Logistics Updates

• Many of the Venomous Oil alchemy cards handed out at the past Confluence listed their duration as 60 seconds. This is incorrect, it should be 60 minutes. Please bring any such cards you have to Wheelhouse at the start of the next Confluence to exchange them for a corrected card.
• New enchanted item cards with sufficient space on them will now have descriptions of the Calls or Spells that the item grants.
• The “charges” language on enchanted item cards has been changed to “Confluences remaining” for clarity. If you have a magic item and it lists “4 Charges” near the top, that means that it was good for 4 Confluences, including the one during which you picked it up!
• If you own a Tower, you will no longer receive a token in your packet granting that Enterprise’s Research Action that you can trade to others. Instead, it will be up to you to come up to Wheelhouse and make the request in person, or send in the request via email during/after the event. Research Action tokens will still be available as quest rewards, but the logistics of ensuring that every Tower-owner’s Research Action has actually been used has made using cards for those Enterprise actions untenable going forward.
• The Altarian Elixir, from the Warborne Alchemicals formulae list, has been renamed Altorii’s Pride, due to allegations of trademark infringement by the Altarian Assembly. Please update your formulae books accordingly. (To clarify, this is a joke, we just wanted to disambiguate the two uses of “Altarian” so that there wasn’t any confusion between them.)

Mechanical Changes

Congregation Revamp

• We have added the point at which Congregations’ worship actions go off onto the Strategy Layer round progression list, immediately before Cultist Cells spawn. This will still require the owners of Congregations to either send their flock to tend to already-destabilized Regions or accurately predict where the cultists will attack during the current Round.
• Stability now automatically recovers by +2 during the Recovery Phase of each Round in Regions that have not suffered any damage to their Security, Economy, or Stability that Round.
• Congregations no longer gain additional Worship Actions at Level 15 or Level 20. The benefit of a higher-level Congregation now lies in increased income and how your single Worship Action now grants much better Level-based scaling to help restore Stability on the Strategy Layer.
• The Worship Actions that a Congregation can use during Downtime have been changed, with additional Level-based Stability repair and the ability to gain a Caravan Rumor when performing a Mission.
• New Worship Actions

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Please note that the Stability numbers listed here are dependent on a player count of less than ~50. Should the number of PCs regularly attending games exceed that amount, the GM team reserves the right to modify these numbers to keep Congregations from utterly trivializing Stability damage dealt by the cultist forces.

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Poultices Changes

• The time required to apply a Poultice has been reduced to 3 seconds, down from 15 seconds.
• The reduced-time-to-apply-a-Poultice ability granted by the Grandmaster Apothecary ability has been changed to instead grant increased efficiency when crafting large batches of a single type of Poultice.

Limitations On Envoy Assistance

• The rules on what Envoys are allowed to mechanically assist PCs with during the game have been codified:
  • Envoys will not craft any Alchemical items for the PCs.
  • Envoys will charge 50 Scales for their time and effort to assist with a ritual.
  • Envoys will charge 100 Scales for their time and effort to lead a ritual.
  • Envoys will charge 50 Scales for the crafting of an enchanted item, in addition to whatever the resources needed to craft the item. The price goes up to 100 Scales if the item is a Master-level formula. These prices apply whether the crafting is being done overnight or during downtime, and apply for each item being crafted.
• These rules are subject to change if we notice PCs are relying too heavily on Envoys to get things done, but should hopefully result in less confusion over what Envoys are actually allowed to do to help the PCs during the game.

Strategy Layer Restrictions On GM Actions

• One issue that we’ve run into while handling the backend of the Strategy Layer is that there are limits on how well we can separate what the armies would know and what we as game-runners know. As such, we want to make explicit one of the rules we’ve been acting under while maneuvering the military forces for the nations whose PCs didn’t send us any orders:
  • The GM team will never have a nation’s military forces perform the Glean or Scout actions without PC orders.
• We believe that it’s unfair for us to even have a possibility of using our insider knowledge of where the Infiltrated cultist cells are located for one nation’s benefit over another’s, and that it’s similarly unfair for us to use Glean to give one nation a boost of resources when we don’t do the same for another nation. As such, we won’t be using either action unless a PC orders us to do so.

Noncom Changes

• The rules for how Noncoms can be “struck” by an enemy have been modified. Instead of calling “Dead!” an attacker must call out a series of “Strike One! Strike Two! Strike Three!” etc. calls, with each Strike call dealing 1 damage to the noncom player as if the attacker had hit them with a weapon.
• The rule for applying normal combat calls to a Noncom player has also been modified, removing the requirement of touching the player with a weapon to apply the call; instead, the attacker can simply make the call verbally as part of the Strike sequence to apply it to the Noncom. Under no circumstances should an attacker ever touch a Noncom with their weapon.
• New Noncom Rules Wording (open the toggle to read)

Battlefield Ritual Changes

• A line of text has been added to the battlefield restoration rituals (Song Of The Archival Font, Ancient Skald’s Uplifting Verse, Four Seasons Of Renewal, Circle of Healing, Circle of Restoration, Circle of Reconstruction, Circle of Cleansing):
  • Performing this ritual does not count against your Ritual Fatigue limit for the day.
• Song Of The Archival Font and Ancient Skald’s Uplifting Verse have had an additional line of text added to them:
  • You can perform this ritual without a ritual site or area of holy ground.
• The intention of these changes is to give ritualists more to do during a battle, provided that they can find somewhere safe to set up and start healing people.

Maimed Leg Modifications

• Replaced the third paragraph of the Maimed condition’s text with:
  • If your leg is Maimed, you must stay standing and keep that foot planted on the ground without moving it (similar to the Rooted condition). You cannot walk or run on that leg unless there is a real-world safety situation that requires you to reposition.
• This change (requiring Maimed legs to be played out as if you were Rooted until the leg is Restored, instead of going down on one knee) is being made to help disambiguate between when a character is Bleeding Out (and thus kneeling/lying on the ground) and when they are “only” Maimed.
• If your leg gets Maimed, remember to scream and let your allies know about it! Because you are still standing up, Healers won’t always know that you’re Maimed and in need of help.

Crushing Blow & Hammer Changes

• The Crushing Blow technique and Crush call have been modified to give a small mechanical bonus to wielding a hammer rather than a sword or polearm. Specifically, one-handed hammers can now use Crushing Blow for 2 Valor, and two-handed hammers can now use it for 1 Valor. All other non-thrusting Heavy Weapons can still use it for 2 Valor.
• The new Crushing Blow text reads as follows:

<aside> 🔨

You use a weapon to knock down a foe. When you strike an enemy’s body or shield (but not their weapon) with a suitable weapon, you can spend either 1 or 2 Valor Points depending on the weapon you are wielding and call out Crush to knock them down as per that call’s effect.

You can only use this Technique with a Medium Weapon in the form of a hammer or a Heavy Weapon. It costs 1 Valor to use this Technique with a Heavy Weapon in the form of a hammer, and 2 Valor to use it with all other weapons.

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• We will be keeping a careful eye on how this new change impacts combat, and it is subject to change should it prove too effective at changing the weapon meta.

Bands Updates

• The rule requiring that all members of a Band belong to the same nation has been removed. We may revisit this change in the future should player count rise above a certain threshold (roughly 100 by our guess).
• The Song Of Many Tongues Standard has been revised to reflect this change. It now rewards the leader of the Band and whichever Band-member is wielding it if the Band has many different nations represented within it, instead of simply allowing PCs from different nations to join the Band.