Rule Changes

Pre-campaign

• Starting XP reduced to 5 again after some streamlining of magic, science and income skills. If it proves underpowered, more XP will be awarded later.
• PCs can start Brushed With Element if they like.
• Mortal wounds no longer become non-mortal at the end of a linear.
• Gather Rumours as a default downtime action removed. This means all rumours are written to order, hopefully guaranteeing quality, and cutting down on admin before time in.
• Exotic Income merged with Personal Income. You may be offered an exotic income, but if one is not available, or you decline it, you'll get money. This is to cut down on admin before time in.
• Dissection moved to general skills to avoid science-side controlling all the resources. Dissectors can hack up non-humans for resources, but it takes dissector+surgeon to autopsy non-humans to learn things.
• Analyse Power changed to add extra Sense Magic uses instead of extra information from it, and renamed to Insightful Observer.
• Merged Intuition into Investigation, and made Investigation and Attune more clearly distinct by separating what targets they work on, rather than a nebulous "mundane" vs "elemental" information split.
• Attune now has base magnitude 0 to match Investigation.
• Investigators can now consume alchemicals to buff their result to match Attune.
• Smuggling made slightly better and merged with Appraise and Spot and named Tricks of the Trade.
• Inspire renamed to Hearts and Minds and emotion effects cut down to a set designed to promote action, rather than being sad in a corner. Clarified that Hearts and Minds works on animals.
• Buffed Preparation to prepare two skills.
• Iron Will buffed to resist emotion effects infinitely to match Hearts and Minds.
• Leadership renamed to Inspire, and its main ability buffed from once-per-day to once-per-day-per-target to match rituals.
• Several rituals made cheaper.
• Empower nerfed for rogues. Added +1 Hit option to Empower so rogues with Quick Wits can still benefit from the ritual.
• Added ability to converse with animals to Attune.
• Made it so repelling someone away from a ritual area doesn't stop them contributing to the ritual, and then retired the Focused Thaumaturge skill.
• Made Graft depend on Surgery again.

Post-playtest

• Starting skills increased to 7.
• REPEL duration reduced from 5s to 3s.
• WEAKEN duration increased from 5s to 10s.
• Merged Ambidex, Buckler and Two-handed in to one Melee Training skill to give fighters more flexibility. Also makes Shield+Polearm 1 skill cheaper.
• Restricted thrown weapons to a carry limit, for balance and to limit the advantage OC expense can have for a thrown-using character.
• Invoker: Added Chain Shock because invokers were light on toys.
• Invoker: Restorative nerfed from CURE 5 to CURE 4.
• Invokers benefit from armour slightly less than other combat schools to make self-healing armoured invokers less tanky.
• Rogue: Thrown Training no longer free.
• Rogue: Dirty Trick ranged STUN changed to thrown STUN and renamed to Weapon Precision.
• Rogue: Survival removed; similar functionality still available through other means.
• Rogue: Combat Awareness buffed from "use wits to dodge" to "once per encounter dodge, and use wits to recharge it". This is to make it so rogues can actually use their abilities against invokers and ranged rogues rather than the best tactic being to hold them back to keep dodge available. Split in to 2 skills (Danger Sense and Awareness) to compensate for the buff (it was already the strongest defensive skill pre-buff).
• Rogue: Alchemical Efficiency moved to general skills because rogues now had too many toys.
• Warrior: Resolve instant heal reduced from CURE 5 to CURE 3.
• Warrior: Implacable buffed to mitigate CRUSH to TRIPLE instead of TRIPLE STUN.

Pre-playtest

• Generalised MINOR and MAJOR modifiers in to a single EPIC modifier that can apply to anything.
• Rogue: Added Alchemical Efficiency to buff "healer" rogue.
• Invoker: Field Medic removed; still available under Surgery.
• Influence campaigns moved from Connections to Negotiator, which were then renamed to Contacts and Smooth Talker respectively.