Fabula Ultima - Understanding Through Dungeons

09 Oct, 2025

With my next session imminent, I'm working on a micro-dungeon for the players to explore. And this has taken me on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and understanding as I once again find what I enjoy about RPGs and what Fabula Ultima finds interesting about RPGs to be at cross purposes. It's been such a ride I felt compelled to blog about it as part of working-out why this one dungeon - no more than nine rooms in size, with a mere two possible fights - has crystalized¹ my feelings about running Fabula.

What I am interested in

At my heart, I am a dungeon gamer. Give me a place to explore, learn the secrets of, and some choices to make in that space, and I am happy. In-turn, I love as a game master to design spaces for my friends to explore and to influence and shape through their choices. Fabula can support this type of play, but it's design does not incentivize it.

Character abilities tend to improve their ability to participate in fights; give new ways to influence characters; or provide ways to introduce new features to the game world. Any tools that might influence the ability to explore tend to be isolated to either the Wayfarer class or niche items. In-turn those tools don't improve a character's ability to navigate a space, they just improve the chance to find sites and avoid dangers while traveling overland.

The book, in-return, acknowledges that dungeons are important to the genre the game builds itself on, Japanese roleplaying video games (JRPGs), but goes out of its way to declare that they aren't really a thing in Fabula Ultima.² They're set dressing for what matters, having scenes with other characters.

Combine all of this with the ability for players to conjure whole locations, tools, or even plot points with the expenditure of a Fabula Point - which players will always start a session with at least one point of - and it becomes clear the game really just wants you to have a series of conversations and fights, ones that the players in-turn have a lot of editorial control over.

So how did working on a single dungeon these past two weeks finally drive this all home to me?

First draft

The adventure we're on right now revolves around one character wanting an accessory to help manage the MP cost of casting rituals at low levels. I ran with this and outlined a plan for them to visit one site - a hill a sage lives under - to get a clue to lead them to a second site - a hidden, abandoned fairy home - where the accessory can be found. This is how I typically approach designing and running games - I ask what the players want to do, then design a place for them to visit and explore.

My first draft for the hill was a seven room dungeon that needed to include the following:

• A sage to talk with, who will point the party to the next stop on the adventure.
• A fight with a Minor Villain.
• A diegetic way to adjust or respec player characters.
• Clues about core mysteries in the world.
• Two routes toward the last room, where the sage is, each with a different challenge to overcome.

For a lot of reasons, I only had a few hours to throw the whole thing together. So what started with seven rooms got edited down. I kept two branches, but one ended in a dead-end. Additionally, the challenge in that branch got scrubbed - I didn't think of an interesting non-combat encounter before we started playing.

In the end, it didn't matter. We ended the session with the party arriving at the outside of the dungeon. I could take time to update the dungeon!

Second Draft, or where I ran into problems

Over the past week-and-a-half since I started work on this, I've spent a lot of time chatting with folks in the Table Shapers community about the limits of the game, particularly around exploration. While I didn't reach any personal conclusion, Scampir concluded that the game doesn't want you to explore locations, even if the inclusion of overland travel mechanics suggest otherwise. We also talked about the announcement of Fabula developing an Adventurer's League organization with some of their Kickstarter windfall.³ I've never enjoyed League-style play - the design choices are constrained to all but eliminate the chance a player character might die and favor mitigating the impact of player choice so that they can curate a specific experience - but it was interesting to think about it in the context of Fabula and its diverse array of ways that players can directly affect the game world.

A few weeks ago I also did some math and realized it takes a party about 50 to 60 sessions to reach the level cap of Fabula. We spent four sessions to finish the introductory adventure I created. If we want to end the game at level 50 and if I want to tackle everything in my campaign outline, I need to pick-up the pace! So I pivoted to improving some of my tools and notes, fleshing out the factions and key characters so I can hopefully in the future prep shorter adventures that can better react to the party's immediate plans or desires.

Factions updated, I decided I should place a representative of one of the factions into the dungeon. I also wracked my brain for a few days to figure out a compelling challenge to stick back into that second branch and... failed! I had nothing!

All of this - the conversations in Table Shapers, realizing that my game is on a soft-timer, wanting to include a new character, and failing to think of a new challenge - forced me to re-evaluate what I wanted the dungeon to include. Draft two's goals became:

• A sage to talk with, who will point the party to the next stop on the adventure.
• A fight with a Minor Villain.
• A fight with lackeys related to the Villain.
• A diegetic way to adjust or respec player characters.
• Clues about core mysteries in the world.
• Two routes toward the last room, where the sage is, each with a different challenge to overcome.
• A conversation with a member of a new faction.
• A place that can be explored in a single session.

