• 10 Dec, 2025 *

The party visit the royal castle in Caer Ys to do some library work and chat with Sir Cai. Along the way they chase down a goblin book thief and metaphorically put three bullets into Chekov’s Gun.

Episode 3, "Hunters X Horses: Showdown at the Stallion’s Roost." Session 11

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 Answers1
• Seren, she/her, Kindhearted Princess on the Run

Mini-Game Catch-Up

We kick-off the session with a return to the Mirrorlight Sea. On her first pass, Matty has minimal trouble navigating the Gusty Gull Waves portion of the Sea, only running into slight issues when a pair of birds insist she help arbitrate who owns the fish they both wanted to sup on. Bird law can be a bit confusing.

Book Chase

Mini-game complete, the group head to the Royal Library in the castle of Caer Ys. Once inside the castle, Mio breaks off to look for Sir Cai while the rest of the group look for help researching the fairy kingdom they need to visit and what will be a welcome gift to its rulers. After being mistaken by the librarian for servants here to pick-up an order for a noble family, the group are led to a book that should be informative.

As they reach the shelves, though, they discover the book is taken by a short, bat-headed man wearing an apron. This goblin panics and runs, tossing out three toy automatons to protect himself - a mouse that gets underfoot, a bear that intercepts aggressors, and a banshee-in-a-box that terrorizes those around it. The party give chase, successfully hounding the fleeing toymaker through the library. As the chase approaches the end, though, a large magpie swoops down and snags the book from the goblin!

Things literally up-in-the-air, both goblin and party try to get the book from the Magpie. The party manage to bring the bird to the ground, in the process discovering it appears to be enchanted or mind-controlled. They take the book and the nervous toymaker collapses, distressed.

Cai Chat

We cut from the library to Sir Cai’s office. Mio enters and proves a welcome interruption from mounds of paperwork for the knight-seneschal. Mio updates her on the party’s progress, as well as the Nova Sinfonia rumors and plans. As the chat progresses, the two warriors discuss duty and knighthood some more, and both agree that Mio’s temperament and goals aren’t suited for life as a knight.

The scene comes to an end with Mio asking which of the threats to Caer Ys that Sir Cai would like the party to help with. Cai briefly points her toward the ongoing bandit attacks, but remembers Mio travels with Seren, a princess who presumably has diplomatic training, and instead tells her to see what is happening with King Niyonin, a lesser Cymry king who is agitating against the Queen. Mio makes note to do so, and as she turns to leave Cai stops her. The knight limps to her suit of armor and pulls the Warhorse Vambraces from it, giving them to Mio to use. The scene ends with the two women putting them on Mio.

A Sour End

Mio returns and meets back-up with the rest of the party. She attempts to talk with the magpie, but the bird is unresponsive and in a daze. Curious, the group collect the bird and head outside to find a safe place to magically investigate the enchantment. Uncertain what to do, the goblin - now introduced properly as Pepper Croaktoad - follows with his remaining toys.

Outside, the casters in the group band together to perform a ritual to break the enchantment on the magpie. Rhiannon, empowered by her time spent with Seren the previous night discussing strategies and plans for the day, takes lead. To ensure she succeeds, she also leverages the full power of the uncustomary clover.

Leveraging every bit of preparation and luck, Rhiannon barely suceeds. The bird becomes responsive, but is obviously lost. Mio gets some basic information that she was sent by a ghostly lady to retrieve the book, but not much more before suddenly poisonous smog erupts from the bird, blocking all sight for the group. As it does, Hemlocke feels someone yank the book from her hands. As the thief runs off, he tanks him in tell-tale rhyme - Puck has stolen the book!

Crushed by the loss of the book, the group ask Pepper what is important about it and why he was after it. Pepper relays he went after the book to repay a fairy debt owed to Puck, who was banned from entering the castle. He has no idea why the Unseelie jester might want the book. He interrupts the party’s exhausted interrogation, though, upon seeing Hemlocke’s gunbrella. Curious about the device, he requests to borrow it for a day to study, offering zenit up-front and a promise of a toy from his store when Hemlocke picks it up. The despondent seneschal very reluctantly agrees.

We end the session on one more go at Matty’s Immram, where the cursed sailor has a short, uneventful trip that involves racing through an obstacle course set-up by a giant octopus.

Referee Thoughts

Ho-boy, this session ended on a real downer of a note! The party understandably did not like losing the book they spent most of the session acquiring. As you might guess from the summary, it and the chase through the library are the two things I have thoughts on this time.

