After a long time in development, version 0.3 is here. Thank you for your patience!

Version 0.3 has a lot of new content, changes, and some substantial (but still very in-progress) changes to the book's layout. Let's take a look at what's included.

• New rules for Fallout, Scars, and Abandon
  • We have simplified Fallout down to a single base category. There's no longer Minor or Major or Critical Fallout, and Fallout doesn't escalate up or down within categories. It's simply a thing that can happen to you, which has longterm consequences.
  • We did this because it's 1) easier to keep track of, and 2) easier to generate. It's a lot simpler to come up with a cool idea for a Fallout without having to consider "okay but is that really Minor fallout or is that more like Major. Hmmmm." Now, you can simply award Fallout when it happens (using the guidelines in the book, if you need help) and carry on.
  • You can now take 3 Fallouts by default without having to worry about it. When you take a fourth Fallout, you'll take a Scar. That Scar is informed by one of your four Fallouts! The player chooses one of the four Fallouts (either the new one the GM is about to award, or one of their existing ones) and turns it into a Scar. That Fallout is now gone, but it's left a mark on the drifter going forward.
  • Gone is the Abandon clock - we now simply just count the number of new Scars you get. When you hit 7 Scars (counting the 3 your drifter starts with!), then you're forced to Abandon this life.
• Zenith Abilities
  • Zenith abilities are a super-ability that you can take that spells the end of your character, one way or the other. They often involve a culmination of the power, insight, and influence you've managed to accumulate for yourself in the UnReal, and all of them involve changing yourself - and often, the City - forever. But you can't fast-forward to the finish: each Zenith move has pre-requisites that you have to fulfill in order to unlock them.
  • Each playbook now has three Zenith abilities for you to choose from.
• Jobs
  • There's now two Jobs in the book which you can run as one-shots, use as part of a campaign, or simply use as inspiration for your own Jobs!
  • The first, Deadheads at the Body Shop, has a gang of supernaturally Doom-addicted bikers terrorizing a local tattoo parlor. But who put them up to it, and why?
  • The second, Forecast and the Futurist, has the drifters racing against the clock to find some leftover prophetic(?) zines from a fringe artist's hidden studio - before the authorities get there first.
• New Job Guidance
  • There's a big new section on how to come up with your own Jobs - how long they should be, how to frame a situation, and how to reward players with Valuables and Fallout.
• New Echoes Guidance
  • There's also a section in the GM Guide that talks about Echoes - the sense that something is weird or off while drifters are in the Real - and how to reflect that in-game.
• New Anchors
  • We've wound up generating a bunch of new anchors that you can use.
• Revised rules for The Grind
  • We've decided to make the Grind - your character's Real background and mode of living - explicitly something you build from scratch, rather than something you would either pick from a list OR build from scratch. This is both easier and more fun. The pre-existing Grinds are still in the book as examples.
• The Expert: Major Ability - Master at Arms.
  • Every playbook has five major abilities to unlock. The Expert inexplicably had one missing from the text of the game ever since FATHOM was first published. It's now properly included with the game.
• The Exorcist: Downtime Activity - Silver Bullet
  • Compared to the other playbooks, the Exorcist's previous downtime ability - Stay Sharp - was feeling a bit mediocre. We've revised and expanded the ability to make the class feel a bit more like a D&D hunter, with a knowledge and understanding of particular enemies in the UnReal. The Exorcist can use their new activity, SILVER BULLET, to improve their equipment against those foes - or the equipment of their fellow drifters. They can also study new foes in the UnReal wilderness and figure out how best to eliminate them!
• New Downtime Ability: Create an Anchor
  • Creating a new anchor has always been implicitly something you could do when you Work on a Problem, but we've made it its own activity for ease of understanding. It has some guidelines on how challenging (or not) it might be to make a new anchor with something Real.
• New Sidebar: Domains
  • Domains are something that folks have had mixed understandings of, when they playtest - we've added a sidebar in the domains section at the very front of the book to explain in really clear terms how to figure out which domain you should be using. 
• New Crews Guidelines - Assigning Haunts
  
  • We've made it explicit how Haunts should get seeded into the game when you first begin playing.
• Lots of fixes and changes to text to fix typos, clarify rules, and make terminology more consistent.

We're really proud of all of these changes, and we hope you'll enjoy them, too. Please let us know what you think, or if you have questions about how something should be used in your game.

What's up next? Here's what you can expect from FATHOM in the near future:

• Continued work on the layout. You might notice a fair bit of awkward whitespace in the book right now. It will improve in the next few passes. 
• Continuing to try and streamline rules. In particular, we're slowly chipping away at "clocks" and turning everything into problems.
• New player spreadsheets coming soon, to help facilitate play online!