Fabula Ultima - The Romance of Ys - Session 14

12 Feb, 2026

I am getting to this one almost two weeks after the session occurred¹, but that doesn't mean the session was uneventful! Aurelia returns after several absent sessions and the party discover, then thwart, the theft of a great many treasures from Rhiannon's Steading.

Episode 3, "Hunters X Horses: Showdown at the Stallion's Roost." Session 14

Cast

• Aurelia, she/her, Ex-Inventor Turned Spy
• Hemlocke, any, Loyal Servant Looking for Answers
• Mio, she/her, Headstrong Pugilist with a Heart of Gold
• Rhiannon the Blue, she/her, Academic Ghost Bride Looking for Answers
• Seren, she/her, Kindhearted Princess on the Run

Aurelia Returns

We open by rewinding the clock a bit and watching as Aurelia appears near the stables of the Steading. She pokes around the stables, noticing how clean and grand they are but finding very little - an exquisite salt lick, some tools, and a single paddock with Lecandan-bred ponies in it. Pointedly, no stablehands or riders are present.

Cautious but calm, she follows her bond-string toward the party, skirting the main house as she does. As she loops around it she hears noises coming from a room inside, but opts to reunite with the party before investigating it.

What's In The House?

All together at last, the party discuss their leads and insights. Seren wants to talk with Manawydan again while Mio and Aurelia want to investigate the noises inside the house closer. The group opt to explore the house first, and approach Sir Bernard. He assures the group he hasn't heard anything inside, but takes their worries seriously and enters to investigate, locking the party out as he does. Mio and Aurelia sneak around the outside to listen-in. When they hear Sir Bernard approach the site where they kept hearing noises earlier, he seems to linger and there are additional noises inside. The two report back before Sir Bernard reappears, assuring the party he found nothing of note inside.

Calming Manawydan

Deeply suspicious, they head to find Manawydan and reintroduce themselves now that they are all together. They find the horse king running wild through the fields, still upset. Seren flags him down and, after some mild convincing, he consents to have her cast a healing spell, cleansing him of his enraged state.

In a more reasonable mood, the party present him officially with the gift they brought and ask about state of the Steading, what the dwarves did, and the other guests, all while presenting the oddities they've encountered, such as the handprint on the gate tree. He broaches that it is possible that another group may be at work, but observes that a dwarf did stun him and that Baroness Butter and her contingent have not done anything wrong yet.

Back to the House

Content that they have made formal introductions, the party return to the house. With the pretense that they need to find the kitchen to place their gift of food in, they pass by Sir Bernard and explore the hall. They gradually work their way back to the room with the noises while Sir Bernard pointedly stares at them. Inside the room, Aurelia, Mio, and Rhiannon discover a hidden door leading down into the dark. The three descend while Seren and Hemlocke look for a kitchen.

The three quietly move down the stairs, where they find a pair of knights collecting and seemingly eating treasure from a hidden vault. The party update each other via Seren's telepathy and stealthily convene in the vault. After psychic discussion they opt to ambush the thieves while Seren flies off to find and alert Manawydan to the theft.

Vault Tussle

Combat ensues, as the party jump the two knights. Seren flees, but as she does sees Sir Bernard approach with another two knights. The ambushers are in-turn ambushed!

As Seren searches desperately for the horse king, Rhiannon studies her foes, expecting them to be undead. Instead, they appear to be humanoids! Undeterred, the party all but defeat the knights just as Seren finds the king. She explains the scenario and he instructs her to hop on his back. The two speed back to the house in a blink of an eye!

As Manawydan enters, he shifts from horse to the form of a great, human king. He strides to the vault, where only Sir Bernard remains standing. He gestures and the knight starts to change shape, but to the surprise of even Manawydan, he does not turn into a horse - only his armor does. Investigating the defeated enemies the party find their armor to be hollow, filled only with bones and pilfered treasure.

Manawydan rushes outside, party in-tow. As the king opens the hall's doors he sees a great magical whirlwind in the distance, where Baroness Butter was. When it clears, the mysterious fairy has vanished!

Referee Thoughts

The session went well. Folks had fun, we had a fight, the party got clever with how they resolved it. But I left it all feeling a bit bummed. The fight didn't really provide a threat, even accounting for the group spending twelve Fabula Points to engineer an ambush on the thieves in the vault. I don't know how to present a fair but not overwhelming challenge to this group and the tools I am provided - clocks and combat - feel inadequate.

I have a hard time figuring out if my dissatisfaction is because the game does not match my expectations or if it is just really, really bad seasonal depression.² It almost certainly is both, but I can't untangle that knot fully until spring. In the meantime I increasingly feel like the GM's role is to be a computer, reacting automatically to the whims of the players in ways that don't excite me instead of as someone presenting a world with challenges to overcome and places to explore.

Talking things over with the Table Shapers crew, I think a lot of it boils down to me taking several sessions to understand what the game actually expects play to look like, instead of the impression the rulebook gave me. I established a "traditional" mode of play, where the GM sets-up a whole scenario and the players run through it, and the game instead is meant to be closer to something like Blades in the Dark with an elaborate combat engine attached to it: The group as a whole establish the threats and crises in the world, the players pick one to resolve, and the GM puts up some threats for them to overcome as part of resolving it. After the resolution, the GM presents an updated state of the world, the party rest, then you restart the loop.³

If I had put this together at the start I... well, frankly, I probably wouldn't have offered to run the game. But if I had, I would have approached prep very differently, focusing on factions and actors from the start instead of realizing I needed to take this approach six sessions in. By treating it as a "trad" game, I also have signaled to my players to engage with the campaign as a "trad" game. So instead of playing to what presumably are the game's strengths as a player-directed, scenario-driven game, we are playing out a "trad" campaign where the players are content to follow a single story thread that I unspool for them.

I am slowly getting us off the "trad" track. Through cutscenes and conversations with important NPCs I've made an effort to say "here is the state of the world and some things you can choose to deal with as you try to stop the evil empire." Pointedly, the threats are things we either set-up through our worldbuilding game or are pulled from player character backgrounds. And the party seem receptive! But we are still engaged in the "trad" story I set-up at the start and I don't expect folks to take a fully player-directed approach to the game until we resolve that "trad" story.

To be more positive, I am delighted that the party solved the threat of the thieves by sending Seren off to find Manawydan. Using the clock rules, we decided it was a ten-step clock - appropriate for a decisive end to the conflict. Each round Seren used an Objective action to try and narrow down where the horse king was. She barely did before the party beat the knight-thieves in more conventional combat, but whether she would drove all the tension in the conflict.

Having the Objective clock in-play also led to the amazing moment where Mio responds to a fumble by Sir Bernard by stone-cold declaring he has already lost, advancing the clock by two steps through sheer certainty. Such a small thing, but the kind of thing I come to RPGs for!

I hope to finish the Steading next session. We just need to resolve the fate of the dwarves and have a wrap-up scene, probably a feast. If that predication is true, we'll have spent ten sessions on what I thought would be at most four sessions of adventure. That follows our first romp, which took four sessions to resolve what I thought would be two sessions of play. I don't know what the next scenario will fully look like, but I think it's safe to say that I should edit it down to the bare bones if I don't want it to last a dozen sessions!

#fabula ultima #rpg #the romance of ys #ttrpg