Simplifying and Analysing Fabrials in the Cosmere RPG

Making fabrials easy to craft and analysing which are best.

How to get a fabrial

If you want to get your hands on a fabrial, it’s worth being aware of the 2 classifications of fabrials. There are standard fabrials, which are fairly commonplace in certain parts of Roshar and not an unusual sight. There also unique Fabrials that might well be new or rare designs. These are much harder to get your hands on.

There’s a few ways to get a fabrial:

1. Buy one: If you want a standard fabrial like an alerter or a heatrial, you can just buy one (as long as it has a listed price). A list of standard fabrials and their prices can be found on p262 of the Stormlight Handbook.
2. Be rewarded one: While any fabrial could be rewarded by the GM, some are only available by being given as a reward. These are the soulcaster and suppressor. This seems to be because both are rare and ancient technology and the method for creation has been lost to time.
3. Find one: Any fabrial can be found, but this occurs entirely at the GMs discretion. It could be found on the body of a foe you’ve killed or in an ancient shrine or basically anywhere.
4. Craft one: Most fabrials can be crafted unless they’re listed as reward only (as is the case for the soulcaster and the suppressor). There’s a lot of extra rules around this which I’ll get into below.

How to craft fabrials

The answer to this is a little different depending on whether you’re crafting a standard or a unique fabrial. The book includes a lot of extra information around lore that complicates the process a lot so I’ve tried to simplify this process below and just provide essential information on crafting fabrials.

To craft a fabrial, you’ll either need expertise in fabrial crafting, or you’ll need an expertise in the individual fabrial you want to craft.

It’s worth being aware that the fabrial crafting expertise is a specialist expertise and not one that’s easily obtained. There are only 3 ways to gain this expertise (you can’t take it as a standard expertise):

1. Talent: The only way to gain this that’s in your direct control is by taking the prized acquisition talent in the artifabrian specialty. Fortunately, it’s only one layer after the key talent on the talent tree for scholars so can be easily dipped into by multipathing.
2. Reward: By completing goals, the GM might award you this expertise, but presumably, you’d need to perform some missions and do some appropriate learning activities to gain this.
3. Permission from the GM: You might be able to get special permission from the GM to gain this expertise. Perhaps you’ve bought and used so many fabrials and taken them apart often enough that you can now have expertise in them. This is entirely up to your GMs discretion though.

Crafting a standard fabrial

Requirements: An expertise in fabrial crafting or an expertise in the specific fabrial you are creating.

1. Acquire materials: The materials required to create a standard fabrial are considered easily accessible. They require half the cost to normally buy that fabrial (see p262 of the Stormlight Handbook).
2. Access to tools and facilities: It’s not specific what tools and facilities would be needed for a fabrial, but for complicated metalwork like weapons and armor, the book suggests a forge and anvil and fabrials require metalwork so I’d say this is what’s required.
3. Make a crafting test: This means rolling a d20 and adding your intellect and crafting rank. You’ll also need to raise the stakes on this test so roll a plot die too. You then use the table on p265 of the Stormlight Handbook determine how successful your crafting was.
4. Determine time spent crafting: This will be 1 day per 100 marks the fabrial normally costs. If you roll an opportunity, this is reduced by 25%, if you roll a complication, it’s increased by 25%.
5. Apply upgrades and drawbacks: Depending on the crafting test you made, you may have managed to craft some upgrades or drawbacks into the design. How many of these will have been determined in step 3. For drawbacks, roll a d6 on the item upgrades and drawbacks table on p266 of the Stormlight Handbook. For upgrades, you can pick which upgrade you want. If you get 2 or more upgrades, you can use 2 upgrades to pick 1 advanced feature of your choice. Standard fabrials can choose from the advanced item feature tables for any crafted item on p266 or the advanced fabrial features table on p270.

Crafting a unique fabrial

Unique fabrials are completely new designs that you either invent, or are still being prototyped by artifabrians. These are especially complicated to craft and require specialist materials as well. They also can’t be bought from standard merchants making crafting one your most likely route to obtaining one.