That last one became the touchstone. I started really drilling down into what I wanted to include and how to do it in the shortest amount of time. I already had the Villain and lackeys designed, so they stayed. I could slip the clues into the room where the Villain is fought. Same with the faction representative. The diegetic way to respec was promised to the players, as was the sage, but could really go anywhere. And it was that last bit - realizing the respec method could go anywhere - made me realize I just needed four or five rooms, all in a row, each with a single scene. After all, the only thing that really mattered was hitting these story beats.

I had fucking worked my way into a goddamn, 1990s-ass railroad. And worse, it made sense to run it as a railroad!

There was no incentive for the players to explore branches in a dungeon. It takes time. All of the player character skills and abilities focus on fights and conversations, not navigating lost ruins. I couldn't think of an interesting challenge or reward to justify two routes. So why not just make a railroad?

Third Draft

As mentioned at the top, two things I come to roleplaying games for are to explore a space and make choices. A railroad is anethema to that. After venting to Table Shapers and a friend, I opened my phone's notes app and got to work on a third draft with the most important goal becoming including two routes with a meaningful choice in which to pursue.

After seriously ruminating on the dungeon's themes and wracking my brain for an hour or two, I outlined a new dungeon. Eight rooms organized into two branches that converge at the end. A simple loop, essentially. At the end of the loop was the sage and the respec. The paths each has a different challenge that the party can look at, analyze, and decide which to engage with to progress. I could go to bed happy!

Living with the realization that Fabula is 90s adventure trash

The next day, over in Table Shapers, the conversation about Fabula's design choices continued. In the middle of discussing my realization that the game ultimately doesn't want you to explore sites, Stepnix dropped a link to this blog post at Valeria Loves:

Why Don't I Hate Fabula Ultima?

By the time it was shared, I was already outlining this blog post, wanting to share how this one dungeon led me to realize Fabula is ultimately playing with the same story-first design choices that was prevalent in 1990s adventure design and central to League-play. Reading it was revealing, and just affirmed my interpretation as correct. In particular, two things clarified everything for me.

• Screenshots of Discord conversations where Ema, the designer of Fabula Ultima, embraces the Quantum Ogre as a core design element of Fabula Ultima.
• Valeria's brilliant observation - "Fabula Ultima is a storygame in trad drag."

The Quantum Ogre is a sort of roleplaying game trick.⁴ You as the game master have an ogre. You want the players to encounter the ogre. You put two roads in-front of the party and encourage them to pick one, suggesting that there is a meaningful difference in which path they decide to go down. Regardless of which they pick, they will encounter the ogre - the illusion of choice.

If you want to tell a story with fixed beats, then the Quantum Ogre is a useful trick. Outline the scene, let your players take the lead on whatever problem they're working through in the session, and drop the scene-in when it feels appropriate. A popular approach - just read pretty much any given AD&D, Shadowrun, or Star Wars adventures from the 90s.

A lot of Fabula's design signals it is a Trad, or Traditional, style game, as defined in this classic post from The Retired Adventurer:

Six Cultures of Play

But if you really drill down into what the game incentivizes and the tools that the game provides players to temporarily become the Game Master, then it becomes clear it isn't really a trad game. It wants the players to drive the story and the GM to just act as a guide or facilitator.

None of this really is what I come to RPGs for. If things are whipped-up on the fly and can be created by the players, then exploration doesn't really exist. To use an example pulled from the rulebook, I can spend a Fabula Point and declare that branching off the tunnel our party is walking through is a cave system with a powerful Arcana for my character to find. If the designer of the game says you should embrace the Quantum Ogre, then you really aren't making choices, or at least not the kind of choices I enjoy.

It's a relief to have finally figured this out. I've strained against so many parts of this game and never quite figured out the core issue. So now that I have this sorted out, what do I do next?

Probably just keep prepping adventures the way I already do. I like preparing places for folks to explore and the other folks in my game seem happy to play like this is a trad game, not a story game. The diegetic respec method is a good example - at any point a player could have spent a Fabula Point and declared they have been carrying around the fabled Changing Orb of Respecticus, Sage of Trying Something New With Yourself. Instead, they asked for a place to visit to have this happen. We like exploring places. It doesn't mean we don't also like stories and scenes with other characters. But its nice to visit a new place and poke around it. And that's alright!

#fabula ultima #rpg #ttrpg