to the minion's level. The HP and MP maximums will only return to their original values if the minion is destroyed.
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • The Ace of Cards from the 2023 April Fools supplement. Its central combat mechanic requires the player to draw actual cards from a real deck and then spend MP to play sets of those cards from their hand. What happens in-game depends on values and suits of the cards you played, along with the hand (or set) that they form. For example, a full house either cures two status ailments of your choice from your whole party or inflicts those same ailments on all enemies, depending on whether the card with the highest value in the set was even or odd.
  • To a lesser extent, the Necromancer from the 2022 Halloween supplement. Most of its skills are built around a special resource called Grave Points, which the Necromancer accumulates as nearby creatures that are in Crisis take damage. They can spend these Grave Points to make their offensive spells inflict extra damage, apply status effects, or affect multiple targets at once; or they can hang onto those Grave Points and use them as a Last Chance Hit Point once per scene.
  • The Chanter from the High Fantasy sourcebook. They’re a magic class, but instead of casting spells, they work magic through "verses" that consist of three parts: a volume, a key, and a tone. The volume determines the verse's targets and MP cost, the key determines its elemental or statistical properties, and the tone determines what it does. For example, combining a loud volume, a haunting tone, and the key of Radiance would produce a verse that costs 30 MP, inflicts Shaken on all enemies, and also makes them vulnerable to bolt damage.
  • The Symbolist from the same book is another weird magic class. Instead of spending MP to cast spells, they spend IP to craft magical symbols which they then apply to themselves or other creatures to produce a persistent magical effect on the recipient. A Symbolist has a hard limit on the number of symbols they can have active at any given time, and going over this limit causes their oldest active symbol to be destroyed. Similarly, any given creature can only have one symbol applied to it at a time, with any newly applied symbol overwriting the previous one.
• Mechanical Monster: The Razorbird is a construct resembling an oversized mechanical bird of prey. They have razor sharp feathers and carry an arsenal comparable to that of a real-world fighter jet, complete with missiles and gatling guns, and are used by militant empires to establish air superiority.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: The Comet spell drops meteors on one or more enemies for extremely high Non-Elemental damage. It can only be obtained by mastering the Entropist class and taking the Comet Heroic Skill.
• Mighty Glacier: The Fury. Their skills let them taunt enemies into attacking them, get stronger as their health gets low, keep themselves alive by giving them ways to replenish their own HP, and score critical hits more often with certain weapons.
• Military Mage: The Battlemage NPC is an armor-clad spellcaster who commands military forces, using powerful magic to support their troops with healing or blast their foes with lightning.
• Mooks Ate My Equipment: A variation. The Hydrozoa and the Mimic both have attacks which deplete the target's Inventory Points, limiting the victim's ability to pull out useful items at a critical moment.
• Morph Weapon: The High Fantasy sourcebook introduces optional rules for creating custom weapons that can transform from one type of weapon to another. The samples provided include mechanical gauntlets that can combine into a powerful cannon, paired daggers linked at the hilts by a chain so they can double as a whip, and a hulking battle-axe that can split into a spear and shield.
• Moth Menace: The aptly named Dreadmoth is a giant moth that eats corpses and can shed clouds of poisonous scales from its wings. The pattern on said wings even looks like a grinning skull.
• Mummy: Mummies are one of the most powerful Undead creatures in the core rulebook. They are mindless creatures driven only to carry out whatever commands their masters gave them. They are immune to most status effects, their touch can make a character vulnerable to all damage types, and when they die, they unleash a curse which inflicts status effects to all living creatures in the vicinity.
• Mushroom Man: The Shroomkin are a species of somewhat reptilian mushroom creatures. Their large caps allow them to protect themselves and an ally at the same time when taking the Guard action, and they can belch out clouds of poisonous spores that leave the victim dazed. They are generally peaceful creatures but can be provoked to violence by the contamination of their native bogs.
