Fabula Ultima - Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds - Session 1

19 May, 2026

We start a new, magical girl-inspired campaign of Fabula Ultima this week, run by one of the players in our Romance of Ys game. This time we move into our college dorm, thwart a monster attack, and are brought together by a manic, suspicious professor who believes the world is in danger.

Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds (CERoW)¹ - Session 1

Cast

• Alison Moreau, she/her, The Devoted Hell-bound Hound
• Clotilde Bellecort, any, Fey-Blooded Dancer Reaching for Greatness
• Iris LaRue, she/her, Rebellious Rockstar Hero
• Margot E'tincelle, she/they, Inquisitive Occultist Career-Student
• Melodie Monet, she/her, Troubled Mechanic With A Heart of Gold

Moving In

The scene opens on Alison Moreau, Clotilde Bellecort, Iris LaRue, and Melodie Monet standing with their belongings outside of Le Maison de E'tincelle, the most prestigious - and expensive - housing associated with L'Académie de la Tour d'Argent. Under threat of expulsion from L'Académie's president, the four young ladies were relocated to Le Maison as part of a "charitable" program to foster equality among the student body. Le Maison is a gift from the E'ticelle family to L'Académie, and is designed in a gothic revival style, albeit one renovated to allow for a student populace to live there. Placards around Le Maison informatively explain who its donors are and its past as an asylum.

The four move into rooms on the first floor as Margot E'tincelle - the heir of the Le Maison's namesake - emerges from her basement rooms in-search of coffee. Iris proceeds to remove sconces from the wall of her room to give her more space to hang-up posters, while Alison tries to find a way to hang a crucifix in hers. Both of them gravitate to Melodie's room, where she provides them with the necessary tools.

Clotilde proceeds to unpack her many possessions and decorate her room, only to be approached by another resident - Léna, a fidgety, athletic woman with wavy blonde hair down to her shoulders. Léna introduces herself, and Clotilde entertains her, putting her nervous energy to work in helping them decorate. Shortly after Léna leaves, an announcement comes over Le Maison's sound system, requesting all the students to meet in the front vestibule.

The concierge of Le Maison, Madam Marielle Leloup, welcomes the new arrivals and explains to the the new residents and the decidedly wealthier existing residents the new equality initiative. Introduction complete, she invites the body to mingle with each other.

Spotting Iris standing with a removed wall sconce, Margot sidles up and asks why she has it on her. Iris explains needing the wall space, and Margot takes it upon theirself to head-off Mdm. Leloup. They leverage their family status to have Mdm. Leloup acquiesce to the renovations.

As she takes in the space, Alison is approached by an existing resident - Clarisse Demaret, a cute, slight, dark young woman who resides on the fourth floor of Le Maison and wears her dark brown hair loose past her shoulders. She quietly, awkwardly introduces herself to Alison, who just as awkwardly reciprocates. Uncertain what to say next, Alison asks if she can take Clarisse's picture. After much too long setting the shot up, Alison snaps the photo and asks Clarisse how to get it to her. Clarisse nervously gives Alison all of her contact information, messily scrawling it on a slip of paper.

Vorash Attack

All of a sudden there is shouting from the kitchen, as staff flee out of its doors. In pursuit, three monsters with the bodies of large meatballs, giant human mouths, long tongues, and two powerful bird legs. The three monsters - Vorash - proceed to run around, licking people and sniffing loudly with unseen noses. The three eventually chase a student and member of the staff down to the basement.

A Vorash. Art credit to the GM.

Iris rushes after the monsters, followed closely by an excited Margot, Clotilde, and Melodie. Alison shouts to Clarisse to help direct people outside and then rushes to her room to grab the architect's tube she keeps her relic blade in and to shrug on her armored coat and a hood. Equipped, she rushes to the basement as well.

Iris ducks out of sight in the basement and transforms into her magical girl form, the vigilante known as Sword Saint. She leaps over the Vorash and puts herself between them and the two civilians they were licking, giving the two the space to flee the basement. Excited or agitated, the Vorash move to attack as the others arrive.

Over the course of the ensuing combat, Margot studies the Vorash and summons a magic gun; Iris strikes at the monsters with a sword made of light; Melodie wounds them with a powerful song; Alice consumes one in a display of barely contained black hound magic; and Clotilde slows them while also talking with the three. The fey dancer relays that the Vorash are hunting magic, that the party's magic is the best they've ever tasted, that they belong to a "Daddy" Kaelen, but were released here by a woman. The party subdue the two remaining Vorash, and Alison is visibly unnerved by Clotilde saying he talked with them and that all three Vorash are named Bill.