Crafting a unique fabrial has a slightly different process which I’ve outlined below:

Requirements: An expertise in fabrial crafting or an expertise in the specific fabrial you are creating. You must also possess a gemstone of the appropriate tier for the fabrial being crafted.

1. Choose your effect: You need to decide what your fabrial will do. You can pick an effect from the unique fabrial effects table on p270 of the Stormlight Handbook or you can work with your GM to come up with your own. The effect must be of a tier equal to or less than the tier of the gemstone used for crafting the fabrial.
2. Obtain a gemstone: As mentioned, you’ll need a gemstone of the appropriate tier for the effect you want to create. Typically, these gemstones can only be acquired by; taking levels in the artifabrian specialty, receiving them as a reward or cutting one from the corpse of a chasmfiend. You can’t buy Gemstones from an average merchant.
3. Acquire materials: You’ll need additional materials to craft the fabrial. It’s assumed that these can easily be bought, but will cost an amount depending on the tier of the effect they create:
   • Tier 1: 100 marks
   • Tier 2: 200 marks
   • Tier 3: 400 marks
   • Tier 4: 800 marks
4. Trap a spren: You must attempt to lure a spren into the gemstone using little known techniques. Each attempt at luring a spren requires a day of downtime activity. You can attempt this as many times as you need to until you succeed. To do so, make a lore test using the following DC:
   • Tier 1: DC15
   • Tier 2: DC20
   • Tier 3: DC25
   • Tier 4: DC30
5. Make a crafting test: Make a crafting test by rolling a d20 and adding your intellect and crafting rank. Use the fabrial crafting test table on p269 of the Stormlight Handbook to determine the success of your attempt.
6. Determine upgrades and drawbacks: For each upgrade, either choose an upgrade listed as part of the fabrial effect, or choose an upgrade from the fabrial upgrades and drawbacks table on p269. You can use 2 upgrades to choose an advanced fabrial feature from the advanced fabrial features table on p270. For each drawback, you can either choose the listed drawback listed for the fabrial effects, or you can roll a d8 on the fabrial upgrades and drawbacks table on p269 to determine the drawback (rerolling inapplicable drawbacks).

Improving the odds of success for crafting fabrials

If you want to have successful fabrial crafting tests, and especially, be able to create fabrials with plenty of upgrades and minimal downfalls, then you’ll want to make your character a master crafter. Below are a few things you can do to improve your odds of success:

• Increase your intellect: The higher your intellect, the higher your crafting test modifier.
• Increase ranks in the crafting skill: The higher your ranks in crafting, the higher your crafting test modifier.
• Increase ranks in the lore skill (for unique fabrials): This will help you capture a spren for your fabrial if making a unique fabrial.
• Use a forge: Will avoid incurring a disadvantage on your test and may even provide an advantage.
• Take more levels in the artifabrian specialty: These don’t have a direct impact on the success of your crafting test. However, talents like inventive design, fine handiwork and experimental tinkering can allow you to create more powerful fabrials, ones with more and better upgrades and means you’re more likely to roll with an opportunity.
• Gain advantage: This is entirely at the GMs discretion, but something like exceptional facilities might allow this. Perhaps an ally that is also very good at fabrial crafting could aid you here too.

Which fabrials are the best?

By now you might have realised that obtaining fabrials is a unique and sometimes difficult process. You likely don’t want to waste these efforts on a subpar fabrial, or perhaps you just have some decision-paralysis on which fabrials are most useful. To help, I’ve scored each fabrial based on those I think are most powerful and useful, taking into account their tier/cost.

Standard fabrials

Alerter (4/5)

Never be surprised! Well, not quite. You’ll have to program it to detect certain types of individuals. Easier if you’re trying to avoid singers or chasmfiends, harder if you’re trying to avoid something harder to identify like a ghostblood or a son of honor. A bit of cunning can help here though. I bet you could use one to alert you to worldhoppers or those using voidlight or even another magic system altogether (breaths, allomancy etc).

On that note, you might use it to identify certain people or possessors of technology more than to avoid being surprised.

