Changes Post Chaosium Con 2025

Changes I'm working on for 'Of Hearth & the Harrowing' post Chaosium Con 2025 playtests:

• Tightening the skill list, some never used

• Powers: People love them. Make more

• Fix rules around health/hope/powers

• Skill points pools/chunks

• Heroes in Hearth phase

Less Skills: The skill list is too large, and a lot of those skills were never used. When I tightened the list post con, only one or two minor changes needed to be made to the pregens. That tells me this is going in the right direction. BRP has LOTS of skills, but you only need to keep in what your game needs. This directly impacts a lot of systems downstream, but I really think it is the right thing for the game.

More Powers: Powers were a hit. But people wanted more of them. Outside of certain situations there were times people in combat were swinging the same weapon over and over. More powers will help with this. Of course they could also be aiding friends, and other things, but still, more powers is good for variety of actions and various situations.

Health/hope/powers: The old rules said that using health instead of hope to trigger powers (power points) cost a possible increase to corruption, that is gone, health is not able to be used for powers. Damage taken this way is strain, and comes back at a point per hour of rest (like hope). More powers=need points

Skill Chunks: Skill acquisition in character generation in base BRP is through large pools of points, it is real fiddly. More modern BRP based games often use chunks of points instead, its so much faster to make a character this way. Pools will be in a sidebar as an option for the min-maxer in your life you want to cater to. For the rest of us, chunks make character generation faster and easier.

Heroes in the Hearth Phase: Heroes can now augment villagers (assuming they were around for the week to help) during the Hearth phase. This keeps them the center of attention, lets them roll something each Hearth phase, and if they fail they still get a villager's worth of effort. If they succeed it doubles. Discovering this was a key win for the convention for me.