For too long now, you’ve only been able to add new entities within the World Builder, and you would have to rely on Franz to generate new things within a campaign.

You can now add, update, delete the following entities within your campaign!

• Characters

• Monsters

• Classes

• Races

• Items

• Spells

Now when you go to the “World” tab in your campaign, you’ll see the map editor along with all of the other tabs that you have in the World Builder and Workshop.

We’ve also updated the map builder so you can now add and move monsters around the map.

Duplicate Characters Fixed!

Some of you reported characters being duplicated nonstop in your campaigns. We finally found the culprit! This would happen only to folks who had updated an existing NPC to a new name. This issue will be fixed for all new campaigns & characters moving forward, but IF you were experiencing this in your existing campaign, you will have to take some additional steps to fix it:

1. Go to your characters page and delete the duplicate NPC

2. Go to the NPC that keeps being duplicated, update their name to some random text temporarily. Save the character. Then update the character name back to its actual name and save it again.

You should no longer experience duplicate generations for that character.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Duplicate Areas and POIs at the exact same co-ordinates are no longer possible.

• In-Campaign Characters tab moved into World → Characters

Map Upgrades

• Added the map sidebar to make it easier to search and select map entities.

• Added a new “Map Image” field to the area forms, this will show up as image overlays on your maps!

• Character and POI images now show up on the maps as well.

• You can toggle images on/off by clicking the image button in the bottom right corner of the map.

• When you click a spot with overlapping areas, both will appear in the modal so it’s easier to access deeply nested areas

• Greatly improved map performance, it should feel buttery smooth now!

• Fixed a bug where map would be really laggy on close zooms

• Fixed a bug where the map in a new world would freeze

The image overlays also work in the mini-map while you’re playing your campaigns to give more context as to where you are in the world. Excited to see how your worlds evolve with these improvements!

Combat

• NPCs now prefer to use their available spells and equipped items when in combat.

• Fixed a bug where when an NPC defeated an enemy, the enemy would still perform their next turn.

• Fixed a bug causing errors when winning encounters.

• Fixed a bug where XP gains weren't being shown when an NPC defeated an enemy.

General Fixes & Improvements

• Fixed an issue where item stat bonuses weren't applying to skill checks or carrying capacity.

• In homebrew worlds, Franz is more likely to use custom races and classes when generating a character.

• Fixed a bug causing an error when saving items with bonuses.

PWA + Notifications

The Friends and Fables site is now a Progressive Web Application (PWA). This means that you can add it to your Home Screen on mobile devices and get an app like experience instead of playing in the browser.

Installing PWA

On mobile devices, you’ll see an Install App button in the header and the campaign sidebar when playing in the browser. Clicking that will show you the instructions, which are tapping the share button (or 3 vertical dots on Android) and then clicking ‘Add to Home Screen’.

Once installed, you can then access Fables from your home screen like any other application and play in full screen.

Notifications

With the PWA installed, you can now receive notifications from the application. So you can receive notifications about messages happening in your multiplayer campaigns.

To turn on notifications, go to your account settings and toggle them on under Push notifications. If playing from a desktop browser, this will also enable notifications on desktop.

We highly encourage you to install the application and enable notifications if playing from mobile since the experience is much better! We still have plans to develop native iOS and Android apps in 2025, but we think this serves as a good experience in the mean time.

Bug fixes and Improvements:

Bug fixes:

• Fixed Character sheet AI generation not filling in stats and skills

• Fixed Character sheet back button

• Fixed missing parent areas on area / POI creation

• Fixed being unable to edit/delete workshop characters on mobile

• Fixed searching for items in character inventory

• Fixed item undo button to remove items from your inventory

Improvements:

• Campaign invite expiration increased to 24 hours from 30 minutes.

• XP earned from quests reduced.

• Delete confirmation text shortened across modals.

• Item outcome cards view button changed to view item form.

• Item appearance lengths bumped to 500 characters.

• Reduction in duplicate locations generated. (We’re still working on reducing the dupes, submitting a bug report with the campaign and event ID when this happens will help us reduce it further)

Really fun update this week, we’ve overhauled the map experience and we think this is really going to improve the world building experience and in campaign immersion! Editing your worlds is faster and easier, and now you’ll have a better sense of where you are in relation to the world as you play.

Campaign Minimap

You’ll now see a mini map when you’re playing campaigns. It’ll automatically update as you move locations, and you can zoom and pan around the map to see your surroundings.

