11th Character: Chouquette, Fabula Ultima

 And we're back with the 11th Character of the year, we're coming soon to the end of the second week already! We're going back to a game I did last year, the impeccably flavored Fabula Ultima! I just got the preview for the upcoming bestiary and it is beautiful, so I was in the mood to do a character in the world best TTJRPG system. It's always a little harder to do a character in this system by yourself though, as you're supposed to come up with the world and details as a group, even character creation should be done together to respect a theme for the group! You never know what someone will come up that will suddenly inspire a big aspect of the character. Oh well, at least I had a pretty strong concept right from the start, have a preliminary list of characters/systems I wanted to go through this year sure helped.

Art by Soske on YCH.commish.com

 To start with, the character Identity is Airheaded Fairy Battle Chef, I already had the idea before I even decided to stat her up in Fabula Ultima. Already, this push some concept into the world, there are both Fairies and Battle Chefs in the setting. Her theme is Ambition, she wants to be the greatest Battle Chef there ever was. It could be from sheer ambition and desire from improvement, but I think she's carrying a dead friend or family member's wish, or maybe she know someone with atrophied taste bud and only the ultimate delicacy can bring joy back to them. Yes, I think I would work with the last one in an actual game of Fabula Ultima. For the Origin, I went to a Fantasy City name generator and picked a name I liked, then played with it a little until I landed on Vauchester, Touristic City of Demons! She's from a big city under the dominion of the Demon King, but there's currently a truce with the humans and Vauchester is a popular tourist destination, being on the edge between the Demon Realm and the Human Kingdom. That also take care of adding a Location and an Historical Event to the setting. I decided to give her a Quirk too, landing on Flying despite one of the option being Outcast Fairy.

 Jumping ahead a little, I gave her the name Chouquette, based on a french pastries. I think I'd work with the GM of this game to have a battle cuisine subplot, with every NPC related to it having a Cuisine related name. Then I picked classes before determining her stats, as various skill option may change what I'd want to take for that. Of course, there was no way I wasn't going to pick the Gourmet class from the Natural Fantasy Atlas, it's perfect for the concept! With her big chef knife and wok-shield, I also wanted her to be more of a warrior type than a caster, so I went with Fury for her second class. For the skills, I gave her the basic cuisine ability to mix ingredients to create special effect, the skill to deal weapon damage when she inflict her recipes on enemies and a easy source of ingredient with travel rolls on the gourmet side of think, Provoke and a ability that heals and buffs her on Guard for the Fury side. The plan for her leveling up is to first focus on Gourmet, then broaden her ability by taking Chimerist, letting her learn Monster's spells with the in-game flavor being either making dishes based on the monster's culture or using the monsters as an ingredient, Quina style. I think she has Weaponmaster and Guardian in her future too, pushing the warrior flavor to the front. Mutant is also a possibility, as that also has some Blue Mage flavoring that I enjoy quite a bit. With those choice out of the way, I'm distributing the ability as follow, d10 Might, d8 Dexterity and Willpower, d6 Insight.

 For her gear, I decided to dig in the Custom Weapon rules rather than try to get her a sword and a shield. She goes into battle wielding a wok as a shield and a chef knife that's almost as tall as she is, so the fact that custom weapons are always two-handed fits with the idea, it's not that she's wielding one big weapon, more than it's a set of paired weapon. I decided to make it a Melee Heavy Weapon, using Dexterity+Might for the accuracy roll and then I get to pick 3 ability out of a list to customize it. Since half the weapon is a shield, I give her the Defense Boost and Magic Defense Boost ability, giving Chouquette +2 to both defense when her weapon is equipped, then completing it with Powerful, dealing an extra +7 damage when hitting with it, for a total damage of high roll + 12 and making the set a martial weapon. Thankfully, Fury gives access to Martial Weapon, so we're good here. I decided to name that weapon "Chef Regalia", leaving me with 200 zenits to purchase armor. That's just enough to buy Bronze Plate, so let's go for that. All that's left then is to roll starting money and determining the 10 ingredients Chouquette starts with, so let's pull out the d6s! Starting money is the left over from the 500 zenits the game gives you for starting equipement and 2d6 x 10 zenits. I rolled a 1 and a 2, spent all my money on weapon and armor, meaning I got 30 zenits to start with, buying ingredient cost 10 for a random one or 20 to choose a specific flavors, so that's not great! Good thing I do generate ingredients on travel roll. Then I rolled the ingredient, mostly getting 2 and 4 for Salty and Sweet Ingredient! When I combine ingredient, I get to roll a d12 to determine the effect the recipes will have and that specific flavor combination will always have that effect in the future. So you don't know what you'll be able to do until you experiment with it and no two gourmets will have the exact same recipes. It's cool, but I'm afraid of never getting the effect I want or getting so unlucky that more than half of the recipe doing the same thing :v Still, super exciting! You also get to invent the name of the ingredients and the recipes, so that's fun.

 As a final note, I haven't really determined how tall Chouquette is! There's no size category in Fabula Ultima, at least not really. Some really big monsters may get special abilities related to their bigness or be separated into multiple monster stat blocks each representing a limbs or a parts, but that's irrelevant for Chouquette. I don't think her Chef Knife is the standard length, but her Wok is the normal size for restaurant usage with large portion. So, just eyeballing and going with my heart on this, her knife is about 2' in length, much more than normal but smaller than most sword, with herself being about 3' tall. More Halfling sized than Tinkerbell. Very satisfied with that character, I think she would be very fun to play and see how she evolves in real play compared to the plan in my head, also how she would interact with a party. I think she would lean a bit into being a lighter character, but there's room for hidden depth and important character moment. I like playing more side character and I think Chouquette fits that bill pretty great.