As the fight ends, one of the faculty, Professor Dubois, nervously calls from the top of the basement stairs, asking if he might come down. Excited to have monsters to study, Margot ropes the rest of the group into transferring the Vorash to her RV while Iris runs interference with Prof. Dubois. This proves fortuitous, as Dubois is a Sword Saint superfan! He is all too ready to let Iris handle things.

The Vorash are stashed away, and Margot leads the group out through a tunnel to a patch of forest near Le Maison. From there they go their ways, returning to their rooms. As they do, a waiting Clarisse notices Alison returning, armed with a folded coat and an architect's tube that she did not have when she left her.

Late-Night Meeting

Close to midnight, each of the five women have a crude note slipped under their doors, saying they know who the girls are and requesting them to come to Sub-Basement Two at one-in-the-morning. Awake and studying a Vorash, Margot immediately chases down who slipped her the note and confronts her former teacher, Professor Sylvie Larousse, the head of astronomy at L'Académie. The professor invites her to sub-basement two and puts on tea while they wait for the others to arrive. Clotilde makes her way there swiftly, Alison spends her time lost trying to find the sub-basement, and Iris decides at the last minute to join. Melodie, meanwhile, sleeps.

With everyone but Melodie gathered in her computer-filled office, Prof. Larousse proceeds to manically lay out her research into astronomy and aetherology. She declares a cosmic event is approaching; reveals she's been spying on the five women the past few months and is watching them over cameras in Le Maison; intimates or declares she is the reason four of them were relocated to Le Maison; frustratedly speculates on how it is odd only the five of them were identified when there should be more; and eventually provides each of the present girls with a Planetary Focus - a crystal transformation device.

As they take them, each is overcome by a strange dream. They find themselves in-space, looking at a cosmic pentagram with each point a separate element - air, bolt, dark, ice, and light. The Foci resonate with the girls, and they start to hear whispers repeating "reach out, reach out, reach out." With only four present, however, whatever magic is happening cannot complete. Iris excuses herself and finds Melodie, who was just woken by the same dream. The two return, and the ritual completes, with the voices taking on a more excited tone.

The session ends with a cut-away to a tall, frazzled man with pointed ears sitting in a separate basement, reading astronomical computer readings and reacting in much the same way as Prof. Larousse. A woman with similarly pointed ears enters, and the man proceeds to rant at her about the readings. She attempts to get him to calm down, calling him brother and naming him Kaelen, and passes along that all of his Vorash had escaped. Kaelen dismisses this as trivial, returning to talk of the astronomical data. The session ends with him surprised by a sudden change in the data he is collecting.

Cast Profile

With this being a new campaign, I want to spend the first few posts introducing each of the new player characters, starting with my own.

Name: Alison Moreau
Identity: The Devoted Hell-Bound Hound
Origin: Our House of Perpetual Lessons
Theme: Doubt
Major: Photography
Signature Element: Dark
Starting Classes: Chimerist (2), Darkblade (2), Magical Girl (1)
Quirk: Fettered Heart (The Church)

Alison is a pale, 18-year-old woman with short, curly blonde hair. In her day-to-day she dresses austerely, wearing a mish-mash of clothes sourced from a Church charity. When transformed, she wears a short-sleeved, double-breasted jacket that terminates in a pleated skirt. One arm is replaced with a hound-themed manica and she wears a similarly stylized knight's visor on her head. Her weapon of choice is a relic blade - a long, thin-bladed knife with a Saint's relic inserted in its grip to empower it.

Pieces of Alison's Magical Girl outfit. Art credit Clouder.

Alison is frequently visited by vivid dreams and visions of a fiendish-looking black hound, which she believes to be a servant of the Devil and the source of her powers. She was "rescued" by the Sisters of the House of Perpetual Lessons when she was ten, and has spent the last eight years being used as a hound to detect the presence of darkness-imbued monsters for the House's fiend-hunting nuns. After a recent hunt went catastrophic, resulting in the deaths of several teenagers, Alison was relocated to Paris by The Cloistered Order of Absolving Flame, who enrolled her at L'Académie de la Tour d'Argent to Alison's confusion and bewilderment.

