Hello! We're in the home stretch, so I wanted to share what I've been working on while the campaign pushes past the finish line.

This is fantastic! Thank you all so much for your support. I've got a good feeling about Sins of Our Mother.

One of my goals for Sins is to innovate on design layouts in D&D and other TTRPGs. To this end, I've been hard at work refining and iterating on layouts to present the information in the best possible light. Here's a Traitor Duchess stat page before and after:

The iteration on the right presents the information more clearly, and contains more information. The attacks, abilities, and stat block are all placed with accessibility in mind. There are still problems to shave out (look how cramped the flavor and body text are), but this new iteration solves many of the issues I set out to tackle.

I've taken the same approach to the classes. One of the prevalent notes I got was that Sins didn't feel like scripture, or a bible. If anything, it felt sci-fi. I've reworked the class layouts to make them more on theme and convey the information more clearly.

Layout's cool, but what about the actual game design?

Work has been going well! Euphoria and Sloth are in the beginning phase of development, but they're already shaping up to be really, really fun.

Here's a surprise piece of Euphoria art, the Mosquito Syringe! I love it.

I originally conceived of Vow of Beauty, Medusite, Flesh Singer, etc. as subclasses that would heavily modify existing D&D classes. I wanted them to feel like corrupted versions of the classic archetypes, but this idea did not survive playtesting as people would inevitably work in their favorite class abilities and wreck the game balance.

For example, people playing the Vow of Beauty would keep trying to cast Lay on Hands. I've decided to pivot to just full, independent classes while maintaining a few, key abilities. This gives us more design space to play with, and opens doors we deliberately closed to maintain the boundaries we'd set for ourselves.

The Vow of Beauty has seen some minor tweaks and I plan on improving some Flawless Executions, but right now I'm pretty happy with this class.

The Medusite may be low key my favorite in Sins, but its development has been a little difficult to nail down. Some abilities, like Voracious and Medusa's Wrath, were incredibly fun but over powered. I've taken her back into the shop for a rework, and things are promising.

We're keeping Inheritance Memories, but slightly retooling the other abilities.

The Flesh Singer went through a soft revision. Stress is gone. Instead, Bardic Inspiration and Hit Die are now one and the same. This ability actually lets you sing with your flesh and grow steadily in power as you level up. Pretty fun!

Furthermore, the Flesh Singer's abilities changed into spells to maintain the pure spell caster mechanics. While powerful, these abilities cost Bardic Inspiration die. This 'balance of power' between the Flesh Singer and their inspired creatures will see a lot of playtesting in a campaign, but so far its been fun in the one-off encounters.

The Lich's Star Race & Inquisitorial Tyranny are tied, so get in there and vote before it closes at noon on the 14th. The house wins in case of a tie!

Catacolyte will take a short break for the holidays, and then come back and lay some ground work. I'm going to quickly update the digital version of Cult of the Blood Queen with what I've learned about layouts working on Sins. This update won't be major, but it'll clean the document up and make everything more readable.

Then, it'll be back to work on Sins to push towards our October release date.