Stonesable's Game Tower

As a bonus, Loremaster makes you better at examining your targets, and getting access to Projects as a Tinkerer opens up the possibility for creating disguises and specialty poisons.

Thief & Scout

These archetypes are already largely covered by the core FU Rogue. Dancer is even more appropriate here, with Quick-Change giving you more free actions akin to Fast Hands and making you better at using equipment, along with the Frenetic Footwork to enhance your acrobatics and speed.

Wayfarer is a good choice as well, especially for a more wilderness-themed Scout, with options like Well-Traveled and Resourceful to be an asset for traveling through the wild, but even a city-bound Thief can lean into options like Tavern Talk and Treasure Hunter to gather information and resources closer to home.

Swashbuckler

An agile, charismatic duelist, the Swashbuckler is another natural fit for the Dancer, with Peacock Dance being a solid analogue to Panache.

I considered mentioning Orator in the core Rogue section as well, since it is a strong option for anyone who wants to be the party's face, but that applies particularly well to the charismatic Swashbuckler. Unexpected Ally especially can go great with any plan to infiltrate a social situation where you aren't known, and pairs well with Persuasive to get the ear of someone important and convince them of something, while Condemn gives you an option to use your words to hamper an enemy and open them up to Sneak Attacks Cheap Shots.

Arcane Trickster

I dearly love gishes, so the fact that FU is so supportive of playing martial-caster hybrids is a big plus in my book. Any of the spellcasting Classes are an appropriate fit here, depending on what you want to focus on. Elementalist has you covered for evocation-y blasting spells, Entropist for teleportation magic and draining spells, and while Spiritist is 'the healer', Spiritism is also effectively considered the school for enchantments - mental and emotional control, with spells like Hallucination and Enrage on their list.

Elementalist deserves a special callout, since Spellblade lets you use the attributes from your equipped weapon to cast your spells, and gives you bonus accuracy if the weapon uses Dexterity - both things most Rogues should appreciate.

Mastermind & Inquisitive

These two Rogues both focus on using insight and understanding to gain an edge in combat, which makes the Loremaster a natural fit for a secondary class. In addition to giving you a flat bonus to checks to study creatures, items, and locations, you can also quickly scan enemies for exploitable weaknesses at the start of combat, or make use of your (ideally high) Insight attribute with Knowledge is Power to make it one of your attacking stats.

If you want to lean more into the supportive helper or tactician, Commander gives you several options to control the battlefield and let your allies jump in and attack with bonuses on your turn, while Orator gives you options for both debuffing enemies and supporting allies, some of which were covered above with the Swashbuckler.

Phantom

Three options stick out here that you can mix and match with your Rogue for this ghastly subclass: Darkblade, Mutant, and Necromancer.

Thematically Necromancer has a lot going for it, but half of the class is dedicated to enhancing spells, so the main benefits will be defensive and utility - being able to talk to undead and force a true answer out of them with Children of the Grave is dead-on for the Phantom.

Mutant is a good option for transformations of all sorts, and using Theriomorphosis to become a flying, defensive ghost lets you enjoy the benefits and flavor of Ghost Walk right away instead of having to wait until 13th level. Wails from the Grave doesn't necessarily have a good analogue here, but you can consider talking to the GM about creating a custom Therioform, following the template for the damage altering options - perhaps one that changes the damage of your unarmed strikes to Dark damage and inflicts Shaken.

You could also let Darkblade cover Wails, however. Shadow Strike gives you a heavy Dark hit that deals bonus damage and also fuels itself with your HP (you probably shouldn't dump Might as a Phantom), and Dark Blood gives you Phantom-appropriate Resistances as long as you're in Crisis (Bloodied, in D&D parlance).

Soulknife

If you want to be a psychic Rogue, there's a clear choice here: the Esper. They specialize in using psychic Gifts which can tack on bonus damage to your attacks or give reactive support to yourself and allies, and Psychokinesis lets you use your Willpower for attacking, including using swords to strike at range the way you might with your teleporting Psychic Blades.

A less obvious option is Mutant; if you want to emphasize the Psychic Blades, Akromorphosis lets your unarmed strikes take the form of any weapon which can easily be reflavored as manifesting psychic weapons, and Genoclepsis lets you learn information about enemies by damaging them, and then gain the power to reflexively manifest some of their abilities - which could be imagined as taking a psychic imprint of a creature and then turning that against it.

Mix and Match!

