Hey everyone,

It's been really cool to see our community growing at a faster and faster pace! With that comes a lot more posts and questions, so we wanted to take some time to update our roadmap so you all know where we are headed.

You can check out the updated roadmap here. Keep in mind this doesn't include everything we are going to be shipping, but it's more of some high-level pillars that we're aiming for. Also, the order in each column does not reflect the priority for each column - it is currently sorted by upvotes. Please continue to upvote features that are important to you, as it will help us decide what to start working on next.

We're working hard on bringing custom Items & Spells to the workshop and worlds, which should be out sometime next week (hopefully). Really looking forward to getting that one out to you all!

Happy Adventuring,

Will & David

The workshop is meant to be a place where you can create characters, items, spells, and more that you can re-use across your worlds and campaigns. We’re making good progress on building that out:

You can now

• Add characters in the workshop.

  • These characters are now accessible in your “My characters” tab when you start a campaign. Characters you’ve played in previous campaigns will no longer show up in the ‘My Characters’ tab when starting a campaign.

    

• To support characters, custom Races and Classes are also now in the Workshop.

• Races and classes can now also have an optional image.

  

You can create your favourite characters in the workshop to select and play across campaigns. In future updates, you will be able to publish your characters and add them to worlds you’re building.

Next up:

We are going to be continuing work on the workshop and worlds, with custom items and spells coming next.

Introducing East of Wasteland

East of Wasteland is a new F&F Official world which demonstrates a new level of creativity and range of genres that F&F can support. This is one of our most immersive worlds yet, we’re super excited for you to try it!

East of Wasteland is a setting about survival in the face of adversity. All civilization back west has fallen to a strange everpresent storm. Its red lightning strikes and dark roiling clouds act as a backdrop to the daily life of the many cowboys, lawmen, and bandits that live on its edge. Most are content to focus on their own problems whether that be cattle wars between warring ranch barons, returning a once proud sheriff's office to prominence, or getting revenge for blood spilled long ago. However, there are a few citizens that are beginning to notice strange things about the storm and the horrifying possibility of it beginning to move east once again.

Want to see how you fare in East of Wasteland? Try it now.

Improved Mobile UI

We know that many of our users are playing on mobile, so we’ve taken some time to improve the mobile experience. In addition to the new layout we added last week, we’ve redesigned the chat interface with smooth animations and automatic hiding buttons, so you have more real estate to focus on your next message.

We’ve also resolved some UI bugs which weird spacing to show up on your screen.

Image Optimization

We made some infrastructure upgrades that should greatly improve image loading times, especially for those on limited bandwidth or bad service.

Bugfixes & Other Improvements

• Completed quests are now displayed in the quests tab

• Fixed a bug where characters created in the Point of Interest accordions would be set to 0,0, despite being related to a POI.

• Fixed a bug where non-playable character forms would show up as Playable

• Fixed various styling issues

• Fixed issue where a public world required login to view - public worlds are now viewable by anyone without any account

• Fixed bug where some spell casters could not learn spells

• Fixed bug where you could not add a new action to a monster in a world

What’s Next?

We’re going to continue building out the workshop and improving the AI systems. We are also going to be introducing a referral/reward system soon for players who create and share their worlds.

Hey Friends,

You can now publish your worlds on Friends & Fables and Discover the worlds that others are building!

Discover Worlds

Head over to the Discover page to see worlds made by the community. This is currently a greenfield with our previously featured worlds, we encourage you to build and publish your worlds to the platform!

Note: Worlds that were previously marked public are now unlisted and will not appear until published.

Publishing Worlds

From your world page, either click on Publish or the Share icon to publish your world. Once published it will appear on the Discover page for everyone to see.

Please note that published worlds must adhere to the Community Guidelines to ensure a positive experience for everyone.

Community Guidelines

We’ve added Community Guidelines for content that is public and visible to everyone, please read them in full before publishing content.

To be clear, private content will not be moderated. However, we must make sure to foster a safe community for all, so public content will be moderated.

Updated World Slots

The world slots for each tier have been doubled to 4, 12, and 24 for the Free, Starter, and Pro tiers respectively. We’ll continue to increase these limits in future updates.

UI Refresh

• We’ve added a navigation menu for mobile devices and refreshed the sidebar on desktop devices. This includes a new quick menu to quickly create things like campaigns and worlds.

• The “Foundry” has been renamed to the Workshop and “My Worlds” has been moved into the Workshop.

  

• Loading states across pages have been improved.

• Discover tab has been added.

You can think of the Workshop as the place to go and build all of your worlds and creations that exist within them. The Discover tab is where you can share and view what everyone else is building.

