Major Update: Tales by the Fire is out now!

Hello mercenaries,

The Tales by the Fire update is now live! This major update features many changes that improve upon all aspects of dungeon exploration, and adds a brand new class to the game: the Balladeer.

We'd like to thank everyone for their support and patience, with a big thanks to those that played on the test branch, gave us feedback, and submitted bugs!

• Balladeer Class: The 8th class in the game fills the role of a pure support character by buffing allies and debuffing enemies
  
• Character Job System: You can now unlock various jobs and assign them to the characters in your company. Each job has unique bonuses that assist your party during dungeon exploration.
  
• Dungeon Navigation: Dungeon navigation has been reworked, with the layout now fully visible from the start. Tiles that have events are marked as such, but the identity of the events (aside from boss locations) are not revealed until you move to or scout the tile (or encounter an event that reveals some to you). The layouts are also now more structured and promote finding a balance between risk vs reward. There is now a linear 'Main Path' that leads to your objective, which can be completed quickly without incurring any new Dungeon Modifiers (usually!). Other than enemies and quest events, this path carries little in the way of extra risk, but also contains fewer rewards. The side paths that branch off the main path are riskier to explore, but also have the most rewarding events to discover.
  
• Dungeon Modifiers: All dungeons now start with 1 Positive and 1 Negative Modifier which is displayed in the party select screen. It's important to pick classes and jobs which best suit the modifiers at play! Players will now accrue less dungeon modifiers via the passage of time (max of 2, anything beyond that will just be Morale penalties), but the ones that are applied will be more potent. We've removed many of the old trivial modifiers, added a few new ones, and tweaked a few existing ones.
  
• Dungeon Events: We've introduced a number of new event types to make dungeon exploration more interesting. We've also reworked many of our old events to better synergize with the new job system. Most events can now be revisited if you did not complete it the first time (so you can choose to hold off on interacting with a Shrine, and still come back to it later if you wanted to).
  

[h2]Additions[/h2]

• Added the Balladeer class
  
• Added 5 Lutes to the gear pool, only usable by the Balladeer
  
• Added 9 character jobs to unlock (through 'Knowledge' events in dungeons): Tracker, Miner, Field Medic, Scholar, Picklock, Pathfinder, Survivalist, Theologian, Scavenger. Each has 2 unique bonuses that will help you be more efficient at navigating dungeons
  
• Added 26 new Dungeon Modifiers, with 1 positive and 1 negative effect being applied at the start of each dungeon (visible from the party select screen)
  
• Added new 9 new dungeon event types:
  
  1. Unknown: A custom event that can be anything from harmful to beneficial. You won't know what lies in store for you until you interact with them.
     
  2. Fortified Area: A tile marked as fortified will allow you to set up camp without the possibility of being attacked by enemies.
     
  3. Knowledge: These events grant XP to your party. They come in the form of journals, tomes that unlock Jobs, and maps that lead to legendary items (coming in a future update!)
     
  4. Map Fragment: Reveals the identity of 2 random unexplored events in the dungeon
     
  5. Shrines: There are 18 different shrines to interact with, allowing you to sacrifice something (Health, Coin, or a new provision called an Idol) to receive a blessing from the Gods in return. If you have a Theologian in your group, they will be able to identify which God the shrine is dedicated to, and what effect you can expect to receive prior to making a sacrifice. If your sacrifice is accepted, you can choose 1 of 3 effects to receive (1 from the shrine in question, and 2 randomly selected ones)
     
  6. Runes: Rune events allow you to choose one character to receive an effect (which is unknown unless you have a Scholar in your party). Runes can grant various things such as levels, attribute points, or even traits.
     
  7. Tracks: Tracks will spawn at various points in the dungeon, and can be interacted with in order to reveal the location of the nearest enemy (at the expense of Time).
     
