Hey adventurers,

The snow has finally settled on our Winter Creator Spotlight event, and the results are in! This month’s theme was the Winter and Christmas Season. All worlds that properly represented the theme have been ranked.

It was a very difficult decision because we saw so many beautiful entries, but we have officially crowned our first-place winner! Our judging was based on creativity, originality, visual presentation, and gameplay.

Thank you to everyone who participated!

🥇 1st Place (10,000 Credits)

Huge congratulations to:

Hizume — Christmas Eve 1987
Play the world

An absolutely beautiful world. What stood out most to the judges was the consistent art and the unique game concept that fit the theme. It was a lot of fun to playtest, and it was clear that Solodit went above and beyond the base participation requirements.

The starting location scripts and lore also helped Franz set the scene very well. This was a very impressive world!

🥈 2nd–5th Place Winners (1,000 Credits)

Shout-out to the next four worlds that landed in the winner circle:

❄️ Winter Reverie

Play the world

Loony's Winter Reverie was a serious contender for 1st place. It was absolutely beautifully done! The art just screamed Christmas and Winter.

The simple Custom Instruction helped keep the gameplay feeling jovial and festive. It was clear that a lot of work was put into this game!

If you come across the mayor, be sure to check any nearby trees for Christmas Day sabotage!

⚙️ The Aether-Yule Spire

Play the world

A Winter/Christmas-themed steampunk world built by Areelu! This one was released early, and I remember looking through the map and early art — it was stunning.

I loved the idea and the unique setting! When playing, I chose to be the Winter Baron, but instead of punishing the naughty, I went around giving gifts and fixing problems around the Steam Slums.

🏔️ Niflheimar

Play the world

Frozz really shocked the judges with the art in Niflheimar. It looked like everything was made using the free in-game art generators and really showed off what the base Friends & Fables generators can do.

I was personally blown away when I realized that everything — even the spell art — was made in the same theme! The map was very well put together, and playing as a giant was definitely a lot of fun.

🍪 Knights of Xmas

Play the world

Knights of Xmas was created by TheScryer, and their characters were some of the best. Aaron Yogurt was my favorite — not just because he was a front-facing featured character, but because he looked like a classic hero… if that hero were a gingerbread cookie.

When playing Knights of Xmas, look for Sora if you want to adopt a cat. You won’t be sorry!

🎁 Participation Rewards

All other participants received 300 credits for entering!

Thank you to everyone who entered!

This was our first-ever Creator Spotlight Competition, and the creativity on display was seriously inspiring. Whether you played, built, liked, shared, or cheered people on — thank you. That’s how a community stays warm, even in winter.

We’ve featured all of the winning worlds on the home page! If you haven’t yet, hop into the winners’ worlds and drop some love. A quick like goes a long way.

Happy holidays! ❄️🎄

Happy adventuring,
Friends & Fables

• When in continue mode, you can now click cmd/ctrl + enter to trigger Franz’s next response instead of clicking the send button.

• Fixed the sorting for popular and new spells on the discover page.

• Added being able to mention @resources, feats, subclasses, and features in world lore pages.

• Fixed an issue where the DC of the skill check roll could be different than the DC Franz mentioned in text.

• Fixed an issue where you couldn’t delete campaigns that had hidden extra spaces in their titles.

• Fixed an issue where you couldn’t clone the SRD fighter or rogue classes from the discover tab.

• Fixed an issue where the next credits date on the account page could be off by one due to time zones.

• Fixed an issue where ending encounters were hitting errors.

• Fixed an issue where in some previously created worlds you couldn’t add new POIs.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes Franz would fail to create context blocks after performing research.

• Fixed an issue where Franz would sometimes not correctly reference research in OOC mode.

• Fixed an issue where you could not see form errors in certain cases when generating spells with AI.

• Fixed an issue where you could not export SRD items from a world to your workshop.

• Fixed an issue syncing classes or characters to campaigns with the same existing feature names or resources.

• Added better error messaging for when a lore sync would exceed the maximum page limit.

• Updated memory creation to truncate and create partial memories for when AI tries to create memories that would otherwise fail due to exceeding limits.

