Skills

Essences determine the supernatural forces available to a character. Abilities determine how those forces manifest. Skills represent what the character has learned to do.

A skill may represent physical training, professional knowledge, practiced technique, specialized movement, weapon training, survival experience, or another capability developed through instruction and repetition.

Skills are not supernatural abilities. They do not require an essence, an awakening stone, mana or stamina unless the skill specifically interacts with another rule that does. Instead, they improve the actions a character can already attempt. Some provide a skill check; others provide a flat bonus to particular rolls or effects.

What Is a Skill?

A skill represents trained competence in a specific field. Anyone may attempt many ordinary actions, but possessing the appropriate skill represents actual training and provides a meaningful mechanical advantage.

Examples might include the twelve core skills below — Skullduggery, Physique, Wayfarer, Treatment and the rest — alongside specialised ones such as Martial Arts, Power Strike and Crafting.

Skills can represent broad disciplines or highly focused techniques. A broad skill such as Skullduggery helps determine whether the character successfully performs an uncertain action. A focused combat skill such as Power Strike instead directly increases the effectiveness of attacks the character already knows how to make.

For that reason, not every skill functions identically.

Skill Rank

Every learned skill possesses a skill rank, representing the character's training, practice and expertise with that specific skill.

A character may become more experienced overall without becoming equally skilled at everything they have learned. Focused practice can make a character exceptionally capable in one field while remaining inexperienced in another.

Attribute rank and skill rank are separate. Skill rank represents expertise with a particular learned discipline; attribute rank represents the raw capability the skill is applied through. Depending on the type of skill, both may contribute to the final result.

Every skill is governed by one of the four attributes, and it is that attribute rank which enters the roll. Physique is a Power skill, so a Physique check adds Power. Skullduggery is a Speed skill, so it adds Speed. Which attribute governs a skill is not a detail — it is half the check.

Wherever this chapter says skill rank or attribute rank in a formula, it means the rank bonus that rank converts to — +1 at Unranked through +7 at Transcendent, as Rank sets out. A skill at Bronze contributes +3, not 3 steps up a ladder.

Skill Checks

Some skills are used when the outcome of an action is uncertain. These are check skills.

1d20 + skill rank + governing attribute rank

The Guide determines the difficulty of the task and whether a roll is necessary at all.

Example: Skullduggery

A character attempts to move through a guarded area without being detected. Skullduggery is governed by Speed. They have Skullduggery at rank +3 and Speed at rank +2, so the check is 1d20 + 3 + 2, or 1d20 + 5. The result is compared against the difficulty the Guide sets, or against an opposing detection result.

When not to roll

Having a skill does not mean every use requires a d20. Do not roll when:

success is routine,
failure would have no meaningful consequence,
the character has enough time and resources to accomplish the task automatically,
or the Guide determines the character's training is sufficient.

Skill checks exist to resolve uncertainty. They should not turn ordinary competence into unnecessary failure.

Core Skills

Core skills are the broad disciplines useful across nearly every kind of adventure. Unlike specialised professional, crafting or fighting-style skills, they cover capabilities that come up constantly while exploring, investigating, travelling, fighting and dealing with the world.

Each is governed by one of the four attributes. The attribute represents the character's underlying capability; the skill rank represents training and experience within that discipline.

Core skill	Attribute	Primary uses
Analysis	Spirit	Investigation, deduction, examination, interpreting evidence
Arcane	Spirit	Magic, essences, supernatural phenomena, monster lore
Book Lore	Spirit	History, geography, maps, cultures, formal navigation, recorded knowledge
Coordination	Speed	Balance, precise movement, bodily control, controlled falls
Divine	Spirit	Deities, religions, astral beings, rites, divine phenomena
Infiltration	Speed	Locks, traps, sleight of hand, pickpocketing, covert manipulation
Mercantile	Spirit	Appraisal, trade, markets, valuation, commercial knowledge
Physique	Power	Lifting, climbing, jumping, swimming, forcing, raw physical exertion
Skullduggery	Speed	Sneaking, hiding, shadowing, moving without detection
Treatment	Recovery	Anatomy, stabilization, diagnosis, healing, injuries and afflictions
Vigilance	Recovery	Maintaining awareness, noticing danger, recovering focus, resisting complacency
Wayfarer	Spirit	Tracking, wilderness survival, terrain, weather, trails, natural signs

Difficulty

A skill check is made when training and natural capability both bear on the outcome and success is uncertain enough to matter. Core skills should not be rolled for routine actions — no Coordination check to walk across a room, no Wayfarer check to follow a road, no Mercantile check to buy a meal. Call for one when an action is difficult, dangerous, contested, time-sensitive, or when failure would produce a consequence worth having.