It has 5 charges too, which last a day each which will normally take you to the next highstorm anyway. And 500 marks isn’t loads for something this useful.

Attractor (2/5)

You’ll have to be a bit more cunning to get use out of this fabrial. It attracts things at a rate of 6ft per minute. That’s 360ft per hour (the period of time for a charge). I think the practical application of this might be to prevent smoke being shown from a campfire, gathering water or perhaps things you might forage for like food or herbs.

It’s a bit of a tricky sell though if your campaign isn’t big on survival elements of the game, which many won’t be.

Clock fabrial (1/5)

Practical for daily life, but not particularly useful in an adventure. Spend your marks elsewhere.

Drainer (3/5)

Use this to save investiture for later or to steal it from an enemy. It’s best used by high agility characters that also happen to be radiants. There’s definitely some practical application to something like this, especially against invested individuals, I’d just say it’s maybe a bit limited in its capacity.

Emotion bracelet (3/5)

Maybe a tad situational to be of use loads, but the Cosmere RPG does lean a decent bit into social interactions making this a decent option for a social heavy campaign.

Freechair (3/5)

Mainly a practical device to allow for characters with disabilities to get involved in the action. Great for those characters, not of much use for anyone else. I’m taking levitation here to understand that you hover just above the ground, but not necessarily elevating above the height of an average person.

Heatrial (3/5)

This is a practical fabrial really. Use it to keep warm, cook or even forge with. It won’t create smoke that tells enemies where you are. If you have an artifabrian in the group, it’ll be easier to craft on the go too.

Painrial (amplifying) (4/5)

Slightly better than the average light weapon due to the extra damage you can cause on a few attacks. If you’ve invested a fair bit in light weaponry, this could be worth the money. I’d focus charges on tougher combats.

Painrial (numbing) (3/5)

Reducing damage by 1d4 per charge is decent. You may already have used your reaction to do something like dodge, but that costs focus, this doesn’t, and it’s even more sure of working, if to a lesser degree than dodge. Use it to save focus and be more defensive.

Sadly, it doesn’t scale with levels so may feel a little underpowered the higher your tier.

Repeller (2/5)

I think the practical applications for this might be to clear things like fog, smoke or maybe even water. I think it’s likely to be quite situational, but could be useful at times.

Soulcaster (3/5)

This is tricky, but potentially very useful while being quite situational. If you’re playing a survival focused campaign, this will help you produce things like food and water which has obvious benefits.

If your campaign doesn’t really focus on these aspects of gameplay, then there may be other ways to use it. For example, you might be able to turn a door into water, allowing you to get through a locked door. You could do something similar with a brick to let you peek through a wall. Oil that might be slippy or flammable could transform into something else and so on.

You may need a fair bit of creativity to make this work, but you’ll also need skill ranks in transformation to allow you to transform larger things (you won’t be able to affect a door when you first get a soulcaster, it’s be too big for example). I’d talk to your GM about how you can go about practicing with a soulcaster and increasing your skill rank in transformation. This is a fairly situational and limited tool that also has a lot of scope for flexibility making it unusually tricky to rate.

Spanreed (3/5)

A possible form of communication if the party split up, but probably the more common use will be to communicate with patrons and others at distance. You can maybe invoke on the knowledge of scholars or others while you investigate ancient ruins, or send communications about enemy movements to generals back in the war camps.

With 3 charges lasting 5 days each, you should rarely have these run out of charges.

Suppressor (5/5)

A pretty devastating piece of kit against radiants and fused. Basically stop them using their surges. Its range can be overcome, but a creature can just carry it on them, maintaining an area of no surges about themselves.

You likely don’t want to face an enemy with one, but you might well want to defeat them in order to grab it.

Unique fabrials

Tier 1

Bindrial (area) (3/5)

With some clever tactics, this can be really effective. Get your tank in the middle of some ranged enemies or enemies you want to keep away from less resilient party members and stick them in place. It won’t last a really long time, but it does work automatically which is rare.