I’ll start a bit lighter with the library chase. This session I decided I wanted to do two things. First, I started treating the campaign like it is an episode-of-the-week affair instead of go even partway in on outlining adventures. I still am nudging the group to finish the first act I outlined at the start of the campaign - I’ve set-up so much about it through cutscenes and conversations that the party also want to pursue it - but this last session was the first time I decided to look at what the players were doing and just design something for that. In this case, they informed me they want to research the fairy kingdom before visiting it, so I decided to make that the focus of my prep.

This turned out to be a misread on my part. While the group enjoyed the non-combat conflict scene, when we discussed the scene during our mid-session break they let me know they really just wanted to make a few checks and move-on. This just reinforced that I don’t have a great grasp of what the party are interested in. I’ll circle back to this in a bit, because it becomes relevant to losing the book as well.

Mechanically, the non-combat conflict was... "fine." I set-up a twelve-step clock for Pepper labeled "escape with the book" and another twelve-step clock for the party labeled "recover the book." From there we largely followed the guidance in the core rules, alternating sides to make Hinder or Objective Checks until one side filled their clocks. The only twists to this strategy was every four steps the players filled of their clock, Pepper could sacrifice one of his toys to add a separate three-step clock the party had to bypass or fill before resuming progress on the main clock; and, once either party reached eleven-steps filled-in the magpie would appear, steal the book, and create three new four-step clocks for each faction to fill with different goals - Pepper to get the book back, the party to get the book for good, and the magpie to escape with the book.

It took several turns for the players to get the hang of how Objective Checks and clocks work, but once they got into the swing of things they had fun. Mio wasn’t in the scene, so we again opted to use the optional rule to allow a player whose character isn’t present in the scene to once-per-turn force any one die to be rerolled. This actually proved clutch, as she turned one crit success into a failed roll and turned a fumble that would have netted the magpie two progress on its clock into a normal failure.

That said, the chase wasn’t without faults. Everyone agreed that it went on too long. I initially picked twelve steps because that was the book’s recommendation for objectives that decisively end a scene. I then added the additional clocks because I was worried the party would easily outpace Pepper in filling in their clocks and because I wanted to create some actual tension beyond filling two separate meters. Next time I set-up a non-combat conflict this way I probably will keep it to six or eight steps.

I was also correct about pacing. The party utterly crushed Pepper. By the end, he hadn’t even filled half of his clock and the magpie hadn’t filled a single step of its own. This was with the foes having an action economy advantage the entire time. The book’s recommendation is to give foes in these scenes high stats, but I am skeptical that is interesting or exciting in-play.

The ending went much worse. The party’s decision to help the bird happened in the last twenty-five minutes of our session. I say that, because that influenced their plan - they decided to use their new accessory, the uncustomary clover, at max strength. The item let’s them take up to a +3 bonus on ritual checks, but gives me as GM an equal number of floating Opportunities I can use at any time in the session. Importantly, the Opportunities only last the session and don’t carry over to the next. As the players discuss how to get as large a bonus as possible, they settled on taking a +3 bonus, flat-out telling me that they didn’t believe I could use use all three opportunities in fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

They figuratively took Checkov’s Gun off the mantle in the last act, loaded three bullets into it, and dared me to fire them.

The ritual roll happens, and between all their bonuses they just barely meet the difficulty level. At this point I skimmed the list of opportunities and decided in the moment I had three choices that would feel impactful - allow a foe to gather information, allow a foe to create a faux pas, or introduce a plot twist. I chose the later twice, first having the magpie erupt with magical poisonous smoke, then second by having Puck appear to steal the book. Hemlocke’s player failed her check to retain the book, Puck escaped with the prize, and the mood immediately crashed.

"Clouder," you might be saying at this point, "You dimwitted ass, you should know not to negate the party’s wins in a given session!" And I did. But a few things impacted my decision. First, I was working on a very tight timeframe. I try to keep our sessions to four hours and knew we still had another minigame to get to1. So I am thinking fast - not a strong point for me, a person with an incredibly prep-heavy refereeing style. Second, I already knew the party could get the book back - Puck getting it was a fail state of the library chase as it was. So I had notes and knew that at worst the group would choose to give the middle-finger to an NPC rather then cut a deal. Which is fine. Notably, though, the party didn’t know that and I didn’t make that especially clear. Finally, I wanted to be nasty. The group said "We are using this risk/reward item to improve our check and we are using it at max strength because we don’t think you will be able to capitalize on the risk."

