Patch Notes

The alien intelligence is the Vraxxal throughout. The settled world’s common name for them is the Hollow Ones, for the one thing the living feel in their presence — that there is nothing inside. The rename was applied across the bestiary, lore, items, and tools.

No mechanics, types, or stats were touched. Undead Vraxxal remain type Undead (Light-Soul and vs-type effects unaffected). Earlier patch entries retain “Aakzad” as written — a changelog records the time, and one earlier entry (Mortek → Aakzad) would read wrong if rewritten.

THRICE-MARKED has been renamed IronTithe across every book, tool, and page. The name comes straight from the cosmology: the world does not give, it lends, and it collects its due in iron — which a mortal carries in one vault only, the blood. Thrice-Marked survives as in-world vocabulary — the name for a soul the Weave has drawn from in all three columns — but the game itself, and everything on your shelf, is IronTithe now. The change is announced at irontithe.com.

Purely a label change — no mechanics, costs, or stats were touched by the rename.

The mechanic the game is named for is finally at the table. The world is always counting, and on the extremes of the die it collects — in both directions. On any damage-dealing attack or working (melee, ranged, or an offensive spell or blessing that deals damage):

• Natural 1 — the world collects from you. You take 3 damage, ignoring all armour. This is on top of the miss itself (a 1 still simply fails); it is the world drawing its due straight from the blood.
• Natural 10 — the world collects from your target. Your enemy takes 3 damage, ignoring all armour — and it lands on them even if your own strike missed. The world reaches past your hand to take from your foe. This fires once per turn, in combat or comparable peril.

Three things keep this fair and farm-proof, and they are worth stating plainly for the table. It only ever takes — it never heals. There is no self-restoration to chase, so there is no way to grind it for free recovery. It rides only on blows meant to draw blood — buffs, heals, wards, and utility carry no Tithe in either direction, so you cannot farm it on idle or out-of-combat rolls. And it is a mortal-vs-world reckoning: monsters do not invoke it, and two mortals in an opposed contest do not tithe each other — the ledger runs between you and the world, never between two players.

On the luck dice, consistent with the natural-1 rules: Luck cannot stop the Tithe (it nudges the math but never escapes a 1 or unmakes a 10), but a Fortune reroll can — replacing the die erases the triggering face before the world collects. Why this is balanced rather than a pure tax: the die punishes you exactly as often as it rewards you (a 1 and a 10 are equally likely), so over a campaign the Tithe of the Die is roughly even — it adds swing and drama, not a one-way drain. The other two faces of the law — the Tithe of Becoming (your XP/skill point-buy, already how advancement works) and the Tithe of the Deep-Drawn (Overreach and the Malefic toll, already in the rules) — are not new mechanics; they are simply named as parts of the one law. Only the Tithe of the Die asks anything new of the table, and a group that prefers may treat it as optional — the law still stands on the other two. Offered as a player option for group review.

Mending was previously usable only outside of combat, and when you used it, it simply worked. Both halves of that change:

• Out of combat — unchanged and still automatic. With time and no threat, Mending works with no roll: restore Mending Points × 2 wounds and clear conditions per your tier, exactly as before. The calm tent is untouched.
• In combat — new, and the reason for the rework. You may now Mend under fire, which you could not do at all before. Doing so is a gamble: roll 1d10 + Mending points against a Difficulty Value set by the patient’s wounds, on the Power of Three — DV 3 light, 6 moderate, 9 heavy, 12 severe, 15+ critical. Success restores your full value and clears conditions; failure on a dying patient still buys them one more turn of life (extends their Iron Will window), failure on a conscious one simply spends the action; a natural 1 costs the patient a little ground (1 damage, or a turn off a dying patient’s Iron Will window — never an instant kill).

Net effect: this is mostly a buff — battlefield medicine is now possible where it was flatly forbidden before — with a fair price (it is no longer a guaranteed heal when the room is on fire). Triage (3 pts) and Clean Hands (6 pts) are unchanged, and a new Steady Under Fire perk at 9 pts grants Advantage on all in-combat Mending tests for the dedicated field medic. A worked “triage under fire” example was added to the core rules. Offered as a player option for group review.

The rulebook never actually told you how to build your Defense number — the math lived only in the character sheet’s code. It is now written out: Defense = 3 (base) + your armour’s Def value + your Evasion bonus (+1 per 3 points of Evasion, reduced by your armour’s Agility penalty). A “Calculating Your Defense” box was added in character creation with two worked builds — the same Defense reached by heavy iron or by light armour plus trained Evasion — and a reminder at the armour table that the Def column is a bonus to your base, not a finished total.

No values changed — this is how Defense already worked on the sheet; the book simply now agrees with it. One genuine correction: an earlier line said Defense was modified by Agility; the skill that actually raises it is Evasion. If you have been reading your Defense off the character sheet, nothing about your number changes.

The dying rules carried one line that read “you die at once” when an overwhelmed bleed-out met a character’s Iron Will limit — which clashed with the rest of the system, where a falling character always gets a reaction window. That is now consistent across every case: death resolves at the end of the turn (your own, or the group’s if you were the last to act), and your companions may still reach you with a heal or stabilise before that turn closes. No more truly instant death from the die.

Net effect: a small but real safety net — the table always gets the chance to save a fallen ally that the reaction rules already implied. This goes in your favour.

Behind the scenes: the public-facing Quickstart was reconciled against the core rules — combat terms, the natural-1/Luck interaction, and the Damage Mitigation naming all brought into line, with no rules changed, only the Quickstart’s wording caught up. The discipline count was corrected to seven wherever it had lagged at six, and the Preview and Patch Notes navigation were repaired. None of this changes play; it keeps the books agreeing with each other.

Footnote: the Quickstart’s three structural “columns” were also re-labeled to the canonical Mind / Body / Soul of the TrineTithe (they had read Flesh / Matter / Trauma), and re-paired so each column names the mechanic that truly belongs to it — a consistency fix with the lore, not a play change.

The rulebook carried two different descriptions of holding an action, and they did not agree: one said a hold costs only the action’s normal AP, the other charged a separate 1 AP to enter a stance plus a −2 penalty. That contradiction is resolved, in your favour, into a single clean rule:

• A declared hold is free. Name your trigger on your turn and hold an action; it still costs its normal AP, but there is now no stance fee and no penalty. If you saw it coming and prepared for it, you are not taxed for good timing. (This is a buff — the old 1-AP stance fee is gone entirely.)
• Initiative now breaks ties. When two held or reactive actions land on the same instant — you and a foe both holding, or both triggering at once — whoever won initiative resolves first. Initiative is no longer just who moves first in the round; it is your priority in any contested moment, which means it keeps mattering even in a patient, hold-heavy fight.
• Only the snap reaction costs. Acting out of turn without having held — reacting on pure reflex — takes a −2 to that roll, waived entirely at Discipline 6+. The penalty now lands on improvisation, never on foresight.

Net effect: holding is cheaper and clearer than before, the −2 only ever applies to un-planned reactions, and Discipline keeps its job (it buys clean improvisation). The Carrying-AP rule (the Power of 3, floor of base AP ÷ 3) is unchanged. A worked “contested moment” example was added to the core rules so the new initiative-tiebreak reads clearly at the table. Offered as a player option for group review — though this one mostly gives time back.

The natural 1 is settled into one plain rule, and it is gentler than what some corners of the book implied. A natural 1 is simply a failure — an attack misses, a test fails. That is all it does on its own. There is no automatic fumble, no backlash, and no self-injury baked into rolling a 1 in the standard game. A few stray passages had still hinted a 1 might burn you when you cast; those are corrected to agree with this.

Two clarifications that go in your favour on the luck dice: Luck cannot rescue a natural 1 (the miss stands), but Fortune now can — Fortune replaces the die outright, so it may reroll a 1 where the older wording said it could not. And casting Backlash is decoupled from the 1 entirely: backlash is the price of Overreach (reaching past your Max TN), not of an unlucky die. Overreach’s backlash is unchanged and remains core for every discipline.

Spectacular failures still exist for groups that want them — they live in the optional Flubs & Criticals appendix, which uses a two-roll confirmation so a 1 only escalates if a second roll also fails. That is a table opt-in, not the default. Net effect at most tables: a 1 is less punishing than before.

The single ambiguous sneak-attack line is replaced by two clearly separated tiers, so it is always obvious which one applies. Ambush is the opening strike from hiding, melee or ranged: the target rolls Awareness against your Stealth, and on a failure your damage bonus is tripled (the Power of Three — the weapon die itself is not multiplied; flat modifiers are, and the assembled total is tripled once, after any two-handed doubling). If they sense you, it degrades gracefully — a melee opener becomes a Backstab, a ranged opener becomes an advantaged shot.

Backstab is the mid-fight move, melee only: one extra d10, gated behind a Stealth-vs-Awareness test — or automatic against a foe already pressed by three or more melee attackers (front and both flanks), unless they are always-alert/Battle-Ready, in which case the test still applies. Ranged attackers get Ambush but no Backstab (position is meaningless at range); their in-fight equivalent is the existing Aim. Thrown weapons count as ranged for Ambush, never Backstab.

This is a clarity rework, not a power swing — it pins down exactly when each bonus applies and removes the “wait, do I double the dice or not” confusion. Worked examples were added so both moves read clearly at the table.

