Fabula Ultima - Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds - Session 4
We got another session of our magical girl Fabula Ultima game in this past weekend. This go around we dealt with a mustache-twirling, sewer-dwelling elf who trapped-us in a death trap made of trash.
Celestial Echoes: Requiem of Worlds (CERoW) - Session 4
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
Trapped!
We open on the fall-out from our fight with elemental sprites last session. As the team and the two tunnel dwellers, Kaelen and Kieri, get their bearings, a wall slams down, trapping the group in the tunnel hovel they are exploring. The wall magically energizes, a microwave sound thrums, and a man's voice comes through a crackling speaker. As the man rants at the team, Kaelen and Keiri lay down on the floor, overcome with lethargy and the girls lose one MP - the microwave seems to be draining the group's magic!
Iris ministers to Kaelen and Kieri, transferring her own magic to them through sheer willpower. Melodie and Margot inspect the wall and determine the energy field is powered by crystals in a pair of devices linked to it and manage to safely power them off. Alison follows the sound of the microwave device to the ceiling and rips it out, turning it off.
Immediate threat dealt with, Margot determines the door is locked down. While the team prepare to blow the corrugated metal door open with the magically volatile crystals that powered the energy barrier, Clotilde arrives. She saw the group chat and after a lot of effort found the hidden passage leading from the university archives to the tunnels under campus. She unlocks the door as Kaelen and Kieri revive.
Motorbike Pursuit
The ranting man starts to curse up a storm in the distance. Alison gives chase on foot but won't reach the man before he escapes. Melodie summons her magical motorbike and zooms off in pursuit, grabbing Alison as she goes. They catch-up to the ranting man, who has pointed ears! He declares his research a success and that he will be rewarded by Grandmaster Liskon of the Brothers of the Crimson Eye. Before the girls can stop him, he points a device at a tunnel wall, turning it into transparent air aether that he dashes through. On the other side he uses the device to turn the wall back to stone. While he gets away, he drops his hat and a folio of notes in his escape. The hat includes the ranting man's name sewn into it - Teshkal Mivari.
Despite its name, it looks like a Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's Apprentice hat, complete with Mickey Mouse ears.
Regroup and Wind-Down
Everyone regroups at the hovel as Kieri and Kaelen steady themselves. Melodie sings a restorative song, granting everyone more magic, and this finishes recovering the two sewer dwellers. As they stead themselves, their own point ears slip out of their clumsy disguises, and they sheepishly stop trying to hide them.
Margot investigates a magic lens left behind and figures out it allows you to point it at a person or object and steal a miniscule amount of aether from it. The stolen aether is the collected into a small crystal in the handle. Kaelen cottons onto the lens working and rants about how stupid and inefficient it is, how stupid the entire death trap was. Alison points out that the group was caught in it, but Kaelen is undeterred.
Alison collects the bloody eye banner from the wall and suggests that Teshkal must have used the lens on Clarisse and Léo while they studied in the archive, and that caused them to pass-out. Melodie in-turn removes the two boxes that powered the magic wall after figuring out they actually cast illusions. As Iris heads-out, Margot notices the notes in Alison's hands and brings them to the attention of Kaelen and Kieri. Before they can look at them, Alison glares at Margot for bringing them to the attention of the mysterious sewer dwellers and quickly storms after Iris without handing the notes over.
The two groups part, but not before Kieri asks Margot to keep her promise to run cables down to her home.
Hospital Visit
Back at the dorms, Alison and Iris collect a change of clothes and a few niceities to bring to Clarisse and Léo in the hospital. They find Brandon Peters near Léo's room and invite the concerned boy along. With a brief lie, Iris convinces the front desk attendant to show them to the two students rooms.
Inside Léo's room, Iris surreptitiously channels magic into the unconscious student and revives him. As Léo wakes, she quickly grabs Brandon's hand and puts it on Léo to make it look like he was standing over his crush. She dips out as Léo thanks Brandon for being a bro and bringing him Skittles.
