Please Review Us!

If you've purchased the game, could you please take a moment to giving a rating? We'd also love your reviews. Both of these are helpful ways for potential players to see if the game is gonna be to their liking. Plus, your thoughts about the game are a lot more convincing than ours!

Changelog

Hail, Errants, and well met! We’ve been spinning the tale tirelessly over here and have a bunch of new stuff to show you:

• Plaintext Preview
  • tl;dr, we got rid of it.
  • Long Version: the plaintext preview version of the game was intended to allow people to check out the game rules without having to pay anything. I typically write directly into layout, and the time I spend copying it over into a Doc would be better spent writing and designing. We’re phasing this out, but if you need a copy and can’t pay for the game you’re welcome to use our Community Copies!
• Welcome to the Blackwood
  • tl;dr, we rewrote this to be more closely tied to the game.
  • Long Version: On a paragraph level, the original text here followed the Blades in the Dark template almost exactly. It’s a great template but we’ve always planned to go in a more original direction. This text breaks the paragraph down by topic: first you learn about the Blackwood, then about the realm of humanity, then about the Errants whose deeds we recount.
• Core Dice Mechanic
  • tl;dr, this has been revamped for easier teachability.
  • Long Version: We want Errant Deeds to hone Forged in the Dark gameplay into a thin blade. Simpler rulesets are easier to pick up and play, and Errant Deeds should feel as natural as a conversation between old friends. We’ve added expert actions and made significant tweaks to the back half of the rolling process to evoke those feelings. We’ve also created a printable flowchart to guide you through the process if you’d like.
• Elven Meddling
  • tl;dr, it’s Devil’s Bargain+Push Yourself with a totally new mechanical effect and timing.
  • Long Version: Elves meddle in human life, and they should be good at tempting humans when they are most vulnerable. The Elven Meddling mechanic in v0.6 offered players rewards in exchange for consequences but the choice usually didn’t feel as important as it should. So now Elven Meddling increases a roll by +1 result level (quite a boon) and you choose to do it after you’ve rolled (when it’s most tempting to get a bit more help). We also noticed that characters weren’t accumulating tangles very fast in the absence of a Push Yourself mechanic, so we’ve given players a choice for Elven Meddling: accept a guaranteed negative consequence or gain 3 tangles.
• Allies and Rivals
  • tl;dr: We’re drafting these rules but they’re not ready yet. So we took them out for now!
• Treasures
  • tl;dr: Quest Items are called treasures now and they have mechanics.
  • Long Version: The negotiation phase of the dice mechanic needed a little more something, so now treasures improve footing or increase effect when used. And “Quest Items” felt like a game term and we’d prefer to find more narrative terms whenever possible.
• Hearthside:
  • tl;dr, it’s got a step-by-step process now and there are specific Faction Moves to guide the Innkeeper.
  • Long Version: The Hearthside section has always been arranged in order of play but playtesting revealed that a numbered list of steps would be helpful. So we’ve got one now! The new process adds Faction Moves to help guide the Innkeeper through this phase as well.
• Toasts, Advancement, and Rank:
  • tl;dr, xp toasts have been reworked to make some more immediate, we’ve got rules for advancement in place, and references to Rank throughout the text are now supported by mechanics.
  • Long Version: One of our long-term dreams is to make every xp trigger immediate. Waiting until the end of the session to tally some XP can make some folks forget. The only change right now is to give players a choice when invoking your “roots” (beliefs, drives, background, parentage): you can use it to either gain +1d or gain +1xp. We’ve got rules for Advancement that are a little closer to Blades in the Dark than they were before (eg we’ve added xp tracks for the attributes). And there’s a whole new section on Rank (our equivalent of Tier, Scale, Potency, etc.).
• Traditions:
  • tl;dr: what used to be called “advanced mechanics” are now called “traditions” and all the crafting mechanics have been rewritten.
  • Long Version: Just like with Treasures, we want to use narrative terminology whenever possible. “Advanced Mechanics” was very gamey so stuff like dueling, fearsome critters, and crafting mechanics have all been grouped under “Traditions.” Also the crafting mechanic have been streamlined: there are two question-answer series, handicraft and rituals, and all crafting mechanics are now subsets of one of those categories.
• New One Shot Deed:
  • tl;dr, a new one shot called Wages, Hours, & Conditions is now available for play! Just like the others, this can be used as a standalone one shot or as the starting situation for a campaign.

Toward the end of this revision I had a great idea for the final layout of the book. Alas, it means we'll have to make some major changes to how the text is organized. There's a chance we'll skip from v0.7 straight to v1.0 in this next update (also because it will almost certainly include faction and campaign mechanics)! We've been looking at v1.0 as the first "stable" version available for public playtesting, and we're basically ready for that at this point anyway.