Changelog for Early Access 4

Hey all, Happy New Year! In the Year of the Tiger, let’s grab the bull by the horns with our jaws.

Firstly, apologies for the rapid update: I was planning to get this out later down the line, but decided to do it now before people started up their games again for the year.

This one is smaller changes, and mostly more narrative changes. These changes will make running the game 100% easier to do, so I hope you enjoy them. They are filled with flavor, and takes the place of “Beats”, which I feel have been a bit of bloat recently. 

Debt “Beats” have been moved to be part of the Debt Mechanic. Combat Beats have been moved into the Tactical Martial Arts section.

Finally, I’m working on an eventual SRD for the mechanics of this thing as I consolidate it. It’s main selling points are: Tactical Combat, Drama, Seasons, and Barter.

• Tactical Combat covers the tactical martial arts of the game.
• Drama covers the Conviction Tokens and Debt economy of the game.
• Seasons covers the new scaffolding for narrative circumstances.
• Barter covers the barter system I’ve here, which can very easily be changed.

The SRD is mostly hopefully going to be used to make your own games, but also to help homebrewers create their own islands, polities, cultures, Disciplines, and modules for Gubat Banwa. It is tentatively titled “Rejoicing in Gubat Banwa.” Though it is currently subject to change.

You now gain a Conviction Token when you...

• Let one of your Complications bring you into a horrible predicament.

Settlements and Season of Play

Settlements are exactly that: guides and rules to making settlements. There are now two possible play styles you can do: Settlement or Non-Settlement, the latter also being known as Wandering. Settlement play hones in the fact of what you do as a Kadungganan: fight for community and conviction. This is also accurate to how actual prehispanic PH warriors would’ve been like. A more usual adventuring story is covered by the Wandering playstyle. These are not mutual play styles: depending on the course of a campaign, they might oscillate in between.

Settlements have guides to the material cultures of the five main polities as well, which helps Umalagad picture places and sell it to players.

Season of Play is a new take on procedural style gameplay akin to Blades in the Dark and Lancer. The main difference is that there are Three Seasons: Farming Season (Where you do some work and interact with the world), Feasting Season (where you rest up, attend feasts, and get into trouble), and Trading and Raiding Season (when, after a harvest, you travel out in the name of duty or adventure to raid and trade and explore the world). 

Another main difference is that each Season has semi-specific times: Farming Seasons last for 7-ish months, Feasting Season is a month or so, a short amount of time, and then Trading and Raiding lasts for three to four months. This makes sense in the fiction of the setting: getting to places can take days, and venturing and such can take forever.

However, the larger amounts of time also allows people to pack in a few more actions within the Season. They can choose how quick or how long they interface with a particular season. Seasons can last from a single session or multiple. 

Most importantly, the Season of Play mechanic provides a scaffolding for both Umalagad and Kadungganan into grounding their actions into the temporality of the setting. Finding out what happens next in a different system such as this can be hard, so having the seasons as Guidelines hopefully provides enough of a scaffolding for people to be able to ride their narrative along.

Changes in Advancement

You now Prestige Up when you finish a Trading and Raiding Season. Esteem is gone.

New Anting-Anting

A slew of Anting-Anting that rounds out Anting-Anting options:

Blazing Deva Weapon
You wield a weapon that is lit aflame.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal fire damage instead.

Mountain King Weapon
You wield a weapon sharpened with earthly elementals.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal earth damage instead.

Gleaming Pureweapon
You wield a weapon that shines radiant, spotless.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal light damage instead.

Shark Fin Weapon
You wield a weapon of shark fin, imbued with the power of the sea.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal water damage instead.

Gale Galura Weapon
You wield a weapon with the feathers of the galura, winged eagle gods, that bestows a blessing of zephyr.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal wind damage instead.

Wounding Talisman
You a talisman that imbues you with amazing striking force.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal force damage instead.

Asuwang Blessing Weapon
You wield a weapon enchanted by asuwang witches, tasseled by pieces of the dark of the moon, silver, and teeth of wild dogs.
When you make a melee or ranged attack, you may deal dark damage instead.

Type Changes

Type Clarifications that you can only choose Type Abilities from your own Type.

Type Addition: Added the option “Choose an Ability from another Type” as a possible choice in the Type Abilities section for each Type, known as Versatility.

Type Balancing: Changed the Sly’s Steal ability to have the following text: Steal a Conviction Token from a Kadungganan. But you gain 3 Debt to that Kadungganan unless you return it at a later time. You can return any Conviction Token even if it isn’t the one you stole.

Rest Changes

Rest now works like this:

When you Rest...

• Heal all Mettle.

• Remove 1 Wound.

• Regain all charges of Charge X technicks.

• Regain the use of Exigent Technicks.

Combat Changes

For Combat, two things have been added to the base list of Actions and Flourishes to round out the base options, so that people can never feel like they’re wasting a turn, which sucks in a tactical game like this:

New Action: Anticipate. Maneuver. Gain Avoid until the start of your next turn. 

Devlog: This lets fight openers to not be a stalling game, and can encourage melee fighters to be a lot more aggressive, since they can spend an Action on a defensive option if they can’t reach anyone.

New Flourish: Shove. Maneuver. Make a melee attack, pushing an adjacent unit 1 space. You cannot push a unit larger than you. 

Devlog: Movement is important in this game. Shove has been a good way of rounding out your actions in a turn (forcing repositioning keeps movement volatile) and can even be used to “save” allies. This is a melee attack so it can be affected by things that affect melee attacks, such as Avoid and Steady.

Keyword Change: Scene > Exigent. A Technick with the Exigent Tag once used cannot be used again until you regain it on a Rest.

Keyword Change: Charge X. You can only use a Technick with this tag X times. You regain all charges when you Rest.

Discipline Tweaks

Heavenspear:

Teaching 2 Flurry is now Thunderbolt. This is mostly because of the addition of the Anticipate Action, which kind of makes Flurry redundant (despite being a Flourish).

Murderglave

Penitent Stance now has been tweaked a bit: All foes in close burst 2 to you gain Enmity to you, which cannot be overridden, and you gain Guarded. 

Swordfish Cavalier

Torrent now has the following text: If the target is an ally, then you may give them Avoid until the end of your next turn.

Sarimanok Knight

Rainbow Presence has “precise damage” turned into “+1 precision”.

2nd Teaching Skyshard now has the following effect: Leap 3 spaces, and then push all units adjacent to you at the end of the leap by 2 spaces. None must stay in your spaces. Then, gain Avoid until the end of your next turn.

Thanks all! I apologize again for the superspeed update. I wanted to wait for new art first but decided to get it out before anyone started games for this year. Thank you for your patience and effort, the changes I hope are worth it.