Fabula Ultima - Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds - Session 3
We pick-up with the group guiding the two sewer dwellers to Sylvie's corpse hole before pivoting to a new Episode - "Lullaby Library - A Cursed Book?"
Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds (CERoW) - Session 3
Cast
- Alison Moreau, she/her, The Devoted Hell-bound Hound
- Clotilde Bellecort, any, Fey-Blooded Dancer Reaching for Greatness (absent this session)
- 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
Margot Makes Friends
We pick-up with the group opening-up Prof. Sylvie Larousse' hidden corpse hole and showing the mysterious sewer-dwelling Kaelen the corpse of his monstrous, meatball hound. Saddened but satisfied, Kaelen thanks the group and excuses himself. Margot offers to drive Kaelen and Kyrie back to the steam plant entrance to the underground, and Prof. Sylvie tags along. Margot cheerfully exchanges e-mails with the two, and even offers to find a way to run several hundred feet of computer and phone cables to K & K's home so that they can have a phone line.
Alison Pokes Around
Taking advantage of Sylvie being away, Alison pokes through the professor's lab, searching for files on the other magical girl candidates. Shuffling through 'zines1 and files, she eventually finds several surveillance photos of both federal agents and Church investigators tailing what look like college students. She doesn't recognize any of the youths, but does get a name on one of the photos - Margaux Fontaine. Alison swipes the developed negatives for the photos and leaves before Margot and Sylvie return.
Overnight Experiments
Still wound-up from the day's revelations, Margot forgoes sleep to experiment more with her aether EKG meter and her transformation device. After some quick tests and accosting several students who were trying to make it to class, they determine that the transformation device creates a connection to a large source of unaspected aether, and once used does not need to be kept on the user to maintain that connection. She also can detransform from their magical girl form on their own now. Curiously, giving the transformation device to another person appears to allow Margot's scanner to get a read on the aether composition of a person. Satisfied with their efforts and now well into the next day, she collapses and sleeps through any classes they might have.
Sleeping Students
Alison is stood-up by Clarisse after class - the two were supposed to have a study date to help Clarisse focus on her literature class. She finds Clarisse's room empty and begins to poke around when her phone buzzes - Sylvie's sent a notice to a group chat set-up for the team and her and asks the group to investigate the abrupt hospitalization of two students who reside in the dorms, Clarisse Demaret and Léo Fournier. The two apparently fell unconscious and were hospitalized.
Alison performs a thorough search of Clarisse's room, finding no signs of magical or mundane interference. Margot and Melodie head to Léo's room, which they find occupied by one of the students Margot stopped to perform tests with that morning, the American Brandon Peterson. The two question Brandon while flipping through Léo's journal and find that Léo, Brandon, and Clarisse are part of a love triangle, with Brandon crushing on Léo, who is oblivious to this and in-turn plans to ask-out Clarisse, who by Brandon's account both is a horrible match and also unaware.
Iris calls the hospital and misleads a nurse into thinking she's Clarisse's sister before asking for how Clarisse is. The nurse confirms that Clarisse and Léo are stable, and says that it is unclear what might have cause them to fall unconscious. The nurse is optimistic that the two will recover soon and promises to help Iris visit Clarisse if she comes to the hospital.
The team reconvene and compare notes and come-up with a single lead - both Clarisse and Léo have special library permissions to visit one of the archives at the university. The team grab their equipment and head to the archive to poke around.
Hole in the Wall
After being waved through by a tired and very over-it student worker, the team make their way to the basement of the archives. Margot inspects the book Clarisse was working from but finds nothing exciting - just the self-absorbed, misogynistic writings of a Revolutionary thinker trying to tie the ideals of the French Revolution to his personal philosophy of love. Alison transforms and starts to sniff around the floor for magic while Iris follows in-tow. Meanwhile, Margot and Melodie search the room the book is in for any other clues. The later have more luck, and discover that a large hole is cut into the wall behind one of the bookcases!
K & K Again
Iris conjures a glowing weapon and leads the group through the hole. They find themselves back in the underground sewer tunnels, which appear to run all through and beneath the campus. As they search for signs of the missing students they are greeted again by Kaelen and Kieri. The two detected odd aether discharges and are investigating, with Kieri letting slip that despite earlier attempts to hide her aptitude with computers, she hacked into the school's records after seeing news about the two students collapsing and believes the two events could be connected. They all continue the search together and follow dirty footprints deeper into the tunnels.
