It's a Christmas miracle! The Dark Matter Ships chapter has come early! Praise be to Space Santa and his merciless army of reindeer-bots!
This month, we're showing off the entirety of the Ships chapter, which includes new rules for building your own ship, revised and streamlined ship combat mechanics, and Mechs!
This chapter only ended up being 12 pages longer, but I could go on at length about the improvements (and did in a recently livestream on the Discord!) Here're some takeaways:
Creating a Ship. The book now includes rules for building your own ship! This comes with a bunch of cool d100 tables to help you flesh out your ideas (and to give you permission to get wild with your ship concepts), and a giant table that scales your ship's statistics so it remains relevant until level 20.
Ship Design. Across the board, you'll see big changes that feel like they were always in this chapter. For example: there's new ranged and melee ship weapons that let Strength-based characters participate better in combat. And each Crew Role is associated with a system, so you can easily add another Gunner Bay for another player to be in the Gunner role at the same time.
Improved Crew Roles. We've reworked the Crew Roles to make sure that everyone playing in ship combat has a blast. The Engineer can repair the ship and use ship systems in combat, the Pilot can fire, and the Captain can regenerate the ship's shields.
Ship Combat. There are a lot of changes to ship combat, but mostly they're substantially easier to skim, read, and learn. The prior version was riddled with "gotcha" rules that were buried in a paragraph somewhere. Now, every important rule is in a friendly header, so you can remember how things work on the fly.
Mecha. The rules for Battleframes went from a single page to an entire sub-chapter with scaling statblocks for mech suits, with custom weapons and upgrades suitable for an entire campaign of Battleframe action.
I hope you enjoy and find time to read this next to a cozy fire this holiday season!