Foreword: A Chapter Closes

It’s been a long while since I started. A lot of back and forth, designing in my free time, sharing with friends and interested internet users, and a LOT of playtesting over the past 2+ years, not even taking into account the “prototype phase” of the game’s early roots starting over 5 years ago.

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that poses a simple question: “if you change all the components of an object, is it still the same object”? It’s a little joke for me with this update, because of the sheer amount of changes that have been happening behind the curtains for a long time, culminating in this single update where it may as well not be the same game.

I’ve taken the time to revise and rewrite as much as I could from the game. Most of these are concepts and models that I’ve been playing around on my own for a long, long time, and I had all the right tools to make them. This is the most complete the game has ever felt for me.

As such, I have decided that this will be the final update of the Alpha period of the game. This is a good place to stop introducing changes, because there is nothing else to change. This is the game I’ve wanted to create for so long, and I’m happy that its structure has officially become solid enough for me to say that it’s wholly playable, in its entire extent.

The game is far from done, however! This is only the first, long chapter closing in its lifetime. The Beta development will feature an improved presentation, moving away from Google Docs into Affinity Publisher. You’ll see me getting some help with the publication and distribution of the game, and who knows, you may actually see this game fully released in your lifetime.

Thank you for keeping up with me for so long.

Changelog Overview

• Rearranged all chapters and rebranded chapter labels. 
• Changed the placement of various introductory narrative sections to better fit the topic at hand. 
• Consolidated the Tech and Journey sections on Vehicles to a single section found in Journey. 
• Collapsed all the scattered equipment sections into Belongings. 
• Reworked Attributes, Traits, Skills, and altered Character Creation and Advancement. 
• Expanded upon Ancestries and reworked their use. Revised Success Tests, Difficulties, Deeds-Not-Dice, Favor & Ruin, Fortitude Dice, added new Prepared Opposed Test rules, Extended Test rules, and expanded upon Insight Points gain and usage. 
• Revised Ranges, Damage Types, Weapon Properties, and Ammo rules. Added new items all around the board. Revised the costs for Rarities, and reorganized the costs for Vehicles and Properties. 
• Added rules for Commissions of custom items, as well as a short section on Services. 
• Revised Skirmish rules for Initiative, Action Economy, Attack and Defense, Damage, the Death Spiral, and Non-Lethal damage. 
• Added rules for Zones, Martial Disciplines, Mounted/Vehicle combat, and removed Alternate Rules. 
• Revised the rules for Systems and Technomancy. 
• Revised Witchcraft rules for Major Effects, Rituals, and Theurgy. 
• Made QoL changes to various small sections of the Journey rules, and added Site Exploration. 
• Added Arbiter guidelines for handling sandbox objectives and player skill. 
• Revised the entirety of the old Tome of Beasts chapter, and divided it into Monster Workshop and Short Bestiary. 
• Revised all the old monsters, and added new example monsters to the Bestiary. 
• Designed completely new Play Aids.

Hotfix 19/5

• Replaced all the placeholder chapter art with a generic chapter banner for all chapters.
• Made body text smaller and increased paragraph spacing.
• Added print-friendly Day Palette version.

Changelog Notes

Document Organization

• Rearranged all chapters and rebranded chapter labels. 
• Changed the placement of various introductory narrative sections to better fit the topic at hand. 
• Consolidated the Tech and Journey sections on Vehicles to a single section found in Journey. 
• Collapsed all the scattered equipment sections into Belongings. 

There were a couple of big issues that I had noticed long ago, but that I couldn’t sit down to really fix until recently. Primarily, this meant the Belongings chapter offering a small portion of the actual items you could buy, with the rest spread around throughout the entire book. This has been fixed in this iteration, making all items stay in the same chapter under various categories. 

The split between the duplicate sections of Vehicles in both Tech and Journey chapters (as well as their brief mention on the Belongings chapter) meant that there were 3 places to look for vehicles. Now the prices and briefly described types are in the Belongings chapter, while their extended rules and descriptions are in the Journey chapter.

Also, through this update, the book is better organized into some sections I've been playing around for a while, and I’ve either added or moved around older sections to provide better introductory information for each chapter.

Chargen and Core Rules

• Reworked Attributes, Traits, Skills, and altered Character Creation and Advancement. 