Over in Clarisse's room, Alison says a prayer, grabs Clarisse's hand, and repeats Iris' magic exchange trick. It works, and as Clarisse revives Alison becomes very aware that Clarisse has a crush on her. Clarisse quickly starts to pick-apart the events of the past day, clearly fishing for more details of how Alison was involved. Flustered, Alison looks over at Iris for an out, much to Iris' amusement. She opts to tease Alison, which upsets her more and she leaves.
Not Quite a Rest Scene
The team settles into their school lives as days pass. Alison gives Margot the notes in-exchange for pulling strings and getting her quick access to the campus dark room. With Clotilde in tow, the three of them develop the negatives Alison took from Sylvie's lab and attempt to read the notes. While written in an unfamiliar language, Margot is able to piece together from diagrams and tables that Teshkal's experiments with the lens were going on for a while and he seemed excited to be able to harvest aether from the surface, albeit poorly.
Alison makes copies of the photos she perused in the lab and shares them with Clotilde and Margot. Clotilde recognizes their dormmate Léna and points her out in one of the photos and Alison shares that one of the women in the photos was identified by Sylvie as Margaux Fontaine. As she finishes developing them, Alison recognizes a person she previously overlooked - Clarisse is included in the pictures.
Impulse Shopping
As the trio wrap-up, the group get an excited message from Sylvie to meet her in her lab. When the whole team arrives, they find her watching the Impulse home shopping channel on a television. She explains that the network is actually a surreptitious magical item dealer, where you can call them over a disposable burner phone and purchase items for drone delivery. Margot purchases a Comet Gun while Iris orders a Maid uniform.
We end the session with Iris visiting a campus rooftop and handing over money to an aerial drone for a maid outfit.
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 Margot, the curious career student and heiress!
Name: Margot E'tincelle
Identity: Inquisitive Occultist Career-Student
Origin: Paris, France
Theme: Hope
Major: Physics, astronomy, ancient history, archaeology, sculpting, and folklore for now
Signature Element: Bolt
Starting Classes: Tinkerer (3), Merchant (2), Loremaster (1)
Quirk: Traveling Workshop
Margot is in their early or mid-twenties - it is difficult to pin down. She is small and slight and wears her curly brown hair short out of convenience more than fashion. In-general, she doesn't particularly put in care for appearance. She also has a set of fractal-patterned scars across their shoulders and hands.
She favors purple-printed button downs over black tank tops or band shirts in her day-to-day dealings. Their clothes are thrifted, but then tailored to their size. She will excitedly tell you about the supposed magical properties of the various pendants they rotate through wearing.
Their magical girl outfit is a white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck, its sleeves rolled up, worn under a purple waist coat with gold details and suspenders. She wears black slacks tucked into knee high boots and carries a small backpack and belt with glowing bits, bobs and equipment of obscure and dubious arcane use tucked and pinned to it. They complete it with short fingerless gloves and large heavy-looking goggles.
Margot is the heir to the wealthy and influential E'tincelle family, whose name is attached to the dorm building the team resides in. Margot is more interested in pursuing aetherological research, with the goal of proving magic real, than she is in carrying on the family business. That said, they routinely use their family name to pull strings around the campus.
Player Thoughts
I enjoyed playing this session, but I now wonder if I should look for other magical girl games to pitch the GM. Seren's is struggling to get the rules for Fabula Ultima to match her vision for the campaign.
Before we played she explained she's bothered by how difficult she is finding it to recreate the idea of a magical girl's powers being attached to a transformation, especially when only one of our characters (Alison) has a level in the Magical Girl class designed by TailsPR. She pitched us on our transformation accessories allowing us to transform by spending MP and an action to do so. The transformed form would grant us Resistance to our character's element, allow our character to transform damage they deal into their element's type, and grant the character access to their magical abilities. She didn't define what she meant by magical abilities, but my take away was "if a skill uses MP and seems magical instead of some trick of athletic training, it is magical." Because this is a change, she also let us update our characters, which I took advantage of, swapping out Magical Girl for a level in the playtest Arcanist class.