• Necromancer: The Necromancer is a mage who harvests the life energy of creatures teetering on the brink of death, using it to empower themselves. Mastering the class allows you to take Heroic Skills which do such things as making life- and mana-draining Entropist spells more effective, granting passive benefits that make you more like the undead while above zero Grave Points, and giving you the ability to reanimate a single dead NPC as a loyal undead thrall.
• Night of the Living Mooks: If you possess the Dead Man's Zenit and are willing to give up your immortal soul, you can call forth an army of ghostly pirates who will obey your every command.
• Non-Combat EXP: While combat is a big part of the game, the players don't gain XP by killing enemies. Instead, XP gain is based on how many Fabula Points were spent by the party during a session, and how many Ultima Points were spent by the Villains during the session. The total number of spent Fabula Points is divided evenly amongst the players as XP, while the number of spent Ultima Points is added to every player's XP total.
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack:
  • The Sharpshooter's Warning Shot and the Weaponmaster's Bone Crusher both let them forgo dealing damage on a successful attack to instead inflict status ailments. The former can inflict Slow or Shaken, while the latter can inflict Dazed or Weak.
  • The Spiritist's spell list contains three spells which do nothing but inflict status effects to the target(s).
• Non-Elemental: A few spells and effects can inflict damage that explicitly has no type. Nothing can resist, absorb, or be immune to such damage, but nothing is vulnerable to it, either.
• Non-Indicative Name: The Cutterpillar, despite its Punny Name, is a giant centipede rather than a caterpillar.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Unless the controlling player decides otherwise, player characters do not die when their HP is reduced to zero. Instead, they "surrender": they fall unconscious and can no longer influence the outcome of the current scene, even if some effect brings them back above zero HP.
• No Self-Buffs: The merge effect for the Arcanum of the Tower gives the Arcanist's allies resistance to one of five damage types, while giving the Arcanist themselves nothing.
• No-Sell: Some NPC species are innately immune to certain damage types or status effects.
  • Constructs, Elementals, and the Undead are all immune to poison damage and the poisoned status effect. Undead are also immune to dark damage, while Elementals are immune to a second damage type of their choice.
  • Plants are immune to the dazed, shaken, and enraged status effects.
• Oculothorax: The Hexeye is a batlike monster whose body mostly consists of a giant eyeball.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: The Black Blood artifact is a glass jar containing a tarry black sludge. Drinking it allows one to rise from their grave as an undead after being killed, with the High Fantasy sourcebook suggesting this as a possible explanation for how one becomes a lich.
• Omniglot: The Arcanum of the Grimoire's merge effect gives the Arcanist the ability to comprehend and communicate in all languages.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: The Monkey Grip heroic skill lets you wield certain types of two-handed weapon in one hand. You can even dual wield them if you feel so inclined.
• Our Demons Are Different: "Demon" is a category, or species, of NPCs. The core rulebook describes demons as "incarnations of legends and beliefs" and states that they aren't truly alive despite having corporeal forms. All demons are innately resistant to two damage types, though which types they resist depends on the demon.
• Our Dragons Are Different: There are a few dragons and dragon-adjacent creatures scattered through the available rulebooks.
  • Drakes, from the core rulebook, are effectively classical European dragons minus the wings: quadrupedal reptiles with red scales and the ability to breathe fire. They are described as lazy and the weakest of all dragons, but formidable despite their shortcomings.
  • The Flame Dragon from the High Fantasy sourcebook is a classic European dragon, possessing two wings, four legs, sharp claws and fangs, and fiery breath. It has humanlike intelligence, an immunity to fire, a vulnerability to ice damage, a tough hide that gives it resistance to all other damage types while airborne, and a roar that can strike terror into those that hear it. The book includes tips for creating variant dragons associated with different elements, such as lightning-spewing Storm Dragons and light-breathing Divine Dragons.