Changing the dice mechanic gave me a lot of breathing room to experiment with a model of tiered attributes and skills that I’d been playing around for a long time, and playtesting told me that I needed a few more dice in general in an average pool, if only to allow a little bit of more customizability and gradual degrees of knowledge in a game with such a large time scope. I never thought I’d actually include this model in a future update, but this time around everything kind of clicked together, giving me the motivation and tools I needed to see it through.

Attributes/Virtues have been given an overall revision to stop them from being a widespread, vague mess, and reduced to a more focused array of six Attributes.

Skills now benefit from a standard model of investment and specialization, serving as the main bulk of changing knowledge and ranks across your adventure and development.

Traits have been reworked as primary steps in the character creation process, guiding you to distribute ranks across skills and giving you a solid grasp of how your origins affect your knowledge.

Lastly, with the larger amount of ranks and customization you can have in a given skill, Advancement has been adjusted to work with these stages instead of on single binary skills.

• Expanded upon Ancestries and reworked their use. 

Another big change coming to Traits was the standardization of Ancestries through the use of their Unique Trait, a mechanical element separate from their fluff that establishes how your innate and cultural bonds affect you in the long run, giving you a boost on certain attributes or activities and slightly bending the normal rules to your favor. This way, knowing when Ancestries are applied are less vague and more clear-cut.

All the Ancestries have been revised in both fluff and mechanics, and additionally, two new Ancestries have been added to the game: Vigil and Jarral.

• Revised Success Tests, Difficulties, Deeds-Not-Dice, Favor & Ruin, Fortitude Dice

Success Tests now benefit from a wider arrangement of “Ranks” or dice distributed across your Attributes and Skills, as well as a more ample breathing room for the old Advantage and Disadvantage, now renamed Favor and Ruin. 

Difficulties and the Deeds-Not-Dice have seen a slight retooling of their mechanical use so that knowing whether a character passively succeeds or not at a task is more directly defined. The thresholds and outcomes themselves haven’t changed, only the way they’re handled passively.

The Exertion Die has been expanded into Fortitude Dice, which work in a similar manner but are quite a bit stronger and more dangerous than ever before, while giving you more control on how much risk you want to put forwards in a task.

• Added new Prepared Opposed Test rules and Extended Test rules

Preparing an Opposed Test was something that I had already halfway-implemented in certain elements, but never gave a baseline support for its widespread use. Basically, you roll ahead of time against possible opposition, giving you an edge if you have the time to prepare ahead of time instead of just reacting.

Extended Tests are a wholly new addition to the rules, however, and they’ll let you do some things that were quite vague before, over a long period of time or through various attempts. It works kind of like a dice-rolling mini-game, making progress little by little.

•  Expanded upon Insight Points gain and usage. 

Insight Points were expanded just a little bit to make them a properly developed metacurrency that lets you bend the rules just a little bit to gain an advantage, and also, serve as the primary reward for interesting action happening in a game. There are more options to spend it, too! Some relate to newer rules, while others are simply retooled or expanded from its older usage.

Skirmishes, Damage, and Death

• Revised Skirmish rules for Initiative, Action Economy, Attack and Defense, Damage, the Death Spiral, and Non-Lethal damage. 
• Added rules for Zones, Martial Disciplines, Mounted/Vehicle combat, and removed Alternate Rules. 

Initiative and Action Economy were in a good spot as they were, but could’ve used some revisions for the sake of clarity. Initiative is more direct now, getting some inspiration from very, very old games. Action Economy is largely the same, simply adjusted to a more manageable array. 

There’s only one addition to Action Economy that I hadn’t introduced before simply because I needed the right set-up for it: COMMAND! Real Warlord Hours have officially begun.

Attack and Defense just needed a proper clean-up to clarify some things, but I went ahead to add a new tactical utility in the same vein as command, PROTECT, which allows you to watch out for your allies more efficiently. However, 

Damage has seen a big change: Stress damage is no longer a part of the game. With the rework of Attributes, I’ve maintained only two of the damage tracks (now labeled Damage Pools): Health and Fatigue. This speeds up and focuses combat and damage in a better way, even more so now that you have more non-lethal damage types to use. The Death Spiral itself has seen some minor revisions here and there to improve overall clarity.

Zones are now the default movement standard for skirmishes, and it has seen some major improvements thanks to it. Ranges, movement, relationships between Zones, cover, interaction, everything is just better laid out all around.