The difficulty class represents how hard the task is. These are the standard benchmarks, used by every core skill below.

Difficulty	DC	Meaning
Easy	10	Straightforward challenge requiring some capability
Moderate	15	Meaningful challenge requiring competence or favourable circumstances
Difficult	20	Serious challenge where training becomes important
Improbable	25	Exceptional feat beyond what most people can reliably accomplish
Impossible	30	Extraordinary feat that appears impossible to ordinary people

Impossible does not mean it can never be done. It means a task ordinarily considered beyond reasonable capability. Exceptional attributes, deep training, supernatural advancement, equipment and circumstance can all let an extraordinary character accomplish the seemingly impossible.

Untrained core skills

Every core skill can be attempted without training. A character needs no rank in Analysis to search a room, Physique to attempt a hard climb, or Wayfarer to follow obvious tracks. These are things anyone can try.

An untrained character receives their attribute rank bonus and no skill rank bonus.

Untrained core skill check = 1d20 + attribute rank bonus

Once they gain training, the skill rank is added normally. Training does not decide whether a character may attempt a core skill. It is the additional capability that practice, education and experience provide.

Analysis

Spirit. Deliberate examination, reasoning, deduction, and turning available information into useful conclusions. Analysis is used when the information needed to reach a conclusion is present but its meaning is not obvious — investigating a scene, reconstructing events, comparing evidence, recognising a meaningful pattern.

It differs from Vigilance in purpose. Vigilance notices that something is unusual; Analysis works out why. A Vigilance check might reveal scratches around a concealed doorway; Analysis determines they are recent and that the door has been opened repeatedly.

Analysis cannot manufacture specialised knowledge the character lacks. It might reveal a repeating pattern in an unfamiliar magical structure, while Arcane is needed to know what the pattern means.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Determine which direction someone entered a disturbed room from
Moderate — 15	Reconstruct the basic sequence of events at a crime scene
Difficult — 20	Identify an intentionally planted piece of misleading evidence
Improbable — 25	Reconstruct a complicated event from fragmentary physical evidence
Impossible — 30	Determine an elaborate sequence of events from almost imperceptible evidence

Arcane

Spirit. Practical and theoretical knowledge of magic and supernatural phenomena — essences, magical effects, supernatural creatures, monster lore, magical structures, and the principles by which supernatural power manifests.

Monster lore sits here deliberately. Monsters are supernatural creatures, and understanding them means understanding the magical forces that shape them. Arcane can reveal documented behaviours, abilities and vulnerabilities, but success does not hand over every statistic or hidden ability a creature has.

Arcane provides understanding, not control. Recognising what a magical phenomenon does does not mean the character can dispel it, manipulate it, reproduce it, or survive it.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Identify a commonly encountered magical effect
Moderate — 15	Recall the known characteristics of an uncommon monster
Difficult — 20	Determine the function of an unfamiliar magical formation
Improbable — 25	Identify an obscure supernatural phenomenon from limited evidence
Impossible — 30	Interpret an extraordinarily rare or nearly forgotten form of magic

Book Lore

Spirit. Formal knowledge from education, maps, archives, stories and historical records — history, geography, cultures, nations, notable people, documented events, cartography, formal navigation.

It is called Book Lore because the knowledge is fundamentally recorded, not because a character must have read it. Tutors, oral histories, schools, archives and scholarly traditions all provide it.

Book Lore and Wayfarer both bear on navigation from different directions. Book Lore knows where the mountain pass is supposed to be. Wayfarer knows whether recent snowfall has made it unsafe.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Recall the location of a major nearby city
Moderate — 15	Identify the crest of a historically important noble family
Difficult — 20	Recall the original purpose of an abandoned fortress
Improbable — 25	Interpret an incomplete map from a long-dead civilization
Impossible — 30	Recall an obscure fact preserved in only a handful of surviving records

Coordination

Speed. Precise control over the body — balance, controlled movement, timing, positioning, and performing complicated physical actions without losing control. Where Physique concerns exertion, Coordination concerns precision.

Coordination does not replace Movement or ordinary Speed-based combat numbers. A character does not roll it to cross a battlefield or make a normal attack. It becomes relevant when controlling the movement is itself the challenge.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Scale a wall with usable handholds
Moderate — 15	Scale the exterior of a building
Difficult — 20	Walk across a tightrope
Improbable — 25	Walk along the mast of a ship while it is in motion
Impossible — 30	Scale a smooth palisade wall bare-handed

Divine

Spirit. Knowledge of deities, religions, astral beings, sacred practices, religious institutions and the supernatural phenomena attached to higher powers.

