Fablecraft News

Hey all! 🧙 In case you missed it, we recently announced that the Tales of Fablecraft demo will be dropping sometime later this month. Keep an eye out for an official demo release date announcement!

[h3]Homebrew Features[/h3]

Whether you're a seasoned GM or a fledgling hero, our upcoming Homebrew features are designed to ensure that your adventures in Fablecraft will be immersive and unique from tabletop to tabletop.

You'll see us use the word 'Homebrew' a lot; that's what we're calling the bundle of tools for game customization and adventure building. These features will grow as Fablecraft moves through development.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Let’s take a look at what’s coming down the pipeline!

[h3]Hero Portraits [/h3]

When you create a character in Fablecraft, you will need to choose a character portrait. Toggle through the provided options OR customize your own!

Adding your custom portraits will be simple. Select “Add Portrait” on the character creation carousel and follow the prompts.



For now, you can upload up to five custom portraits. We plan to expand this option down the road.



Once you’ve gotten your hero looking just right, it’s time to make a hero token.

Your full custom image will appear on your character sheet and your token will appear on the side of your video chat and on the battlemap.



[h3]Story Scene Environments[/h3]

Similar to character design, environment options have gotten an upgrade.

Click “Add Backdrop” and follow the steps to start creating your own custom environments.



You will be able to upload two different types of media when prompted; static images and video files.



Upload your image and it will populate the corresponding socket.

For future video environment customization, if you upload a video, it will prompt you to add an additional image that will allow players to toggle animations on and off while in game.



You will also be able to add variations of images. For now, you will be able to add up to 5 variations for each environment.



You can write in your own descriptions that players will be able to read in game as well.

[h3]A Sneak Peek at What’s Next[/h3]

Tales of Fablecraft’s mission has always been to lower the barrier to entry into the world of tabletop gaming. Continuing to expand and build upon various customization features will be a big part of that!

Upcoming Homebrew features include:

• Custom Music + Soundscapes - Add your own music and sound effects to the in-game jukebox!
  
• Custom Battlemaps - This will include tools to define the battlemap grid as well as the ability to define line of sight by drawing walls.
  

[h3]Creator Marketplace[/h3]

We're currently developing an in-platform Creator Marketplace, which will allow wonderful artists and creators to share and sell content directly to others! We’ll have much more on this after Early Access launch.

It's just one of the ways that we're hoping to support human creatives, and we hope it'll connect players to artists they love.



Excited for Homebrew? Wishlist Tales of Fablecraft on Steam!

Hey Mages! 🧙 We have some exciting news to share. The Tales of Fablecraft demo will be dropping sometime later this month. Keep an eye out for an official date announcement!

[h3]What is this?[/h3]

Whether you're participating in our Closed Beta or you're ready to try Tales of Fablecraft for the first time, you will be able to play the demo very soon! There's lots to experience in the demo from onboarding to combat, so get ready!

[h3]But wait, there's more![/h3]

Also included in the demo are the first 3 sessions of our starter adventure, The Road to the Starfall Festival!

[h3]New art animations![/h3]

We've never been more hyped for a menu screen! Credit for this magical design goes to Isabeau Backhaus and animations were brought to life by Greg Platt. The gif below is a small taste!



Waiting on the demo to get your roleplay on? Wishlist us on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2176900/Tales_of_Fablecraft/?utm_source=steam&utm_content=050124-demo-announcement-post

📢 Hey everyone! We would like to make a quick announcement at the top of this update. The Streaming Embargo on Tales of Fablecraft will lift on May 1, 2024. We can't wait to see some of you running sessions out in the wild.

In this week's update, we will be spotlighting one of Tales of Fablecraft's incredible artists, Linda Lithén. We got a chance to see some of Linda's latest work in a previous update. This week, we'll talk to Linda herself and learn more about her creative process!

