Almost ready for internal playtesting

Well, it's been a long time, and it took a lot of writing and rewriting some particularly stubborn sections and mechanics, but everything is finally starting to fall into place with Guild's Adventure. Soon I will be subjecting my tabletop group to playtesting, and I am very excited to share an updated version of the game after a couple sessions of that to make sure I didn't make something totally bogus.

I think the greatest challenge over the past two years (aside from some personal health trouble), has been adapting Blades in the Dark for a high magic fantasy genre with a much greater possibility space in terms of what characters can do. Magic, in particular, has been a major challenge to represent mechanically. What ultimately worked is modifying the action system to take a two-dimensional approach. In Guild's Adventure, characters will be defined not just by what they can do, but how they approach the things they do as well. This is a bit counter to some of the original intentions of Blades' action system, but I think it works well here.

Also changed, to a degree, is the voice of the text. In the first previews I relied a lot on referential humor and well, that was fun at the time, but things have shifted to something a little more earnest and from-the-heart. In a way, the vibes of my setting have rubbed off on me while I have been writing the book, haha.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to testing what I've got with my own group, then hopefully opening up public playtesting not too long after. If you're reading this and voiced interested in taking part of that process those years ago when I first announced the project: don't worry, I've still got you penned down in my notes. There's still a lot of work to be done. I don't have a ton down on campaign structure or guilds (crews) that quite work well with how the core part of the game is shaping up, but I hope what's there so far can still produce some great stories.