So things went sour. Four of the five players were immediately bitter and we limped through the last bits of the session. This bled over into our Discord a little, with one player immediately discussing plans to get rid of the clover. I offered to walk the ending back, but asked folks to give it a couple days.

With cooler heads, I started the conversation again two days later. Over the course of a long discussion we hashed things out, agreeing to wind the scene back. Most of their grievances were what I expected - I did a very nasty thing, and frankly am comfortable with the knowledge I did make a nasty move - but in the process I was surprised to learn that one player thought I was making a habit of negating player choices, pointing to the prior session’s encounter with Ilona, the bounty hunter.

She felt that all the effort to stage the group rushing the bounty hunter from three directions amounted to nothing. From my perspective, though, the players never asked me for a bonus or gave me an indication as to what sort of what they wanted to accomplish. I defaulted to a normal fight because the characters made the choice to call-out to anyone inside before staging the attack, alerting the bounty hunter to their presence. Combine all this with anemic rules for ambushes - you can optionally allow a side to win initiative or even get a free turn - and I just ran the fight as normal.

The players again brought-up that they really just wanted to make some checks to find a book with a clue, not have a conflict scene. One mentioned it felt like the self-directed quest the group is on to find an accessory has gone-on too long, and this just padded it out more.

I, in-turn, got very frank and asked what is an "acceptable" set-back or loss. Over the course of eleven sessions I don’t feel like I’ve been able to threaten them. Even in two very early, difficult fights we ran while I was getting a sense for balance, by the mid-point of the encounter I knew the party would win with no meaningful issues. On-top of that, several conversations with folks outside of the game demonstrated a pattern of folks vetoing plot beats I felt were challenging while encouraging we have beats I felt were safe.2 The group eventually settled-on they are fine losing if it is because they made a mistake or because they felt they just had poor dice rolls.

End-off-the-day, we settled on the following:

• We will rewind the ending scene and take it in another direction.
• Everyone will try to convey the mechanical effect or story beat they want to happen before making a check.
• The party are fine with setbacks and failure occurring, but don’t like when failure feels arbitrary or out of their control.3
• The story is dragging a bit and they would like to wrap-up the accessory hunt.4

I’m ultimately fine with the decisions I made. I can only make the calls I make under the conditions at play. But I am glad we discussed it after and am happy to roll back the scene. I am, however, starting to feel my interest slip a little.

Fabula’s expectations for the GM’s role don’t really align with what I find interesting about hosting a game, and every time I try to engage with Fabula’s expectations I come away a bit disappointed. This session, it was trying to adapt to the player-first pacing the game encourages and learning that no, the players don’t really want that at the moment. I also spent a tremendous amount of time trying to create an interesting non-fight conflict scene that also felt like it was a challenge and only partly succeeded with making it interesting and failing to make it challenging.

I’m enjoying the act of playing a game with friends, but running Fabula continues to drive-home that I really just want to host an old-school dungeon delving game and not have to worry about things like story and pacing quite as much.

I also wanted to end the session on a dramatic cutscene, but completely forgot to do so because of the time crunch. Given the scene has a favorite NPC turn heel, I suspect it would have made things worse.↩ 1.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that I’ve played RPGs for over a decade with two of the players in the group; played intermittently with two others in that time; this is only the second campaign ever for one of those intermittent players and she is incredibly invested in getting everything "right" for her character; and I’ve never played a game at all with one of the players. It helps that we talk things through, but I struggle with getting a read on three-of-the-five players.↩ 1.

How poor dice rolls still feel like they are in the players’ control is a mystery to me. I suspect if I go digging around I can find a couple dozen blog posts and maybe even a few books looking at why people find dice - an arbitrary randomizer - to "feel" fair.↩ 1.

We’ll see how well we can keep to this. So far our pacing issues really boil down to two things - we have five player characters, a thing the rules increasingly do not appear to handle well, and I as the game master am learning how to pace for Fabula Ultima and the group. I have yet to have a single session get through all the scenes I thought we would, and while I am zeroing-in on how much we will get to in a session - we only didn’t get to one cutscene, even with the players deciding to focus on the magpie, a character I really didn’t have plans for outside of the conflict scene - picking-up the pace is going to remain something we collectively have to work on.↩

[#fabula ultima](https://clouder.bearblog.dev/blog/?q=fabula ultima) #rpg [#the romance of ys](https://clouder.bearblog.dev/blog/?q=the romance of ys) #ttrpg