Triggers are what make a gimmick happen. These can vary timing wise: sometimes they’re reactions to PC actions, sometimes they trigger when a Target meets certain criteria, etc. Most triggers do not come with a check: they’re typically layers on top of the basic check->result structure. You could also phrase that as a trigger is how this creature can do something outside the normal actions everyone can take.

The effect is what happens after a trigger’s conditions are met. The simplest effect would be changing the State (see below) of the Target affected by the Gimmick. This covers a lot of the basic effects, like recovering hit points, applying status effects, or changing damage affinities.

You can get far more involved with effects though. Other examples include having additional creatures join a conflict, enabling or disabling moves, or tying a powerful effect to a clock the players must prevent from being filled. The Game Master’s Toolkit includes some examples of these kinds of effects. There are many more beyond that too, but what we’ll focus on here is how you can get the most out of State based effects.

States refer to parts of a character than can be modified. These are something the Gimmick can modify as part of it’s effect. These are at least somewhat lasting: You can cure Hit Point loss or a Status Effect, Dispel a bonus to Magic Checks, but until you do they will remain on the character for at least the rest of the scene.

Sometimes a State change comes wrapped in a check of some kind: the easiest example is making an attack roll to see if you hit a creature before causing it to lose Hit Points, vs simply making it lose those Hit Points without a check. Not requiring a check is a way to increase the overall effectiveness of the gimmick. (In one school of thought, an attack roll could be a trigger with a state change of Hit Point loss, but that would be too granular of a break down of game interactions.)

A Custom Status refers to anything you can apply like a Status Effect that is not one of the core six found in the Fabula rulebook. Some examples are “Consumed”, “Burned”, or “Charmed”. Custom Statuses are very powerful, you can attach pretty much any mechanics you like to the status and apply them with an attack or spell. There are some components to keep in mind with this though.

How long does the Status last? The base would be Scene duration, making it a good use of Dispel from the Entropist’s spell list. If you go this route, be sure to keep the Status from being too oppressive: your Entropist player won’t enjoy having to constantly be casting Dispel to keep the game playable for the party.

What if you want a more powerful effect, or something that can’t be wiped out in a single action? Custom Statuses that create a Clock associated with them are very fun to work with. You’ll need to decide how that Clock can be interacted with. The basic rules of using the Objective action for dealing with a clock make the Clock something a PC has to dedicated turns to in order to move.

If you want something that keeps them in the action, you can setup the Status to fill a segment whenever a certain Trigger is met. (See? Any mechanic can fit in a Custom Status!) You can even add a shortcut to filling the clock completely with a second trigger. To give an example, dealing damage to the creature that applied the Custom Status might fill one segment, but damage it’s vulnerable to might fill the whole clock.

You can also say that a Clock can’t be interacted with, meaning it only fills when a particular trigger happens. This is good for as a “warning” to the PCs that something is coming. If they see that at the end of every one of the creature’s turns it fills a segment of the clock, they know that something will happen at the end of the turn it fills the clock on. You can use this to telegraph things such as a big nasty attack. This also allows you to enforce a duration on an effect that’s not scene based.

How large is the clock? The core book has some good advice on clock size, roughly equated to the more segments you include the more powerful/advantageous the benefit upon completion. Also keep in mind how the clock ticks when determining it’s size. If the clock ticks at the end of every creature’s turn, it will fill very fast. If it requires PCs to take the Objective action, it will fill slower.

Something else you can do with the number of segments is have the segments filled by part of the effect of your Status. You can create an effect that scales in power the more the clock is filled this way, encouraging a quick removal of the Status. This can work on a negative as well, a creature could heal 10 Hit Points for every segment in a 12 section clock after 3 rounds, but every Objective action taken to reduce that clock reduces the Hit Points recovered.

What does your Custom Status do? A simple custom status is the Weaken spell from the NPC spell list: creatures suffering from the spell take 5 additional damage if it’s a particular type. It lasts for the scene, and applies a passive effect on the target of the spell. (Weaken is technically a Gimmick as well, as it as a trigger and effect!)

A more advanced Custom Status might be “Grabbed”, dealt by a Wyvern. The Wyvern can start a clock with 4 sections, and each of it’s turns it increases the clock by one segment. The target of the status gets the Flying skill while the effect is applied, but when the clock is full, the Wyvern drops them and deals 10 damage for each filled section of the clock! You can give the PC an out in the form of an opposed check against the Wyvern to break free, preventing the full clock worth of damage.