• Our Gargoyles Rock: Gargoyles are a type of magical construct which resemble winged demonic statues. They have the power to levitate and can attack by rending foes with sharp claws or using earth magic to launch volleys of stone.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Ghouls are a type of undead, "[h]ulking corpses inhabited by a spirit driven mad by a terrible curse". They have sharp claws, can exhale clouds of poisonous gas, and hang out in graveyards where they can chow down on dead bodies.
• Our Imps Are Different: Imps are the weakest form of demon, spawned from "the dark thoughts of a single person or small community". They look like chubby little humanoids with red skin, tiny wings, curling horns, and a Third Eye. Their touch is supernaturally cold, and they can use magic to shield themselves from harm or to enrage foes. Fortunately, they are also physically weak and cowardly.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are a race of diminutive humanoids with round bodies covered in thick black fur. They have small horns, beady yellow eyes, and prominent grey facial hair like mustaches and beards. They live in the woods or near mountains, and some of them can cast magic.
• Our Nymphs Are Different: Nymphs are a type of Elemental which resemble elven women with green hair and branchlike horns. They're stated to live in forests, mountains, and lakes, much like classical dryads, oreads and naiads. They're immune to earth and poison damage, resistant to fire and ice damage, and possess a magical "seasonal touch" attack which inflicts different status effects depending on the current season.
• Our Pixies Are Different: The Acorn Pixie is a type of Elemental which resembles a fairy wearing an acorn cap as a hat. They are curious and playful creatures stated to "gather in places where life force flows untainted", though they can be negatively influenced by the corruption of said lifeforce. In combat they use magic to entangle their enemies in rampant plant growth and wield sharp needles as weapons.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Carmilla, the vampire sample villain included with the Halloween 2022 supplement, is an ancient demon possessing the corpse of a long-dead noblewoman. She can turn herself into a bat at will, attack by conjuring up swords made of blood, and take on a demonic One-Winged Angel form once her initial "Lady" form has been reduced to zero HP.
• Percent Damage Attack: One of the Gamble spell's possible effects halves the target's current HP and MP. Unfortunately, this effect can only target the spell's caster.
• Photographic Memory: The Loremaster's Trained Memory skill lets them perfectly remember the details of any scene that happened within the last week, to the point that they can reexamine the scene entirely within their mind to look for clues that they might have missed the first time around.
• Plant Person: The Arboreal quirk lets you play as some sort of sapient humanoid plant. Mechanically this gives you immunity to one of three status effects, vulnerability to one of five damage types, and the ability to cast a single spell from the NPC spell list.
• Poisonous Person:
  • Poison is one of the game's elemental damage types. It's comparatively uncommon for players, with the only class in the core rulebook that can inflict it being the Tinkerer (and potentially the Chimerist, if they copy the right spell from an enemy). On the flipside, quite a few of the sample rare weapons can inflict poison damage.
  • There is also the poisoned status effect, which lowers the victim's Might and Willpower stats. The Tinkerer and the Chimerist can both inflict this status, as can enemies like the Giant Rat, the Dreadmoth, and the Ghoul.
• Possessing a Dead Body:
  • The Cait Sith is a dead cat which has been possessed by a spirit, giving it new life and magical powers. Curiously, the game classifies it as a Monster rather than an Undead creature.
  • The villainous vampire Carmilla is a bloodthirsty demon possessing the corpse of a long-dead noblewoman.
• Power Copying: The Chimerist can use their Spell Mimic skill to copy the magical powers of the beasts that they encounter.
• The Power of Hate: Thematically implied by the Darkblade class. One of its skills lets them establish a Bond of Hatred toward an enemy upon entering Crisis, while another skill lets them recover small amounts of HP and MP whenever they deal damage to an enemy that they have a Bond with. One of their potential Heroic Skills, Heartbreaker, lets them halve their current HP to deal extra damage to an enemy that they have a Bond with, with the damage being proportional to the Bond's strength. The latter two don't require a Bond of Hatred, but the synergy between all three skills certainly encourages it.
• Practical Taunt: The Fury's Provoke skill enrages one enemy into attacking them, simultaneously drawing the target's aggro while also hobbling them with a nasty status effect.