Name: Linda Lithén
Socials: artstation.com/darantha Location: Sweden
Artistic superpower: The tasty little details.
Interests beyond painting: Gaming and writing, also baking / cooking to satisfy the stomach’s needs.
Couldn't live without: Tea. I run on it, much to my dentist’s chagrin.
Favorite ice cream flavor: I like fruit flavours, like lemon or banana. Or something w/ chocolate chips in it.

Our Creative Director, Darci Manley, gives a more in depth look at the art brief process and the joys of working with Linda. You can peek behind the scenes of the design work in this week's video update!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Linda Lithén has many artistic superpowers, which makes it tough to pick what we are most in awe of. It could be her gorgeous and intricate details (a hallmark of any Linda creation). Or perhaps it’s the speed at which she can take a brief to final picture (seriously, she’s FAST).

It might be the fantastical creatures she often adds to her character designs (everything is better with an animal buddy!). And then of course there’s the vibrancy and storytelling she brings to anything she designs. Luckily we don’t have to choose! Players will have the opportunity to meet many of Linda’s NPC characters and play as several of them as well.



[h3]Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be a professional artist?[/h3]

LINDA: It took a couple of years after college, but it was either continuing to kick around at unemployment busywork events while trying to compete with all recent graduates for low-paying jobs, or just registering as my own business owner.





LINDA: I did some smaller jobs for self publishing authors and a few Power Rangers comic covers early on, but when Critical Role published their first book together with Wizards of the Coast, they brought in a lot of artists from the CR community, and that’s how I managed to sort of wedge my foot in the door. A lot of ADs seemed to find me through my Critical Role fanart at first. So, to be honest I think I was just in the right place at the right time.



[h3]Who are your biggest artistic influences?[/h3]

LINDA: I don’t know if I can name specific artists as general media. I remember trying to mimic the W.I.T.C.H. covers and media when I was young, and one of my childhood memories is lying on the bed in our caravan during summer vacation, copying the drawings in the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos manual. Warcraft remained a fairly big influence as I played WoW during my teens, along with other anime influences like One Piece and Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy.



[h3]What are your main sources of inspiration?[/h3]

LINDA: My fellow artists keep me pushing myself, haha. Got to learn to live with that “Oh man, I could never paint like that” to “Ok time to just try and aim higher with the next painting” emotional swing. But I also get inspiration from games that I play, and I like taking in various art styles as inspiration.



LINDA: For example, I’m currently bouncing between Elden Ring, Genshin Impact, Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV, and I try to follow artists from outside of the TTRPG/MtG fantasy art style bubble so I have something new I can try to parse and feed into my own style.



[h3]Can you walk us through your process when working on Fablecraft artwork, from brief through to final execution?[/h3]

LINDA: The briefs I get are always so great and leave me with a fantastic base to build from, so I usually start with just thinking about what sort of character it’s supposed to be, what the brief says about them and how they live. Then I do some thumbnail sketches with very basic design elements in them and send them off for review.



LINDA: After that one thumbnail has been selected, I do a cleaner sketch of it with basic colours. I am not good at lines, so my sketches are fairly rough, because I just merge them down into the base colours when I start painting.



LINDA: If everything looks good, I will then do a first pass on everything. In cases like the woven grass cloaks for the Longstriders like Delphine here, I will go looking for references like woven baskets and other decorations and work it up to a point where it looks ok and reads well, without getting too bogged down in the details. This is usually the point where we discuss tweaks to the art piece, like if the facial features need to be changed.



Once everything has been worked out and everyone’s happy with how the process image looks, I do a finishing pass and clean up edges and add more details and textures.

[h3]How would you personally define success as an artist?[/h3]

LINDA: I believe success is what you yourself define it as. In a social climate where ‘monetize your hobby’ is so prevalent, I am a ardent believer in that success as a artist can be anything from “I mostly draw my favourite fandom ship for my 200 followers on tumblr” to “I just got hired to work on this high budget show/AAA-game.



[h3]Any advice for aspiring artists out there?[/h3]

LINDA: If you don’t know how something looks, use references. It’s not cheating. And study your fundamentals!