With the new Held-Actions rule making initiative the tiebreaker when two held or reactive actions collide, the 9-point Quickness mastery First Blood (which wins initiative ties) gains a clean, explicit role: it wins those contested-hold standoffs. No numbers changed — this just connects two rules that now touch, with cross-references added in both directions so the interaction is obvious. It only ever matters on a genuine tie or against a boss, which is appropriately rare for a 9-point investment.

Heads-up: this one is a trim, and we want to be straight about it. Ki previously ignored armour entirely — the armoured monk paid nothing for plate. That has changed: Ki now sits in the Iron Cage on the same line as the Vibhuti, because both are disciplines of breath and body, and heavy iron that locks the chest and shortens the breath disrupts the channel just as it scrambles a mage’s gestures.

In practice the change is mild where most monks actually fight and only bites at the heavy end: no penalty through studded leather; half penalty for chain, banded, splint, and field plate; and a flat −3 To-Cast in full plate only. A monk in light or medium armour feels nothing. The cost lands squarely on the full-plate Ki build — the one concept this deliberately reins in — while leaving the classic robed or lightly-armoured monk completely untouched.

Why the change: a discipline that paid zero for the heaviest armour in the game was an outlier no other caster enjoyed, and it quietly made “full-plate monk” a strictly-better default. Matching Ki to the Vibhuti keeps the monk’s identity (the body is the weapon) while restoring a real choice between mobility and protection. Offered as a group-review item — if your table has a full-plate Ki character, this is the one to talk through before it lands.

To match the world’s new name, the money is now the Iron Bit, Silver Mark, and Gold Crown. The base coin — previously called the copper “Bit” in one place and the “Iron Penny” in another — is unified into the single Iron Bit, struck from melted-down weapons and frontier scrap (fittingly, the commonest coin in a world that tithes in iron). The Mark and Crown keep their names and their meaning — the merchant’s silver standard and the Church’s gold authority.

No values changed: 10 Iron Bits = 1 Silver Mark, 10 Marks = 1 Gold Crown, 100 Iron Bits = 1 Crown, exactly as before. This is a naming and flavour change only — and it cleans up the old “Bit vs Iron Penny” inconsistency into one coin.

A loose end is tidied: the Overcast and Essence rules now correctly list every channelled discipline. The Vibhuti draws on Willpower and Ki on Physique; both have Essence pools and full access to the Overcast menu, just like the other traditions. The old line claiming the Vibhuti “stands apart with no characteristic home” is gone. Runecraft remains the lone exception — it is carved, not channelled, and draws no Essence.

This brings the Overcast section into agreement with the Essence rules, which already pointed this way — a consistency fix, not new power.

The 5 June terminology pass split damage (dealt and mitigated) from wounds (the health pool that healing mends). A handful of offensive descriptions across the spell lists still said “wounds” where they meant damage dealt; a careful pass caught and corrected the remainder, while deliberately leaving every legitimate use of “wounds” intact — healing, the 0-wounds threshold, max-wound checks, and object/barrier durability all still read “wounds,” as they should. No mechanics changed; the words just match the system now.

Trained opposed contests are now 1d10 + Skill  vs.  1d10 + Skill. The characteristic no longer rides on top of every test — it keeps its other jobs (wounds, casting) and gains one clean role in a contest: the untrained fallback.

The untrained roll their nature, at a cost. With no points in the relevant skill you roll Disadvantage on the d10 (two dice, take the lower) + the governing characteristic. Training is what steadies the hand; without it the die is unkind, but raw aptitude still carries the gifted. The worse die is the penalty — not a missing bonus — so a naturally tough soul can still occasionally resist even a fearsome foe, rather than auto-failing.

Two skills keep the rule of three. Inspire and Performance still roll 1d10 + skill + characteristic. Both are uncontested projection — you radiate Charisma at allies or an audience against a flat Difficulty Value, never against a defender’s bar — so the characteristic there cannot distort a contest or outpace a creature’s defence. (Authority was considered but reverts: it is opposed, which is exactly where the inflation lived.)

Creatures need no change. The Law of Resistance bar (Characteristic TN + Resist by Tier) was always the pre-computed defender; with the PC side back to 1d10 + skill, the two sides line up again, which is the point of the revert.

Applied across core-rules (the core section plus every affected skill: the social, larceny, craft, and resist lines), both ledgers, and the three planning docs (spec, re-carve, worksheet), which now describe the re-centred rule. The character sheets needed no structural change — they store skill points, so dropping the characteristic from the roll is a reading change, not a data one.

An audit found the contest rule covered opposed tests well but left edge cases unwritten — what the untrained roll against a flat Difficulty Value or a creature bar, and whether some skills can be tried untrained at all. These are now spelled out in one place (Resolving Any Test, in the core rules).

The shape of any roll is one of three — against a task (vs a GM Difficulty Value), a person (opposed), or a creature (vs its Law of Resistance bar). Across all three, the trained/untrained rule is now explicitly universal: trained is 1d10 + skill; untrained is Dis.d10 + the governing characteristic. Inspire and Performance remain the only skills that add the characteristic when trained.

New: trained-only skills. Some skills are pure learned craft and cannot be attempted untrained — Alchemy, Engineering, Medicine, Read/Write, Linguistics, Riposte, Precise Strike, the Combat proficiencies, and the seven Disciplines. For these, untrained is no roll at all; the knowledge or technique is the price of entry. Their entries now carry a ⚒ Trained-Only flag.

No mechanics changed for trained play — this fills gaps and writes down what was previously left to GM inference.

The Dominator archetype (Will & Coercion controller) is reviewed and confirmed. Its identity holds up: it does not out-damage the room, it decides who in the room gets to act — and its value scales with the size of a fight, not the toughness of one target, which keeps it cleanly distinct from a striker rather than competing with one.

Two guard-rails make that control fair, both grounded in how the system already works. First, the creature Resist bar rises with Tier, so a Boss or Legendary foe is a genuine gamble to control rather than a guaranteed lockdown — control is strong against the many, a coin-flip against the mighty. Second, a new core rule, The Unbroken Will: once a creature has been hit by any control effect this encounter, it resists every further control attempt at Advantage (static-bar defenders impose Disadvantage on the attacker instead). The first domination lands clean; chaining a single key foe into permanent helplessness does not. It applies symmetrically — it shields the party's own champions exactly as it shields the GM's. Damage has no ceiling; control now has one, by design.

The Dominator’s Build-Guide entry was also brought onto the re-centred contest rule (it had been written in the old +characteristic form). No change to its skills or vocations — only the roll notation and the new anti-lockout guard-rail.

Opposed tests now resolve the same way everywhere: 1d10 + skill + characteristic on each side — but each side uses its own skill and that skill’s governing characteristic. A commander pressing Authority rolls 1d10 + Authority + Charisma; the target resisting rolls 1d10 + their resist skill + Willpower. If you have no points in the relevant skill you still roll, leaning on the bare characteristic (1d10 + 0 + characteristic) — training is a bonus over innate capacity, and no one is barred from trying. The name echoes the Power of Three already at the system’s spine: a contest resolved as die + training + nature.

Against Bestiary creatures, nothing changes at the table — the Law of Resistance bar (Characteristic TN + Resist bonus, scaled by Tier) is the creature’s pre-rolled version of that same roll. Live opposed rolls happen against fully-statted NPCs; the fast static bar still handles monsters.

The rewrite has been applied to the skills whose tests are genuinely opposed: Charm, Deception, Intimidation, Seduction, Authority (defended with Zealotry/Insight + Willpower/Awareness), and Thieving, Stealth, Sleight of Hand, Disguise, Escapology (defended with Acute Senses/Insight + Awareness, or a grappler’s Brawling). Stealth also gained its missing characteristic — it now rolls + Agility rather than points alone. Creature-facing auras (Light-Soul, Dark-Soul) and saves (Shieldsman’s bash) were left on the Law of Resistance form, which is already the correct creature-side resolution.

A few embedded errors surfaced and were fixed in passing: Intimidation’s Stand Down and Deception’s Confident Lie both rolled “against Resolve” — a skill, not a characteristic — and now resolve correctly.

The high-tier Wizardry spells (TN 16+) had drifted into overlap — several were the same apocalypse at escalating numbers. No spell was removed. Instead, the three that blurred together have each been specialized so every capstone now answers a different battlefield problem:

Wave of Annihilation (TN 18) — the Debuffer. Damage eased from 5d10 to 4d10, but its cellular-decay teeth sharpened: a failed save now strips 2 random characteristic points (was 1), unrecoverable by ordinary means for the encounter. It no longer competes as a nuke — it cripples a crowd and leaves husks.

Zero-State Erasure (TN 20) — the Zone. Same opening 6d10, but the erasure now lingers across the full 60 Ft as sustained terrain — anyone entering or starting their turn inside takes the recurring damage and stat-drain, and the caster can hold the zone turn after turn. It is battlefield denial, not a single blast. (No damage reduction.)

Reality Fracture (TN 21) — the Anti-Caster. Damage eased from 6d10 to 5d10, but its disruption escalated: enemy spells cast inside the AoE now misfire 75% of the time (was 50%), and the Disorient (lose all AP) recurs each turn rather than once. It is the wizard’s answer to enemy wizards and to any foe relying on a clean turn.

