It's done! Sea of Dead Men is now a full, stand-alone game: a 387-page PDF containing all the rules you need to play, plus a wealth of extra material.

The rulebook includes advice on playing and running the game, tons of detail on the Carrascan Sea and its inhabitants, a primer on nautical terminology and concepts, optional rules for adding claims and larger fleets of cohorts, five different starting scenarios for your game, an array of random tables, and a complete set of reference sheets - in short, everything you need to jump right in and get started with a daring pirate adventure. 

The full ruleset is available for $15, but you can download a demo version for free. This demo is equivalent to the previous non-standalone releases: it doesn't include material from the Blades SRD, but it covers all the new rules introduced in Sea of Dead Men. As long as you're familiar with the core FitD rules, it's fully playable.

There are a number of small rules changes from the previous version, but to highlight a few:

• The travel rules have been streamlined: rather than rolling dice to check for complications every time you travel between regions, the game assumes that the journey goes relatively smoothly.
• The hunting roll has been un-streamlined (it's now two separate rolls) to help provide more specific and useful results.
• A few numbers have been tweaked. Buying a ship cohort now costs 8 coin instead of 4; entanglement rolls use Tier-1 instead of just Tier.
• Lots of small updates to the character and crew playbooks: contact names, equipment, special abilities, and the like have all been reworked. (My favorite new addition: "Derelict Soul", a Phantoms ability that turns your flagship into a living thing.)

Both the full rulebook and the demo version have a quick summary of how the Sea of Dead Men rules are different from Blades; it's worth scanning through to get an overall sense of things before you dive into the details.