Martial Disciplines (the new ones) are a new type of skill that works in a similar fashion as Magic Traditions, with overarching categories that encompass an array of Paths, giving you an edge during combat. This is the new replacement for old Combat Styles, or the freeform Martial Disciplines of the older versions. This is solely to improve focus and clarity. They’re briefly mentioned in the character creation chapter, but are officially expanded in this one.

Mounted and Vehicle combat have been a long time coming, but only now I have the proper structure for it.

Belongings, Items and Trade

• Revised Ranges, Damage Types, Weapon Properties, and Ammo rules.

Just a general revision to accomodate to other changes to the game, as well as things I’ve wanted to change for a while. Ranges have been adjusted to the new Zones model. Weapon Properties were cleaned up, and Ammo Rules have been given a better presentation, as well as new additions in the form of Ammo Packs and the Disaster-induced reload.

Damage types have seen some departures and additions: Piercing and Slashing have been merged into Rending, Arcane has been absorbed by Radiant, and two new Non-Lethal types have been added: Blinding and Deafening.

• Added new items all around the board. 

Tactics are back on the menu, boys.

• Revised the costs for Rarities, and reorganized the costs for Vehicles and Properties. 
• Added rules for Commissions of custom items, as well as a short section on Services.

These were adjustments that I’ve had in mind for a while, and I took the opportunity to make them. Now you can properly pay for custom items and special services, and you can spend your money with a more clearly laid out set of rules for costs.

Other Big Changes

• Revised the rules for Systems and Technomancy. 

I’ll be honest, this original subsystem was an afterthought. I had the concept laid out, but didn’t have the time to really follow through with it. The new Systems categories and the revised rules for Technomancy now allow you to be a proper hollywood-type viking machine hacker. Hooray?

• Revised Witchcraft rules for Major Effects, Rituals, and Theurgy. 

Major Effects (and Long Rituals) now require a certain amount of investment to be performed. Additionally, they’ve seen a small change in how they handle Area effects, now properly displaying what they can target. It’s not a major change, but you now also have the option to use magic with other attributes depending on the situation and effect.

Rituals have been better laid out to adjust to the time spent in a single Watch, so that you can mix and match your time spent in Rituals more efficiently through the day.

Theurgy has seen a revised process to be more clear. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to the original intention of Theurgy rules. Success!

• Made QoL changes to various small sections of the Journey rules, and added Site Exploration. 

Just a bunch of little changes here and there that improve and streamline the overall experience. The structure at large was great, but there were a lot of little hiccups in the presentation throughout the chapter. Changes include resource management in different climates, different journey tasks being clarified, hazards using improved rules for Burdens, and just a general structure cleanup all around. I can confidently say it’s much better now.

• Added Arbiter guidelines for handling sandbox objectives and player skill.

A better layout on how to write up and plan campaigns. Additionally, some tips regarding how to use the newly developed Deeds Not Dice rule to settle disputes, and how to better recognize when player and character skills aren’t quite matching up.

• Revised the entirety of the old Tome of Beasts chapter, and divided it into Monster Workshop and Short Bestiary.
•  Revised all the old monsters, and added new example monsters to the Bestiary.

Changes to the core structure of the game meant changes to the core statistics of monsters - but i took the chance to improve the whole structure all around, adding new concepts and expanding on the old ones. Changes include a revision to Kinds and Bearings, the implementation of the originally intended Point Buy structure, an expanded categorization of Kinds, and an exciting new addition: SPOILS!

It’s so fun for me to create new monsters right now, I’m not even kidding. New arrivals to the bestiary! Say hello to Shade Spiderlings, the Merfolk of Dondrin, Giant Bog Trolls and Boarcs!

Also, of course, all the old monsters have been given a cleanup. They’re more interesting all around now, in my honest opinion. I hope you have as much fun creating monsters as I did.

Notice that I’m saying Monsters and not Adversaries, too. Wink Wink.

• Made completely new Play Aids.

So many changes were introduced that it was absolutely necessary to change the Play Aids. Instead of trying to update the old ones, I’ve created completely new ones! 

No Monster or Company sheets for the time being, however... I might add them to the game in a future update.

Character Sheets, Blank Hex Map and Calendar Sheet have seen a full redesign. The new Journey Sheet expands on what the old Calendar used to have!

As always, thanks for reading!

Make sure to join the Development Discord, where I spend a lot of time posting and blogging about the development of the game.