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.


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[discord.gg] or our feedback site[fablecraft.featureupvote.com]. We’ll be improving these features over time.


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 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.


“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!

Greetings, Mages! 🧙‍♂️

The end of 2024 is nearly upon us, and now we set our sights on the future. Today, we’re ready to reveal the most recent changes to our living – we’ll talk more about that in a second – Fablecraft development roadmap. Keep in mind this development roadmap represents the next 6-ish months, and it isn’t inclusive of all our plans.

Let’s begin.


Our roadmap is living because we’re an Early Access game made by a small team with an active community. Most of the changes to the roadmap we’re sharing today come from requests and discussions with our community members, so we try to be upfront about exactly how much we intend for our roadmap to change.

It will likely change again, too! We have to continuously shift our focus to meet the needs of our players while also completing the vision we have set for Fablecraft. We appreciate your help and understanding in this process.

So, thank you!



In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll share as much as we can about each of the entries on our roadmap here on our dev blogs and on our Discord. For instance, next week, we’ll discuss the Nice Dice campaign settings toggle and our homebrew battlemaps.

For now, we’ll share the items that we’ve added.

• Nice Dice campaign settings toggle
  
• Multiplayer matchmaking parts 1 & 2 – Yep, we’re splitting this feature up.
  
• Text-only session improvements – We know lots of folks only want to use text to chat, so we’re working on improvements to that experience.
  
• Daily single-player content
  
• Subscription support – We are working on a subscription system to give GMs and players good stuff while offsetting server costs and getting more support to make Fablecraft the best it can be.
  
• Single-player rewards

So, what was pulled or changed up? Only two things, essentially.


When Fablecraft launched this past summer, we immediately heard that players wanted us to prioritize homebrew NPCs. Our initial thought was to let GMs create their own Mages and then add them to campaigns as NPCs.

This was always a half-step move that we planned to patch out with better homebrew, and that better homebrew is closer than we thought it would be. With NPC Copy & Customize dropping later this month (!), we don’t need the GM Heroes in the sidetray functionality. The NPC Copy & Customize feature is much better suited to what GMs want.


Getting Fablecraft up and running on the iPad with cross-play between PCs and Macs was challenging, but it’s now live! You could probably guess this, but it’s much easier for our team to continue down the iOS development path from iPad to iPhone than switching to a different platform entirely.

So, we’ve decided to finish our iOS port work and get Fablecraft on iPhones before shifting over to Android tablets and, later, Android phones. This decision, while delaying the Android launches, will speed up our overall development process significantly.

That’s it for this week’s update and the roadmap reveal!

Looking for your next adventure? Join our Discord[discrod.gg]. We’ll see you there!