The Forge explained

Fabled has two main surfaces. The table is where you play; The Forge is where you prepare. This page is about The Forge.

Most of the platform's content authoring lives in The Forge. Characters, custom rulesets (frameworks), display templates (frames), session prep notes, marketplace bundles, and shared assets are all built here. Once a piece of content exists in The Forge, it can be pulled into a session at the table without copying anything across.

What you find in The Forge

Three top-level kinds of object live in The Forge, plus a handful of supporting surfaces.

• Elements are the things in your game world: a character, an NPC, a magic sword, a town, a faction. Anything that has state and can change during play is an element. Characters are the most common kind, but most rulesets define more specialised types too.
• Frameworks are the rules. A framework defines what an element looks like, how it behaves, and how it reacts to changes. The official D&D 5e framework knows about ability scores and HP and saving throws; a homebrew faction-tracker framework knows about reputation and territory and trade routes.
• Frames are the visuals. A frame describes how an element looks on screen, like a character sheet or an item card. The same element can be displayed through several different frames depending on context: a tiny token next to a name on the map, a full sheet inside the sidebar, a printed handout for the player.

These three kinds of object are explained in detail on the Frameworks, elements, and frames concept page. If you are about to build something custom, read that one next.

Who works in The Forge

Most of The Forge is GM territory. Game Masters spend session-prep time here building campaign content, customising rules, and staging encounters. The platform does not gate The Forge by tier or role; any account can open it, and Free-tier users get the full creation surface (with limits on how many of each thing they can save).

Players touch The Forge less often, but they touch it for one important thing: building and customising their own characters. Adding stats, picking class options, uploading a portrait, writing a backstory. After a character is built, the player typically only comes back to The Forge between sessions when something changes (level-up, new gear, a major story shift).

How The Forge connects to the table

Every element you build in The Forge is available at the table by reference, not by copy. Edit a character's HP in The Forge between sessions, and the next time the table loads it shows the new value. Update a framework's rules, and existing characters using that framework re-derive their state automatically.

This works because everything is rule-driven, not snapshot-driven. The framework decides how a character's derived stats fall out of its raw inputs; the element stores only the inputs (and any explicit overrides). When the rules change, the derived state changes for free.

Where to go from here

• If you have not yet built anything, start with the Create a character how-to. It walks you through The Forge's character wizard end-to-end.
• If you want to build a custom ruleset from scratch, the Frameworks, elements, and frames concept page is the next stop. It covers the data model in enough depth that the framework editor stops looking like a wall of unfamiliar nodes.
• If you are reskinning an existing element type, jump to the Customise a frame how-to. It is the player-facing version of the visual editing surface.