• Fixed bug where cover images are replaced by map images when editing the shape of an area via the map editor.

Group Rolls

We know this has been a problem for a while, but we have finally gotten around to improving group rolls. When Franz requests rolls from you and other characters in your party, you can now click “Roll All” or handle individual rolls for NPCs. Franz will continue once all rolls are pressed or dismissed.

Profile Bio, Follows, and Notifications

As we continue to grow the platform, a big part of it will be improving the ways new published content is surfaced and awarding and recognizing creators who contribute and make it all possible. This update is a small one that sets up some of the foundations for that in the future.

In your public profile, you can now add a bio and see your total likes across all published content. You can now also follow and unfollow other players. For now, following is only used to show support for your favourite creators, but in the future will be used so you can get notifications whenever they publish new content or make updates to your favourite worlds.

In app notifications are now also viewable. For now this supports notifying you when your content was liked, when you got new followers, or when you received credits. We’ll be adding more notification types and controls in the future.

Image Studio

• You can now bulk select to download and delete multiple images from the image gallery. To select multiple images hold down the shift button while clicking or tap and hold on mobile.

• You can now browse your image studio generations via any form by clicking the “Browse” button from the image picker.

Other Changes & Improvements

• Fixed an issue where you couldn’t remove the last monster spawn in an area.

• Fixed an issue where SRD monsters where showing in the area monster select when SRD defaults were turned off.

• Fixed an issue where SRD feats were showing up in the workshop.

• Fixed SRD Armors granting double dex modifier bonuses.

• Improved the spell selector in the class form. You can now preview the spells and more easily view and select many spells at a time.

• Sorts and filters were added to the discover tabs and other grids in game, so you can now quickly filter worlds by theme or popularity. Items and monsters can be further filtered by their types, sizes, or rarities.

• Added quick background removal on images across all forms

• Improved Franz’s contextual understanding of how to handle failed rolls

• Added a requirement for host to roll initiative, this prevents the encounter from being generated twice when multiple players click it at the same time

What’s coming Next

We’ll continue fixing issues and adding QoL features in upcoming patches but this will probably be the last big “platform” type update in a while as we focus on improving the campaign experience in the next big updates.

Now that the fundamental pieces of the platform are mostly there, we’ll really be able to turn our attention back to the core experience: Combat, narration, memory. We’ve been making steady updates over the years, but they’ve always been a bit rushed as we’ve had so many other features to build. We’ve learned a lot from past iterations and this time we’re going to take our time and really try to nail these aspects of the game for you all. Please stay tuned. As always, thank you all for playing and supporting friends & fables!

Hey Friends,

We're kicking December off with another big update! In this one we're releasing credit packs, background removal, a brand new image to image model, and have some QoL updates you all have been asking for.

Credit Packs

Early feedback on our premium features has been really great. We know many of you want to keep using these features, so we're making credit packs available to purchase! You can see the pricing below.

We know some players don't like additional in-app purchases (we don't like them either), but we decided to use this system for three main reasons:

• People who want to access stronger and more expensive models that would otherwise be completely unavailable on F&F can do so without raising subscription prices more for everyone. The premium models and features we are offering are really expensive to run at scale.

• People who play periodically now have an option to play without a subscription.

• It allows us to provide new features that would otherwise have been too expensive to include like scene generation and image editing. The credits allow us to provide limited usage to all players rather than these features being completely non-existent otherwise.

The standard Friends & Fables experience is unchanged and will only keep getting better, even if you never buy any credits! AI is getting smarter, faster, and cheaper very quickly. Gemini Pro 3 might be too expensive right now for us to include in standard, but over time it's likely we'll be able to include it or something just as smart in standard.

Lastly, don't forget that subscriptions come with monthly bonus credits that stack. From your profile page you can now see when you’ll receive your next batch of credits on your renewal date. These monthly credits gives everyone some room to try out the latest and greatest!

Background Removal

You can now use Image Studio to remove backgrounds! We've added a new tab to the Image Studio where you can upload an image, or just click the button in the top right of any existing image to remove the background! Your original image will stay intact and a new image with the background removed will show up. This feature costs 1 credit.