  8. Mining: Mining events give you a chance to extract some precious resources. Having a Miner in your party will make the process quicker and less dangerous
     
  9. Void Breach: You'll sometimes come across a Void Breach, especially when they've been reported in the county. You can enter combat and try to close the breach, or leave it be and find another route.
• Added a new 'Idol' provision that you can purchase when entering a dungeon (used for interacting with Shrine events, though you're not required to have one)
  
• When a dungeon event is revealed (from anything other than scouting), the tile will briefly flash to let you know which ones were revealed
  
• Every city now specializes in gear and recruit availability. Those specialties have a higher chance to appear there. This information is displayed in the city entrance window.
  
• Added two new company upgrades: Retraining (for reducing costs of resetting Attribute and Ability points) and Training Dummies (to increase rate of XP gain)
  
• Added information to the dungeon exploration UI which displays the number of battles completed, tiles explored, coin on hand (used for interacting with various events), and whether or not you've obtained the dungeon key
  
• Fully exploring a dungeon will give your party bonus XP and generate a map which can then be sold at the market. The sell price increases based on the dungeon's difficulty.
  
• When looting an item in the dialogue window, you can now mouseover the highlighted name to see the item's tooltip
  

[h2]Changes[/h2]

• Reworked the visuals and mechanics of dungeon exploration. The layout is now immediately visible, but the identities of the dungeon events remain hidden until scouted or otherwise revealed
  
• Moving to a new tile in dungeons now costs 2 Time, while moving to a previously explored tile costs 1 Time.
  
• The dungeon scout mechanic has been tweaked to reveal a single unidentified event of your
  
• choosing within a range of 1 tile (regardless of whether there is a connecting path)
  
• The 'Scouting Distance' company upgrade will increase your scout range radius to 2 and 3 with each tier.
  
• The Time threshold for accruing new dungeon modifiers has been increased to 50 on the default difficulty (up from 16).
  
• Removed some old Dungeon Modifiers (that are applied via Time) that were fairly trivial. We rebalanced some others and added a few new ones which pose more of a challenge
  
• The UI icons for dungeon modifiers have been condensed into 2 icons, one for Positive effects, and one for Negative. Mousing over the icon shows a tooltip for all the Dungeon Modifiers currently in effect
  
• With the changes to dungeons we had to make a few tweaks to the way Fatigue was calculated. Overall, character's will now accrue less Fatigue than they would previously from a dungeon or overworld encounter
  
• Reduced the number of traits a character spawns with. They now get 1 personality trait, and 2 combat/physical traits. We felt the previous number was too high and made characters feel less unique as they often shared one or more traits with other members of your company.
  
• Made some changes to the Morale mechanic so it now has an effect on combat: If a character has 75+ Morale, the duration of negative conditions applied to them will be reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 1 Round). If characters have 25 Morale or less, there is a chance (it's a dice roll which takes into account their current Morale) on their turn that they will delay their turn until the end of the round. Once their turn comes up again, if their Morale is still below 25, another roll will determine whether they skip their turn entirely for that round.
  
• Updated various Tutorial popups and added a few new ones for the new mechanics in the game
  
• Rebalanced the costs and effects of various Incenses
  
• Added three new Incenses: Prayer (reveal Shrine events and restore Morale), Recharge (reduce Health but restore all ability charges), Illuminate (gain extra scouts)
  
• The default number of provisions you can bring into a dungeon is now 4. The 'Satchel Size' upgrades (for increasing the amount) has been adjusted to 2,3,4 from 2,4,6
  
• When entering a dungeon, you now need to select how much coin you want to bring with you (instead of having access to your entire stash of gold). There are only a few events at the moment which use coin, but that number will be going up in the future as we add more 'Unknown' events. Keep in mind, that if you die or choose to abandon a dungeon mid-combat, your coin on hand will be lost.
  
• The tables for Loot events have been reworked, and it's now possible to get a variety of things (based off a dice roll, the difficulty of the dungeon, and a few other factors), Enchantments and Gear being the most rare.
  
