Update - 19/02/2024
Hello, and welcome to another weekly update! I hope everyone had a nice weekend. Mine was pretty uneventful; I had a tough fight on Friday and I felt like crap the whole weekend. That's what happens when you help train the professional fighters in the gym, haha. I did manage to continue my Ker Nethalas game, though, and this time with the cards, which really sped things up. I'm so happy to finally be able to play one of my games with a full set of cards. And yeah, I do realize that I made cards for Seekers Beyond the Shroud back in the day, but if I remember correctly I released those right before a big rules overhaul (so stupid of me) and I never really got the chance to try them out properly.
Speaking of cards, I've been thinking about adding the few new enemies and items that will appear in the first issue of The Vaelorian Codex (the official Ker Nethalas zine) as their own separate deck. I need to know if it makes sense, but it would be a good excuse to add a couple of new events I thought about, and a cool way to slowly expand the game further. The only thing that is truly stopping me from doing so is trying to maintain a parity between what's available in card format, and what you can simply look up in a table. The problem with tables is that I can't really add a new Events table each time I want to include a couple of new ones, but with the cards is totally doable. We'll see...
As expected, I've continued working hard on Ruthless Heavens, Boundless Fate. The chapter dedicated to the exploration procedures, as well as explaining everything about the game's setting, is finally done! This means that I've started working on the chapter dedicated to actual playable content: the Trials, Hunting Grounds, and Divine Decrees. The first thing I worked on was the wandering city of Yeross, which is the de-facto capital of the sector, and neutral ground for all the different factions. This is where your Ascendant is sent to first to seek out new opportunities, and it will be the game's hub. I wrote quite a few pages of lore and descriptions of the city, but I finally finished it as well and I'm now working on the first proper Trial that all new characters should tackle: the Forge. This is the place where you will obtain your living weapon, so it's not one you should skip! I still don't know for sure how to arrange it, though, so far I only have the lore part of the Trial and I need to start adding the actual gameable content.
It really looks like I'll not be finishing the game this month, though, which was kind of expected, considering I just keep adding stuff to it. I'm pretty sure it's going to end up being over 300 pages long once it's all done. I've started working on the layout for the second chapter, which is all the core rules and procedures, and should give you the ability to actually play the game, if anyone wants to playtest it with some other content (it's a D20 ruleset, after all, it works perfectly well with DCC adventures, I think). I'm planning on doing some playtesting very soon, but I was waiting to have the character sheet details more defined, since I'm a snob and I hate playing anything without a character sheet. It wouldn't be the first or the last time, but if I can avoid it, I'll do it, haha.
So that's it for this week, I hope it's a great one for all of us!