Seedream 4.5

We're introducing another premium image model you can start using today! We've found Seedream 4.5 to be incredibly capable when it comes to image to image tasks like Scene Generation. It's almost as good as Nano Banana Pro, but at 1/3rd of the price (12 credits)! It's a great option that sits in between the two Nano Banana models.

It’s really good at bringing over character and location details from reference images, but it has a tendency to look a little more video-game / realistic with its depth of field. Here’s an example of Riven Thatchmere from Odrun Fell in Crackline Alley.

It is now the new default for scene generation and also available in Image Studio for text to image and image editing.

Area and Point of Interest Tabs are Back!

We promise we're still looking at older requests in our feedback portal! It's been harder to do that the last couple of months with some of these bigger updates, but we're getting back into the swing of doing more QoL updates. Anyway, by popular request, we are bringing Areas and Points of interest tabs back in the World/Campaign screens!

Changes to our Referral Program

Unfortunately we’ve found that the sign up referral system has kept being abused since we’ve been rolling out premium generation features, so as of today we are no longer granting sign up referral credits.

However, the 1,000 credit subscription referral is still in effect and should still be a great incentive to share Friends & Fables. Post a link to your world somewhere and who knows, someone might subscribe after clicking it!

You can read more about the referral program here.

Bug Fixes and QoL Updates

• Fixed an issue where you were unable to save SRD classes exported to the workshop after the class features update. If you exported an SRD class to the workshop, please delete it from your workshop and then re-export it. Updating will work again after re-exporting.

• Fixed an issue where all the SRD class hit dice were displaying as 8 in the discover page.

• Fixed an issue causing deletion errors on worlds with many lore pages.

• Fixed an issue causing exporting to workshop to fail on some entities like SRD classes.

• Optimized and made cloning worlds faster, also increased the timeout limits for very large worlds which were previously causing clone errors. We want to optimize this even more in the future, but for now it should be faster and workable again for the largest of worlds.

• In the lore page editor you can now mark text as spoiler text so it's not immediately visible to players. Franz can still read text marked as spoilers.

• Improved form error messages when fields are missing or incomplete.

• Increased the time out limit on Gemini 3 Pro since it's a slower model. If there's heavy load, you can expect for the response to take up to a minute before it may re-route to Fenix if it completely errors out.

• Fixed an issue where grid cards would have weird widths or overlap.

Hey Friends,

We're excited to announce some major updates to how you create and customize content in Friends & Fables! As of today, our new credit system is live, along with some powerful new creative tools and a new premium narration model, Gemini 3 Pro. These new premium features are supplemental. Our goal is for the standard offerings to always be great, and optionally offer higher quality AI to those who want to pay for it.

Some quick highlights:

• All current subscribers receive 100 bonus credits today to test out the new premium features.

• A brand new Image Studio for generating, editing, and combining images with reference support.

• Scene generation is now available—Franz can bring your adventures to life visually.

• Premium narration models like Gemini 3 Pro are now available for enhanced storytelling.

Credits

Starting December 1st, the updated pricing goes into effect. Here's what that means for you:

Monthly Bonus Credits

On your subscription renewal date, you'll automatically receive monthly bonus credits based on your plan:

• Starter - 100 bonus credits

• Pro - 300 bonus credits

• Legend - 600 bonus credits

These credits will stack and roll over if you don’t use them!

Testing Period Credits

We decided to go straight to beta with these premium features, so all current subscribers are receiving 100 credits today. These are meant to help us test things out and give you a chance to try the new capabilities before we make individual credit packs available for purchase.

Credit Packs Coming Soon

Soon credit packs will be available for purchase so you can get additional credits whenever you need them. For those who’ve been asking us if there are ways to support Friends & Fables beyond the monthly subscription, the credit packs will be the best way to do that once they’re released!

We’ve also had a lot of users ask if they can buy turns instead of a subscription as they play in bursts here and there. With credit packs you’ll be able to do that, with the lowest pack starting at $5.

Image Studio & Premium Image Generation

You can now visit the dedicated Image Studio to generate, edit, or combine images. This is a big step forward in giving you more control over your visual content!