The other four capstones — Arcane Nova (panic-button burst), Entropic Coil (max-wound soft-kill), Unravelling (permanent single-target unmake), and Obliteration (the raw 8d10 hammer) — were already distinct and are unchanged. The two small damage trims on Wave and Fracture are offset by markedly stronger signature effects: these are specializations, not reductions. Updated on the v4 ledger sheet (and legacy v3).

A balance pass found Dark-Soul was the weaker twin of Light-Soul on two counts, and both are now corrected in its favour — this is a buff, nothing was taken away.

Cost parity. Dark-Soul cost 25 XP while Light-Soul cost 20. It now costs 20 for all races, matching its counterpart exactly.

Trigger parity. The real gap: Light-Soul’s bonus fires against a broad swath of the bestiary (Undead, Daemons, Beastmen, Chaos, Cultists — the genre’s standard foes), while Dark-Soul only hit creatures tagged strictly Good — barely a seventh as many. Dark-Soul’s bonus damage (and its 6-point Ward) now applies against the Good and the consecrated: celestials and the divine, the faithful (paladins, clerics, the blessed), and the sacred-natural (treants, fey, unicorns, Pyreborn, woodland spirits). The theme reads cleanly opposite to Light: Light burns the corrupt and unnatural; the void in you burns the pure and the hallowed. The bonus does not extend to ordinary unaligned mortals or spiritually-neutral monsters — it strikes the sacred, not merely the living.

The Sundered Soul rule (Light and Dark each reduce the other’s effective points) was reviewed and is sound — it remains the anti-dabbling mechanic, now governing two properly-balanced halves. Applied to core-rules and the v4 ledger cost table.

Resolve and Zealotry both covered Fear and Charm, doing roughly the same job in different words. They are now split along a clear line: Resolve endures the supernatural (Fear, Terror, magical compulsion, Dominate), and Zealotry endures mundane coercion (being charmed, intimidated, or seduced by people). Zealotry was also fleshed out from two tiers to a full four — gaining No Purchase (3 pts; mundane Intimidation/Seduction at Disadvantage) and Conviction’s Banner (9 pts; an ally aura mirroring Resolve’s Iron Bulwark). Both passives are written in the new Mark of Three roll style, making them the rule’s first adopters.

Resolve’s old “+Damage Mitigation vs spells/blessings” line was removed — that warding belonged to Spirit, and has now been consolidated there. Spirit’s magical mitigation now stacks two lines — +1 per 2 points and a further +1 per 3 points (so Spirit 6 grants +5, Spirit 9 grants +7), keeping its +1 Willpower per 3 alongside. The net effect for existing casters is at or slightly above their old combined Spirit+Resolve mitigation — nobody loses ground — while magical defense now lives in a single, thematically correct skill. Resolve is purely the supernatural-endurance skill going forward.

Willpower Reserve required Willpower 10 to access — by far the highest prerequisite of any skill (most gate at 0–3). It now requires Willpower 3. With the gate lowered, the dense Deep Well passive was trimmed: the per-turn upkeep reduction moved out to a new Sustained Efficiency tier so the skill isn’t a front-loaded mega-buy. The tier order is now Sustained Efficiency (3), Push Through (6, the failed-cast re-roll, moved up), and The Last Cast (9).

Two ghost mechanics were removed: the “Spirit upkeep” label (the rules denominate sustained upkeep in AP, so it now reads AP upkeep), and a “casting penalty from being below half Wounds” that the old Second Wind claimed to negate but which existed nowhere else in the rules. Second Wind itself was removed as redundant.

Both skills let you act after reaching 0 wounds — the rules even noted the two were “separate and both apply.” The death-defiance now lives once, as a 9-point capstone: Pain Tolerance keeps it (its old 6-point version promoted to the stronger per-session form), with Tectonic sliding down to 6. Endurance gives up the duplicate and gains a new 9-point capstone, Tireless (immunity to Exhaustion), completing its existing resist–slow–immune progression.

Brawling: the passive’s Disadvantage-on-defence edge is now lost against armored opponents; Dirty Fighter costs 1 AP rather than being free, and its leg-sweep DV is GM-set by footing and size; Brawler’s Finish now deals 3d10 + your melee damage bonus (the Combat Mastery figure).

Climbing: Free Climber’s flat DV 9 became a GM-set difficulty scaled to the surface, with the listed surfaces as the mid-band anchor.

Seduction: Exploit and Loyal Tool converted from static DVs to the standard opposed roll (Loyal Tool with Advantage for the hour of groundwork).

Three read-only documents accompany the Mark of Three for review before it becomes settled canon: the rule spec (the resolution principle and its two design decisions), the resist-cluster re-carve (how the will/mental/social defences divide into clean lanes), and the migration worksheet (every skill and exactly what its wording becomes). A companion skill-resolution map sorts all 54 skills by how they resolve.

The Dwarf had been carrying the steepest net XP premium of any race, concentrated in a handful of finesse and social skills where it sat a full +15 above the cheapest race. Those four were pulled level with the rest of the spike pattern:

The Dwarf’s deliberate “poor at finesse, strong at endurance” profile is untouched everywhere else — this only clipped the four cells that overshot even that pattern. A player option for group review.

A broad tuning pass adjusted costs across two dozen skills, mostly small per-cell shifts (±5 XP). The intent was parity: bringing the four races’ average cost-per-point into a tight band rather than leaving one race broadly cheaper or dearer. The pass is net cost-positive across the system (more raises than cuts), so it reads as a gentle, system-wide increase — flagged as a proposed option for table review rather than silent canon.

Skills touched: Charm, Discipline, Evasion, Dark-Soul, Mending, Quickness, Read/Write, Riposte, Shieldsman, Stamina, Survival, Thieving, Tumble, Escapology, Linguistics, Swift Read, Intimidation, Performance, Alchemy, Navigation, Endurance, Swimming, Meditation, and Willpower Reserve. Per-cell detail lives in the rulebook and the Ledger skill tables.

Iron Will bundles three benefits on one skill — +2 permanent Wounds, the 0-Wounds survival window, and Willpower scaling — at what had been the toughness cluster’s baseline price. Its cost was raised one step to sit level with Hard as Nails: Dwarf 25→30, Elf/Halfling/Human 30→35. This is a genuine (if small) nerf to a defensive skill, so it is the change in this pass most worth table buy-in.

After the full pass, the four races sit within two-thirds of a point of each other on average cost-per-point — effectively flat parity, while each race keeps its characteristic spiky profile underneath. Figures cover the 55 cost-varying skills (uniform “flat” skills and the GM-gated Mounted Combat are excluded, since they don’t vary by race).

Read with care: a flat average smooths over the shape that gives each race its identity. The Dwarf still pays more on finesse and social skills and less on Physique and endurance — the profile is intact; it simply nets to near-parity in aggregate. “Everyone costs about 25 per point” is true on average without meaning the races feel the same to build.

A cross-file audit turned up two cells where the rulebook and the Ledger disagreed (pre-dating this pass): Performance / Elf (set to 25, the rulebook value) and Discipline / Human (set to 20, the Ledger value). Both reconciled across all files.

The Primary Skills reference table had drifted from the rulebook over earlier passes and was re-synced to the canonical costs. A few of these were sizable pre-existing corrections rather than today’s tuning — most notably Resolve (the table had it at 25–30; canonical is a flat 15), Tracking/Tracker (table 10 → canonical 20), and Ki (table 30–35 → canonical 25–30). These move character power in both directions and are called out here so they aren’t mistaken for silent changes.

A handful of entries on the table (Runecraft, Shaman, and a few others) have no per-race cost in the core rulebook to sync against, so they were left untouched — a gap worth a dedicated reconciliation later.

Meditation’s old passive granted a flat bonus to resist Fear, Shaken, Dominated, and Confused — which simply tripled up with Zealotry and Resolve, both of which already cover that ground. That redundant save (and the mundane-fear immunity) has been removed, and Meditation re-pointed at a niche nothing else fills: holding a working together.

• At 3 — Channeling: the disciplined exception to the No Channeling Iron Constraint. You may carry AP into a multi-turn cast — beginning a working whose AP cost exceeds one turn’s actions and finishing it next turn (e.g. a 4-AP cast with only 3 AP). The Two-Turn limit still applies.
• At 6 — Unbroken Focus: a cast you are channeling resists being knocked loose — add Meditation pts to hold it when damaged or disrupted. Distinct from Willpower Reserve, which guards already-active sustained effects. Also grants +1 Essence if the Essence rule is in play.
• Unchanged: +1 wound/pt, Meditative Recovery (short-rest healing), and The Eye (9 pts).

This shifts who Meditation suits — away from generic mental-defense, toward casters. A player option for table review.

The optional Essence resource is being adopted at the table, and its formula has been reworked to honour the Power of Three. The v4 Ledger now computes and tracks it automatically: Pool = (vocation ÷ 3 + Discipline ÷ 3 + Characteristic ÷ 3) × 3, plus any relic bonus, plus 1 if you have Meditation 6+. The Characteristic is the discipline's primary attribute — Intellect (Wizardry), Willpower (Shamanism & Vibhuti), Charisma (Devotion), Awareness (Druidism), or Physique (Ki); Runecraft draws no Essence. Each spell costs its TN; cantrips are free; the pool refreshes each encounter. The sheet shows max pool, used, and remaining.