• Public Domain Artifact: Some of the sample rare weapons from the core rulebook are named after and based on items from mythology and folklore, like the staff Caduceus, the hammer Mjolnir, the spear Longinus, and the swords Kusanagi and Excalibur.
• Random Effect Spell:
  • The aptly named Gamble spell from the Entropist spell list can produce one of five randomly chosen effects. Three of those effects are detrimental to the caster and/or their allies, but the remaining two are quite beneficial.
  • A Tinkerer who specializes in alchemy gadgets can spend Inventory Points to craft potions with randomized targets and effects. It’s entirely possible to make a potion that fully heals your enemies or cripples your whole party with multiple status effects.
• Reduced-Downtime Features: Inventory Points (IP) are a renewable resource which abstract the minutiae of inventory management. IP can be spent to produce single-use consumables like HP-restoring Remedies or damage-dealing elemental stones on the fly, and they can be replenished by spending money while the party is in town or at a merchant.
• Reduced Mana Cost:
  • It normally costs 40 MP for an Arcanist to summon a bound Arcanum, but their Emergency Arcanum skill greatly reduces this MP cost while the Arcanist is in Crisis.
  • The Elementalist's Cataclysm skill is an inversion. It lets them increase a damage-dealing spell's MP cost to make it inflict extra damage.
  • Some pieces of equipment reduce the MP cost of specific skills or spells when worn. For instance, the Desperado Coat halves the MP cost of using the Sharpshooter's Barrage skill.
  • The Commander can invert this trope with one application of the Bishop's Edict skill, which doubles the MP cost of everything, for everybody, until the start of their next turn.
  • The Symbol of Sorcery shaves 5 MP off the cost of any spell which targets the symbol's bearer. The effect is cumulative when casting a spell that targets multiple creatures marked with the symbol.
  • The Ceaseless Battlefield heroic skill, which can be obtained by mastering the Commander class, halves the MP cost of several of the Commander's skills.
  • Inverted by the Dancer's Follow My Lead skill, which lets them double the MP cost of a dance to share its effects with one of their allies. Played straight by the Paso Doble heroic skill, which negates this extra MP cost so the Dancer can share their dance's effects while paying its normal cost.
  • The Showstopper heroic skill allows a Dancer to spend a Fabula Point to perform up to three dances in a single turn without spending MP on any of them, with the caveat that they cannot dance again before the end of their next turn.
  • A spellcaster who is performing a ritual can halve its MP cost by providing an appropriate ingredient.
• Reduced Resource Cost:
  • Tinkerers can initiate long-term Projects where they build complex custom magitech devices. Projects usually have a monetary cost proportional to how powerful the invention is meant to be, how large of an area it can affect, and its intended duration, and the more expensive it is, the more time it will take to develop it. The Visionary class skill shaves up to 500 zenit off the Project's cost and speeds up development time.
  • The Deep Pockets heroic skill, which can be obtained by mastering the Tinkerer class, reduces the IP cost of any action which requires the spending of Inventory Points by 1 (to a minimum of 1).
  • Any creature marked with the Symbol of Creation can sacrifice it to negate the IP cost of a single action during a conflict.
• Relationship Values: Player characters can forge Bonds with NPCs and one another over the course of a campaign. Each Bond consists of a combination of one-to-three emotions like Loyalty or Hatred, with the number of emotions representing the strength of the Bond. Under the right circumstances, the player can invoke these Bonds in gameplay to gain mechanical benefits, such as adding the Bond's strength as a bonus to a Check.
• Revive Kills Zombie:
  • Zigzagged with undead NPCs. When an HP-restoring effect is used on such an NPC, the person who produced the effect can choose to have it harm the NPC instead of healing them, though they could also choose to have it heal them normally.
  • Averted with undead player characters. Curative spells and items have the same effect on them as they do on living player characters.