Image Generation Models

On initial release, Image Studio will support these 4 image generation models:

Sana - This is the primary image generation model we have been using in F&F. It remains free to use in Image Studio!

SDXL Lightning - This is another free model. Sana is generally better, but for some subjects and styles, SDXL can be better.

Nano Banana Pro - Google’s latest and greatest image generation model. It’s the best one we have seen thus far and is capable of taking in multiple images as well as a prompt to create new images.

Nano Banana - Similar to Nano Banana Pro, but a lot cheaper and slightly lower quality. Still incredibly capable.

How It Works

Think of the Image Studio as more of a raw image creator—similar to tools like Midjourney—whereas the world and campaign image generators are specifically designed to generate images for particular entities (characters, spells, items, etc.).

What You Can Do Today

• Quickly import existing images from your workshop to use as reference images

• Generate new images from scratch

• Combine images (for example, equip your character's profile picture with an item)

These new capabilities are powered by the latest Nano Banana models recently released by Google. Since they’re more capable and much more expensive to run, they will cost 10 and 30 credits each per generation.

What's Coming Next

In the future, we'll integrate the Image Studio better with worlds and campaigns to make it even easier to create and edit images directly where you need them.

In-World and In-Campaign Premium Image Generation

Scene Generation

This feature is one we’ve been dreaming of since we first started working on Friends & Fables, and now the technology is finally good enough to bring it to you! You can now create realistic scene images of what’s currently happening in your campaign.

How to Use It

There are two ways to generate a scene:

• Ask Franz directly: "Generate an image of the scene"

• Click the new paintbrush icon in the input bar

When you do this, you'll see a scene generation prompt:

Confirm the characters and images you want included in the scene along with any additional instructions and then watch them come together. Note that for Scene Generations, Nano Banana Pro is recommended as it’s much better at adhering to the current world style and handling multiple subjects at once. Scene generation is also only possible with the premium image models so it does consume credits; use it wisely when you want to capture those epic moments!

Premium Narration Models

Over time we’ve had a ton of users ask us about including larger language models to play with, so we’ve decided to bring you the best one! As of today, Gemini 3 Pro is available as a premium narration model and will cost 6 credits per turn. According to external benchmarks, Gemini 3 Pro is currently the smartest model available.

Please keep in mind that the language model only affects narration. You will see better instruction following, adherence to context, and improved common sense. However, this will not affect state updates or combat.

Account Usage History

You can now go to your account page to see your credit usage history. You should see your current amount of credits as the first row detailing your ‘Initial Balance’. We will also not charge your credits in the case that one of the models errors out, and you can always use this credit history to double check.

Other Updates & Bug Fixes

• Classes can now have up to 10 subclasses (increased from the previous limit of 5).

• Added a new quick actions menu to the campaign screen input bar on mobile screens for easier access to common actions.

• Don’t forget, you can get between 100 to 10,000 credits by entering our Winter Creator Spotlight Contest!

Hey Friends,

We’re so excited to announce a few of the most requested features we’ve had, all in one go! As of today, Friends & Fables now supports class features, feats, and real subclassing. Some quick highlights:

• A new level up screen where you can choose ASIs / feats / and see the new class features you’ve unlocked.

• Homebrewing classes now feels complete, with class features, subclasses, and resources (rage, focus points, mana, etc.).

• You can select from the SRD feats or homebrew your own.

• ~60% of Class Features / Feats should work in narrative and turn-based combat (more on this later)

Our Approach & Goals with this Update

Getting subclasses, class features, and feats to work is incredibly complex. Our goal with this update wasn't to get everything working perfectly—it was to get enough working so that world builders can start adding these elements to their worlds and players can start feeling the impact of their class and feat choices. In this post, we'll break down what you can expect to work today and what we'll be improving in future updates.

We’ve waited until now to tackle these features because getting them to work is very technically challenging due to the mechanical nature and complexity of D&D feats & class features. We had two approaches to choose from:

1. Hard-coded mechanics: Break down every component of feats and features and hard code them directly into the game engine. This would guarantee most mechanics work correctly, but it's extremely time consuming to implement and has limited flexibility which makes homebrew much harder to support.

