Hey folk,

I'm back from my holiday and Ava and I have been busy refining the draft. Her help has proved invaluable and the zine is shaping up to be something I'm very excited to share with you all!

This week I would like to introduce you to the bigger developmental changes Ava has helped me with: making the progression tree of the archetypes more consistent and changing the combat ranges to zones.

Consistent Archetype Progression

The archetypes weren't really consistent before, not every archetype would gain something each time they leveled up and some of the fun bits were all the way at the end of the progression tree. The new update fixes this by frontloading the cool features and just improving the power or quantity of these at later levels.

The Vagabond now already gains access to their first Advanced Maneuver at 2nd level instead of 5th, to allow the player to customize their character early on :)

Previously the Warlock had some holes in its progression and wouldn't gain any new stuff to play with at 3rd and 8th level. Now, this has been fixed by introducing a new feature that allows the warlock to re-roll dice when casting spells.

The Name-crafting feature that allows a Warlock to customize their spells has also been moved to level 3 to get more customizability early on.

Zones

The biggest change to the combat mechanics is the introduction of zones instead of relative ranges. The previous rules required you to loosely track distances relative between objects. The new zone rules make it so the battlefield is divided into a handful of "zones". Creatures can move between adjacent zones and creatures together in the same zone can fight each other using melee weapons. This system is still pretty abstract but it has some more room for interesting tactical options, with zones being given different conditions or creature limits. 

These changes, together with some small edits, are included in the 0.7 updates of the Playtest Rules that you can download now for free :)

I'll talk to you all again next week and as always, you can find me on Twitter or in the CULT OF THE LIZARD KING Discord!

Also, I have a Patreon which you can support if you like what I'm creating :)

Cheers!

- Emiel