It's ALIVE!!!!!

It's official, folks, Hands of Fate is now live on RPGNow.com and available for purchase. For the avid readers here ( I know theres at least 2 of you ;) ) I have a special discount link for you to use to get the PDF at 25% off:

Hands of Fate Core Rules 25% Off!!

This link will work for a couple of months so take advantage of it now. Also to those of you who have already purchased it, I thank you, PM me with your Customer ID in rpgnow and I'll see that you get a special discount on future products.

Next:

Hard at work getting the first few suppliments completed, The Guide to Karth is ready for download, only there is little artwork. I did plan on getting some artwork for the various areas however it's proving to be too expensive to get what  I wanted so instead of putting in shitty hand drawn stuff I did myself I'm leaving it blank. It's available to download off this site (in the Downloads Page) and will be up soon on RPGNow.com.

Monsters of Karth needs more work, this is something I'd love to get artwork for on the critters, but once again my budget is not being very productive. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for good, cheap drawings, so if anyone has a good hand at this sort of thing I'd love to take a look.

Other Suppliments - Ars Academia has been started, but is far from finished; Return of the Weaver adventure has first chapter finished, but needs lots more work; others have not been started yet.

Stay tuned for more information!

State of Play

Happy 1st of May, HoFers!

Today's blog is an update on the State of the Game so far, and intentions for up coming work.

My partner and I have returned from our holiday to Thailand safe and sound, and ready to get back into things. First up; changes!

Wounds have had a slight revamp, in that only PCs may take wounds. This is to represent consequences to combat, even in victory, and we've left NPCs with simply larger Hands to compensate this. We figured that only non-player character big enough to warrant anything greater than the fast creation rules in the Game Mastery section of the Core Rules will most likely be created as a fully fledged character using the same rules as a PC, Wounds and all. Also, being knocked down to 0 Hand or less only generates a Light Wound, escalated in the case of filled Wound severity.

Damage has had a revamp. We weren't happy with the way Maximum Damage was handled. We found that even with a limit put in place equal to the Aptitude governing the combat style (POW for Str, INT for magic or CNG for Ref) the damage output was still too high. The rule in question was for when suits matching the skill being used were able to ignore the Max Dam limit. For example, Swords use the suit of Spades, so if a Damaging Trump had any Spades in it, they did not count towards the Max Dam set by the sword wielder's POW Aptitude. This has now been changed to only a Dramatic Lead can increase the Max Dam, and only by 1. The other methods for increasing Max Dam remain the same; ie Dual Wielding and Two Handed Attacks.

Magical damage has had a similar overhaul; where before the Core Rules stated (pg67) that each card that was higher than twice the target's POW, or a Diamond, is a Damaging card, we have removed the Diamond statement. Now, a caster may exchange 2 Aether of a successful damaging spell per increase of 1 to Max Dam. So an Aether 8 damaging spell may cause 6 Aether in damage with a +1 to Max Dam. Dramatic Leads on the castng Skill checks also add 1 to the maximum damage.

These changes, although small in detail, affect a larger scope of the game. The issue of balance is probably one of the most important aspect of a new game, one we hope we are working towards resolving. 

On another note, we are planning the next phase of high end game testing, possibly this weekend. We had toyed with making various builds using 75xp, 100xp and now 150xp. The characters built are advanced enough to be true wrecking balls in any combat, and the enemies they can face would squash any lesser combatants. However, what we've been unable to test so far, is how they fare in a story situation. Do the spread of skills they garner enough to allow them better manipulation of the game world, or are we spending too many points on Talents and Attributes? 

Also, I am making available the first suppliment to the Core Rules, Monsters of Karth. Although this is far from finished, it shows some fine examples of what you can achieve using the Creature Features presented in the Core Rules. Go to the Downloads section of this blog, or the direct link to the Drop Box location for it. Enjoy!

More info to follow....