Divine does not require faith. A scholar may study religions extensively without worshipping any of the beings involved, and worshipping a deity does not automatically grant knowledge of that deity, their church, or other astral powers.

The boundary with Arcane is the subject, not the method. Arcane is magic and the supernatural broadly; Divine is deities, astral beings, religions and what attaches to them.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Recognize the symbol of a widely worshipped deity
Moderate — 15	Identify the purpose of a common religious rite
Difficult — 20	Recognize the influence of an uncommon astral being
Improbable — 25	Interpret an obscure divine phenomenon
Impossible — 30	Identify a forgotten rite tied to an ancient or nearly unknown higher power

Infiltration

Speed. Covert and precise manipulation — picking locks, bypassing mundane security, disabling traps, pickpocketing, sleight of hand, concealing small objects, delicate work that must not draw attention.

It relies on Speed because these actions need precision, timing and fine control. Knowing how a lock works is useful; manipulating its components under pressure requires the hands to do exactly what was intended.

Infiltration and Skullduggery work together constantly and solve different problems. Skullduggery gets you to the locked door unnoticed. Infiltration gets you through it.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Pick a simple lock with proper tools
Moderate — 15	Pick a well-made lock, or discreetly palm a small object
Difficult — 20	Disable a complicated mechanical trap
Improbable — 25	Pick a sophisticated lock while being actively observed
Impossible — 30	Bypass an extraordinary security mechanism using improvised tools

Mercantile

Spirit. Knowledge of value, commerce, markets, goods and trade — appraisal, pricing, market conditions, supply and demand, recognising quality, spotting counterfeits, knowing what is worth what and where.

Mercantile determines what something should be worth. It does not determine what another person is willing to pay: social interaction stays situational rather than becoming a permanent Persuasion, Deception or Intimidation skill.

What it provides instead is leverage. Knowing that a merchant is dramatically undervaluing an item, or that their goods are counterfeit, can change a negotiation completely without replacing the conversation.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Estimate the normal market price of common equipment
Moderate — 15	Appraise an uncommon piece of equipment or merchandise
Difficult — 20	Identify a convincing counterfeit
Improbable — 25	Accurately value an exceptionally rare item with little market history
Impossible — 30	Estimate the value of a unique artifact with no established market

Physique

Power. Applying physical capability to demanding tasks — learned movement and exertion where strength, leverage, body mechanics and conditioning matter. Power sets the capability available; Physique is how well the character knows how to use it.

Not every feat of strength calls for it. Carrying, lifting, pushing and pulling already have hard limits set by Power rank in Inventory Management, and a check should not let a character ignore those limits. Physique decides whether they can apply the Power they have under difficult circumstances.

Physique and Coordination can meet at the same obstacle. Physique when force and exertion are the challenge; Coordination when balance, precision or control are.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Climb a rope under normal conditions
Moderate — 15	Swim against a strong current
Difficult — 20	Force open a reinforced wooden door
Improbable — 25	Hold onto a violently moving creature while being dragged
Impossible — 30	Break exceptionally strong restraints by exertion alone

Skullduggery

Speed. The art of avoiding attention — sneaking, hiding, shadowing, controlling noise, using cover, and moving through occupied spaces without revealing your presence.

It is a Speed skill because concealment usually depends on timing and controlled movement. Moving at the wrong moment, putting weight down badly, letting equipment shift, or failing to stop when an observer turns will expose even a carefully hidden character.

Skullduggery does not manipulate locks, traps or objects; that is Infiltration. Skullduggery conceals the character's presence and actions.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Move quietly through an empty building
Moderate — 15	Slip past a distracted guard using available cover
Difficult — 20	Shadow an alert person through a populated area unnoticed
Improbable — 25	Cross an actively guarded area without attracting attention
Impossible — 30	Remain undetected while moving through an area under intense observation

Treatment

Recovery. Practical knowledge of injury, anatomy, stabilization, healing, and the processes by which a body restores itself. Ordinary first aid, and recognising how unusual injuries, toxins, diseases, conditions and afflictions affect a creature.

It is a Recovery skill because treatment depends on understanding restoration. The practitioner has to know what the body is trying to do, what is stopping it, and what intervention lets it continue.

Treatment cannot automatically cure everything. Some injuries and afflictions need specific medicine, equipment, magic or specialised intervention. A success may instead identify the problem, stop it worsening, stabilise the victim, or reveal what proper treatment would require.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Clean and properly dress a simple wound
Moderate — 15	Stabilize a seriously injured creature
Difficult — 20	Diagnose an unusual poison from its symptoms
Improbable — 25	Keep a critically wounded creature stable in extremely poor conditions
Impossible — 30	Diagnose an unknown supernatural affliction from minimal symptoms

Vigilance

Recovery. Maintaining awareness and recognising something that needs attention — observation, alertness, watchfulness, and resisting the complacency that sets in when nothing appears to be happening.