What’s coming next

This is just the beginning of our vision to create a platform of building blocks that you can share and use to build AI worlds and experiences. In the future you will be able to browse through Characters, Monsters, Items, and more to bring into your worlds.

In the upcoming month we’ll be working on adding custom items, spells, and updating the inventory management to support your party members. Continued improvements to Franz are also planned.

Thanks for your support everyone, and go out and publish your worlds! We’re excited to see what you all build.

Best,

Will & David

We know that quest and location updates have been one of the bigger frustrations lately, but I'm here with some good news! We've been able to significantly improve the accuracy of both location and quest completion detection.

For location detection, we've dug into these functions, and after extensive testing and evaluation, we've been able to increase accuracy by 2.5x.

On the quest objective completion side, we identified a bug that was causing false positives on quest objectives completing. While I don't have a precise metric to point to here, you should see a substantial reduction in false positive completions, by approximately 50%.

These stats are based on our own testing and evaluations, but we want to hear from you if you're seeing a noticeable improvement! While we achieved 100% accuracy on our test set, we expect there may still be some inaccuracies in real-world scenarios. If you continue to encounter false positives, please submit bug reports, and we'll work on further improvements.

Mark characters as non-playable

We've also updated the character forms in the World Builder, giving world builders more control over which characters are playable and which ones should remain as NPCs. You can now designate a character as Featured, Playable, or Non-Playable. By default, all characters are set as Playable.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where editing an existing character would reset its coordinates

This one has been LONG overdue! We’ve updated our character select flow to allow you to play as any character in the world. World builders can now mark characters as featured to indicate recommended player characters for their worlds.

New UI

We’ve updated the character select cards. They now give you more information, so you can quickly browse through available characters and pick one that fits what you’re going for.

You can hover over a character to reveal more information about their stats, or click the Edit button to view the full character sheet and modify the character to your liking.

World Builders: Setting Featured Characters

As a world builder, can differentiate to your players which characters are meant to be player characters. To do this, you can mark a character as featured when editing a character.

When your character is marked as featured, it will be shown at the top of the character select screen.

Attack Updates

UI

Combat UI has gotten an upgrade!

The new attack cards now show more information! You can click on the elements to get more information, such as how the +8 bonus was calculated.

There’s also a new Attack button, so you can quickly pull up your available attacks

Custom Attacks

You can now add custom attacks! Hit the Sword button and then go to the Custom tab.

At this time, Custom Attacks can only be performed via the Attack Button. You won’t be able to dictate your custom attacks to Franz yet. Coming soon!

This is great for homebrew. Playing a ninja? Add a jutsu!

You can also use custom attacks to adjust modifiers / bonuses of existing attacks.

Favorited Attacks

This is one of our most requested combat features, and its finally here! You can favorite a custom attack, or edit an existing attack and save your modifications. To favorite an attack, go to the Custom Tab or Edit an existing attack.

At the bottom, just click Favorite Attack and then you’ll be able to find that attack in the Favorites Tab.

As of now, favorited attacks are not saved cross-device. That is coming soon!

GPT-4o mini

• Yesterday OpenAI released a new GPT-4o mini model which is more performant than the previous GPT-3.5 model. GPT-3.5 has been deprecated and replaced by GPT-4o mini which you can try today! As a reminder, you can change the model in your campaign settings at any time. If you try it out in your campaigns, let us know how you feel about it in Discord!

  

Faladrim Update

• Our first ever world has gotten some love and been updated with new characters and locations! Try it out today!

Help Center

We just moved the help center over to a new platform and have started writing more articles for it. You can visit the help center at https://help.fables.gg/, where we added some new Encounter/Combat documentation

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• You can now search through your locations when world building

• Fixed a bug where experience points were not being given after defeating monsters.

• Fixed character form bugs

Usernames

Display names have been replaced by unique usernames. Usernames have the following restrictions:

• Usernames are unique to each user and no two users can share the same username.

• Usernames must be at least 2 characters long and at most 32 characters long.

• Usernames cannot use any special characters except underscore (_).

Usernames have been automatically migrated based on the previous display names, and you can change your username at any time from the account page.

We made this change so that players can be uniquely identified by their chosen username when sharing content and to make it easier to find other players to play with in the future. Stay tuned as we work on supporting better discoverability of the amazing creations you all make on Friends & Fables!

Quest Experience

Quests now grant experience points after completion depending on the level of the party.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed an issue with modal pop-ups on Safari browser.

• Fixed some errors occurring during NPC turns in encounters.

• Fixed an issue where some quests were not progressing.

• Forms will no longer automatically close when clicking outside of them when you have made changes.