Changelog

This page records the current public version of ELDRA. Older website packages are not stored here; groups that need to preserve a specific release should keep their own downloaded copy.

Current — 31 October 2026

A full consistency audit of the handbook. Every rule was read against every other rule, and the owner decided each change. The website, the character builder and the character sheet follow the handbook, so all of them changed with it.

Core rules

• Margin 0 is a success, barely. In an opposed roll, a tie goes to the defender. A Critical on any roll gives +2 (+4 with Advantage); only attacks and damaging spells double their damage.

• Required Might now matters for every item: armor below it gives Disadvantage on Reflex and Stride and costs 1 m of speed per missing point; a shield below it loses its properties; melee and ranged weapons below it attack with Disadvantage. Armor has Light, Medium and Heavy categories. Warmage's Magical Armaments covers armor, shields and weapons; Spellblade Gnomes ignore Required Might 2 or lower.

• New rules: Grappling (and escaping), Range (−2 up to long range, crossbows have no long range, thrown Daggers and Javelins), Shooting in Melee (Disadvantage), Dying (the GM decides what is lethal; stabilise with healing or 2 AP and a Lore or Crafts roll), damage overflow (fills the next Consequence slot), Broken Items, Scrolls, and Advancement (a skill step costs EXP equal to the new rating; stunts and second specializations cost 1 EXP).

• Conditions: tiers (Mild, Moderate, Severe) are defined, and Cursed, Fatigued, Friendly, Invisible, Petrified and Slowed are now real conditions. Conditions carried by Mental damage need a Mental Consequence; conditions from a failed defend roll apply at once. Exhaustion has sources and recovery.

• Mana can never be reduced below 1, affinity included. Concentration has a limit of 1 that abilities raise; holding several effects needs no roll. Necrotic and Radiant damage are magical: Elemental Defense reduces them, and living creatures no longer have Vulnerability to Necrotic.

• Vampires follow every undead rule except Necrotic damage, which they resist. Surface Born-Vampires take normal Radiant damage. Advanced Vampiric Features unlock by Vampirism rating (+2, +3, +4) for free.

• Elements: a spell's element is fixed when its entry names one; you choose only when it does not. The Elementalist picks one element at the root. Bombs are thrown with Shoot (Volatile Mixtures: Crafts). Masterwork weapons add to attack rolls, Masterwork armor to both defenses.

• The Bestiary follows the Stress Pool tables for all 58 creatures; a few ratings were lowered where a creature outgrew its Rating.

Classes, spells and stunts

• Twenty-six abilities that shared a name with another ability were renamed (for example Focused Channel, Hunt Mark, Refusal, Patron's Brand, Static Field). Saved characters keep their selections.

• Sleet Storm is now a real Level 3 spell with its five stunts. Hunter's Mark is a Divination spell. Bestow Curse costs 1 Mana and lasts Magic turns. Arc Surge, Deeper Cold and Hotter Flame add one extra d4 to their spells.

• Fixed nodes: Scholar, Soothing Hex, Unnatural Recovery (twice Lore), Pact Magic and Deep Pact, Smite the Wicked, Triage Protocol, Way of the Hand, Master Armorer, Wild Shape (lasts until a long rest), Summon Guardian and Nature Spirit pools, Bound Legion and Planar Army, Precise Wound, Vital Strike, Debilitate, Weight of Stone, the Mage root, and the Assassin's light-weapon nodes.

• Crafts gains the Scribe field; Blacksmiths make shields and Fletchers crossbows, staves, rods and wands.

Character builder and sheet

• Items above your qualifying Might can be chosen; the card and the Review show the penalty instead of blocking the sheet.

• Vampires see their Advanced Vampiric Features as soon as Vampirism reaches the rating.

• Renamed stunts are migrated in old saves; affinity text says minimum 1 Mana.

Website

• New pages: Advancement, Broken Items and Sleet Storm. Scrolls, Grappling, Dying, Condition Tiers and Poison and Acid Damage live on their chapter pages.

Current release: Use the online handbook · Download the handbook PDF · Download the offline website

18 October 2026

Rules

• Experience Points are written EXP everywhere.

• Mana has its own section under Game Mechanics: maximum Mana (Magic × Magic, with a table), spending, the Affinity Mana Pool, and recovery. A short rest gives back Mana equal to your Magic.

• Stress Pools are explained in plain words, with one table for Fortitude and Resolve.

• Initiative is explained in full: the initiative roll, and the initiative bonus the character sheet records. Surprise is now defined: creatures caught unaware get no turn in the first round and no Reactions until it ends.

• Summoned and raised creatures join a fight at once and act right after their summoner.

• Lore is a general skill with no penalty on any topic; one optional specialization grants Advantage on that topic. Classes, stunts, and creatures that used Lore (Occult) or Lore (Religion) now use Lore.

• Fight and Shoot specializations no longer give −2 with other weapons; they decide which Weapon Techniques you can learn. Throwing weapons no longer take −2 by default.

• Weapon Techniques: an attack technique spends a use only when it hits, and uses come back after a short rest.

• Might: one-handed weapons add half your Might, two-handed weapons your full Might, and light weapons (no Required Might) only half, even in two hands. Unarmed strikes are reworded, and Multi Attack works once per turn, on a melee Basic Attack.