It is a Recovery skill because sustained awareness means continually restoring focus. Attention wanders, distractions happen, fatigue builds, and familiarity breeds complacency. A vigilant character is practised at recovering from those moments before something important slips past.

Vigilance determines whether a character notices. It does not explain what the thing means: finding strange residue beneath a window may take Vigilance, and working out how it got there takes Analysis.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Hear an approaching group making little effort to be quiet
Moderate — 15	Notice a concealed object during a careful search
Difficult — 20	Detect an ambusher before they reveal themselves
Improbable — 25	Notice a nearly imperceptible disturbance while distracted
Impossible — 30	Detect a well-concealed threat from the slightest environmental clue

Wayfarer

Spirit. Practical experience travelling through and surviving the natural world — tracking, foraging, reading terrain, recognising weather, finding water, choosing campsites, identifying hazards, and following the signs creatures leave behind.

Wayfarer is practical rather than academic. A character may know through Book Lore that a mountain pass exists, while a wayfarer reads the weather, the animal behaviour and the recent snowfall and concludes that crossing today would be lethal.

Tracking is deliberately part of this skill. Following a creature uses the same disciplines as wilderness survival: recognising disturbed vegetation, understanding animal behaviour, reading soil, accounting for weather, judging direction, and knowing which signs actually matter.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Follow clear tracks across soft ground
Moderate — 15	Find safe water and shelter in unfamiliar wilderness
Difficult — 20	Follow a faint trail after several hours of weather exposure
Improbable — 25	Track a careful creature across terrain that preserves few signs
Impossible — 30	Reconstruct a creature's path from signs most travellers would never see

Bonus Skills

Not every skill creates a separate check. Some provide a flat mechanical bonus to an action the character is already performing. These are bonus skills, and their bonus equals the skill's rank unless the skill states otherwise.

Skill	Effect	At rank +3 or +4
Martial Arts	Add your Martial Arts rank to melee attack rolls.	Rank 3 gives +3 to hit in melee.
Power Strike	Add your Power Strike rank to damage dealt by melee attacks.	Rank 4 gives +4 melee damage.

No separate check is made in either case. The skill improves the action itself.

A bonus skill adds its rank alone. Martial Arts at rank 3 gives +3 to melee attacks, not +3 plus an attribute rank — the action it modifies already carries its own rank terms, and adding another would scale the same bonus twice.

A check skill answers did I accomplish this difficult task? A bonus skill answers how much better am I at something I already do?

The distinction keeps skills useful without requiring an additional roll for every action.

Combining Skills

Some actions draw on more than one area of expertise. When two skills are both meaningfully relevant to the same task, they can combine.

The Guide decides which is the primary skill and which is the supporting skill. Both add their skill rank to the same roll.

1d20 + governing attribute rank + primary skill rank + supporting skill rank

Only one attribute rank enters the check, and it is the one governing the primary skill. Where the two skills answer to different attributes — Treatment supported by Arcane, say, or Physique supported by Coordination — the supporting skill contributes its training and nothing else.

	Is	Provides
Primary	The skill actually being used to accomplish the task.	Its skill rank bonus to the check.
Supporting	Additional knowledge or training that leaves the character better prepared.	Its skill rank bonus, added to the same check.

One check, two relevant disciplines, both ranks counted.

This is what makes a combined check the strongest roll in the chapter, and why it is gated: the supporting skill has to be trained, only one may apply, and the Guide has to accept that it genuinely bears on the task.

When skills can combine

All of the following must be true:

Both skills have a clear and meaningful application to the task.
One can reasonably improve how the other is being used.
The character has information, training or capability from the supporting skill that actually matters here.
The combination is a single action, or a closely connected task.

A skill does not become a supporting skill just because it is vaguely related to the situation. The character should be able to say how it helps.

If removing the supporting skill would not change how the character approaches the task, the skills do not combine.

Which is which

To find the	Ask
Primary	What is the character actually trying to accomplish?
Supporting	What additional training makes them better at accomplishing it?

A character working out the purpose of an unfamiliar magical formation is trying to understand a magical structure, so Arcane is primary. Their training in Analysis supports it, as they read the repeating patterns and the relationships between components. They roll Arcane, adding Spirit, their Arcane rank and their Analysis rank.

Change the goal and the relationship reverses. Reconstructing what happened after that formation was activated makes Analysis primary — they are reconstructing an event — with Arcane supporting, because knowing magic is what lets them read the supernatural evidence correctly.

