Hey Friends, we’re excited to announce ACE-1.5 (Agentic Campaign Engine). This update is huge for both players and world builders! Our campaign engine now supports POI maps, conversation mode with NPCs, and much more. You should notice more lifelike and engaging NPCs, higher accuracy representing scenes, and improved accuracy with things like traveling, picking up items, etc. With ACE-1.5, Friends & Fables really starts to feel like something in-between a TTRPG and a video game!

Point of Interest Maps (POI Maps)

POI maps are one of the biggest changes this year. They really make your worlds feel real and alive! Most importantly, they help Franz understand truly whats going on in the space. You and Franz can both can see where you are relative to the NPCs, monsters, and items in your surroundings.

Generating Maps

Franz will automatically generate a map image when you are at a POI. If you’d like to regenerate it, just go to the Edit POI form and you’ll be able to regenerate the image with your own prompt. You can now switch between different art styles and themes as well!

Editing Maps

Franz will now be able to set scenes himself and move you and other characters around as he narrates. But if you’d like to set things up yourself, you’ll be able to do that directly on the map. You can drop characters, monsters, and items directly into the map, and Franz will see all of your updates.

New Travel System

Within a POI

To move around within a POI, just narrate your actions to Franz naturally. “I walk over to Joren and hand him an Ale”.

Franz is also now able to see the map image and can sometimes successfully move you based on a description like, “I walk to the blue sign”. However, visual descriptions are not as accurate at the moment and will be improved over time.

Exiting a POI

To leave a POI and travel through areas again, just tell Franz you are leaving the POI. “I walk out of the tavern”.

Within the World

Franz has two primary modes of moving you around the world map, Specified POI or Unspecified POI travel.

Specified POI Travel

If you tell Franz, “I make my way to Ezra’s tavern”, then he will move you there if you are nearby, or if your text indicates arrival “I arrive at Ezra’s tavern”.
Otherwise, if you are traveling towards a specific POI that is far away, Franz will move you halfway to the POI.

Unspecified POI Travel

If you want to move around an area without snapping to a POI, you should make unspecified travel "I walk 30 minutes north”.

Picture-in-Picture Mobile Maps

Since maps are such a huge part of Friends & Fables now, we wanted to make sure mobile users were not left out. That’s why we’ve added a picture-in-picture map that floats around your screen, so you can always see what’s going on. You can move this around and hide it so it does not block you from reading text.

Items on POI maps

Did we mention you can now place items on the map? You can also tell Franz you are picking up or dropping items, and they should show up / disappear from the map and in and out of your inventory.

The NPCs are Alive!

Conversation Mode

In conversation mode, Franz will have much better memory of a conversation you had with an NPC. You should be able to talk to an NPC and come back later, and they should be able to remember things you spoke about previously. Additionally, now that we have POI maps, Franz understands that not every NPC in the tavern is part of the conversation. He’ll keep conversations isolated to NPCs that you are near. In general, Franz is now much more capable when it comes to bringing NPCs to life and making them feel real.

You can now target conversation mode with custom instructions - just set a custom instruction to “Conversation”.

Improved Character Context Use

In the past, the engine would try to decide when to pull in contextual fields about NPCs which sometimes left out key fields such as personality or backstory when they should have been included. With POI maps, we’re able to improve our context engineering so that based on distance and character importance, the AI has all the context about a character when they’re nearby and relevant to the action. This greatly improves coherence with the fields defined in their character sheet like personality, backstory, and appearance.

Mannerisms & Aliases

We’ve also added two fields to the character sheets: mannerisms and aliases.

Mannerisms are a short field that help Franz bring your NPCs to life. Write something like “Jim bites his nails when he’s nervous” or “Sam swears a lot”.

Aliases help Franz understand context when a character is referenced by different names. That way he knows “Shadowfang” and “Phil” are actually the same person.

Character Voices

You can now select a voice for each character! Franz will automatically read character dialog in their voice. If multiple characters speak in a message, you’ll hear Franz narrate in his voice, and then switch between the NPC voices automatically.

Other Updates

World Map Improvements

• Improved map performance for larger worlds. They may still be a bit laggy on zoom/pan but overall should be much easier to work with!

• Added new click controls to quickly move / edit

• You can now move areas from the minimap

• Added a “Move party here” button

Custom Image Generation

You can now regenerate any image within F&F with custom prompts and art styles. Just go to the form and hit the “Generate” button on any image picker.

Starting POI Introductions

Now when you create a POI as a starting POI, you can set a campaign introduction message. This will be the first message a player sees when they start a campaign in your world.

Franz Automatic Character Generation is 5-10x faster!

When Franz creates characters for you, he now does it 5-10x faster than before! This is especially important now, because Franz may create new characters when you travel to new POIs.

Reduced Franz writing player dialog

You might still run into this on rare occasions, but 90% of situations where Franz writes dialog for player characters should be eliminated!

Mentions & Auto-linking

We’ve also improved the “@mention” system quite a lot. Now when you “@”, the list will be sorted by the closest and most important characters.

Auto-linking (when a character’s name is underlined in text) accuracy is now also much higher!

Player HUD

You can now see a quick display of your character below the POI map, including quick access to your equipment and spell book.

Reduced Refusals

As a game platform, we aim to support all types of content, including content you’d find in traditional rated M games. That being said, we do have CSAM content filters (more info here) and have also changed our model providers. This has resulted in a higher rate of Franz refusing requests that should be acceptable on our platform. We’ve fixed that in this update! Please let us know if you continue to receive any false positives for allowed content.

Annual Subscriptions

Long term subscribers can now save with annual subscriptions which include 2 months free. You can choose an annual subscription at checkout, or for existing subscribers you can change your subscription by clicking on ‘Manage Subscription’ from the account settings and then clicking on ‘Update Subscription’.

Please note that annual subscriptions are non-refundable after the first month.

Note to World Builders

For all you world builders out there, we want you to be prepared for what’s about to come. While this is a huge update, ACE-1.5 sets the foundation for ACE-2. In ACE-2, we’ll be bringing back quests and interactions, as well as upgrading memory. With ACE-2, you’ll be able to set up triggers and conditions “If the players pick up this rock, they set off a trap”, etc. Once we have that in, you’ll be able to plan out interesting quests and scenarios for your players to run into. We think what all of you are building inside of F&F is already an entirely new form of media, but once ACE-2 is out you will be able to make truly awesome content for your players. We’re so excited to see what you all create!

All this being said, some advice for your worlds. Up till now, the meta for world building has been to do just that - build entire worlds. This results in expansive worlds at a larger scale, but details at a particular location were lacking. With ACE-1.5 and beyond, we encourage you to focus on smaller scales but with more detail. Start by building out a single castle. Make each room a POI. Place NPCs throughout and think about how they will all interact.

What’s coming next

With this update, the immersiveness and depth of characters and POIs has increased dramatically, but the pacing of campaigns is slower than before. In the coming weeks, we’ll be re-introducing interactions and quests to address this and give you as world builders more control to start building out things more akin to your own games and experiences.

This month, we’ll also be working on upgrading and releasing improvements to memories, so that Franz has greater long term memory and recall of relevant information in the past for long campaigns. Stay tuned as we make progress on both these fronts, with expected releases later this May.

Well, that was a long one. Hope you all enjoy the update! Would love to hear what you think - hop in our Discord and let us know!