Why the change: counting the governing characteristic — not just skill points — makes the pool reward commitment to a single path. A pure caster who invests in both discipline and attribute draws a deep well; a hybrid splitting between weave and blade carries a shallower one. The earlier draft used (vocation + Discipline÷6) × 2, which ignored the characteristic and so handed dabblers the same pool as devotees of equal skill. The new figures sit close to the old for pure casters (a 9/6/Cha-6 healer: 20 → 21) and trim hybrids modestly.

Housekeeping: three stale “÷ 3” notes in the Ledger (left over from the casting-capacity change to ÷ 6) were corrected. The underlying math was already right; only the labels were wrong.

Two loader defects in the v4 sheet were fixed. An empty swap-slot in a saved file no longer defaults to the wrong skill and shuffles the column (the “Discipline jumps rows” symptom). And the old “Sabda” discipline name now migrates to “Vibhuti” on load, so characters saved before that rename restore correctly. Characters saved before this fix may need their Willpower discipline re-selected once and re-saved.

Every mount on the ledger’s Mount dropdown now has a full stat block in the Bestiary, from the humble Jackass (Riding 0) up to the legendary Drake / Young Dragon (Riding 9). Each lists Move, Wounds, Size, and a signature trait, and notes its Riding requirement. Flying mounts (Griffon/Hippogriff, Wyvern, Drake) show both ground and flight speeds.

The roster, by Riding tier: Jackass (0), Pony/Mule (1), Riding Horse (2), Light Warhorse (3), Heavy Warhorse & Large Ram (4), Dire Wolf & War Boar/Elk (5), Giant Lizard/Raptor (6, Rare), Griffon/Hippogriff (7, Rare), Wyvern (8, Mythical), Drake/Young Dragon (9, Mythical). These are player options — available to any character who invests in Riding and can find a willing beast.

The character sheet’s Mount field is now a dropdown gated by your Riding skill. Normal mounts warn if you’re under-skilled; Rare and Mythical mounts are hard-blocked until you meet the requirement. The Jackass sits at the bottom as the tier-0 mount — the honest start to any riding career.

All 198 creatures (and the new mounts) are tagged Good, Neutral, Evil, or Corrupted, shown as a colour-coded tag in the stat block. Corrupted is reserved for the living twisted — the Chaos Dwarves of Birn Uluhm, the Blight Elves, cultists, and the cursed — distinct from things that are innately Evil (undead, fiends, the Aakzad).

This isn’t just flavour: it’s the hook the soul and willpower skills key off. Light-Soul and Dark-Soul deal their bonus damage against Good and Evil respectively, and Insight / Zealotry reference it too. A GM can now read a creature’s alignment at a glance to know what triggers.

A spellcasting creature’s discipline tag now uses its proper colour from the rulebook — Faith/Devotion red, Druidism green, Wizardry indigo, Shaman teal, Ki sienna, Runes grey, Vibhuti purple, Necromantic deep purple — so you can spot a creature’s tradition instantly.

The Bestiary moved off its old warm-brown base to a cool charcoal, and the creature card’s header is now a parchment block with a red border and black text. Stat labels and to-hit values are deep blue; characteristic boxes are white; meta and alignment tags are outlined tiles; the toolbar, filters, search box, and creature count were all brightened. Fonts across the card were enlarged for legibility. Purely a styling pass — no stats changed.

Corrected the spelling of the Chaos-Dwarf faction name to the canon-correct Birn Uluhm across the affected Bestiary entries.

A new Charisma skill for those who walk the dark path. Every point grants +1 damage against Good and consecrated creatures; it gates the fallen abilities (profane blessings, necrotic leeching, command of lesser undead) the way Light-Soul gates the Crusader's powers. At 3 points it radiates Profane Dread (a Shaken aura against the pure); at 6 points it grants Profane Ward (Damage Mitigation vs holy and radiant). Thematically it is the mark left by the void — the Aakzad register, the Titan-Blood that unmade Birn Uluhm.

A soul cannot be both pure and corrupt. Your effective Light-Soul is reduced by your Dark-Soul points and vice versa (minimum 0), for all purposes — bonus damage, prerequisites, Wards, and encounter powers. A character who splits evenly between the two holds neither. Alignment is now a real choice with mechanical weight.

Defensive answers to the skills that force tests on you:

• Insight (Awareness) — detect Deception, Charm, Intimidation, Seduction, and Disguise used against you.

• Zealotry (Willpower) — resist Fear, Charm, Intimidation, Seduction, and Dominate; auto-pass the first Fear test each encounter at 6 points.

• Steadfast (Physique) — resist shove, push, charge, grapple, and being knocked Prone; forced movement halved at 6 points.

• Linguistics (Intellect) — decipher codes, dead languages, and scripts that predate the current Age.

The standalone Riding box has been retired; Riding is now a normal selectable skill in the Agility pool with a proper race-varied cost, alongside every other skill.

Each characteristic still shows 3 permanent skills + 3 selectable swap slots (6 total), but the pool each swap slot draws from has been widened — the new skills and disciplines are now options in their characteristics' dropdowns, giving more meaningful choices without changing the slot count.

Sixteen skills whose costs had drifted out of sync between the rulebook and the ledgers were reconciled to agreed values, and a hidden duplicate-entry quirk in the ledger cost table (which silently overrode some costs) was resolved so the rulebook and both ledgers now agree exactly.

A handful of outlier-cheap skills were nudged up by 5 for the races that were running cheapest overall — closing part of the gap toward the Dwarf's higher total without lowering any costs (to avoid min-max incentives) and without touching each race's signature-cheap identity skills. The Dwarf retains a modest premium as a counterweight to its durability.

A full comparison pass over the ledger's armour values — standard ladder, Mithril, shields, and the whole beast-craft line — checking Defense, Mitigation, Agility/Awareness/Movement penalties, casting TN, and the melee/ranged To-Hit costs. The ladder held up well; the standard progression and the no-penalty beast pieces (Dragonscale, Wolf-Pelt) are working as intended as rare perks, and the off-ladder Mitigation values (Titan-Vein and Chimera-Hide at 7) are deliberate.

The Khugron chitin armour previously waived its casting penalty entirely (TN 0) on top of its other boons, which made it a touch too generous for a Chainmail-class piece. It now has a +1 casting TN, in line with other warded mid-weight armour; its Bleed immunity and first-crit-softening boons are unchanged.

New options for players who hunt the right creature, each counting as a base armour class with its own boon:

• Broodmother Carapace (Studded) — +2 Climbing, ignore webs & difficult terrain, immune to natural Poison.

• Gravebone Harness (Chainmail) — +1 wound vs the living; once per battle, ignore a Critical's extra effect.

• Elemental-Forged Plate (Field Plate) — attune one element (fire/frost/storm/stone): immune to it, and once per battle melee attackers take 2d10 of it.

• Iron Golem Reinforced Plate (Full Plate, reinforced) — Mitigation 10 and a further −1 to all physical wounds taken; immovable by equal/smaller Size. The trade is steep: −20 movement, the harshest casting penalty in the game, and a heavy ranged To-Hit cost. A walking fortress, not a skirmisher. Now gated by a Physique requirement: it asks Physique 6 to bear — meet it and the suit moves as ordinary Full Plate; fall short and it becomes a cage of dead weight (an extra −2 Agility, −1 Action per turn, and Disadvantage to all To-Hit). The armour is still findable by anyone, but only the genuinely strong can fight in it. A soft gate, not a lock — the first armour in the game to carry a Physique floor.

All four new armours were folded into the Beast-Hide & Monster-Craft loot tables at the appropriate rarity (the spider and bone pieces in the Common Hoard, the elemental and iron-golem plates in the Greater Hoard), with the d100 bands re-balanced so every roll still resolves cleanly.

The old one-line Unconscious entry has been expanded into a complete rule. Reaching 0 Wounds drops you Prone and Unconscious — no actions, attacks against you at Advantage. Whether you survive the drop now depends on Iron Will and Bleeding: with Iron Will you linger for a number of turns equal to your points before death (each Bleeding stack costs you one of those turns); without Iron Will and Bleeding, you die at the end of the turn you fell, though allies with actions left may still save you.

Being healed to 1+ Wounds no longer snaps you instantly upright. You rise at the end of your party's turn and may take half movement; you may optionally attempt a Resolve test (DV 10) for a single 1 AP action, but failing that attempt leaves you Shaken. You act normally the following turn. An optional Dying Clock is included for tables that want a tenser bleed-out.

Iron Will now grants a survival window equal to your points invested (1 point = 1 turn) while Unconscious at 0 Wounds, rather than a flat single turn — reduced by 1 per active Bleeding stack. A designer note flags this for possible future scaling.

The Castable / ⚠ Overreach / ✕ Beyond Reach grouping in the spell dropdowns previously appeared only in the first five (cantrip) slots. Slots 6–18 now rebuild the grouped, reachability-sorted list the same way. Fixed in both the v4 and v3 ledgers.

The "Target must surpass [Characteristic] TN [number] + Resist bonus" formula line was rendering as dark text on its dark box — effectively invisible. It now reads in light parchment. The rule and its tier math (Boss Resist +3 turning a TN 7 test into a 10) were already correct.

Four consistency fixes: the Spell Miscast "Enveloped" and Devotion "Reversed" results now stay in second person; the Critical "Devastating Hit" save reads "make a Physique test with a TN equal to the total wounds received"; and the "Death" result is now phrased in second person to match the rest of the table.