• Shields no longer add Physical or Elemental Defense. Each shield has its own properties: the Buckler parries, the Heater deflects and can splinter, the Kite guards against arrows and covers a retreat, the Pavise can be planted as cover, and the Tower Shield is a moving wall. A shield takes one hand.

• Equipment tables show each item's crafting cost, and Rods and Wands cost the same as a Staff. A Herb Pouch is worth 5 gold and Magical Powder 10 gold. Improvised Weapons moved to Equipment.

• Skills and skill stunts are listed alphabetically.

Classes, spells, and stunts

• Every subclass node shows that it costs 1 CLA; nothing about the costs changed.

• Natural Medicine and Wilderness Survival heal a Mild Consequence. Academician's Scholar counts as specialized in every Lore topic. Fighter's Weapon Mastery lets you learn techniques for any melee weapon, and Weapon Expert now adds only +1 damage.

• The Summoner's Eidolon and Lesser Eidolon have complete rules: skills, attack, stress, actions, and what happens when they are banished.

• Warmage fixes: Spell Guard, Runic Shield, Perfect Fusion, Channeled Strike (formerly Spellblade), Arcane Fortress, Combat Caster, and Arcane Deflection. Shieldbearer and masterwork shields work with the new shields.

• Animate Dead keeps at most as many undead as your Magic, and they last until destroyed. Pack Tongue reaches a whole pack with one roll, and Nature's Informant questions every Beast within 100 meters. Human Ingenuity is once per scene. Searing Burst reaches 3 meters, and Shielding Light grants +1 to Resolve defend rolls against mental attacks.

Character builder and sheet

• Lore's specialization is optional, and Pact Magic needs only a positive Lore.

• Weapon bonuses no longer include a −2 outside your specialization; the technique list shows which techniques your specialization opens.

• Shields show their properties, heavy shields lower your Speed, and each shield appears in the Rules Appendix. The sheet shows "none" for shield defenses and counts Weapon Technique uses per short rest.

• The Bound Eidolon records its chosen skill, size, and Strike damage type.

Website

• Removed the pilot illustrations, fixed doubled introductions on the Armors, Shields, and Ranged Weapons pages, and multiplication signs now show as ×.

5 October 2026

The six Classes

• Classes are now six broad traditions standing on a ring: Warrior, Guardian, Mystic, Arcanist, Savant, and Hunter. The 26 former classes become their subclasses. Seventeen belong to one Class; nine are shared, six between neighbours on the ring (Cavalry, Paladin, Summoner, Alchemist, Rogue, Berserker) and three between opposite Classes (Warmage, Commander, Ranger).

• Every Class grants a free Class Feature: Press the Attack, Guard, Bond, Trained Will, Know the Angle, or Quarry.

• Class Points now come from all of your trained skills: 1 CLA for every 4 points of Skill Total, plus 1 for each trained skill at +5 or higher. People modifiers and other bonuses never count. Your first root is free.

• Tier gates: roots and T1 nodes are open from creation; T2 nodes need a trained skill at +4 and T3 nodes a trained skill at +5.

• A second Class costs 2 CLA, and a character can have at most two. Each new Class Point also lets you swap one node that nothing else of yours requires.

• Added a page for each Class, a redesigned Six Classes chart in the handbook and on the Classes page, and Class badges on every subclass page.

Character builder

• The Classes step now starts with the Class: it shows the Class Feature, offers only the subclasses that Class can take, counts Class Points from your Skill Total, marks the free root, and supports a second Class.

• Characters saved before this update are converted automatically, and the builder explains what changed.

• Specializations must now be one the skill offers.

Character sheet

• Redesigned the fillable A4 and US Letter character sheets. They record the Class, subclasses, Skill Total, Class Points, and Class Feature; trained and effective ratings for every skill; ten stunt rows; quick-access slots; and an exhaustion track that shows when a character dies.

• Sheets made by the character builder keep the designed type, shrink only text that would not fit, and point to the Rules Appendix whenever a table is full. The Rules Appendix now matches the sheet and lists entries one after another instead of four to a page.

• Weapon bonuses on generated sheets include the Fighter's Weapon Mastery. Every character also gets an Unarmed strike row, and variable Mana costs such as 1+ keep their plus sign.

Corrections

• Fireball & Icestorm & Electrical Discharge and the Shadow Leviathan no longer show a stray backslash.

• The Conjure Animal and Fear tables, and the full Gnome Arcane Resonance rule, now appear correctly in the character builder and on generated sheets.

Handbook and tools included in this version

• Published the complete handbook as a searchable web reference.

• Added a guided character builder with automatic calculations, validation, local autosave, JSON import and export, and personalized editable PDF generation.

• Simplified the character builder’s opening step, added concise help for creation settings, restyled dropdown controls, reduced autosave notices, and added spell-level filtering to the spell picker. No character-creation mechanics were changed.

• Added blank fillable character sheets for A4 and US Letter paper.

• The Illuminated Atlas website design, the ELDRA Sundering logo, and a link to the official ELDRA subreddit on the homepage.

• Expanded search to cover rules, tables, class-tree nodes, stunts, creatures, spells, and weapon techniques.

• Embedded skill stunts beneath their respective skills and spell stunts beneath their respective spells.

• Combined spellcasting rules and magic lore with the Spells section.

• Consolidated all weapon techniques under Equipment / Weapon Techniques and Mastery.