Feats (General)
These feats are intended to fill in a few holes in Expertise post-Essentials. I'll withdraw them if appropriate substitutes appear in future books.
My Homebrew Feats

Versatile Expertise
The feat bonus to attack rolls now increases to +2 at the 11th level and +3 at the 21st level.

Powers (General)
This feature improvement is intended to help out defenders that rely on defender aura.

Defender Aura (Knight/Cavalier)
When an enemy leaves your defender aura, that enemy takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls that don't include you as a target until the start of your next turn.

Bonus Feat
This is to help players out with feat taxes, though it may not be as necessary with the new Essentialized expertise feats. But since it's promised, I'll deliver.

Level 5: Bonus Feat
Benefit: When you reach the 5th level, you can select any expertise feat as a bonus feat. These feats include master at arms, bag of tricks, combat caster, or any of the house rule expertise feats, any of the Essentials expertise feats, or Versatile Expertise.

Level 11: Bonus Feat
Benefit: When you reach the 11th level, you gain Improved Defenses as a bonus feat.

Skill Challenges
Action Points
During a skill challenge, you cannot use an action point to take an extra action to make a skill check in order to contribute to the skill challenge. Instead, you may expend an action point to reroll any skill check result you dislike as a free action. You must decide to use your Action Point to reroll before you know if your check succeeds or fails. You may still spend an action point to take an extra action to do something else (if the skill challenge is part of a combat encounter, for example, you could use that extra action to move or make an attack).

Resting
When you rest, if you have a leader in the party with an encounter-based heal such as Inspiring Word, you can add the average amount of extra healing the class offers to each surge you spend, to simulate using the power over and over (the average of a d6 is 3.5). Special consideration is given for a Healing Spirit and feats that boost your encounter heals, etc.. Note that this may extend one short rest to three or four, and you may not be able to make use of this benefit if you are pressed for time.

Reasoning: This should help you guys last longer without me including more healing caverns or healing infusions in your treasure.

Darkspiral Aura
Remove the second paragraph and replace it with the following:
"When an enemy under your Warlock's Curse is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, add 1 to your Darkspiral Aura. At the end of the encounter or after 5 minutes (or when you take a short rest), your Darkspiral Aura resets to its minimum value. Your Darkspiral Aura's minimum value is equal to the number of encounters you have fought in which your Darkspiral Aura increased by at least 1. Your Darkspiral Aura has a starting value of 0, and resets to 0 and its minimum value resets to 0 whenever you take an extended rest."

Reasoning: This should allow your Darkspiral Aura to help Myn steadily increase in power when combined with Darkspiral Rod, without the absurd 20+ Aura counts of the previous adventure.

Basic Attack

The monk gains the following attack as a class feature:

Monk Basic Attack
At-Will * Implement
Standard Action / Melee touch
Target: One Creature
Attack: Dexterity vs. Reflex
Hit: 1d8 + Dexterity modifier damage.
Level 21: 2d8 + Dexterity modifier damage.
Special: You can use this power as a melee basic attack.

Reasoning: Melee training was a silly feat tax placed on certain classes, and then they nerfed it. What the heck. Fixing that in any occurrences in my game.

Other

The rhythm blade now grants a +1 shield bonus that doesn't stack with other shield bonuses.
The two-weapon defense and hafted defense feats now increases your shield bonus to AC by 1 when you meet the requirements.

Reasoning: The opportunity cost for an item like rhythm blade is low and gets increasingly low as you increase in level. The opportunity cost for a feat like two-weapon defense on the other hand remains fairly constant across all levels. Therefore, I feel feats should be more powerful than the item. And the item borders on abuse at times. Therefore.

Banned Stuff
Frostcheese is no longer banned.
Potion of Invulnerability is banned.
I reserve the right to alter any rules as I see fit.

Basic Attacks

Swordmages (and hybrid swordmages) get Intelligent Blademaster as a bonus feat at level 1.

Reasoning: Mostly the same reasoning as giving monks a basic attack.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds that modify which ability score your HP is based off of are banned. In addition, the following FR backgrounds have been been modified:

Impiltur
You gain one additional language of your choice, and you gain a +5 bonus to knowledge checks made concerning demons.

Thay
You add Bluff to your list of class skills, and gain a +2 bonus to Bluff checks. In addition, you gain Thayan as an additional language.

Reasoning: I have always disliked the background benefit of using another ability score rather than Constitution for your hit points, largely because it's so much better than any other background benefit for a class that isn't based on Constitution. In addition, it can result in a striker having as much HP as a defender without investing anything in improving their hit point total (other than the Background slot, but we already established that it was by far better than the other options). So, sorry, but I'm changing this and confirming my stance.

Knowledge checks

Knowing an enemy's resistances and vulnerabilities is now part of the information you receive by meeting the moderate DC for the creature in question. Knowing information about their powers is now part of the information you receive for meeting the hard DC for the creature in question.

In addition, you may need a different knowledge skill to know some of the monster's powers than to learn more general information about them. For example, a creature with the natural origin that invokes the power of Orcus will reveal basic information and its natural abilities via a Nature check, but understanding the divine power it uses will require a Religion check (hard DC).

Reasoning: It was kind of weird that you could learn so much about a monster with a largely unrelated skill, purely because of its origin. It doesn't make much sense to know about an arcane spellcaster's abilities via a high nature check just because it happens to be an orc. Additionally, it seems to me that a monster's resistance and vulnerabilities should be more common knowledge than its exact powers.

Homebrew Items
You may find certain items that are not available anywhere else in the world.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B8mqAzuTXE5dZDExM2Y2MmUtYjIzMS00NzJmLWI0OTctNjRlY2QyZmNiYzU2

Each character possesses a bag of holding with this custom enchantment:
Property: When you use a wondrous or consumable item, you may draw the item as part of the same action used to use the item.
Free Action (1/round): Stow an item. Use this power only on your own turn.
Free Action (1/round): Draw an item. Use this power only on your own turn.

Mini-Rest Details

For the foreseeable future, your mini-rests will be handled as such:
-You may spend up to 2 healing surges as you would during a short rest.
-You may recover one encounter attack power and one encounter utility power. The utility power must have a level, ie be one of the powers you took at level 2, 6, 10, etc. For the purposes of this rest, powers such as Power Strike, Backstab, and Holy Smite are treated as encounter attack powers with a level.
-You recover all encounter-based utility powers that do not have a level, such as leader heals, item encounter powers, and racial powers.
-You may position yourselves on the map, taking up to one full turn's worth of actions. You may ready an action if you forgo the mini-rest.

Ritual Casting
Ritual Casting is subject to certain house rules. These rules overwrite any other ritual rules when applicable, all other rules for rituals still apply.

* You can copy ritual spells from ritual books you find or borrow into your own ritual book without cost. You can copy any amount of rituals of any levels over the course of an extended rest. The same rules apply for mastering rituals.
* Casting a ritual from a scroll requires no components. These components are used up in scribing the scroll instead. You still must provide any relevant focus.
* If you possess the ritual caster feat, you have a number of ritual points (RP) equal to your level. You can expend any number of RP to cast a non-Creation ritual with a fixed cost without expending components (you must still provide a focus if applicable). The amount of RP you must spend to cast without components is equal to the ritual's level, but the RP cost is halved (rounded down, minimum 1 RP per ritual) if you are trained in the relevant skill for the ritual. The ritual must not have any sort of variable cost, so rituals such as raise dead are ineligible, as are Creation rituals like unseen servant. You regain all expended RP after taking an extended rest.