The parallel v3 ledger received today's rune work (two new runes, fifteen TN updates, Blood-Surge and Dread Horn effect changes), the Ghost Wolf → Ancestral Wolf rename, and the seven new Shaman Calling spells (Breath of the Clanless, Grave Miasma, Grave-Shard, Necrotic Frost, Spirit Walk, The Var'kai Ritual, The White Blind). All of v3's own unique spells were preserved — nothing was overwritten.

Three invocations that previously applied their effect automatically now call for a resist test: The Severed Chord (Willpower TN 4 + Resist to avoid Silence), The Abyssal Deterrent (Willpower TN 7 + Resist each turn for void entities), and the Silencing Word’s save was already in place. Hard control should be earned, not guaranteed.

The Char-Tongue’s arrow-enchantment now lasts a single turn rather than scaling with bonus turns. The Osteo-Resonance was fleshed out — now 3d10 per turn, with a Stun save whose TN rises by 1 for each turn the tone is sustained, rewarding a committed channel. “Maximum damage on the dice” was simplified to “maximum damage” throughout.

Mid-tier invocations (Hollowing Verse, Agni-Axiom, Sphoṭa Strike, Agneyastra Volley) now clearly bypass only non-magical armour Mitigation — skill-based and magical Mitigation still apply — reserving full bypass for the high-TN and heavy-cost workings. The Retraction rules now spell out passive vs. active Retraction and define double severity, so every invocation’s Retraction line is self-explanatory.

The two Bija (TN 0) cantrips now sit under a proper section header alongside the rest of their tier. All remaining offensive “wounds” in the lexicon were converted to “damage” per the system-wide terminology split.

Runecraft was the only discipline with no relics above Uncommon — every other caster could find Rare, Legendary, and Artifact foci, while a Runemaster found nothing past mid-game. Six new Discipline Relics close that gap: The Anvil-Sworn Chisel, Plate of the Deepening Vault, and The Quenching Basin (Rare); Vorn’s Hollow Heart and The First Forge Ember (Legendary); and Thessan’s Last Inscription (Artifact).

By deliberate design, the new relics never exceed the per-object rune limit, the Mastery Limit, or the no-duplication law. They reward a Runemaster through bigger To-Cast bonuses, the readiness to keep an extra prepared Temporary rune, faster Permanent inscription, a tactical Defense-stripping rider, and runework that lesser hands cannot erase — power that honours the craft’s rules rather than bending them.

A long-standing inconsistency is resolved across every book and the character sheet. Damage is what an attack, spell, or harmful effect deals, and what armour and wards reduce; wounds are the health pool that damage carves into, and what healing restores. Accordingly, Wound Mitigation is now Damage Mitigation everywhere (including the Ledger’s defence table and the W.Mit / WM abbreviations), offensive effects now state the damage they deal rather than “wounds,” and healing, the health track (0 wounds, maximum wounds), and damage-over-time that drains the pool continue to read as wounds. Conditions such as Bleed and Poison deal damage.

A sweeping change — roughly 300 Mitigation references and several hundred damage lines were converted, with healing and health-pool wording deliberately preserved. Bestiary stat blocks, with their many damage types, got the closest scrutiny. Worth a read-through if any individual line looks off.

Vibhuti now advances its governing characteristic like the other casters — +1 Willpower per 3 points invested (the Power of Three) — and its offensive invocations add the Speaker’s casting bonus damage. It still carries no healing. The old “standalone, advances nothing, adds no bonus” framing (in three places) has been corrected.

The per-discipline identity colours now extend to the left spine of every spell, rite, calling, and rune block — Devotion crimson, Druid green, Shaman teal, Wizardry indigo, Ki bronze, Runecraft iron, Vibhuti violet — replacing the single red spine they all shared. Vibhuti’s remaining gold framing boxes were also recoloured to its violet, matching the contrast treatment the other disciplines received.

The two Bija (TN 0) cantrips were nested inside the cantrip intro box, so they rendered cramped and “covered up.” They now sit as their own cards, consistent with the rest of the discipline.

The bold labels inside spell, rune, and power descriptions (Permanent:, Temporary:, damage values, conditions) were rendering in a washed-out crimson that read as muddy gold against the parchment — worst in the dense Runecraft, Ki, and Wizardry blocks. They are now crisp dark ink across every discipline, with the identity colours kept where they belong (titles, spines, headers).

Both Ledger v4 and v3 still carried the discipline’s old name, Sabda, in the magic selector and its underlying logic. Renamed to Vibhuti throughout the user-facing selector, display, and spell data so the sheet matches the rulebook.

Every rune’s cost is now stated explicitly and tied to the core system. Temporary runes show their carving cost as Inscribe X AP, scaled to the casting bands by the Power of Three (TN 1–6 = 1 AP, 7–9 = 2, 10–12 = 3, and up) — a high-TN rune can take more than one turn to carve in combat, banked across turns like a large spell. Permanent runes show their labour as X Days, scaled to TN tier. Activating a rune costs whatever the triggered action naturally costs — a Block or Parry is 1 AP, a weapon-bound rune rides the weapon’s own attack cost.

Rune of the Bulwark (Armor / Shield) grants the bearer the Block reaction once per turn even without the vocation; Rune of the Deflection (Weapon) grants the Parry reaction once per turn even without the skill. Both give access to a defence the bearer hasn’t trained — the geometry knows the move.

Across the list: Rune of Might now grants +3 To-Wound (Power of Three) at a higher TN; Rune of Shielding now halves non-magical missile damage rather than reducing it to 1; Rune of Stone grants +1 Defense only (the stray Parry reference is gone, now covered by the new Deflection rune); Rune of the Blood-Surge grants +1 AP for melee; Rune of Spell Breaking gains a permanent always-on suppression aura; and a spread of TN adjustments touched Speed, Luck, Resistance, and several Master Runes (Vorn, Balance, Breaking, Dread Horn, Thessan, Spellbinding, Spite, Weapon Flight). The Undying Edge climbs to TN 33 and the Soul-Chain to TN 32.

Rune of Resistance’s save now reads “Willpower TN 10 + the carving Runemaster’s Resist bonus,” tying the ward’s strength to the smith who forged it.

Previously most discipline headers shared the same gold (or, in three cases, the same purple), so the sections blurred together. Each discipline now carries a distinct identity colour on its section header and title, themed to its nature: Devotion crimson, Druid forest green, Shaman frost teal, Wizardry indigo, Ki bronze, Runecraft iron, and Vibhuti violet.

The discipline’s opening rules — Permanent and Temporary Inscriptions, the AP Scale, the Laws, and the Compatibility table — were previously five identical gold boxes with gold titles on a gold-tinted background, which made the headers hard to read and gave the section no hierarchy. They now use a left-accent layout with dark, high-contrast titles: the two defining mechanic boxes take Runecraft’s iron accent, and the three reference boxes a gold accent. No rules text changed.

Forced-movement and knockdown effects across the discipline now respect the creature size ladder, in line with how the Bestiary already gates knockback. Force Kick, Quake Fist, and Ki Eruption no longer knock Giant size or larger creatures Prone or throw them; Shockwave gains the same immunity for its throw; and Chi Strike’s natural-10 pushback now scales — full distance against your size or smaller, half against one size larger, none against Giant or greater.

Silent Hand Strike now allows a Willpower save to negate; Expel Wounds’ expelled damage now permits a Physique save and is capped at 15 ft range. Two capstone tests that used off-scale values were normalized: The Vajra Lance’s limb-loss test moves from a flat TN 18 to TN 14 + Resist, and The Pashupata Stance’s retaliation test moves from “TN = Ki skill points” to TN 16 + Resist.

Inner Flame now scales off casting bonus rather than Physique modifier; Empowered Strikes deals +3 bonus wounds (was +1); Shockwave’s throw is now 3 ft per Ki point (the system’s rule of three, up from 2); Soul Resonance now costs the Monk Disadvantage on their own actions while the tether holds; Zen gains a Willpower save if the entranced body is dropped to 0 wounds; Pressure Points now requires the Monk to declare the targeted effect before rolling; Astral Projection’s natural-10 Ki action is capped at 2 AP; and Iron Body now lasts 1 turn.

Repositioned within the discipline’s TN order accordingly.

The compounding −1 To-Hit penalty was a poor return on a 5-AP cast, so it has been removed. The wording is also clarified: the casting itself delivers all 5 melee strikes with no additional AP cost, and the power remains an instant burst rather than a sustained stance.

Two powers (Death Touch and The Still Point) carried malformed TN labels and a non-standard, compact stat-line that rendered differently from the rest of the discipline. Both were normalized to the standard navy stat-line and (TN n) title format, so the entire Ki section now matches the other disciplines.

Spells that called for a bare attribute test now use the standard form — the relevant characteristic plus the Shaman’s Resist bonus. Applied to Unwieldy, Bones, Cursed Spells, Mental Anguish, and both saves on Spirit Transference, bringing them in line with the curses that already scaled off Resist.