Bindrial (self) (2/5)

I know this is tier 1 and an ascender is tier 2, but the ascender let’s you fly (superior to climbing) and it actually lasts longer (same number of charges, but the ascender lasts until the end of your next turn rather than for 1 round). If you must have a way to gain heights at tier 1, then it’s fine, but I’d be tempted to hold out for an ascender.

Compressor (2/5)

This is fine, but the bindrial (area) works on multiple enemies, does so automatically and it completely immobilises enemies.

True, you also cause disadvantage on skill tests, but the bindrial just seems like a better tool for this kind of thing.

Cremrial (2/5)

Again, I can’t help but feel that this is just a weaker bindrial (area). It’s not bad, there’s just a better option available.

Cultivator (2/5)

Sone interesting utility here. Climb up giant plants, use them to block line of site or use them to take cover (or possibly other things). However, 5ft isn’t a lot and you might question whether most plants could be considered cover. This kind of makes it a bit too situational. As a GM, I’d probably be quite generous with this to make sure it has the desired effects, but it’d be easy to rule against a lot of the benefits you’re likely to want from this.

Tier 2

Accelerator (4/5)

Basically a free movement which can give you the ability to focus your actions on other things. There’s just 3 charges though.

Armor augmenter (5/5)

2 whole scenes with an extra 2 deflect is really substantial. Use this at the start of a combat scene to have the extra protection on as long as possible. This is probably best for the party tank who’ll likely get a lot of use out of it.

Ascender (4/5)

Flight is very useful and 5 charges is a fair bit. Note that this works on a free action (so no action economy lost) and it works until the end of your next turn, so if you activate it at the beginning of your turn, then you can have 2 turns using it per charge.

Drainer (4/5)

This is a more powerful version of the standard fabrial drainer. With 5 charges, this is a much better way to drain your foes or their equipment of investiture for yourself. Great against invested adversaries.

Liferial (3/5)

1d6 isn’t a huge amount of health and it scales poorly with levels. However, it could be very good for recovering an unconscious ally, especially as the healing effects are guaranteed.

Lightrial (4/5)

Draining focus and potentially disorienting is really useful for nullifying enemies somewhat. And you’re guaranteed at least 1 focus drained. Really solid option.

Painrial (1/5)

This is no different than the painrial (amplifying) that you can craft from the standard fabrial list except that this will require a tier 2 gemstone and harder crafting. I’m not sure that’s worth the effort when you could just use your hard-earned gemstone on something else.

The only upside is if you can upgrade, this makes the painrial rechargeable and capable of absorbing some damage which is a big buff. But the bog standard painrial is just unnecessarily more expensive in resources with no upsides.

Projectile (4/5)

The damage here is solid and the fact that it has the offhand trait means you can dual wield a pair of these if you can obtain them or use something like a sling in one hand and a projectile in another. The main issue is going to be charges. It’ll last a single combat encounter, but you’ll either need to save it for tough fights, or use something like a drainer or something else to keep it recharged for longer adventuring days.

Tier 3

Disruptor (4/5)

Destroying weapons and armor could be a real nuisance. But at this level, uninvested or infused items that are going to make a substantial difference may not be that common. There may be some situational elements to this. But it’s potent when the situation arises.

Tier 4

Surge fabrial (4/5)

This is going to work better on radiants to provide extra uses of surges that require investiture. You could use it to use surges that you don’t currently have, but this will work best in cases where skill in that surge is not too important or where you have a high willpower.

The ability to unlock additional surges could be great though.

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When comparing fabrials to something like magic items in D&D, there a lot more limitations on what they can do. But I don’t mind that. Sometimes D&D has what seems like a magic item for everything and that can stifle some ingenuity or get in the way of more interesting problem solving. Admittedly, I might have liked a few more fabrial options available in the book. Especially as some crossover a lot in their effects. But we can always just create our own.

I do think the crafting mechanics are much more fleshed out in the Cosmere RPG, even if they take a fair bit of digging through to properly get to grips with. Hopefully this article makes that a little easier.

What do you think of fabrials in the Cosmere RPG? And which do you think are best? Do you have any ideas for homebrew fabrials? Let me know in the comments below.

Spotlight on the Cosmere RPG