• Trap events have been split up into Hazards and Traps. There are now 3 different trap variants that each do different amounts of damage (the more dangerous ones don't show up until later difficulties)
  
• Added some Renown Level restrictions to the 'Tents' company upgrade as a safeguard against new players expanding their company too quickly and running out of coin
  
• Added two new difficulty settings and tweaked the values of existing settings. If you have previously played the game and enjoyed the difficulty you were on, you should move up one difficulty level from where you were playing (eg. If you played on Battle-Hardened, you should now play on Warlord). Battle-Hardened remains the "default" difficulty, and is now slightly easier than it used to be.
  
• Added a few more values to the dropdown when choosing custom difficulty settings (eventually it'll all be converted into sliders)
  
• Added a way to toggle aging penalties on or off when starting a new campaign. It is enabled by default, but we know not everyone likes having their characters retire, and this feature has been requested for a while. If you want to apply this to an existing save, you can open up the console (~) and use the debug command agingEnabled 0 to disable it. If you haven't enabled debug commands before, you'll need to head to C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Curious Panda Games\The Iron Oath and open up the Options.json file. In there, look for the DebugEnabled value, and change it from False to True.
  
• Greatly increased the expiry timers for all campaign missions. In the future we will be adding a toggle when starting a new game to select whether you want it to expire or not
  
• Slightly expanded the height of the event dialogue panel
  
• Adjusted the values of various world events that affect the quantity and quality of recruits and items showing up in cities, such as Tournaments and Thriving Trade events.
  
• The quantity of items available in the Marketplace is now based off the city's size (before factoring in modifiers from world events), so capital cities will have more items available than smaller cities by default.
  
• Targets with the Sleep condition are now healed on their turn. We did this to differentiate the mechanic more from Fear and Stun, and to add a bit of a drawback that must be considered
  
• Updated the look of the 'Party Select' and 'Purchase Provisions' screens to match the rest of the UI
  
• Updated the look of the 'Expedition Summary' screen to match the rest of the UI
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• World events now properly effect cities when loading a game (previously it took a few days to update)
  
• Fixed a bug related to world event modifiers and how many items and recruits appeared in markets and inns respectively
  
• You should (hopefully) no longer get ambushed in boss fights. This bug has been around for a while but we think it's been fixed!
  
• The Level up icon next to the portrait should now only show when you have points to spend
  
• Changed all video codecs to work better on Steam Deck and Mac (so video tutorials should now work properly)
  
• Provisions should now be properly consumed with using them during an event (such as using Tools to clear an obstacle)
  
• Fixed a bug with the Potency upgrade for the Icebinder's Arctic Armor ability - it should now increase the shield value correctly
  
• The Immunity Duration upgrade for the Pugilist's 'Mind, Body & Soul' ability now works correctly
  
• The Guardian now also gets conditional immunity when her passive triggers
  
• A bug where combat would hang after the Pugilist's turn should likely be resolved now due to some changes we've made to code with this update. We haven't been able to re-create the issue, but if you do see this happen still, please report it in game!
  
• The Sharp-Minded trait should no longer be found on new recruits
  
• Fixed an issue where the settings window on the start screen wasn't scaling properly based on resolution (and the window was getting cut off)
  
• Many more undocumented fixes!
  

[h2]Notes[/h2]

• Due to changes made to dungeons, if loading an old save from within a dungeon, you will be kicked out (but not penalized with fatigue or anything).
  
• There is currently a bug where a hazard or trap event won't properly trigger and will immediately close. We haven't been able to determine the reason for this one yet. If you encounter this one, any info you can tell us would be helpful (such as if you were moving past the tile or directly to it, or just completed a combat encounter before moving to it, etc)
  
• There is an extremely rare bug that we're investigating (it's only happened to a few players) where sometimes a player will get stuck in the prologue with no way to progress due to a quest turn-in event not properly triggering.
  

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We've updated our roadmap to reflect our future plans. With the changes made in our last two major updates, we're satisfied with the state of the game and feel it's close to being ready for a 1.0 release. With our next update, we'll be adding Named Gear and filling out the game with some more content (with much more coming for 1.0!).

Thanks for reading, and we hope you like the update! If you're enjoying the game, we'd really appreciate you leaving a review on Steam, and we'd also like to invite you to join our Discord community. Have a good weekend :)

-Curious Panda Games