Check out more of Linda’s work on Tales of Fablecraft, join our party on Discord, and Wishlist us on Steam today!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2176900/Tales_of_Fablecraft/?utm_source=steam&utm_content=042924-steam-update-linda-lithen

This week we talked to Riftweaver’s Creative Director, Darci Manley, about the design of the starting inventory for our seven classes. Here’s what she had to tell us.

[h2]Seven Bags for Seven Classes [/h2]

We are just beginning to design Fablecraft’s inventory items, and we've tapped the incredible Linda Lithén to bring them to life. Linda has been working with us for two years at this point and is really an expert on what our world looks like, from the people and creatures who live there, to the regions they call home.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

After we settled on our seven classes, the next step was to bring them to life in a way that supported storytelling. We thought it would be fun to design a custom kit, or bag, for each.

We knew the starting items for each class would be very different (and a little bit weird!). We'd need the bags to be physically easy to transport - after all, Mages in Mythas are explorers. They also needed to be roughly the same size to fit seamlessly into the actual game design. We wanted to highlight 2-4 items to reinforce the class personalities. We knew the colors, materials, and contents of each bag needed to reflect our world and lore. And finally, we were determined that each bag would feel equally special and unique.

So, Linda got busy sketching! You can see some of our early exploration and final designs below.



Early exploration for the Performer bag



Variant sketches for the entire collection of class bags

[h2]The Guardian Class[/h2]

Our Guardians are basically a fantasy sheriff without the pistols. These characters tend to be do-gooders and, honestly, a little bit smug about it. The bag is outdoorsy in its color palette by design. We’ve got some elements that look like leaves here as well. The natural world always influences our art direction, so that’s coming into play here. This is also the most traditional bag shape out of the bunch.



You’ve got the shackles there to reinforce the authority of the class, but also, Claire Purcell (Riftweaver’s lead storyteller) came up with this idea of giving our Guardian a “Watchful Eye.” With a successful Might check, you can roll this magical eyeball around a corner or under a door to see what’s going on. It’s so weird and kind of gross and just endlessly hilarious to me!

[h2]The Inventor Class[/h2]

Our Inventor is a magical MacGyver type. This is the kind of character who is going to grab a seashell, a few feathers, and a pile of sand, then create a new gizmo to get themselves out of a pit trap and/or defeat a Tidemaw and/or detect buried treasure.



There are lots of handy tools and schematics in the bag, plus the stitching and shaping of it is just really fun. The goggles were oddly the hardest part of the design. We had to make sure they didn’t read as too steampunk since that’s not the look of our world.

[h2]The Merchant Class[/h2]

I just love this bag. All of the vibrant compartments, woven details, and straps, and the general shape–it’s such a fun interlocking puzzle of potential fun (and sales!). You can think about it as an on-the-go storefront for pretty much anything a player could dream up.



In particular, I love the shell detailing on the scale and the colorful abacus. When you roll a successful Empathy check as a Merchant you can gauge a fair cost during any negotiation. There are so many story hooks for this class!

[h2]The Naturalist Class[/h2]

This bag is so pretty and sweet. When I want to play a character who is going to try and tame every animal they meet (which is most of the time, tbh), this is the class for me.



The bag is basically a herbalism kit that highlights a variety of our regions. The structure is woven from grass from the Long Meadows–this is also where the bioluminescent butterfly comes from. We’ve got a shell from the Coral Coasts and a mushroom from the Wildwoods. The flower is a rare one from the Highlands, and the sickle is handy anywhere you’ll travel in Mythas. The bag sets you up to make any number of herbal concoctions and brews.

[h2]The Performer Class[/h2]

This was the first bag we designed, and it remains my personal favorite. In Fablecraft, a performer can be anything—a singer, tap dancer, mime, or drag queen. If there is a Performer in the adventuring party, you are almost guaranteed to have some dramatic scenarios.