As a final note for today, you may have noticed that several Classes came up multiple times across the Subclasses section - one of the nice things about bundling up specific archetypes and requiring you to combine them means that you have a lot of extra flexibility with a given concept. Want your Phantom to be more magical? Lean into Necromancer and Entropist from the Arcane Trickster. You can mix Mastermind, Inquisitive, and Swashbuckler together for a socializing investigator that still is great at sneaking into or escaping out of bad situations. With 5 Classes minimum on a max level character - not to mention Heroic Skills - the options to widen out your concept over time or refine your presentation of it gives you a ton of options for expressive character building.

Who's Next?

Cheap Shot is the most obvious signature ability, letting you deal a significant chunk of extra damage on every attack against enemies who are suffering from one or more status effects (FU has a short list of 6 standard status effects that cover 90% of the debuffs in the game - Dazed, Weak, Shaken, Slow, Poisoned, and Enraged) - a clear analogue to Sneak Attack.

High Speed lets you fight dirty and get an advantage right at the start of combat, while See You Later makes you a peerless scout, as someone who can reliably escape from a bad situation and reunite with the party. Dodge adds to your defenses as a light armored skirmisher, and lastly Soul Steal gives you the unique ability to steal bonus resources from enemies in combat. You can mix and match these skills and the relative investment in them based on what you want to emphasize, but I think most Rogues who enjoy big Sneak Attack numbers will want to invest 5 points into maxing out Cheap Shot, which will add 5-11 damage onto every hit on a debuffed enemy.

With the baseline established, there are two other routes I want to explore: Core Class Supplements and Subclasses. Because FU is a game that requires every starting character to have 2-3 classes even at the lowest level, you can start thinking about classes that synergize with the aspects of the Rogue fantasy that interest you, or taking classes that would echo the subclass options 5e Rogues get at level 3. (There's also the third option of multiclassing/hybrid concepts, but that's a bit beyond the scope of this essay. Needless to say, if you want to mix and match an eclectic blend of abilities, FU eagerly supports this.)

Accentuating the Rogue: Weaponmaster, Sharpshooter, Dancer

Rogues like doing damage and specializing in weapon-based combat, and 5.5 has doubled down on this idea by making weapon mastery an aspect of the Rogue class. In FU, a good way to lean into this is by taking levels in either the Weaponmaster, who specializes in melee combat, or the Sharpshooter, who specializes in ranged weapons. Both have options to boost your accuracy and hit more targets with your attacks, and also offer some additional skirmisher-relevant defensive powers.

The best part of either Class for the Sneak Attack lovers is Bone Crusher/Warning Shot, however. Both of these skills let you forego damage on a successful attack to apply a status effect, which means you can use it with your first attack while dual wielding (or with High Speed at the very beginning of combat!) to activate Cheap Shot and start rolling out the damage.

The other less-obvious option is the Dancer class from the High Fantasy Atlas. While you can play it (conceptually) straight and play a roguish acrobat or performer, Fabula Ultima encourages players to reflavor their skills to be something that fits their character, and in the Dancer's case, their special Dances could easily be reflavored as combat stances or dirty fighting techniques. The key detail is that you can Dance during your turn without using up your Action, a rarity in FU, and you're encouraged to cycle through your Dances with a discounted MP cost. While there are several powerful effects, the obvious choice for the Rogue are the series of Dances that inflict a chain of status effects on an enemy (like Satyr Dance, which automatically applies Dazed to an enemy that is already suffering from Weak - a sap attack to an enemy tangled up in ropes, perhaps?), which has obvious benefits for Cheap Shot.

Beyond that, War Dancer gives you more flat damage for Roguishly appropriate light weapons like daggers and thrown weapons, and Frenetic Footwork makes your acrobatic skill checks more reliable. The sleeper hit in my view, however, is Quick-Change. This lets you swap out your weapons and accessory whenever you Dance, which would normally take your Action. As you amass more gear, this can let you pull out specific answers to your enemy without having to waste a turn, such as grabbing a defensive accessory to counter a specific foe, or swap in weapons that deal damage of a type your enemy is weak to for a huge boost.

To sum up:

Rogues make for good 5e Rogues

Consider supplementing with Weaponmaster or Sharpshooter for more combat expertise.

Dancer is good (possiblywith reflavoring) for acrobatic dueling and dirty fighting.

Six Four Core Stats

This is one of the most visible departures FU makes from D&D, but also relatively easy to explain. The familiar six core attributes (Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma) have been condensed down to just four: Might, Dexterity, Insight, and Willpower. For the most part thinking of them as combinations of the classic D&D stats works fine:

The other big difference here is that rather than a score, each core stat is represented by a die. A frail, nimble character might have d6 Might but d10 Dexterity, and so rolls a d10 when asked to roll Dex - when sneaking, for instance.

Wait, No Skills?

Correct, imagined interlocutor! Fabula Ultima doesn't have a skill list. Instead, every check uses a combination of two Stats that may or may not be adjusted by modifiers. You're still trying to roll high and beat a certain Difficulty, usually 10.

