Hello and happy May! Version 0.35 is here.

Version 0.35 is primarily aimed at trying to make the text more consistent and more comprehensible. FATHOM has undergone a lot of changes (even before it was first put out into the world) and there were still a lot of fossils and artifacts buried in the text. While they're not all unearthed just yet, this update makes a decent stab at it.

It also features a big new tool for playing FATHOM: a new set of player spreadsheets made by Coffee Johnson which have all of the text for each drifter playbook available in them. These spreadsheets are absolutely phenomenal, and we couldn't be happier with the incredible job that Coffee did putting them together. We hope you'll get a lot of good use out of them as we continue to update and support them.

Included in 0.35 is:

• Terminology Changes
  • The game no longer makes mention of "clocks" or "ticking a clock" to make progress. Because of FATHOM's hybrid-DNA of Forged in the Dark and Sparked by the Resistance, we've wrestled with where stuff should behave more like clocks and where stuff should be have more like Resistances/problems. We've finally narrowed down the use-cases for clocks and converted them into problems so that there's not mixed terminology being used. In instances where you would've "ticked a clock", you'll instead "mark 1 progress" to a problem. Hopefully this makes for an easier reading experience.
  • Instances of "Once per job" have been revised to "Once per session." There was an inconsistency across the abilities that didn't have a rhyme or reason, and so we've revised these to "once per session" in order to favor a higher rate of player shenanigans. This means that if a job stretched across multiple play sessions, you can use an ability over again; it also means you can use a drifter ability during downtime, although dropping to a lower fathom when you're on your own is implicitly Dangerous!
  • There were a few other leftover pieces of terminology which no longer applied (like "tier" for companies) which have been corrected or removed.
• New Crew Playbook: The Freaks!
• Inspired by the secret lives of weirdos in the real world like What We Do in Shadows, Being Human, and Third Rock from the Sun, the Freaks are a group of drifters bound together by a shared secret, isolated from the rest of the City by who they are, what they know, and what they're capable of.
• The Velveteen: Stranger in a Strange Land
  • We've rebalanced this move to make it less powerful, in light of how FATHOM calculates stress and checks for fallout. Now this move can both add OR take away Weird stress, keeping you hovering right around the dangerous threshold of 6.
    
• The Media: Core Ability - Reputation is Everything
  • Added a mechanical benefit to trading rumors with the GM
• The Returned: Major Ability Upgrade - Signs / Prognostication
  • Reworked the wording on this ability and added a mechanical benefit.
• The Velveteen: Major Ability Upgrade - Breakthrough / Moment of Clarity
  • New upgrade to replace "Here it is, your moment of Zen," which was previously designed to turn a once-per-job ability into a once-per-session ability. Since that's now the default, this new upgrade instead just gets you more benefits when you roll successfully.