So, I've got the Khitai quickstart and have studied it a bit, and am going to put out what I think are the differences between the 2 systems:
Traits
Eastern characters pick 5 of these 7 instead of the classic Thean ones: Compassion, Honesty, Joy, Loyalty, Peace, Respect, Wisdom. I think that two are required by your Nation. It's an interesting way to distinguish characters more in the traits, and I think it stops one being the obvious choice. When choosing an approach, your trait is Why you're acting and your skill is How you're acting.
Skills
One skill has been changed: Mysticism is a new skill and Sailing (!!) has been dropped.
Rolling
It is now explicit: As soon as your dice add up to 10, stop adding.
Hero Points
When you get an HP, you need to choose whether to keep it for yourself (max 5 at a time) or put it in s shared pool (no Max). When buying danger points, it's 1-for-1. So, to buy 2 dice, you give the Hero 2 HP. When spending an HP on your own risk, rather than 1 die, you make all your 10s explode.
Danger Points
What you do with them is changed: +2 dice before rolling, Explode all 10s, Activate a power. No longer do they increase the difficulty of Risks.
Peril
When the number of Danger Points you have breaches certain thresholds, the rules change for the rest of the session:
- 10: Non-hero get 2 rerolls
- 15: Double damage from brutes
- 20: Non-hero 10s explode automatically
Wounds
No death spiral, just Wounds and Dramatic Wounds. If you have 5 or more Wounds, you may choose to convert your Wounds to a Dramatic Wound. If you have (5+Resolve) or more Wounds you must convert your wounds to a Dramatic Wound. Which is interesting, since no-one has any Resolve in Khitai.
Brute Squads
Now roll a pool equal to their strength. They can only take 2 actions: Create a Consequence of 'Cause Strength wounds to a hero at the end of the round'; Activate an existing Consequence or Opportunity (including their own). They always act after Heroes on the same initiative.
And that's it. It might be fun to try to assign 2 Traits to each of the existing 'western' nations.
Also, there's 2 new advantages:
Shadow Stalker (calculated at 2): Spend a Hero Point to move in silence, vanish into the darkness or otherwise demonstrate your affinity with the shadows.
The High Sign (calculated at 2): You can convey a single-word message (such as danger, help, go or flee) to any allies who can hear or see you through an innocuous sound or motion that others won’t understand and often even seem perfectly normal. Most often these are bird calls, animal cries or subtle gestures.
Both of these showed up in the New World preview.
The High Sign is only 1 point in there.
Mike said on Reddit that the Wounds part was an oversight from a previous draft. It works just as in the Core Book for Theah.
"Compassion, Honesty, Joy, Loyalty, Peace, Respect, Wisdom"
Given this is a quickstart, I wouldn't take it as absolute gospel that certain elements of the game will be removed for 7th Sea: The East, such Sailing not being listed (it's not necessary for the adventure, and if no PC has it, why include it in what is effectively an advanced demo/advertisement?) or Danger Points not increasing the difficulty of Risks.
To be honest, I'm not overly enthused with the alternate Traits, and may simply have 7S:TE PCs use the standard five Traits that their Thean counterparts use. I get why they used what they did, as it fits thematically with the setting, but having seen players struggle with approaches in Fate Accelerated, I could see that happening here as players try to figure out which Trait/'virtue' best applies to a givin Risk/Sequence.
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