• Ritual Magic: Rituals are a special form of magic available to the core rulebook's five spellcasting classes. Unlike regular spells, rituals take more than one action to cast during combat, and their casting time, MP cost, and difficulty level are proportional to their intended potency and area-of-effect. The possible effects of a ritual depend on the "disciplines" available to the caster: the Arcanist, Chimerist, Elementalist, Entropist, and Spiritist can each unlock a class-specific discipline by taking a skill, and there is a generic "Ritualism" discipline available to all of them but the Arcanist. Once a ritual has been initiated, any character can help advance it toward completion, and only once it is ready does the caster spend their MP and roll to see if the ritual was a success.
• Rock Monster: The most powerful Elemental in the core rulebook is the Cragboar, a living rock formation in the shape of a massive boar.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: The Giant Rat is one of the sample enemies included in the core rulebook. They live in sewers, have a poisonous bite, get more dangerous once they're in Crisis, and fear fire.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Two of the Press Start adventurer's premade characters, Blair Clarimonde and Lavigne Fallbright, are heirs to the royal lines of their respective kingdoms. Their adventuring party was put together by Blair to stop the empire of Elonia from taking over the world.
• Seeks Another's Resurrection: One of the sample High Fantasy villains is a former priestess who turned to the dark arts and became a lich purely to resurrect her sister, who was betrayed and murdered by their former king.
• Shield Bash: The Guardian's Dual Shieldbearer skill not only lets them wield two shields at once, but it also lets them treat these shields as a special paired melee weapon.
• Shock and Awe: "Bolt" is one of the game's eight elemental damage types, and it is mainly inflicted by attacks and spells that involve lightning and other forms of electricity. The Elementalist can learn spells that inflict this damage, while enemies that can inflict bolt damage include the Battlemage, the Static Ooze, and the Thunder Wheel.
• Shout-Out: Two of the sample rare arcane weapons from the core rulebook are the Ars Goetia and the Necronomicon. The former deals light damage and gives the wielder bonuses to certain checks against demons, while the latter inflicts dark damage and makes your enemies shaken whenever you hit them with an offensive spell.
• Situational Damage Attack: The Rogue's Cheap Shot skill lets them inflict extra damage to an enemy that's suffering from at least one status ailment, with the damage increasing for each status effect on the target.
• Situational Sword: Many of the rare weapons in the core rulebook inflict extra damage when certain conditions are met. Some deal extra damage to an enemy that's suffering from a specific status effect, some deal extra damage if the wielder or the target is in Crisis, some deal extra damage if the user has a particular type of Bond with the target, and some have more esoteric triggers. One example of the latter is Quartermain, a gun which deals extra damage equal to the difference between the wielder's current and max Inventory Points.
• The Smart Guy: The Loremaster class. All of their skills relate to knowledge, memory, or deduction in some way, they can get a flat bonus to any check which relies purely on Insight, and they can even substitute Insight for one of their other attribute dice when making a Check.
• Snake People: The Echidna is a type of demon which resembles an elegant woman with light green skin, a forked tongue, and live snakes in place of legs. They possess a Deadly Gaze and can fry their opponents' brains with magic.
• Snowlems: The Spikeflake is an Elemental which resembles the disembodied head of an oversized snowman, complete with a small hat. Its eyes, nose, and mouth are all made from shards of ice rather than stones and a carrot, and various other icicles jut from its body. It has an icy bite and a chilly Breath Weapon. Naturally, it absorbs ice but is weak to fire.
• The Social Expert: The Orator class is such a talented and persuasive diplomat that their words can have a tangible impact in battle. Their class skills allow them to buff and heal allies by encouraging them, subject their enemies to Break Them by Talking, accomplish persuasion-based tasks more easily, and turn nearby non-hostile NPCs into temporary allies.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: The Chimerist's Feral Speech skill lets them communicate with animals and plants.
• Spell Blade:
  • The Elementalist, Entropist, and Spiritist each have an "[X] Weapon" spell which imbues a weapon with magical energy, making it inflict damage of a specific elemental type for the duration.