The same two skills interact differently depending on what the character is actually trying to do.

Examples

Combination	How it works
Book Lore + Wayfarer	Book Lore knows the documented route; Wayfarer reconciles the map with the terrain actually in front of them.
Arcane + Divine	Arcane identifies the magical structure of an effect; Divine supplies the deity, astral being or rite responsible for it.
Treatment + Arcane	Treatment examines what is happening to the body; Arcane identifies the supernatural effect causing it.
Skullduggery + Infiltration	Skullduggery keeps the character unnoticed; Infiltration handles the precise work on the lock, trap or pocket.
Physique + Coordination	Physique supplies the trained exertion; Coordination controls it through a difficult manoeuvre.
Mercantile + Book Lore	Mercantile prices the object; Book Lore supplies the historical or cultural fact that changes the price dramatically.

Sequential skills

Not every situation involving two skills is a combination. Sometimes one must succeed before the other can be attempted at all.

A character searching a chamber makes a Vigilance check and finds a hidden inscription. Having found it, they make a Book Lore check to identify its origin. Those are two separate actions with two separate outcomes. Vigilance did not make them better at history — it supplied the thing history could then be applied to.

Likewise a character may use Skullduggery to reach a guarded door unnoticed and then Infiltration to pick its lock. But if being discovered while working the lock is still a live concern, Skullduggery becomes a legitimate supporting skill for the Infiltration check.

One skill	That is
Creates the opportunity to use another	Sequential — separate actions
Actively improves another while the action is performed	Combined — one check

A supporting skill must be trained

A character cannot draw a supporting benefit from a core skill they are untrained in. They may still attempt any core skill untrained, on the attribute rank alone — but they do not have enough specialised training for it to enhance a different discipline.

A primary skill may be used untrained. A supporting skill must be trained.

This is what makes training worth more than the skill's own direct use. The broader a character's expertise grows, the more often two parts of it meet.

Only one supporting skill

A check benefits from one supporting skill at most. A situation may reasonably touch three or more disciplines, but letting every relevant skill contribute would reward stacking bonuses rather than deciding which expertise actually matters.

Where several could support, the player picks the most appropriate trained one. The others may still supply information, create opportunities, or be resolved as their own checks.

A skill check has one primary skill and no more than one supporting skill.

The point of combining is to reward meaningful overlap between the things a character knows — not to collect every bonus that can be attached to a roll.

Chained Skills

Some actions need more than one skill check, and the checks are so closely connected that they resolve as a single action. These are chained skills.

A chain happens when one action creates an immediate secondary requirement that must also be resolved before the action is complete. Unlike a combined skill, the skill ranks are not added together and neither skill supports the other. Each makes its own normal check.

What chaining buys is action economy.

All chained skill checks are resolved as part of the same action.

Example: a rooftop escape

A character hidden from the town guard tries to escape by jumping from one rooftop to the next. The jump is a Coordination check. But taking a running jump across an open rooftop creates a second problem immediately: can they stay hidden while doing it? That is a chained Skullduggery check.

Check	Answers
Coordination	Do they make the jump?
Skullduggery	Do they stay unseen while making it?

Both belong to the same action. The character does not spend one action jumping and another trying to stay hidden.

How a chain works

Determine the primary skill the intended action requires.
Determine whether the action creates an immediate additional requirement.
Resolve each check separately.
Treat all of them as one action.

Each check uses the ordinary formula:

1d20 + governing attribute rank + skill rank

If the character is untrained in one of the required core skills, they attempt it normally on the attribute alone. Unlike a supporting skill, a chained skill does not have to be trained.

Different checks, different consequences

Each check succeeds or fails on its own. In the rooftop example:

Coordination	Skullduggery	Outcome
Success	Success	Lands safely and stays hidden.
Success	Failure	Lands safely; the guard sees them.
Failure	Success	Misses the jump, but may still avoid immediate detection.
Failure	Failure	Misses the jump and gives away their position.

The Guide decides the exact consequences from the situation. This matters because a chain is not one larger check. It is several things happening during the same action.

When to chain

One action naturally requires two different skills.
The second requirement exists because of the first action.
Both happen in the same immediate moment.
Splitting them into separate actions would feel artificial.

Chain	Doing what
Coordination → Skullduggery	Leap between rooftops while staying hidden.
Physique → Coordination	Shove a wagon rolling down a hill, then dive into it.
Infiltration → Skullduggery	Pick a pocket while concealing the act from bystanders.
Wayfarer → Coordination	Track a creature through dangerous, difficult terrain.
Treatment → Arcane	Perform emergency treatment while avoiding a spreading magical effect.
Coordination → Infiltration	Cross unstable footing while working a mechanism on the way past.