2. AI-assisted flexibility: Give Franz the core tools he needs to handle the basics (updating bonuses, stats, etc.) and let him interpret things the way a human would. Not everything will work perfectly out of the gate, but it's easier to implement, will improve over time, and makes homebrew much more flexible and easier to support.

We went with approach #2 because we believe homebrew freedom is essential to the platform and going beyond D&D. It also lets us get this update into your hands faster so world builders and players can start creating and experimenting.

What this means for you:

• Not every feat or feature will work exactly as expected right now, but you can expect steady improvements with future updates.

• Many feats and features will work on the honor system for now. For example, if you have the Weapon Master feature, we won't track which weapons you have mastery with—that's on you to manage. If a feature grants a stat bonus, you'll need to update it manually. In the future, we’ll work to make these updates automatic.

We believe this is the most flexible path forward. We're trading some accuracy now to ensure homebrew can be truly awesome in the future.

Feats vs. Features

Quick explainer/refresher for those that might not know the difference between a feat and a class feature. Class features are abilities your class gives you automatically as you level up — they’re the core abilities that differentiate a Barbarian vs a Wizard for example. Feats are optional perks available to all characters regardless of class that you can choose at certain levels (usually instead of an Ability Score Improvement) to customize your character’s style.

Class Overhaul (Class Features, Subclasses, Resources)

With proper subclassing, resources, and features, classes in Friends & Fables finally feel complete! You can now create full classes across your workshop, worlds, and campaigns and sync them.

Classes and Subclasses

We have loaded in 2024 SRD classes which will show up in worlds with SRD defaults on. They all come loaded with SRD class features, resources, and subclasses. This does put us in a slightly awkward spot between 2014 and 2024 rules, but the plan is to eventually transition fully to 2024. If you prefer one over the other, you should be able to homebrew into your preference!

The SRD classes each come with one subclass, which we have included, but we have also extended each class with 3 F&F official subclasses as well. These will be included if you have SRD defaults on.

Class Resources

Resources like Focus Points (Ki), Rages, etc. have been loaded in and now can be used in game. Franz should automatically track usage and restore upon resting. For the highest level of accuracy, be specific in your wording: “I use one focus point to…”

While we’re excited that the SRD class resources are in, we’re even more excited about the possibilities with homebrew. You’ll be able to create manageable class resources like mana, oxygen, chakra, etc. We can’t wait to see the creative things that you guys will come up with!

Feats

SRD 2024 feats are now loaded into the platform, and you can homebrew your own feats in the workshop, worlds, and campaigns.

You can update your character’s feats when you edit your character and you will also be able to choose them in the level up screen if you have reached a level in which your class gets to choose a feat.

Character Stat Adjustments

Stat Adjustments are a new character feature that make it easier to track buffs and debuffs on your character. Stat adjustments are separate from item bonuses, but work the same way. You can add a stat adjustment via the character form. Stat adjustments are meant for tracking changes to stats from feats or temporary effects. Say you drink a potion that gives you +10 speed for an hour. This would be a great use case for a stat adjustment!

Stat adjustments are a purely manual feature in this update. In a future update, we’ll give Franz the ability to automatically add and remove these character stat adjustments.

Level Up Screen

We wanted leveling up to feel more meaningful, and now that we’ve got classes fully fleshed out, it was time to give leveling up a refresh as well!

On ASI / Feat levels, you’ll now see a UI to choose whether you want to put two points towards ability scores, or choose a feat.

On other levels, you’ll be shown any new class features you have unlocked.

When leveling up from 2→3 (or whatever level your class gets to choose the subclass), you will be prompted to choose a subclass.

Using Resources

You’ll see resources used when you use an ability. Tip: call it out by name - ex. As a ranger, it’s better to say “I use one charge of favored enemy and cast hunter’s mark” instead of “I cast hunter’s mark”. This helps Franz differentiate between feature usage vs casting a spell normally.

Syncing / Imports / Exports

You should be able to sync class updates from worlds to your campaigns which now includes syncing the features, subclasses, and resources between worlds and campaigns, as well as importing/exporting them to the workshop. Same goes for feats!