The bag contains this beautiful mask that Linda designed as a cue to our Highlanders. The moon and stars are integral to our world, and I love that these details were included in the bag. If you zoom in, there are even sequins stitched on! The bag of glitter is endlessly entertaining to me. The thing about glitter is that it gets everywhere and is impossible to clean up. When I play a Performer in Fablecraft, I leave a trail of the stuff wherever I go!

[h2]The Rogue Class[/h2]

Ya gotta love a Rogue to add some chaos and thievery into any story. We’ve provided a number of lockpicks and skeleton keys for all of your troublemaking needs, plus a Wanted sign. Cause that’s when you know your thieving career has really taken off. ;)



This bag was kept small and simple, the better to get in and out of sticky situations. Still love the thoughtful stitching and fun colors, though!

[h2]The Sage Class[/h2]

An intellect, are you? One look at this bag confirms it! You’ve got your esoteric scrolls, your quill and ink, some magical crystals, and no doubt a number of dusty old tomes safely packed away as well.



As for that strange glowing cube? We imagine it works just like a magic eight-ball. Shake it and find out the future. Just don’t blame us if the outlook is hazy or if you need to ask again later. Depending on your GM, a successful Academics check may clear things right up!

[h2]The Final Collection[/h2]

With all of our bags, we really leaned into bright colors, which is the approach for most of the Fablecraft artwork we create. If you google “fantasy adventure bag,” you’ll find a lot of brown leather backpacks. Nothing wrong with that, except that it’s been done before. So we tried out something a little more vibrant and fun. Let us know if you have a favorite!



[h2]Wishlist Us On Steam[/h2]

We love hearing from all of you, so please keep the feedback coming! Your support makes a huge difference to an indie game like ours.

Join our party on Discord and Wishlist Tales of Fablecraft on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2176900/Tales_of_Fablecraft/?utm_source=steam&utm_content=steam-update-040224

We’ve officially crossed a pretty cool milestone here on Steam: Tales of Fablecraft now has more than 20,000 Wishlists!

Wishlists help indie studios like ours a lot, so thank you. Your excitement and support for our virtual tabletop RPG means so much to the Riftweaver team. 🧙🎲🍻



Wishlists bring new players, and new players bring a lot of questions. So! We’ve gathered five of your most frequently asked questions here, complete with official answers straight from our team.

Let’s dive in.

[h3]When will Tales of Fablecraft launch?[/h3]

We haven’t announced the official launch date yet, but Fablecraft will launch into Early Access here on Steam sometime this summer (in the Northern Hemisphere!).

[h3]I see there was a closed beta; can I still join?[/h3]

The Fablecraft closed beta officially stopped accepting new participants earlier this year. The good news is that we’re working on a demo that will launch on Steam very soon and will include brand-new content that wasn’t available in the closed beta.

[h3]How many people can play Tales of Fablecraft? Is there a recommended group size?[/h3]

Fablecraft supports groups of up to six people, which means one GM and five players. The recommended group size depends on the scale of your adventure and the spirit of the group. Internally, we tend to run with one GM and four players.

[h3]Tales of Fablecraft is free-to-play, but how will it be monetized?[/h3]

When Tales of Fablecraft launches into Early Access, the complete five-Session Road to the Starfall Festival adventure will be included for free, along with a host of other digital assets to homebrew up a storm.

At launch and beyond, we’ll sell adventures of varying sizes, cosmetics like dice skins and player portraits, and we’ll offer a subscription tier that gives GMs the ability to homebrew their own assets. Homebrew functionality will grow throughout Early Access, but the ultimate vision is for Fablecraft to be as flexible as possible.

We’ve not settled on exact price points for content yet, but we will share those details as soon as we have them.

[h3]Will everyone need to buy adventures to play them or just the GM?[/h3]

Only the GM needs to own the adventure or homebrewed assets to run a session. Players can simply download the free base Fablecraft game to join these sessions.

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If you have any other questions, come on over to our Discord and fire away!

And if you haven’t already, please Wishlist Fablecraft here on Steam to help us achieve our next milestone moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2176900/Tales_of_Fablecraft/