Update - 26/05/2025

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another weekly update! I hope you all had a nice weekend! Mine was pretty nice, it was my wife's birthday so we went out and had dinner at out favorite restaurant. The weather is nice for the time being, we're in the limit of what is pleasant here, temperature-wise, so we have to take advantage of it! In a few weeks it will be too hot to exit during the day.

Of course, I also worked, and made great progress with Riftbreakers 2e. The Bestiary chapter is moving along nicely, and I'm doing everything I can to have it done for you guys this week! There might be a few blank pages cause I left space for the potential unlocking of the Sentient Weapons rules (we're getting close to unlocking that stretch goal!). But it will be fully playable, and essentially done!

So with the end in sight (when it comes to writing, I still need to do a lot of playtesting!) I've started to look ahead. June's Patreon reward will be the third Vaelorian Codex for Ker Nethalas, which is shaping up really nicely, and I think it's time to get back to Across a Thousand Hollow Vaults and wrap it up. I really want to finish the Advanced Rules for Machine Gods, though, since I feel the game is incomplete without them, and the recent Ithaqua's Bane videos have really hyped me up. People seem to really like the game! And of course, there's more Ker Nethalas content I'm working on that I want to get done before winter, and Sacrifice 2e... So many cool games to work on! And of course, I had some ideas for some new games but I'm trying hard to keep them out of my mind, haha.

One thing I've been doing this week (aside from packages and more packages, since the Ker Nethalas and Machine Gods offset copies finally arrived) is think a lot about alternate damage and injury systems for my games. Right now I have a couple of cool ideas that I'd like to implement:

• A D100 ruleset that works a bit like Rolemaster (so you roll D100, add your weapon skill, and look up the result on a table), but with the difference being that you do not obtain a damage result, but a type of injury. So it would be moderate injury, serious injury, and grievous injury, something along those lines, with each type of injury having different effects, and PCs being able to take X amount of injuries, depending on the type. That way we move away from HP and damage numbers and just focus on injuries. I was considering implementing this into Empire Undying, the game I have stuck in development hell for already more than 4 years... but we'll see.

• A system where a PC's Health goes down when attacked, as usual, but when reaching certain thresholds, or suffering too much damage at once, you gain an injury. Once out of combat, you recover all Health, but injuries stay, unless you treat them, and have a variety of effects. It's similar to what I have in Across a Thousand Dead Worlds, I suppose.

So, as you can see, I'm getting a bit tired of tracking health the regular way. I know this isn't anything new, but I'd like to release a game with my take on this. We'll see!

In any case, that's it for me, I'm going back to making packages, still a lot to go! Have a great week!