  • The Elementalist's Spellblade skill lets them channel a single-target offensive spell through one of their equipped weapons, letting them use the weapon's accuracy check formula instead of the spell's normal Magic Check formula.
  • The Dancer has many dances which change the damage inflicted by their attacks and spells to a specific element until their next turn. The Phoenix Dance makes them inflict fire damage, for instance, while the Yeti Dance makes them inflict ice damage.
  • The Infusions branch of the Tinkerer's Gadgets skill lets them spend 2 IP after successfully hitting an enemy with an attack to change the attack's damage to another type. The more levels they sink into this branch, the more options they get for the new damage type.
  • The Flame Dragon has a unique power, Gift of Flame, which enchants another creature's weapon to make it deal fire damage. Since the dragon is immune to fire, it mainly uses this power to gimp its enemies by making their weapons useless against it.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: When the Arcanum of the Forge is dismissed, it can create one piece of basic equipment from nothing. Naturally, this equipment can be a fiery Elemental Weapon.
• Squishy Wizard: By default, the various magic-using classes don't get proficiency with martial armor or shields, and they don't get the free HP increase that the more physical classes get. A player whose character takes nothing but spellcasting classes as they level up will be a touch on the frail side as a result.
• Status Effect-Powered Ability: The Adversity heroic skill gives the character a stacking bonus to checks and damage output for every status effect afflicting them.
• Status Effects: The game has six harmful status effects: Slow, Dazed, Weak, Shaken, Enraged, and Poisoned. Four of these each reduce a specific stat by one die size, while Enraged and Poisoned instead reduce two stats each.
• Stone Wall: The Guardian class. Its skills are all defensive in nature, giving them increased HP, damage reduction, the ability to shield allies from harm, and the ability to dual wield shields for even greater defense.
• Summon Magic: The Grand Summoning heroic skill allows an Arcanist to summon their bound Arcanum as an independent entity instead of channeling its power. An Arcanum that has been "Grand Summoned" this way will fight alongside its Arcanist for the remainder of the current scene, and can use its dismiss effect repeatedly, provided that the Arcanist can spend the 20 MP needed to keep the Arcanum from vanishing into thin air after each use of said effect.
• Support Party Member:
  • The Orator class has no skills which can directly damage an enemy. They can debuff and Mana Burn enemies, however, and they can also heal their allies, buff them, or spend their own Fabula Points to give an ally the benefits instead of themselves.
  • The Loremaster has no offensive skills whatsoever. Their talents mainly involve investigation and gathering information, though they can still help their allies in combat by identifying an enemy’s elemental affinities at the start of a fight.
  • An Arcanist who takes the Oak or Wheel Arcana. The former's Dismiss effect is a powerful group-heal that also cures poison, while the latter's is a Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack that slows all enemies.
  • The Commander. Their skills focus on two things: providing temporary buffs or debuffs to friend and foe alike, and helping other party members take actions/turns more quickly. Their sole personal offensive skill is a weak attack whose true purpose is to either heal an ally or activate one of their other, supportive skills.
  • The Dancer. Their dances can inflict status ailments and Mana Burn on their enemies or give themselves resistance to specific damage types, amongst other personal benefits, and they have a skill which allows them to share said benefits with a dance partner. They can also use their dances to heal people, Draw Aggro, and let allies take their turns sooner.
  • The Symbolist. Their symbols can produce a variety of persistent effects on those who bear them, whether harmful or beneficial, and their skills can make symbol-bearing allies recover more HP or MP from healing, make symbol-bearing enemies take more damage whenever they get hurt, and give marked allies the ability to cast spells known by the Symbolist. The one thing a Symbolist cannot do with their skills and symbols is directly damage an opponent.
• Take That!: The empire of Elonia in the Press Start adventure is a subtle dig at Elon Musk, with its main characteristics being unstable constructs prone to malfunction, and stealing tech and materials from other countries to use them as their own.