You could also have a Status that applies various passives to the creature. When you hit a creature with Bolt damage, that creature could gain a Bolt to lightning, then change it’s basic attack to be Bolt. This is often called a Stance change, and there’s a lot of flexibility you can have with one. (You don’t always have to create a named status for stance change though. Sometimes it’s easier to include the Stance’s changes as part of the effects that are modified by the change.)

In summary, in addition to how you want to apply your status, also thinking about:

• How long does your status last?
• If the status uses a clock, how can you interact with it? How large is it? Do the segments impact the effect?
• What does my status do?

A Gimmick is a combination of a Target, Trigger, and Effect. While we don’t have an explicit table of effects here, States can inform you on what you might want to do as an effect.

Gimmicks can take on multiple forms based on the Target. Let’s take “Target suffers damage from a (Choose one: Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, Offensive Spell)” as an example.

• With Target being “This Foe”, this can be a reaction skill that deals damage to those who use melee attacks on the Foe.
• With Target being “One of this Foe’s allies”, this could be a reaction that gives this foe a bonus to hit when it’s allies take damage.
• With Target being “the Target”, this can be a Custom Status applied by a spell that increases damage the Target takes from Ranged Attacks.

Here we have a Reaction that deals damage, a Reaction that provides a bonus, and a spell effect. Think about your Target and what kind of skill would best let you leverage that Gimmick.

One trick you can pull with a Gimmick is applying negative effects to yourself, or positive effects to an enemy. An example could be hitting the Evil Christmas Elf with Fire Damage causes it to drop a present that restores 1 IP to the one who dealt the damage. “Negative Gimmicks” are a great way of keeping things fresh. They also give the PCs something to exploit, and encourage them to take particular actions. (You can then of course, pair that elf with a creature that heals itself when it takes Fire Damage and the PCs will be shocked at how clever the combination is!)

You can use the Minor/Major/Massive damage table from the corebook to do a generic amount of Damage that scales with PC level. This is a good way of guaranteeing the Damage from an effect that has an easy trigger to activate doesn’t become overwhelming to deal with.

Routines are a way of coding actions for an NPC so that they act in a way the players can predict and take advantage of. It also allows you to quickly denote what a creature does so you can be sure to take advantage of all it’s available skills.

A Routine is a list of entries that the GM reads top to bottom. When they find an entry that the NPC can do, it executes that action, simple as that. The order of your Routine list is important! The most important actions and then the most specific actions should be higher up, then the more general ones.

• The Condition of a Routine determines what must be true for this routine to be selected. You can leave this section blank to make it an “always selectable” option. (That means you should always keep a blank condition entry on the bottom, as it will always be picked!)
• The Target of a Routine is who the Condition is checked against, and who the Skill will target.
• The Skill of a Routine is just the name of a skill on this NPC to use.

Here is an example of an entry: 1st Turn @ Random : Bash Attack . This Routine will only happen on the first turn, it has a Random target, and it uses the “Bash Attack” skill on that target. The goal of a routine is to be quick to read, so Random here implies that the routine would only target enemies with an attack.

Some other notation goes into Routines as needed:

• || is a symbol for “Or” in programming. This lets you combine two choices that the GM can choose from in a routine. In the above example, you could do 1st || 3rd Turn, or Bash Attack || Magic Attack.
• & (And) is for when you want to require two things in a Condition before the Routine can be selected. 1st Turn & Poisoned could be added to the Routine for the NPC to cast a spell that curses it of Poisoned.
• –> The arrow is used in Skill sections to denote that on the turn following the first Skill listed, the NPC should use the second. Apply Poisoned --> Bash Attack would automatically make the action after this routine is picked the Bash Attack.This is good for a follow up attack that takes advantage of a Status that just got applied! (Be sure not to break this up if the first attack missed: consistence is part of using Routines!)
• Some routines can be triggered as a reaction: you can imply this via the Condition. There’s no specific notation to denote entries that are Actions on the NPC’s turn vs Reactions.

Let’s look at a full list of Routines for an NPC. This NPC has a skill called “Shield” that allows it to nullify damage from an attack with the Multi property, a basic attack with a “Boomerang”, and a special effect where it can deal bonus damage by giving itself Weak called “Overextend”.

Multi Attacked Used @ User : Shield
Crisis & Not Weak @ Random : Overextend
@ Random : Boomerang