Let's take a simple example of trying to get past a locked door to see how that looks in action:

Our frail guy above would thus roll 2d6 (Might + Might) if they tried to kick the door down, or 2d10 (Dex + Dex) to pick the lock, trying to meet or beat 10 either way.

You can also mix and match the stats used (and in fact, many Checks will use a combination):

In all of these cases, you also want to think about your core Traits and how they can help you, which takes the place of skill proficiencies.

Every FU character has an Identity (a core concept like "half-orc barbarian" or "lost princess of a fallen kingdom"), a Theme (the core emotion that motivates your actions, like Duty or Ambition), an Origin (where they came from like "Riverton Palace" or "The Veldt"), along with Bonds to other people or groups that let you influence a roll, letting you do things like:

Basically, the best way to be good at something is to play to your character's narrative strengths; even if they both have a d10 in Dexterity, someone whose Identity is a Thief is going to have an easier time sneaking into a building than someone whose Identity is a Ranger, but the latter will likely have an easier time sneaking past monsters in the wilderness.

Classes - But Wait, Can I Be A Ranger?

Yes! And no!

The other big difference between FU and D&D is how classes and levels work. Every FU "class" is a collection of 5 Skills that you can put one or more Skill Levels into, and every time you level up, you get +1 Skill Level to distribute (more or less) as you please. Every new character starts at level 5, and so you have 5 total points. The other kicker here: you must distribute them in at least 2 different Classes. This means that everyone is sort of a hybrid character, or if you like, everyone has a class and a subclass at the start of the game.

For some D&D classes this is very obvious - if you want to play a Rogue, you probably want the Rogue FU Class, which will give you access to Skills like Dodge to up your light armor Defense and Cheap Shot to do more damage to debuffed enemies. Then from there you can consider what other abilities you want to round that out. Want to be an Assassin that hits as hard as possible? Supplement Rogue with the Weaponmaster Class to improve your melee weapons. Thinking more Arcane Trickster? Entropist gives you access to controlling and tricky magic. This is all available to a starting character.

Ranger, conversely, lacks a one-to-one class here, but instead you can mix and match several Classes to make it work. There's Wayfarer, which gives you the ability to explore the wilderness more effectively and have a companion pet, and then Weaponmaster or Sharpshooter if you want to specialize into using ranged or melee weapons, and Chimerist if nature magic (of a sort) is your thing.

I have a lot more to say about this in future pieces, but for now you can hopefully start to see how open and flexible this build system is; it's genuinely well-designed in a way that encourages you to mix and match abilities and find synergies across classes. It's also very digestible: every classes' core abilities fits on a single page in the rulebook, with spellcasters and the like getting an extra page or two for their spell lists. Crystools is a fan website that has all of the Open content for the game compiled handily online, including a full list of all of the Classes and their Skills, for those who want to get a taste of what is available.

That Doesn't Seem Like Enough Spells! And What About Items?

One thing that I really appreciate FU for is how it tries to replace a lot of individual fiddly rules with a flexible system that's functional in play and works consistently across many different circumstanes. The two biggest examples to my mind are Rituals and Inventory Points.

The spell list is specifically a list of discrete combat spells that are meant to be used during conflicts; things like your Magic Missile and Lightning Bolt. The game encourages you to let players create minor magical effects without needing a specific spell (specifically, one example in the rules is letting a spellcaster conjure a light to follow a fleeing thief), basically covering the minor utility cantrips like Prestidigitation and Druidcraft in one fell swoop.

For more intricate utility spells, the game has a Ritual system that gives players guidelines for magical effects; if you are playing a character with ritual magic and want to discover any hidden magical properties of an object, for instance, you can check the chart and determine that this would be a minor Ritualism effect, requiring 20 MP and a Difficulty 7 Check to do. Everything works like this. In practice, it doesn't always cover everything, but it gives enough guidance that a spellcasting player and a GM have a strong starting point to determine what the cost of the effect should be.

Consumables are also abstracted; instead of a huge list of items and encumbrance rules that you're probably ignoring, each character has a limited number of Inventory Points, or IP. You can spend them to retrieve and drink a potion, produce camping gear for a Rest, or have some unusual piece of kit on hand, and then restock your bags by spending money to refresh your IP in town. Other classes have ways to interact with IP too, which makes it feel like part of a greater whole.

What About Combat? And Other Classes? And What Was That About Narrative Influence?

There's a lot more to say about FU and getting into the mindset of it from the starting point of D&D, and I aim to say it. But these are the key points that relate to making a character and interacting with the system at a high level; between this and a run through of Press Start, you should be able to get a grip on what the game is doing.