An Ominous Banner
Their search leads them to a hovel set-up among the various steam pipes and tunnels. The space is messy, filled with the normal detritus of day-to-day living and piles of books. On the wall is a large symbol, though - a red banner of a lidded eye weeping blood over the Earth. Kaelen and Kieri blanche at the banner, but before the team can press them on this the cries of bats ring-out.
Kaelen and Kieri duck out of the hovel to hide as the team are attacked by energy balls with bat wings and large, lamprey-like mouths! The combat goes quickly, though, as Alison senses two of the four creatures are weak to dark energy and takes them down with a single pulse of darkness. Margot studies one and lets the group know it has a spell while Iris finishes off the fourth. Melodie weakens the last one flying, taking some damage in the process. The fight ends with Alison "eating" the remaining bat and learning the Ice Flux spell.
We end the session there, with unresolved questions and dead energy bats!
Meet the Team
With this being a new campaign, I want to spend the first few posts introducing each of the new player characters. This week we meet the extraterrestrial Iris!
Name: Iris LaRue
Identity: Rebellious Rockstar Hero
Origin: The Endless Void
Theme: Duty
Major: Musical Arts
Signature Element: Light
Starting Classes: Mutant (3), Rogue (2)
Quirk: Demonic Scion (a tweaked version of the Revenant quirk)
Iris is nineteen and sports messy, shoulder-length hair with a front cowlick. She has a beauty mark below her left eye and a face full of piercings - lip, septum, and more. Her fashion sense tends toward the tomyboyish and she frequently wears headphones and carries some sort of instrument with her.
Her magical girl outfit is a regal and princely military-inspired lolita dress with a shoulder cape and floral adornments. It's primary color is white and its accent color is a pink matching her hair. A shoulder cape falls from the shoulders, fading from pink to white. The filigree on the cape is golden, along with any metal amidst the ensemble. She wields a variety of light-constructed armaments that shimmer like a mirage, primarily a longsword which she maintains sheathed at her hip when it isn't drawn.
Iris is an extraterrestrial half-demon, with a human mother and a demon father, the later of whom she is estranged. Her high school years were tumultuous - she played in an idol-esque band, but broke with the group to pursue political power within the school, working from an anti-music platform. After high school she felt lost and estranged. Efforts to reconnect turned dire, however, as a summer trip led her to be targeted by the monster-hunting nuns of Our House of Perpetual Lessons. Iris escaped, but all her friends were killed in the process.
Iris enters college a year later than intended, but with a newborn focus on her music. She has minor online celebrity, both as a musician and as the masked vigilante Sword Saint.
Player Thoughts
I had fun with this session! I was especially happy to have a threat introduced who isn't tied to the Church. We don't know who this "crying blood on the earth" faction is yet, but it is a new one to me. A welcome relief after two sessions and a lot of out-of-game chatter centered the Church so much.
Combat and pacing remain an issue for us. We ran long because the GM wanted to get to combat... which we promptly stomped. Looking at the stats for the one creature we studied, it was more-or-less at-level to the party - a level 5 monster to our level 6 characters. Unintuitively in Fabula, this means the fight is "easy," and "easy" in Fabula means "trivial." The only reason anyone took damage is because we discovered the bats have spells and the group generously agreed to keep one alive long enough for me to have Alison learn one of the spells.
This isn't really anyone's fault. It doesn't really make sense that something the same level as the player characters would be no-threat to them and the rulebook doesn't do a good job conveying just how easy at-level fights are. I only figured this out through testing over the course of several sessions.
We also hit a pretty familiar problem, where GM expectations don't quite mesh with game rules. In this case, Seren pitched giving each of us the ability to convert attack damage into our character's signature elements. Discussing it, she more-or-less explained that she's trying to find ways to make us fit the idea of a magical girl team that she has in her head2, something that Fabula doesn't really lend itself to since the game encourages folks to take different, non-overlapping classes. We also didn't discuss the idea as a group during character creation, so we didn't settle on things like a team name, theme, or outfit scheme.
Fortunately, we're only three sessions in. If we want to rework characters, it isn't too hard to do. And I don't think any of us are so mechanically attached to an idea that we wouldn't be willing to change it.
One-last shout-out to Seren, who built a web-app to run combat in! It's a work-in-progress, but is super slick, letting us to update character and foe stats with the click of a mouse. I'm excited to see what she does with it next!