Ruler tool

One fun feature we added is the ruler tool. We know a lot of you mentioned distances and coordinates could be confusing at times, so we added a ruler tool so you can quickly see the distance between two points and estimated travel time.

Edit and Create Areas + POIs + Characters in-campaign!

You can now create, edit, and move things all over the map during your campaign. The map has replaced the World tab of the campaign screen. This should make it easier to relocate NPCs and adjust locations.

FYI - when you create a campaign, it creates a copy of the world, so editing the world in-campaign will not affect your existing world. Stay tuned as we’ll be building syncing features between worlds and campaigns in the future.

QoL Improvements

• Made zoom much better. You can zoom into as close to a 50x50 view.

• Made grid lines and coordinate displays smoother.

• Fixed a bug that was causing map crashes.

• Fixed bug where placing areas at close zooms would cause it to be at the wrong coordinate.

• Collision aware labels and clustered objects. Items are now clustered so you can easily tell how many POIs are in a general area. As you zoom in, they will split into their individual entities.

• Characters can now be added and displayed to the map. Adding monsters and items will be coming soon.

Other bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where invite buttons would say ‘Party Full’ when your party was filled with NPCs.

What’s Next

There’s still more to build for maps. They didn’t make it in this update, but some things we want to build in the future are

• Hiding POIs / areas you haven’t visited yet

• Displaying your travel path on the map

• Non-rectangular areas

• Roads

As for the next couple of weeks, we’ll be focusing on bug fixes and some smaller QoL updates before ramping up efforts on an overhaul of the AI behind Franz.

Quick one for you all - fixed a lot of big bugs in the last few days so just wanted to make you aware! More to come soon.

• Fixed responsiveness bug on tablet screen sizes where the Book Icon / Info Panel was not accessible

• Fixed bug where game state panel (right hand side) would close incorrectly on mobileFixed issue where screen would jitter slightly when sending a message

• Fixed bug where spell slots were not being exhausted properly

• Added reset button back to spell book to reset spell slots

• Fixed bug where long rest would not properly recover spell slots

• Fixes bug where Franz would send double messages

• Improves location updates

• Fixed bug where SRD items Franz added to your inventory would not stay in your inventory

• Fixed bug where armor would completely overwrite other AC bonuses (shields and armor work together now!)

• Fixed a bug where editing a character form would reset XP

We're excited to announce one of our biggest updates yet: Items, Spells, Party Management, and more!

This update unlocks a ton of cool things in F&F:

• Create custom weapons in the workshop with custom damage outputs, equip them to multiple characters across different worlds, and use those weapons in combat!

• Franz will now generate equipable weapons and armor on the fly

• Write a set of custom spells and assign them to a custom class.

• Give yourself bonuses through equipped items!

• Manage the inventory and spells of your party members and other NPCs!

But that's not all—we've included much more in this update. Keep reading to find out everything we packed into this update!

Items

^ That's our the new inventory screen! We think it's SO much better than the old one. In addition to revamping that, we've made a ton of upgrades around items. 

You can now: 

• Create custom items in the workshop or world

• Add items to ANY character’s inventory (including NPCs)

• Apply bonuses with equipped items

• Use these items in combat

This should make items feel much more meaningful in the world. Items you pick up now affect your stats and have utility during combat. 

Spells

Homebrew spells are finally here!

• Create your own homebrew spells in your workshop or world

• Add them to a world / class

• Use those custom spells in your campaign / during combat!

• Manage the spells of any character (including NPCs)

Classes

We’ve extended the functionality of classes quite a lot as well. You can now modify the type of spell caster a class is, how many spells they get at each level, and what their class spell book is.

Other goodies

• Character sheet has been redesigned - it should be much more intuitive and better looking now. 

• Improved spellbook UI

• Improved combat UI

• Hundreds of new images and icons for SRD races, classes, items, and spells

• Lots of bug fixes

What’s Next?

We have so much more to build! In the coming weeks our main focus will be on:

• Fixing bugs / smoothing out the overall experience

• Improving AI (less false positives on item generation, location changes, etc)

After that, we’ll likely be turning our attention to improving the in-campaign world tab and system.
We can't wait to see what kind of awesome spells and items you will all create. If you make something cool, please share it on social media - it helps our community grow!

Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Will & David

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.