Well met, Mages! 🧙‍♂️

We can officially announce that we plan to launch the next major update to Tales of Fablecraft (v0.21.0) next week. This update includes some key features that folks have been clamoring for.

Today, we’ll talk about three big features making their way into our virtual tabletop RPG: Homebrew Battlemaps, NPC Copy & Customize, and our Nice Dice campaign settings toggle.

Let’s begin.

An important note: Consider these features as entering Version 1

One of the more ambitious goals we have for Fablecraft is to support homebrew everything, from top to bottom, with a user experience that’s simplified, intuitive, and attractive. That means design, development, and rollout take a little extra time as we polish the user experience to the best of our ability.

What you’re getting next week from our homebrew tools are early iterations. If you have thoughts, concerns, or general feedback, share them on our Discord or our feedback site. We’ll be improving these features over time.

NPC Copy & Customize

The first stage in homebrew NPCs arrives with NPC Copy & Customize. We’re working to make this super approachable for budding and veteran GMs.

Hop into a campaign, open the characters panel, and right-click a friend or foe NPC. Select Copy & Customize, and you’ll be able to give them a name, portrait, description, token size, and more. You’ll even be able to set their level, which beefs up stats like health and damage.

Note: This is a work in progress screenshot. It could change!

You’re essentially copying their ability kits, so doing this to a Highland Dragon, for example, will mean the resulting NPC has the Highland Dragon’s move set.

Homebrew Battlemaps

Homebrew Battlemaps arrive next week, too. Remember, this is the first version of Homebrew Battlemaps, and we’ll be implementing improvements on this system quickly.

If you’ve uploaded a custom environment, then Homebrew Battlemaps will function similarly.

Open the scenes panel and add your map. You can set names, descriptions, and tile counts, but this first iteration does not include map variants or the ability to paint traversable terrain. Both features are coming super soon, though, so stay tuned.

Finally, Nice Dice

“What the heck are Nice Dice?” Fair question.

Despite what you or your party may believe, Fablecraft’s dice are truly random. With random odds, though, streaks happen. And nothing feels good about a streak of failures; they can slow down the combat pace significantly and even put GMs in an awkward position.

We’re adding a campaign setting toggle for Nice Dice to address this. Here’s how that works.

Right now, Fablecraft’s dice are truly random. When you roll them, you get an unweighted, random result every time. That means you’re just as likely to roll a failure as a success each time you toss the dice.

The Nice Dice setting makes Fablecraft’s dice roll pseudorandomly. With this optional campaign setting toggled on, you’re less likely to see a streak of missed rolls. The dice are still random, but they’re weighted to feel more intuitively random. The goal here is that you’ll be a lot less likely to run into a streak of sadness and stalled battles as every player misses their swings.

Give it a shot! Like we said, it’s totally optional… but it may stop your players from screaming foul, which is worth it.

That’s it for this week’s update. We’ll drop the new version of Fablecraft next week, and you can expect our typical patch notes on launch day.

Get ready!