Chained against combined

	Combined skill	Chained skill
The situation	Two skills bear on one problem	One action creates several separate problems
Roles	One is primary, the other supports	Neither supports the other
Checks	One	One each
Reads as	One check, two relevant disciplines	Multiple checks, one action

Studying a magical trap with both magical knowledge and careful deduction is Arcane + Analysis, combined. Disabling that same trap while staying hidden from a nearby guard is Infiltration → Skullduggery, chained.

Chaining more than two

Most actions should involve no more than two chained checks. An exceptionally complicated action might justify a third, and that should be uncommon.

The point of chaining is to keep a complex action flowing, not to turn one action into a sequence of loosely related rolls. Every additional check should be something that genuinely happens as part of the same action. If the character has time to stop, reassess and begin again, the next check is usually a new action.

Failing part of a chain

A failed chained check does not automatically cancel the whole action, unless the failure makes continuing impossible.

A failed Skullduggery check does not stop a successful rooftop jump. It means they were seen. A failed Vigilance check while tracking does not erase the trail. It means the character may not notice what is waiting along it.

Resolve failure according to the specific skill that failed. That is what lets a complicated action produce something more interesting than success or failure.

Skill Interaction Summary

Interaction	Checks	Action cost	Purpose
Single skill	1	1 action	One skill resolves the task.
Combined skills	1	1 action	One skill is supported by another.
Chained skills	2+	1 action	Several skill requirements arise during the same action.
Sequential skills	2+	1 each	One skill creates the opportunity to use the next.

Multiple skill checks can belong to one action when those checks are immediate consequences of performing that action.

The three multi-skill cases are told apart by two questions: does the second skill improve the first, or stand on its own? and does it happen inside the same action, or after it?

	Improves the other	Same action
Combined	Yes	Yes
Chained	No	Yes
Sequential	No	No

Vigilance Is Always On

Vigilance cannot be used as a combined skill or a chained skill.

Vigilance is a character's continuous awareness of their surroundings, not a discrete task performed alongside something else. Nobody spends part of an action "being vigilant" — their awareness is assumed active at all times, which is why Vigilance sits outside the rules above.

Vigilance is always present and never consumes an action.

Passive Vigilance

Every character has a passive Vigilance score: what they notice naturally, without rolling.

Passive Vigilance = 10 + total Vigilance bonus

The total Vigilance bonus is everything that would apply to a Vigilance check — the Recovery attribute rank, the Vigilance skill rank if trained, and any other applicable modifier.

The Guide should assume this score is always active. Players need not announce that they are watching for danger, examining their surroundings, listening, or staying alert. If something can reasonably be noticed and its difficulty is at or below the character's passive Vigilance, the Guide may simply decide they notice it.

No roll is requested before using passive Vigilance.

Active Vigilance

A character may roll Vigilance once during each of their turns. Doing so costs no action, no bonus action, no movement, and nothing else from their action economy.

1d20 + total Vigilance bonus

The result becomes their Vigilance score until the start of their next turn, replacing the passive score for that period. A character cannot roll and then keep the passive score because the roll was worse.

Once active Vigilance is rolled, that result replaces passive Vigilance until the start of the character's next turn.

At the start of the next turn the result expires and the character returns to their passive score. They may roll again during that turn.

Worked example

A character has Recovery +3 and Vigilance +2, so a total Vigilance bonus of +5 and a passive Vigilance of 15. Unless the player does something about it, the Guide treats them as Vigilance 15.

Suspecting something nearby, the player takes their free active roll and gets 17, for 22. That is their Vigilance score until the start of their next turn, when it returns to 15.

If they roll again next turn and get 6, their score becomes 11 — worse than doing nothing. Actively searching carries the uncertainty of the roll.

Vigilance during other actions

Because it is always on, Vigilance never needs chaining. A character can follow tracks with Wayfarer, cross bad ground with Coordination, stabilise an ally with Treatment, or pick a lock with Infiltration, and their Vigilance score keeps working throughout.

If a hidden enemy approaches while the character is treating an ally, the Guide compares the enemy against the character's current Vigilance score. No Treatment → Vigilance chain is required, and a character tracking a monster does not chain Wayfarer → Vigilance to stay alert. Their Vigilance is already there.

Vigilance cannot support another skill

Nor can Vigilance be the supporting half of a combined check. Noticing something provides the opportunity to use another skill; it does not improve that skill's roll.

A character's Vigilance reveals strange scratches around a hidden doorway. They may then use Analysis to work out what the scratches mean. That is not Analysis + Vigilance — Vigilance already did its job by revealing the evidence, and Analysis now interprets it.

