You are right that I will touch in this in later posts.

As for your potential issues with stifled organic growth, allow me a few suggestions:

Instead of having the possibility of closing a key and collect a ‘turning point in character development’ reward, allow players to switch one of their keys each time they leveling up.

Also, if you check the Sweet20 reference, characters gain more keys as they level up,broadening their char.dev. options.

My 2 cents.

Reading about these keys actually reminds me a lot of True20’s virtues and vices, and if I use this key system, I might encourage/force my players to choose a key that’s a virtue, and a key that’s a vice. Obviously, the Paladin will likely have a pretty tame vice, and even then not act on it much, but for the rogue or the barbarian, it could stimulate some pretty interesting situations.

My big worry, however, is that these will become too prescriptive. I’d like the players to be able to develop their characters organically, so I’m thinking about some system where they can swap them out fairly easily, though not easily enough that they can use them to maximize XP each session based on expectations.

I’d be interested in hearing how this turns out once you’ve played with it a couple times, and I expect that I will.

Nice blog, i’m subscribed now. I’ll link here Friday from Geeknews.