Numbers brought into line across the calling: Pin Doll now deals Dis.d10 + casting bonus alongside its Bleed; Bestial Curse drops to a 1-turn lock; Spirit Rush adds +15 ft movement to its extra action; Maelstrom can apply to up to 3 AP in a turn; Tribal Tenacity grants +1d10 to allies’ melee/ranged damage; Cursed Wound’s per-turn growth is now a flat +1d10; Blood Boil’s resisted tick rises to 2d10 + bonus; Grave Miasma gains a 2d10 + bonus hit and moves to TN 12; Voodoo Storm’s storm-move now costs 2 AP; and Tribal Mending / Soul Surge are capped at once per turn per character.

Vigor trades its three-stat spread for a sharper buff: a flat +1 to Physique and Willpower and +1d10 to the target’s next action’s damage or healing. Enduring Agony drops its per-turn damage stack in favour of relentless Disadvantage on all tests and actions until the victim breaks the curse with a Willpower save.

The escalating death-curse no longer grows without limit — its damage now caps at 6d10 from Turn 3 onward, and the automatic Stun is gated behind a To-Cast of 9 or higher (Stunned, or lose 1 AP).

The discipline gains a new highest calling, seated just below the Variable-TN utility spells. The Var’kai Ritual is the rite the Broken Father performed — the summoning that, in our lore, created the Orcs. The ancestral spirit manifests on the field and strikes a random enemy for 3d10 each turn; every enemy resists Willpower TN 23 + Resist or takes 4d10 (bypassing non-magical Mitigation) and permanently loses 2 Willpower, with any target reduced to −1 consumed outright. The terror of the rite, per lore, is that it works — but what answers the call is not guaranteed to be what was summoned.

The existing Broken Father entry gains a “The Calling” section connecting the discipline’s two highest spells to him — The Var’kai Ritual as his original summoning, and The Hungry Dead (TN 21) as its lesser echo. Separately, Ghost Wolf was renamed Ancestral Wolf, and The Hungry Dead’s malformed TN label was normalized to the standard format.

A deep pass across all five casting disciplines found heavy redundancy — the same fire, ice, and lightning spread thin across Wizardry, Druid, and Shaman. The fix was a wholesale restructure giving each discipline a distinct elemental identity: Wizardry now owns arcane, force, and kinetic magic; Shaman owns frost, curse, spirit, and death; Druid owns fire, nature, beast, and earth; Devotion owns blinding holy radiance.

A new combat spine of 36 spells (with renames such as Thirsting Blade → Monomolecular Edge, Death Coil → Entropic Coil, and a new TN 22 capstone, Obliteration), all utility kept (Dispel Magic, Teleport, the Daemon suite), Lightning Bolt retained, and 14 fire/ice spells pulled out for relocation. Fireball stays as the one wizard fire spell.

The Wizardry ice line was reskinned as spirit-frost and rehoused here (Cold Blast → Breath of the Clanless, Ice Lance → Grave-Shard, Frostbite → Necrotic Frost, Whiteout → The White Blind). All of Shaman’s own fire and lightning was stripped, leaving a discipline of cold, curse, spirit, and death.

Seven relocated spells placed at their TNs (Consumed in Flame, Lava Spray, Incinerate, Molten Earth, Frozen Shards, Ice Blade, Ice Field); three redundant ones dropped (Fire Sling, Firebomb, Summon Firebrand Weapon). Druid also got a light text polish on five high-tier spells.

Pulled the radiant spells out of Druid and Wizardry and concentrated them in the Church: added Unconquered Sun (TN 3), Sun Beam (TN 8), and Sunburst (TN 11), replacing three redundant divine-damage spells (Divine Weapon, Righteous Wrath, Upheaval).

Dozens of targeted edits: casting-stat corrections (Arcane Shield uses Intellect, Bonded in Blood uses Willpower), duration tightening on strong buffs (Void Carapace, Ablative Matrix, Life Diverted now 1 turn), damage rescaling (Lacerate, Soul Burst, Molten Earth, Fireball burn), and the standard once-per-turn clause added to every healing spell that lacked it.

Conjured Elemental Mote (Summon Elemental), a Corrupted Woodland Spirit stat line, daemon-manifestation tiers for Twisted Words, and the Summon Damned / Call the Unhallowed reanimation tables — all scaled from the bestiary’s tier system and tied to the existing Turn Undead ladder.

Stat-block values are first-draft and not yet playtested.

Protection from Evil and Cast Out now define true Evil as Undead, Daemons, and the corrupted/Chaos-tainted (so Orcs and Hobgoblins aren’t auto-affected). Anti-undead riders across Devotion changed from “maximum on the dice” to simply “maximum damage.”

The Actions / Range / Duration line under each spell was low-contrast gold on cream. Every instance — including the differently-formatted Runecraft and Vibhuti lines — is now navy (#1A2740) for legibility.

Pre-existing ordering drift (most notably in Devotion) corrected so every spell list runs in ascending Target Number, cantrips first and Variable-TN spells last.

All four caster spell arrays in the character sheet were brought in line with the rebuilt rosters in one comprehensive sweep, and the Druid and Wizardry TN 0 cantrips reconciled to match the rulebook exactly.

Ledger v3 sync remains deferred.

The reliquary’s d100 roller gained click-to-jump links from the master table and each roll result to the matching loot table. The Campaign Chronicle had all “Mortek” references renamed to Aakzad and standardised (Elder Rock spacing, racial capitalisation) to match house style.

A coverage pass on the Grimoire turned up a real hole: Vibhuti — a damage-focused discipline — had an offensive spell at TN 3, then nothing until TN 12. A Speaker had no scaling attack for the entire early-to-mid game. Four new spells now fill that span, built on the discipline’s own identity: the arc from the “blunt edge” of the Dissonant Word toward the high Axioms that strip Wound Mitigation entirely.

• The Rendering Note (TN 7, 2 AP): the first true offensive frequency — 2d10 sonic, single target. Ordinary armour still applies, but a To-Cast of 9+ rattles the inner ear for a Stunned condition.
• The Unstringing Chord (TN 9, 2 AP): the turning point — 2d10 sonic that ignores the first 3 points of Wound Mitigation, the Speaker’s first step toward the unmitigated Axioms.
• The Shattering Cadence (TN 10, 3 AP): a 10×50 ft line — 3d10 sonic that shatters brittle and crystalline matter (frozen wards, bone, stone carapace) and strips the mitigation of anything relying on it.
• The Hollowing Verse (TN 11, 3 AP): 3d10 sonic bypassing mundane Wound Mitigation, and a Willpower save or the target’s concentration / Maintained effect collapses. Hands off cleanly to the TN 12 Agni-Axiom.

First-draft values, matched to the system’s TN/AP/damage scaffold — worth a table-test for balance against the other disciplines’ spells at the same tiers. TN 8 was left to Vibhuti’s existing utility Words.

The Tome of Lore (52 A–Z entries) and the Mechanics Reference (17 sections) were rebuilt into the same codex layout as the core rulebook and the skill compendia: a collapsible iron-and-gold side index, live search/filter, scroll-position highlighting, a collapse toggle, and a clean print stylesheet. Lore is grouped alphabetically with each entry individually linkable; Mechanics is grouped by theme (Core, Combat Bonuses, Casting & Healing, Reference).

The interactive tools (Reliquary, Refinery, trackers) and the tab-based Races page were deliberately left as-is — the codex layout suits long reference reading, not tools.

By table request: clicking an advanced skill’s name (or the new ⓘ icon) in the Ledger now opens an in-page panel with the skill’s complete codex entry — flavor, Mechanic, Specialization, and Vulnerability — exactly like the racial passives popout. Closes with × or Escape. This also replaces an old link that pointed at a since-renamed file. Applied to both v4 and v3.

In the Active Defenses row, the third input (Dodge) was being cut off by the container edge. The row was resized to fit all three boxes cleanly in both screen and print views. Fixed in v4 and v3.

The Mechanics armour table was still showing the old uncapped “+TN (Cast)” penalty (+1/+2/+3). It now carries the full per-discipline To-Cast breakdown — Wizardry/Druidism/Shamanism, Devotion, Vibhuti, Ki as separate columns — using the current capped values from the core rules’ Iron Cage table. No caster is penalized worse than −3 by armour weight; Ki is never penalized.

The Piercing 1H row (Dagger / Rapier / Spear) listed an “Advantage vs Leather/Cloth” property that is no longer part of the rules. Removed; the row now reads simply “Finesse eligible.”

One Lore entry (“Northern Clan: Stoneback of Brackwater”) — and everything after it — was spilling outside the reading pane and jumping to the bottom of the page. The cause was a handful of stray closing tags in the source that the new codex layout exposed. Removed; all 52 entries now sit correctly in the pane.

A mechanical audit of all 198 monsters fixed a small set of data defects: two creatures with a tier name stuck in the group-size field, a caster wrongly flagged as a non-caster, an inconsistent casting-type spelling, and a couple of formatting slips. No balance or stat values were changed.

The Reliquary gained a dedicated Beast-Hide & Monster-Craft Armour category — 35 entries across a Common Hoard and Greater Hoard, the full d100 spread from Common up to a Unique artifact. Every piece is rendered from a slain creature’s hide, scale, bone, or carapace, and counts as a standard armour CLASS in brackets (Furs, Leather, Studded, Chain, Banded, Field, Full) so it plugs straight into the existing rules for casting penalty, Agility, and slot. Beast-craft never rusts and is always proof against the natural weapons of its own kind.

