Hey everyone!

It's barely been two weeks since the last update, so I won't include too many details about exact progress metrics in this update (not a ton has changed there - progress continues apace), but I do have some exciting stuff to share and an important question for you all (poll at the end of the update).

First up: In between monster design over the last couple of weeks, I took some time to flesh out the Ritual Overcharge System a bit more. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted it to actually be a system, as it were. Rather than adding complexity on top of the existing ritual enchanting rules, it seemed best to make it a simple extension. Here's how it works:

When you prepare a ritual, you can also prepare for it to be an Overcharged Ritual. Doing this the first time doesn't add any cost - every character can basically get one done for free. Every time you try to add an Overcharge Effect to a ritual being applied to a character after that, the cost of the ritual increases by 10% per effect they already have and you have to succeed on an extra Ritual check to successfully apply the ritual. So you eventually hit a sort of soft limit of what's actually possible. If you ever want to remove an overcharge effect, you can do that as part of applying a new one.

At first, I wanted to make a table of overcharge effects that could be generically applied to boons and charms in the book. However, the more I tried to do this, the less possible it felt. Instead, I've opted to create a single effect for each of the 300 boons and charms, some of which scale with the boon or charm's rarity for those with rarity variants (which is quite a few of them). I'll also have a guidance note for making your own (essentially, you want the power gained to be about on par with the drawback applied by the effect).

That brings us to my question for you! With the additions I've been making to the boons and charms - adding overcharge effects and, in many cases, one or two rarity variants for when the boon/charm is crafted using components from a more or less powerful version of a monster, the boons and charms are taking up a lot more space in the book!

With how much space the added stat blocks and expansion of the boons and charms are taking up in the book, it's become necessary to find ways to reduce space (while still trying to maintain quality of life in using the book). One improvement to space is probably going to be that the Recipe section you see in the above layout (and that I had in the preview sample) is going to go away, being replaced with just a listed component. All of the other information in the Recipe is fully redundant with the information in the tables in Chapter 1 (rules for ritual enchantment), and with the addition of the rarity variants it's less useful to provide the information for just one of the rarities. While I'd love to keep it as a potential quality of life bonus (saves you from looking up most of the information in the tables all the time), the amount of redundant information across all the boons means it ends up being a lot of wasted space. 12-1500 lines translates to quite a few pages!

Another improvement - to both space and quality of life, I think - is to move the boons and charms to their own chapters, separate from the monsters. Not only does this take better advantage of space in layout, but it also gives the book separated "player" and "GM" sections, allowing GMs to let their players flip through the "menu" of boon and charm options without revealing all of the monsters' secrets to them (although the boons and charms are similar to abilities the monsters possess, so would still have some spoilers). Like the monsters, and similarly to the first book, boons and charms will be organized by entity type (so split into sections based on whether they're of aberrant, celestial, fey, primal, or unholy origin).

Of course, this leads to an important question: Within those sections, should they simply be organized alphabetically (probably with a subsection for boons and another for charms within each entity type) or should they remain linked to the monsters they're crafted from (in which case they'd remain grouped like they are now, just not with the monsters)? I lean towards alphabetical (the monster's name will still be in the component listed for enchanting the boon/charm after all), but I wanted to hear from you to see if I'm totally off on that before making a unilateral decision there. Let me know what you think by voting in the poll below! If it ends up being alphabetical, I might include a list of rituals that can be conducted under the harvestable components tables for each monster section to help people find them after defeating a monster.

- Josh

Hey everyone!

Back with a regular progress update today. Nothing super special to share other than that progress proceeds apace.

The freelance writers I've been working with have been hard at work making some really fantastic creatures that I've been very excited to design. 98% of monsters have now been named, with probably 95% of those being lore-complete (or very close. I still have some a final edit pass to make on a number of them). 66% of all monsters also have at least 1 stat block done, and 139 total stat blocks have been written so far (the final number will be slightly over 300). Here's what the current spread of CRs in the book is looking like:

I'll be aiming to even out the lower end a bit more as it seems I've subconsciously preferred certain CRs as I've worked through the first half of these creatures, although there's some small amount of skew from certain groups like Mephit Swarms (which are going to have multiple sets of stat blocks - 3 stat blocks for 3 types of swarms this case), so you'll likely see counts for <1, 1, 4, 5, 8, 11 increasing to better fill out the curve.

23% of illustrations are complete (meaning I've sent final payment), but another 12% are very close to done and another 12 should be going out for commission this week. Overall progress has been a little slower than I'd hoped, but the quality is fantastic and I'm willing to let the process take a little longer to make sure the book looks as good as it can in the end!

Overall, I think we're still on track for a December PDF release, depending on how long editing and layout end up taking. My expectation is that balance checks on monsters can begin in the near future, somewhat in parallel with me finishing up the remaining 50-ish stat blocks, but since I'm at the heart of every process anything that requires my feedback does slow down the rate at which I can work through the stat blocks.

VTT conversions and physical production can only really get started after the PDF is fully complete, so getting everything to the point where I no longer have design work to do will be my top focus for the next month or two.

Once I have a bit more art to share, I'll be putting together a list of my favorite creatures that I think would be a good fit for turning into miniatures, and then we'll put it to a vote to pick out our extra unlocked minis (probably sometime around next month's update, maybe a little after).

Thanks as always for your support!
- Josh