Vigilance notices	Another skill explains
Magical residue	Arcane
A religious symbol	Divine
Tracks	Wayfarer
An injury	Treatment
A valuable mark	Mercantile

Vigilance discovers. Another skill determines what the discovery means.

Outside of turns

In structured turns, a character may actively roll once on their own turn. When play is not in turn order, passive Vigilance is the default. The Guide should use it for routine awareness rather than repeatedly asking for rolls while the party travels, explores, talks or rests.

If a situation becomes important enough that a player deliberately focuses their attention, the Guide may allow an active roll and treat the result as their Vigilance score for that scene, or until circumstances meaningfully change. Once turn order begins, the once-per-turn rule resumes.

Hidden information

Passive Vigilance lets the Guide resolve hidden information without announcing that there is something to find. Asking the whole table to roll Vigilance tells the players a threat exists before anyone has noticed it.

Instead, compare the creature's concealment quietly against each character's passive Vigilance. Those who meet it notice; those who do not remain unaware. That is what makes Vigilance an always-present defensive skill rather than a prompt.

Vigilance at a glance

Rule	Vigilance
Governing attribute	Recovery
Passive score	10 + total Vigilance bonus
Always active	Yes
Consumes an action	No
Can combine	No
Can chain	No
Active roll	Once per turn, on your turn
Active formula	1d20 + total Vigilance bonus
Active result lasts	Until the start of your next turn
Returns to passive	Start of each turn

Vigilance is not an action a character takes. It is a state of awareness they continuously maintain.

Passive Vigilance is that normal state. Active Vigilance lets a character test it deliberately once per turn, accepting the risk of a worse result for the chance of noticing something their passive awareness would have missed.

Non-Core Skills

Core skills are broad capabilities anyone can attempt. Non-core skills are the specialised knowledge, practised trades and trained techniques outside those universal competencies, and they come in two kinds.

	Represents	Untrained
Profession	Learned trades, crafts and productive work.	Can be attempted, badly.
Technique	Specialised methods built on learned procedure.	Cannot be used at all.

Both use ordinary skill rank progression once learned. They differ in how they are acquired, and in whether an untrained character can attempt them.

Profession skills

A profession is the ability to create, produce, alter and refine things. Where a core skill is a capability applied across many situations, a profession is a practical trade built through study, experimentation and repeated creation.

A profession is deliberately broad. A Metal Worker does not need separate skills for blacksmithing, weaponsmithing, armorsmithing and locksmithing — those are all applications of one trade. A Cook can bake bread, butcher meat, brew ale or produce a feast. What varies is the project's materials, tools, time and difficulty, not the skill required.

Professions cover creation and transformation, not gathering. Mining ore is not Metal Worker; picking herbs is not Alchemist; hunting an animal is not Leather Worker. Those are core skill work. A profession begins once the materials are in hand.

Each profession is governed by the attribute that best matches what the trade actually demands — its default attribute. An unusual project or circumstance may justify a different one at the Guide's discretion.

The eleven professions

Profession	Attribute	Creates
Alchemist	Spirit	Medicines, poisons, potions, magical reagents, transformed substances.
Artificer	Spirit	Complex mechanisms, magical devices, constructs, traps, engineered systems.
Artist	Speed	Written, visual, decorative and informational works needing precision and expression.
Construction	Power	Structures and large functional objects in wood, stone, brick and glass.
Cook	Recovery	Meals, preserved foods, fermented products, beverages.
Enchanter	Spirit	Nothing new — takes a finished mundane item and deliberately imbues it.
Jeweler	Speed	Fine work in gemstones, precious metals, engraving and inlay.
Leather Worker	Speed	Armor, footwear, belts, packs and other goods from hide and leather.
Metal Worker	Power	Weapons, armor, tools, locks and functional metal goods.
Outfitter	Recovery	Ranged weapons, ammunition, saddles, tack; and the care of mounts and working animals.
Textile Worker	Recovery	Cloth, garments, rope, sails, embroidery and other woven or sewn goods.

Profession checks

A profession check is made when the outcome is uncertain. Routine work by a capable professional with proper tools, materials and time may need no check at all. Call for one when the craftsmanship is meaningful, the materials unfamiliar or difficult, the design ambitious, the conditions poor, or the quality of the result matters mechanically.

Difficulty follows the complexity of the finished creation and the process that makes it. A material's value does not set the DC: a plain gold ring may be easier than a complicated steel lock, for all that the gold is worth more. Tools, facilities, instructions, materials, conditions and familiarity may all bear on whether a project can be attempted at all and how hard it is.