Personal Thoughts

Where do I start? I think this is the first time in almost a decade I am a player in a campaign instead of the referee or game master. On top of that, our game master - who plays Seren² in our Romance of Ys game - is new to running games, much less a campaign. There were some new game and new GM jitters in the session, but honestly nothing novel or worth commenting on. What I do want to highlight are some of the ways we're still running into friction with Fabula.

We still struggle with playing a proper Session Zero. With Ys we developed a world with three players and used that to pitch a game that attracted three more players. Here we had everyone present from start and worked through the steps outlined in the book, but they weren't entirely productive. Going through optional rules is overwhelming now that Fabula is five books, a handful of online supplements, and a set of ever evolving playtest rules. Midway through those rules Seren called for a pause and jumped us ahead because it was cutting into our time to develop a setting. And we probably did need that extra time because we ran into an issue I haven't seen brought-up elsewhere - What do you do when the GM has a pitch they are passionate about but the rules expect you to cooperatively create a world and its threats?

While we worked through each step, pitching factions, historical events, and threats, I got a strong impression that Seren was increasingly daunted by the idea of having to incorporate these disparate and new elements into the campaign she had in her mind. And from what we encountered in Session 1, I can see how. She seems to want to run a game set in a dorm that focuses on big cosmic space imagery and young adult drama. Meanwhile, we pitched things like fey, kaiju, fictional versions of real religions, vampires, and more during Session Zero. If I ask Seren if we stepped on her toes with our pitches, I am all-but-certain she will say no, everything is fine. But I can't help but wonder what her pitch might be without us bringing all these elements to it.

I don't really know what to do here other than be mindful of it in the future. If the GM has a pitch that excites them, maybe prompt them to outline as much as they can before you move onto adding factions, threats, and historical events. It removes some of the power from players, but I think it's necessary. If a GM isn't excited by the game, then it won't last long.

The other bit of friction comes from the Fettered Heart quirk and choices I made in taking it. The quirk situates your character as being under-the-thumb of an organization or individual and then challenges you to break away from them. You fulfill the conditions of the quirk by violating precepts from your character's masters and then having a dramatic showdown with a villain representing those masters. It's a quirk well tailored for playing young adults coming into their own, like our collegiate magical girls. The trick with it, though, is it necessitates the player who took the quirk to develop out a faction or character as well as three precepts to follow and break. For some groups that will be fine. For mine, it created a situation where I wrote more about one faction than anyone else wrote about the factions they contributed to the setting in Session Zero.³

This seems to have centered or singled-out the faction, making them more important than the others we created. That might be fine for some groups, but in my case I actively requested in Session Zero that we treat Alison's Fettered Heart organization as one faction among many and not the central villain of the campaign. It did not help my case either that I picked "The Church" - a stand-in for the Catholic Church - for her Fettered Heart organization. I am interested in exploring faith and what it means to break-up with your religion, and with the game set in a fantasy Paris using a fantasy Catholic Church made a lot of sense. Plus, hey, I could make a take on Ciel Tsukihime if I wanted to.

I should have taken a moment to really look at the group, though. The majority of the players are queer and only two of us were raised Catholic. Between that and the centering effect of Fettered Heart as a quirk, half-or-more of the group are defaulting to viewing the Church as the central enemy of the campaign, despite them not appearing on screen in the first session. This was driven home a few days after the session, when discussions of what to name our magical girl team led to one player declaring the name "Zero Saints" was great, in-part because it put our group into conflict with the Church.

I am not naive. I picked the Church with full knowledge of history and the Church's agenda and beliefs. I am excited to use that as a way to tell a story of Alison breaking away from a heightened fantasy version of Catholicism. And I am ready to have her bend-over-backwards to justify going along with party decisions that might otherwise go against her faith. But I am at a point where I worry that things will be less "bend" and more "immediately break and shatter," and it is hard to build a narrative arc around that.

I might be overthinking things, but the comment during team name brainstorming really sits with me.⁴ For now, I plan to give it a few sessions and if it still bothers me I will bring-up the idea of changing Alison's quirk and backstory or playing another character.

Overall, though, I had fun! I have some reservations and a lot of questions, but it was a good time. I especially want to know more about the residents of the dorm the party moved into. Having something in the game I am excited to investigate and explore is a good sign!

#CERoW #celestial echoes #fabula ultima #rpg #ttrpg