The roster leans on our own lore rather than generic fantasy fare: Khugron deep-beast chitin, Aakzad pre-world shell, Weald-beast and Pyreborn hide, Titan-Blood-fed scale, dragon and wyrm scale & bone, the Iron Chitin mutation, and Lizardman-cut scutes. Standouts include the Dragonscale Hauberk (chain-class, no penalties, halves the dragon’s element), the Carapace of the Deep Stone (stay at 1 wound once per battle), and the unique Wyrm-Father’s Whole Hide.

The d100 master roller was re-banded to fit it (Armour 18–24, Beast-Craft 25–31, Enchanted 32–35); the roller now handles all sixteen categories.

Beast-craft isn’t free loot. Quartering a monster for usable material assumes a full day’s butchery and a Survival or Medicine test — fail it and the hide is ruined. Worth a GM ruling on time and tools before the party starts skinning everything they drop.

27 new entries were woven into the existing Enchanted Arms & Armour category (now 152 items total), re-flowing the d100 bands so both sub-tables stay gapless. They follow the enchanters’ convention — +1 Common-grade, +2 Rare, +3 Legendary — and the higher tiers carry abilities that earn the rarity:

• +1 (Common Hoard): Drake-Hide Coat, Chitin-Plate Vest, Lizardman Scale Shirt, Wolf-Pelt Furs; and monster-bone weapons — Wyrmtooth Dagger, Bone-Spur Axe, Drakebone Bow, Spine-Dart Set, Stinger Spear.
• +2 Rare: Dragonscale Hauberk, Khugron Carapace, Iron-Chitin Plates, Manticore-Spine Brigandine, Aakzad-Shell Scale; Wyrmtooth Greatblade, Stingerblade Rapier, Echo-Tuned Crossbow, Pyre-Throat Hand Cannon, Titan-Vein Maul.
• +3 Legendary: Wyrm-King’s Mantle, Carapace of the Deep Stone, Pyreborn Heart-Hide; The Stormstag Bow, Heart-Coal Brand, The Gravewarden’s Cleaver.
• Artifact / Unique: The Wyrm-Father’s Whole Hide and Heartpiercer, the Sinew Bow — each with a once-per-session signature power.

An enchanted beast-craft piece stacks its magical bonus (+X To-Hit/Wounds, or +X Defense) on top of the hide’s native trait — so a +2 Dragonscale Hauberk is chain-class with no penalties, +2 Defense, and still halves its element.

Because the same hides appear in two places — plain in Beast-Hide & Monster-Craft, warded in Enchanted Arms & Armour — both table intros now point at each other so it’s clear which tier you’re reading.

The new Ledger v4 (built from v3) regroups the two armour selectors with clear headers — Forged Armour, Shields, and Beast-Hide & Monster-Craft — adding 19 beast materials, each labeled with the armour class it counts as (e.g. “Dragonscale Hauberk (Chain, no pen.)”). Picking one feeds the real engine, so all the Defense / Mitigation / Agility / casting math resolves correctly.

Selecting a beast-craft armour drops its special boon into the Props field automatically (e.g. “immune to Bleed; 1st crit/battle → normal hit”), so the effect isn’t lost — the engine only scores the base class. It won’t overwrite a note you typed yourself. Saved characters load in v4 with no migration needed.

The hub now carries a Ledger v4 card in Play Tools, marked newest. (v2 remains the stable default; v3 is still listed.)

A correction to last session’s notes: Vibhuti was not actually untouched by the armour rescale. Full plate had been imposing a punishing −5 To-Cast on Speakers — harsher than any other caster. That’s been normalized to −3, the same hard ceiling Wizard / Druid / Shaman hit in plate. Lighter armour is unchanged.

Fixed in the Ledger v4 engine and across the rules text (the Arcane Interference table, the Vibhuti entries, and the Toll of Iron). No caster is now penalized worse than −3 by armour weight alone.

Worth flagging because it caused confusion: the armour “Tension Value (TN)” — the 0–5 weight index on the armour tables — is not the same thing as a spell’s Target Number, even though both get abbreviated “TN.” The armour figure just feeds the To-Cast penalty; it isn’t a number you roll against. Reference tables should label that column “Tension Value” or show the derived To-Cast penalty, never “Cast TN.”

A standalone older copy of the rulebook (rules_noted.html) was still running the original uncapped casting penalties (Wizard up to −5 in full plate) and had no Vibhuti column at all. Its Arcane Interference table was rebuilt to match current core rules — capped penalties, the Vibhuti column added at the −3 ceiling — and its armour stat block (“Toll of Iron”) was re-aligned: corrected Agility / Awareness values and real capped To-Cast figures in place of the old “+X TN to Cast.”

Heavy armour still interferes with the arcane (Wizard / Druid / Shaman), but the penalty is far gentler than before. The middle and heavy tiers were brutal on a d10 — a plate mage essentially couldn't cast. Now:

Devotion, Vibhuti, and Ki are unchanged — they already had their own forgiving rules. This buff is specifically for the three traditions that took the worst of it.

There is now a clear ceiling on the highest-TN spell or blessing you can attempt:

Max TN = (your vocation's skill points) + (Discipline skill ÷ 3)

So a Wizard with 9 Wizardry and 6 Discipline can attempt spells up to TN 11 (9 + 2). A magic item or relic can raise this ceiling further. The Ledger now shows your Max TN right next to your Cast bonus, with a "+itm" box for any item bonus.

A desperate caster may attempt a spell above their Max TN — but never by more than 3. Each step over makes the To-Cast roll harder, and on a failure the weave tears its price from your own body. (Succeed, and you only eat the roll penalty.)

The backlash wounds ignore all Mitigation — armour can't stop the weave turning on the one who forced it — and the Stuns feed straight into the new Action-loss rule. Reaching more than 3 TN above your maximum is simply impossible.

Harm kept its signature auto-maximised damage vs Undead & Daemonic, but it no longer ignores Armour Wound Mitigation. Holy wrath still scorches the unclean, but an armoured Grave Warden's iron now actually counts. Previously it was a guaranteed, undefendable delete button.

The Mitigation it grants allies can never exceed your Light Soul skill points. Before, it added the caster's full damage bonus to the whole party's Mitigation with no ceiling — a high-offense Cleric could near-immunise the group. Now the protection scales off a holy/defensive skill, as it thematically should. The +1 Defense is unchanged.

Now grants +2 To-Hit and adds your casting damage bonus (no longer +1d10 and the bonus) to the target's attacks for one turn. Trims the per-swing burst that was feeding already-high martial damage.

Still 2d10 + casting bonus with a Prone knockdown, but the automatic Prone on a natural 10 is removed — the knockdown is now always a fair contest (target resists with Willpower vs TN 7 + your Resist bonus).

Restored to its proper form as a ranged Cleric attack rather than a melee-weapon buff. Now TN 8: strikes up to 2 targets for 1d10 + casting bonus each, with Undead/Daemonic taking an additional 1d10. This removes the old abuse where the per-hit bonus doubled and stacked across many attacks over several turns.

Three changes at once. The TN rose from 5 to 6; the duration dropped from "1 + bonus turns" to a flat 1 turn; and the per-hit fire damage was changed from a raw Intellect characteristic to 1d10 + casting damage bonus. The old version let a high-Intellect Druid keep a free, scaling damage rider running for many turns off a TN 5 cast — too cheap and too persistent. It's now a sharper, single-turn burst that costs a real casting beat. The Ledger TN was synced to 6.

Duration changed from "1 + bonus turns" to Instant. The damage is unchanged (3d10 + casting damage bonus to the primary, half to others in the 20 Ft AoE), but it no longer lingered as a maintained effect — it was never intended to be a multi-turn channel. TN and Ledger entry are unchanged.

Both were checked during the pass and held up. Husk-Skin (TN 3, +2 Wound Mitigation, non-stacking) and Adrenal Jolt (TN 6, +1d10 + casting bonus on next melee strike, +10 Ft move, then a Dis.d10 crash) are balanced as written. No change.

The Vajra Lance (TN 14), The Pashupata Stance (TN 16), and The Narayana Strike (TN 17) were misfiled at the tail of the Wizardry list — all three are Ki workings (Monk, unarmed, "Perfect Form" prerequisite). They now live in the Ki Powers discipline where they belong, sorted by TN. No mechanics changed; this is purely a filing correction. Reality Fracture (TN 21) and Obliteration (TN 22) were reviewed alongside them and confirmed as intended Wizardry capstones — they stay put.

Mage's Arrow was the odd bolt out: identical cost and damage to the other TN 7 bolts but with no rider at all. It now has a real identity — the slug ignores all cover and cannot be reacted to or blocked by Arcane Shield or any other reactive defense. Damage (2d10 + casting bonus) is unchanged. It's the bolt you reach for when the target is behind cover or holding a reactive ward.

On a failed save, the flames now leap to the nearest creature within 15 Ft — friend or foe — igniting a fresh burn there (1d10/turn, same TN 10 save to end). Never spreads to a creature already burning. Turns the spell into a crowd-punisher with real friendly-fire risk, and distinguishes it from the other damage-over-time spells.

The per-turn tick was lowered to a flat 1d10, but the orb now detonates when the target dies while afflicted or when the spell expires: every creature within 15 Ft takes 3d10 + casting bonus wounds. Stack it on something about to die, or on a fleeing enemy who'll carry it back to its allies.

