Update - 20/01/2025

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another weekly update! I hope you all had a nice week. I spent it working non-stop on the new little game that I want to have ready for this month. I've been talking about it on the Discord, and even showed the cover, so I think it's time I do the same here!

So what do you guys think? The cover is done by Simone Tammetta, and I think it's fantastic! I love the colors and composition. So what's the game about, I hear you ask? Well, it takes place in the far future, where humanity has fallen from its technological peak, and lives now in a feudal society. Most people live in large city-states ruled by machine gods (ancient AIs that have now taken over the planet) and the few noble families that are needed to run the day to day things. Technology is seen as something mystical, and virtually nobody alive understands how any of the relics of the past work. In a way, I'm going for a bit of that Dark Sun feeling, with cities ruled by tyrannical beings, and large swathes of wasteland in between. I think it should be fun!

The ruleset I went for is the true and tested D20. It's a really minimalist version of it, with a lot of streamlined things, but I am including some ideas that I really haven't seen in any other game. The game works a bit like Skyrim, where it doesn't matter what you do or you go, things scale to your level. And the way I've done this is SUPER simple, and I really can't believe nobody has thought of this before. Like I literally cannot believe it, I must be reinventing the wheel and I'm simply not aware of it, because it's so simple and elegant. I can't wait to show you guys!

In a way, I'm using Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse to test quite a few ideas I had planned for Sacrifice 2e. This is a much simpler game, but the core concepts remain the same.

This month you'll get the Core Rulebook, and I'm planning on releasing next another zine with one of the game's regions explained in more detail. After that, I'd like to release the Advanced Rules book. Like I said before, the game is extremely simple and modular, so it's really easy to build upon it! And the setting is a fun one, with lots of possibilities. In a way, it reminds me a lot to what I originally did with Disciples of Bone & Shadow. Yes, the first edition of that game used a D20 ruleset, and was super basic, really similar to this game! Of course, I've learned a lot of tricks since then, though, so this one is a thousand times better.

So this week I'll wrap up the Core Rules (I'm guessing I'll be able, I have a medical appointment but if things go well I should be able to work properly). Once they're all written, I'll start some playtesting, and I'll work on the layout. This is a rules-light game, but it's still a Blackoath game, so even though I'm really trying to keep it minimalist, I'm physically incapable of making a game with fewer than 50 pages. I suspect it will be closer to 100, as a matter of fact... Still, most of it is just random tables, the rules are just 4 pages. So truly rules-light!

So that's it for now, I hope you all have a great week!