I hope those of you who celebrate the winter holidays had good ones. I’m assuming I did, as I write these from the distant past of “before I went on break”. But even though I am enjoying a little time off, I promised you weekly updates about Realms of Pugmire, and I don’t want to disappoint you.

Last week I said I’d cover what changed. And, well, it’s a lot, but it’s also not a lot. Let’s start with what was in the press release:

• Lots of refined and clarified rules, developed after years of playing and community feedback.
• New and updated tricks, spells, masterworks, and enemies.
• New features such as random and template character creation, friendship rules, and safety tool advice for Guides.
• Advice on how to create cat and rodent player characters right away and converting older materials to the new edition.

Refined and clarified rules: Pretty much the main reason to even do a new edition, right? Okay, maybe not, but certainly over the years I’ve discovered little errors, unclear rules, inconsistencies, and even retroactive issues as my thoughts on the world evolve. A lot of them have come from reading the community discussions, talking to players and translators, and running the game over and over at conventions and on streams. There was a half-step measure to address this in Buried Bones, which had a lengthy erratum, but in truth there are also things that aren’t obvious errors, but certainly stood out to me as things to improve, So I did.

New and updated tricks, spells, etc.: Again, some of this is obvious – if you update the rules, you need to update the abilities to match. It goes a bit deeper than that, though. For example, spells never took advantage of the opportunity to spend more spell slots to cast more powerful versions, and as a result a few spells felt just like more powerful versions of previous ones. Further, enemy math in the OGL SRD is, to be frank, kind of a mess, and I’ve never been entirely happy with how they scale, so I rebuilt all the math around them from the ground up.

New features: Safety tools are something that became popular right after I released the first edition. I (somewhat arrogantly) believed Pugmire didn’t need such because it wasn’t a horror game, but I’ve done a lot of research over the years, and I see the tremendous value they bring to games outside of the horror genre. I’ve also wanted to add more explicit rules for making friends (a big part of any dog’s life). Finally, I wanted to make character creation even faster, and I think templates and random creation can make that happen.

Cat and rodents right away: Yes, you can play cats and rodents with this rulebook. It won’t have all the material you need – I have plans for cat and rodent player’s guides to help with that – but if there’s one person who wants to play a cat in a group of dogs, you now have enough information to get something that feels right without needing a separate book.

Next week I’ll talk about some of the core rules changes, because I think they’re very exciting!