Hey Gang,
As we round the approximate halfway mark of the long dark, we wanted to share some information about this years rules changes. Those of you who’ve been around a while will know that we typically take this time to tweak things. This year, however, we’re going a little bit beyond tweaking, and are planning to release a full blown second edition of the rules.
Because this is such a big change, there’s two things that will involve your involvement. Firstly, what we’re sharing today is not the final version of the rules, but an Open Beta. While we’ve been working on these for a few months, shared them with a small review group of players and given some parts a spin at training, we do still want to give people the chance to take them for a spin before we lock the ruleset down.
Five Oaths Second Edition v0.5
One change we want to signpost here is that the rules is now split into multiple discrete parts, chiefly Field Rules and Character Creation & Advancement. Those are presented as tabs in the document linked above. The first of those tabs is the Development notes, and goes into a lot of detail about the changes made, and reasoning behing them.
The Open Beta period is currently intended to run until the end of February, to give time for playtesting – we’re hoping to organise some of that ourselves, so stay tuned. In the document above you’ll find forms to send us your thoughts – we also encourage you to discuss the rules amongst yourselves, and we’ll try to keep up with online conversations we can see, but the forms are the best way to get our eyes on something.
Secondly, this is going to create a need for character respecs. While it’s possible that some characters will pass through this change totally unchanged, we anticipate that most will need some adjustment – either because their feats or spells have gone away, or because there are other feats/spells that now exist which are important to them.
We’ll be updating the character database and unlocking characters for editing after the open beta, but we’d encourage you to think about what changes you’d make now – in part because if we’ve broken someone’s build beyond repair, that’s very much a piece of feedback we want to hear.
Happy Reading, and Merry Holidays.
The Five Oaths Team