While the cuts remain open, the target cannot recover wounds by any means — healing magic, regeneration, potions, and natural recovery all fail until the wounds close (Willpower TN 11 save each turn). The dedicated answer to enemy healers and high-regeneration bruisers. Damage is otherwise unchanged.

Exsanguinate was the filler of the Shaman's damage-over-time spells — a plain 3d10 + small bleed, while its neighbours each had a real identity (Scarlet Venom counters healing, Cursed Wound ignores armour and escalates, Enduring Agony immobilises, Blood Boil can't be shaken off, Agony ramps each turn). It now has its own niche: the bleed scales with how wounded the target is — 1d10 per turn above half their maximum wounds, 2d10 at or below half, and 3d10 at or below a quarter. The closer to death, the faster the blood drains. Cast it to finish what other wounds have started. The opening hit (3d10 + casting bonus) is unchanged, and the duration was aligned to the other DoTs ("1 + bonus turns" with a Willpower TN 10 save each turn to break free).

Sphoṭa Strike was the cheapest "ignore all armour" attack in the game by a wide margin. Every other effect that bypasses all Wound Mitigation with no strings sits at TN 16 or higher and pays a real price — caster self-damage, a once-per-encounter limit, or permanent stat loss. Sphoṭa delivered clean full-bypass damage at TN 13 with no resist roll and no cost. It now bypasses mundane Wound Mitigation only — it shears through ordinary armour, but magical wards still hold against it. The damage (4d10 + casting bonus) and TN are unchanged. Against Aakzad units the full bypass remains — their own pre-world architecture has no defence tuned against their register — so the spell keeps its signature role as the answer to the Aakzad. This brings it in line with The Agni-Axiom (TN 12), its smaller mundane-bypass sibling.

A new line in the magic chapter draws a hard floor under one of the game's most armour-invalidating effects. As a rule, only workings of TN 16 or higher may bypass all Wound Mitigation — that's the tier where a spell is costly and rare enough that turning steel to paper is its earned reward. Below that line, magic that "burns through armour" bypasses mundane Mitigation only: ordinary leather, mail, and plate yield, but magical wards and enchanted armour still hold. The single exception is a foe whose own nature has no defence against the effect (an Aakzad struck by its own pre-world register, for instance). The point: mid-tier magic should make armour worse, not irrelevant. Every existing full-bypass capstone (TN 16 and up) is unaffected — that's exactly the tier the rule protects.

The lone offender under the new floor. A 5d10 projectile that ignored all Mitigation from 400 Ft, once per encounter, at a TN a dedicated Monk reaches well before the capstone tier — it deleted an armoured target's entire defensive investment with no answer. It now bypasses mundane Wound Mitigation only; it still shears through ordinary armour and punches through cover and walls, but magical wards and enchanted plate bite against it. Damage, range, and the once-per-encounter limit are unchanged.

This one sits below the floor but keeps its full bypass. It only strikes those bearing genuine hostile intent — it cannot be fooled by feigned surrender, and anyone who truly lays down their arms is unharmed — and it carries a brutal Retraction cost (failure inflicts double-severity backlash and locks the Speaker Silenced for the rest of the encounter). It behaves like a capstone in everything but its TN number, so rather than gut an elegant mechanic, it stands as an explicit exception to the bypass floor.

The discipline formerly written as the Śabda-Axiom is now Vibhuti (The Manifest Power). Vibhuti carries a double meaning that fits the tradition better than the old name did — it is both the sacred ash left when fire has consumed all that can burn, and the manifestation of divine power made visible. That range — from the quiet diagnostic syllables to the apocalyptic unmaking workings — is what the discipline actually spans, so the name now reflects the whole of it rather than only its sound. The old "Śabda" term has been retired from the rules; the body of surviving fragments is still called the Primordial Lexicon, and the individual Bija syllables are unchanged.

This is a name change only — no mechanics, TNs, costs, or spell effects were touched. Every Vibhuti spell works exactly as it did. On the character sheet the discipline still shares the same skill row it always has; only the label you see has changed.

The Ki discipline was reviewed against the new Bypass Floor. The only spell below the line that ignored all Wound Mitigation was Karma — the retaliation working that redirects wounds you've taken back into an enemy. It now bypasses mundane Mitigation only; raw redirected suffering shears through ordinary armour, but magical wards still hold. Everything else in Ki was already correctly gated (the full-bypass workings all sit at TN 16+).

Four staple utility workings that the disciplines were simply missing have been added:

These are new player options — run them past the table. They use the same TN / save / casting-bonus conventions as everything else.

The proposed Essence rule now has a home on the sheet. The casting panel auto-computes your Essence pool — (vocation points + Discipline ÷ 3) × 2, the same figure that drives Max TN, doubled — with a +itm box for relic Essence (e.g. the Wellspring Pearl). A Used / Left tracker lets you count what you've spent in an encounter; Left shows what remains (Pool − Used, floored at zero). Essence remains an optional rule under group consideration.

Five relics were added to the Discipline Relics table, keyed to the new casting mechanics: a ring that raises your Max TN, a sigil that eases Overreach penalties, a pearl that grants and refreshes Essence, a cord that absorbs the first Overreach backlash each encounter, and a legendary relic that both raises Max TN and lets mid-tier spells bypass mundane Mitigation.

To keep play stable while the group decides on Essence, the sheet now comes in two flavours. The Ledger v2 is the default. The Ledger v3 is a proposed redesign with a cleaner, denser casting panel (a three-column stat grid and a grouped Essence block). Both carry the Essence tracker; pick whichever your table prefers. Your saved characters load in either.

A coverage pass turned up a few obvious holes — areas a tradition thematically owns but had no working for. Four more spells were added (verified absent first, designed to the usual conventions):

These are new player options — worth a look from the table.

Every mitigation- and bypass-touching relic in the hoard was checked against the new Bypass Floor. The result was clean — no violations. The collection already used the safe forms throughout (ignore N points, mundane-only bypass, or full bypass reserved for the top tiers). Two items were examined closely and left as designed: the Draught of the Open Gate (half-bypass for three turns, then Exhausted — partial and costed, so compliant) and The Sundering Edge (full bypass, but a Cursed item, where breaking the rules is the entire point).

The d100 master table was re-banded to make room for three categories the hoard lacked: Enchanted Ammunition (arrows, bolts, shot — from Keen Broadheads up to a once-only Artifact quarrel), Scrolls & One-Use Castings (single-use spells that cast at their TN without spending Essence or risking Overreach, then crumble; anyone may attempt one with a Willpower check), and Mounts & Companions (steeds and bound beasts, from a sure-footed mule to a bonded wyrmling). The roller handles all fourteen categories.

A gap was identified: weapons buffed melee or casting, never both, leaving the sword-and-spell fighter to choose. Two teaser hybrids were seeded — The Adept’s Edge (Uncommon, a Wizard’s arming sword: +1 To-Hit/wounds and +1 To-Cast) and The War-Sage’s Brand (Rare, any discipline: +1 To-Hit/wounds, +1 To-Cast, +1d10 to offensive spells, and once a battle a melee hit cheapens your next spell by an Action). Each is deliberately modest in either lane; the value is doing both at once, so neither outclasses a dedicated weapon or focus.

Armour was stacking too many penalties at once (to-hit, Agility, Awareness all piling on). Everything was eased and smoothed into a cleaner curve. Here's the full current table:

The biggest winners: Agility at the heavy end (chain/banded dropped from −2 to −1; plate from −3 to −2), and the to-hit penalties were trimmed across the board. Movement penalties were left alone.

Each Stunned condition strips 1 Action from your turn (2 Stuns = 2 fewer Actions, floored at 0). Enter your Stun count in the Tactical Conditions panel and the Ledger now drops your total Actions for you. Clear the Stuns and your Actions come right back. (The rulebook already described this — the sheet now enforces it.)

On the character sheet, "Wounds" → "Damage" and "W. Evil" → "D. Evil" for clarity. The math is unchanged — just clearer labels.

The advanced skill some of you were looking for wasn't lost — it existed under the name "Devout / Runepriest." It's been renamed to "Cleric / Crusader" everywhere. The mechanics are unchanged and already balanced for 100 XP: requires Devotion (3) + Light Soul (2), gives a +1 Wound Mitigation / +1 Healing passive, and the Crusader action (Cause Fear to Evil, add Light Soul to wounds vs Evil).

The −5 XP discount on your chosen Adaptable skill was silently disappearing when you saved and reloaded a character. It now persists correctly — including across different devices/browsers — and applies even before you open the racial-traits panel.

Vibhuti characters were showing the wrong Max TN (scaling only with Discipline, ignoring the vocation itself), especially on imported sheets. Root cause: the Vibhuti skill's points weren't being read into the casting math at all. Fixed — Vibhuti now scales exactly like the other disciplines, however the character was built.

The Max TN display was overflowing its box. It now sits on its own tidy row, clearly labeled, with its value and an item-bonus field.

We looked hard at whether melee/ranged to-hit bonuses are too generous. Verdict for now: they're in range. A mid-tier fighter's +5 to-hit only lands ~30% of the time against a peer's Defense, and Defense scales on the same engine, so it's largely self-correcting. The thing that makes hits feel big is the exploding natural-10 crits plus high wound output — not the accuracy itself. If "hits land too often on elites" keeps coming up, the most likely fix is making sure elite enemies carry high enough Defense (16–18), not nerfing every character's to-hit.