I don't know if we really resolved this before starting play. We pointed out that all of us except Clotilde have a transformation gimmick - pilot's vehicle, mutant's form shifting, tinkerer's magitech gun summoning, etc. I also pointed out that if we have to use the device to transform and then use our separate transformation skills after that, most of us are paying a two-action tax before we can actually use the powers. Seren agreed that was an issue and walked back the MP and action requirement, but did ask Clotilde to find a mechanical way to replicate a transformation sequence.
In-play, it never really came-up. Iris and later Alison channeled magic into other characters without needing to transform. Melodie summoned her pilot vehicle, but didn't declare that as a transformation. I didn't press on it in-play because honestly, Seren seemed pretty frazzled from other stuff. I'm not certain if I am going to bring it-up between sessions either, because locking "magic" class skills behind an ill-defined transformation feels like a recipe for not getting to the cool abilities the game rules assume we can use anytime. I also don't want to run into a situation where I ask to use a ritual only to have to spend 30 MP to merge with an arcana - Alison's transformation vector - before I am allowed to.
Trying to wrestle what magic can do mechanically into the Final Fantasy XIV inspired setting rules for what magic is also came-up with Iris's magic-transfer trick. Seren observed it probably should be a ritual mechanically, but opted to waive that requirement since we're playing characters who are supposed to be uniquely magical in the story. Rituals are one of the catch-all tools in Fabula, and specifically the catch-all tool meant to replicate what in-fiction is attributed to magic. But only two characters can use them - Clotilde's quirk lets her use Ritualism rituals and Alison can use both Ritualism and Chimerist rituals.
The easiest thing we can probably do is just give the transformation device an additional property - you can use rituals from the Ritualism domain. Is it another instance of chipping away at our ability to make meaningful choices in how we build and level our characters? Yeah. I swapped Alison away from Magical Girl to Arcanist in-part because the transformation devices replicated one of that class' abilities. But it might solve some of the recurring "what does it mean to be magical" problems by allowing everyone to perform ritualism rituals.
I did take bleak satisfaction in Seren exclaiming about how frustrating Fabula's treasure is. When she gave us the Pointy Yellow Hat, she explained that yes, the 1,000 zenit cost means she shouldn't be giving it out, but also that she doesn't care because all the items that the book allows you to give out at our level are boring. And she's right! While getting a +1 bonus to accuracy on a weapon or receiving an accessory that lets you change damage types are mechanically very useful, they are boring. It's the +1 sword problem from old D&D, made worse because each session you have to give out a set value of treasure. It is nice to know I am not the only GM who gets frustrated with the way loot is handled in Fabula.
On a better mechanical note, I finally see the vision behind "create fights on the fly," or more specifically, the way that the Bestiary facilitates that. Seren didn't expect us to chase the villain, much less make the skill rolls she said were necessary to catch him. She called for a break to figure out what to do, and while she got up I flipped open the Bestiary, found two villains that fit the guy's general description in it, and forwarded the page numbers and some real quick-and-dirty level scaling advice to her. She opted to have the guy escape using an Ultima Point instead of run a conflict scene, but I was happy by how useful the Bestiary proved in this instance. I still hold that pausing the game to create a villain whole-cloth is poor design, but as supplemented with the Bestiary, I can see how you could do it without disrupting the flow of the session too much.
The hospital scene with Alison and Clarisse was interesting and clarifying. I'm playing Alison as a repressed lesbian who has to unpack a lot of Catholic upbringing before fully admitting it to herself, and her building a relationship with Clarisse is a fun way to do that. The scene was great at playing that out, but I need to make the pacing thing explicitly clear to Seren and Iris, because both of them assumed that Alison would try to kiss the sleeping Clarisse as part of this, and were disappointed that wasn't the case. I think if I pitch them on the idea of Alison kissing a girl in-front of an important Church figure as her last Fettered Heart violation that they will buy into the slower burn of it all.
That's more or less it! I think I am on the hook to run our Ys game next time we meet. I'm making slow, steady progress in outlining the next several sessions, and after picking-up Obsidian at Flux and Inumo's recommendations in the Table Shapers Discord server, I am having an easier time organizing them into something easier to reference at the game table.