• Taking the Bullet: The Symbol of Sacrifice allows a Symbolist to take damage on behalf of a creature marked with that symbol once.
• Talking the Monster to Death: The Disarming Rhetoric heroic skill lets you persuade an enemy to give up and leave peacefully. It only works on Mooks, unfortunately, and only if they're already shaken or in Crisis.
• Threatening Shark: One of the core rulebook's sample bosses is the Thornshark, an enormous man-eating shark which can fly and spray damaging jets of water at its foes.
• Throw the Book at Them: The "arcane" weapon category includes tomes, which can be used to smack enemies upside the head.
• Thunder Drum: The Lightning Wheel demon is surrounded by a wheel of drums not unlike the god Raijin. Naturally, it absorbs bolt damage and can cast spells of the same element.
• Thunder Hammer: One of the sample rare heavy weapons is Mjolnir, a one-handed hammer that inflicts both bolt damage and the Dazed status effect to anyone it hits.
• Time Master: Some of the Entropist's spells involve the manipulation of time, namely Acceleration (which lets the recipient take an extra action on their turns) and Stop (which reduces the number of actions the victim can take on their next turn). They also have a skill, Stolen Time, which lets them manipulate time to produce multiple effects like curing or inflicting the slow status and letting an ally take their next turn immediately.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Tome of the Gate is a sinister book filled with incomprehensible eldritch scribbles and disturbing illustrations of monstrous beings. It can be used to ritualistically open a portal to a realm of cosmic horrors during the night of a full moon.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Final Feather is an in-universe example. This unique magical feather is believed to have the power to resurrect the dead if made into a powder, but since this would destroy the feather, nobody is willing to put it to the test.
• Turns Red: Like player characters, some enemies get more dangerous in various ways upon entering Crisis.
  • Giant Rats get a bonus to all Checks while in Crisis, making their attacks more accurate.
  • Sun Bears burst into flame while in Crisis, making their melee attacks hit harder and deal fire damage instead of physical damage.
  • Brigands become immune to all status effects while in Crisis.
  • When the Flame Dragon enters Crisis for the first time in a battle, it regains some health, cures itself of all status effects, and bumps its Might die up a size to make its attacks and Breath Weapon more accurate.
• The Undead: "Undead" is one of the game's NPC creature categories, and it includes the ghastly ghosts and spooky skeletons you'd expect of a game like this. Mechanically, all undead are immune to dark and poison damage, cannot be poisoned, and are weak to light damage. They can also be subject to Revive Kills Zombie on a case-by-case basis. The "Revenant" quirk from the High Fantasy sourcebook lets you play as an undead character; they're subject to the same rules as NPC undead, except that healing spells and items affect them normally instead of hurting them.
• Universal Translator: The Lantern of Discovery from the High Fantasy sourcebook. Its magical flames shape themselves into a translation of any written text that their light falls upon.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: A Villain facing imminent defeat can spend an Ultima Point to automatically escape from the current scene, even if the heroes had just knocked them down to 0 hit points.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: Some of the core rulebook's rare weapons inflict extra damage when attacking enemies of a specific species. The Heart Knife inflicts extra damage to demons, for instance, while the Diamond Pistol and the Artisan's Mallet both deal extra damage to constructs.
• White Mage: The Spiritist is a magic class whose spell list consists primarily of healing spells and buffing spells, with a light-based offensive spell and several debuffs for variety. They can also take a skill, Healing Power, which increases the HP restored by their spells.
• Willing Channeler: The Arcanist class's main gimmick. They can summon supernatural entities called Arcana into themselves to gain their power, with each Arcanum granting a passive benefit that remains in effect for as long as it is summoned.
• World Tree: One of the locations described in Fabula Ultima Atlas: High Fantasy is Yiggdrasill, a colossal tree that nourishes the surrounding landscape, contains mystical portals which lead to other parts of the world (and possibly to other planets), and is believed to be the source of all life.

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