What does NOT work yet

This update was huge, and we thought it would be better to give everyone the usable parts now rather than making you wait for it to be perfectly complete. Here’s a list of some things that you can expect to not work yet, but will be addressed in future updates.

• Feats or features that give access to new spells (such as Magic Initiate) will have to be manually managed by adding them directly to your spell book.

• Feats that change how resistances / damage multipliers are handled.

• Feats that give reactions (we need to make reactions work in combat first).

• Automatic stat adjustments. For example, if you take the Defense feat, your AC will not be updated automatically - you will need to manually create a stat adjustment for now.

• NPCs do not use their class features in combat yet - only Player Characters can use features.

• Publishing and Discovering feats.

Other Updates & Bug Fixes

• Default image generator for classes and races has been updated.

• Fixed world pages breaking when making a world private after it’s been published.

• Fixed a bug where factions were sometimes not visible on the world overview page.

• You can add a spell directly to your spell book from the available SRD spells or from your workshop.

Reminders

We have a couple of quick reminders for everyone!

• Please remember that the updated pricing goes into effect on your next subscription renewal after Dec 1st. If this is your first time hearing about this update, please see here for more information.

• Our Winter Creator Spotlight contest is live! If you want to win 10,000 credits and have your world featured, See here for more details! Please make sure your submissions follow all the rules to be considered valid. All valid submissions will receive 100 credits! Submissions close Dec 21st.

What’s Next

If you’re still reading, we appreciate you taking the time to read such a long patch note! We hope it has been worth the wait.

As for what’s next, we’ll soon be rolling out giving subscribers monthly credits and some new features that you can finally start spending those credits on such as premium image and text generation.

Thank you all for your continued support, it’s what allows us to keep pushing the frontier forward in this space. Happy adventuring!

The season of frost and firelight is here! Winter 2025 will be the start of Friends & Fables first Creator Spotlight Competition! The theme of this month is Winter and the Christmas Season. The goal is for participants to create a world that captures the essence of the season, regardless of the genre. Whether cozy, eerie, joyful, or tragic, your world should make players feel the atmosphere of winter as they play your game. Be sure to read the rules to make sure you qualify!

Contest Details

Theme: Winter / Christmas Season Tone Keywords: Frost, Hearth, Celebration, Survival, Wonder

Prizes

1st Place: 10,000 Credits, Top Creator Reddit Flair, Top Creator Discord Role & World Featured until Jan 30

2nd–5th Place: 1,000 Credits each, Creator Spotlight Winner Reddit Flair

All Qualified Entries: 100 Credits Note, consecutive winners will be awarded a stack to their Reddit Flair. Winning Top Creator or Creator Spotlight Winner will add a x2 if you win it twice. The number of times you can win or stacks you can earn is unlimited.

Rules

• You must be part of the Friends & Fables Discord to participate.

• Your world’s theme must clearly fit the Winter / Holiday theme.

• Worlds must have a minimum of 10 Points of Interest.

• Worlds must have a minimum of 10 Characters (with at least 1 Featured Character.)

• No NSFW or copyrighted material.

• Collaboration is allowed (credits go to the listed creator).

• Worlds must be set to public.

Judging Criteria

Judging will take place on December 22nd and will be based on:

1. Creativity & Originality [Is it unique and engaging?]

2. Visual Presentation [Is it consistent and appealing?]

3. Gameplay [Is it fun, clear, and playable?]

Submissions:

• Submissions open November 24, 2025

• Submissions close December 21, 2025 11:59pm EST

• You must share your world on the Friends & Fables subreddit and complete the Submission Form below to enter. On Reddit, submissions should have the Event Submission flair so that they can be searched by the judges on December 22.

Submission Form

Reddit Submission

• Increased research agent speed and reduces duplicate context blocks

• Fixes an issue where Franz chooses the wrong character ID for relationship updates

• Added a fallback provider for TTS, so if the main TTS provider has another outage then TTS on Friends & Fables should still work.

• Fixed an issue where sometimes damage resistance was being applied twice in a combat turn.

• Tweaked encounter generation so that encounters should be easier for parties where the average character level is below 5.