Difficulty	DC	Meaning
Easy	10	Straightforward work requiring some capability
Moderate	15	Meaningful work requiring competence or favourable circumstances
Difficult	20	Serious craftsmanship where training becomes important
Improbable	25	Exceptional work beyond what most people can reliably accomplish
Impossible	30	Extraordinary craftsmanship appearing impossible to ordinary people

The examples under each profession are benchmarks, not recipes. For anything not listed, compare it to whichever example it most resembles in complexity.

Working untrained

Professions can be attempted without formal training. An untrained character can experiment, and can teach themselves through repeated successful work. What they lack is efficiency and understanding.

Untrained, a profession
Adds no skill rank bonus.
Doubles base materials.
Doubles hourly materials.
Has a 0% chance to imbue.
Still requires the appropriate tools and facilities.
Still requires enough material for the base cost and the first hour before starting.

The crafting DC and the completion hours do not rise because the character is untrained. Inexperience shows up as wasted material, weaker checks and an inability to imbue — not as a harder task.

Alchemist

Spirit. Alchemists turn ingredients into substances substantially unlike what went into them — mundane medicines and poisons alongside potions, magical reagents, refined substances and outright transformation. The defining act is deliberate change: combining, refining, distilling or altering into something new.

An alchemist might prepare an antiseptic salve, distil concentrated poison from monster venom, brew a restorative potion, neutralise a dangerous reagent, or refine supernatural material into a form another profession can use.

Spirit governs it because alchemy needs sensitivity to the supernatural properties inside a material and control over them as they interact. Knowing which ingredient has a useful property may take another skill; turning it into a product is alchemy.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Prepare a common medicinal salve from familiar ingredients
Moderate — 15	Brew a standard healing potion from an established formula
Difficult — 20	Produce a potent poison from dangerous monster components
Improbable — 25	Refine unstable magical materials into a powerful reagent
Impossible — 30	Create a legendary elixir from extraordinarily rare and volatile ingredients

Artificer

Spirit. Artificers build devices where several systems must work together — mechanisms, engineered devices, traps, siege engines, constructs, magical machinery, and combinations of ordinary engineering with supernatural components.

Other professions frequently make the pieces. A Metal Worker forges the gears and springs and an Enchanter supplies a magical power source; the artificer designs and assembles them into something that runs.

Construction builds a gate. Metal Worker forges its fittings. Artificer builds the mechanism that recognises a magical seal and raises it.

Spirit governs it because artificing in the awakened world usually means integrating and controlling supernatural forces inside a working system. A thoroughly mundane device may justify another attribute.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Construct a simple mechanical trigger or basic mechanism
Moderate — 15	Build a reliable mechanical trap or complex locking mechanism
Difficult — 20	Construct a working siege mechanism or magically powered device
Improbable — 25	Create an autonomous construct incorporating several magical systems
Impossible — 30	Build a machine whose operation appears impossible by conventional principles

Artist

Speed. Artists make works whose purpose is information, expression, representation or decoration — painting, sculpture, calligraphy, scribing, bookmaking, printing, cartography, illustration, engraving of non-metal materials.

The work does not have to be beautiful. A precise anatomical diagram, a military map, an architectural drawing or a copied manuscript is as much a product of the trade as a portrait. The profession covers the ability to physically produce the work; having the information to make it accurate may still need another skill or a reliable source.

Speed governs it because artistic craftsmanship runs on fine motor control, precision and coordination — translating an intended design into a physical object.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Produce a clean sign, simple sketch or legible copied document
Moderate — 15	Create a detailed portrait, quality sculpture or accurate local map
Difficult — 20	Produce an intricate illuminated manuscript or exceptionally detailed artwork
Improbable — 25	Create an extraordinarily accurate regional map from incomplete records
Impossible — 30	Create a masterpiece whose precision seems beyond ordinary craftsmanship

Construction

Power. Structures and large functional objects in wood, stone, brick, plaster and glass — carpentry, masonry, joinery, shipbuilding, stonecutting, roofing, glazing. Furniture, doors, wagons, barrels, houses, bridges, walls, ships, towers and fortifications, plus repair and modification where real craftsmanship is involved rather than labour.

Scale alone does not set difficulty. Complexity, materials, design, conditions and the quality demanded matter just as much.

Power governs it because construction means physical control over heavy materials, tools and structural components, sustained over time. It is skilled labour, though — Power alone does not make anyone a carpenter, mason or shipwright.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Build a simple wooden crate, stool or basic shelter
Moderate — 15	Construct a sturdy door, wagon, barrel or piece of quality furniture
Difficult — 20	Build a durable house, bridge or seaworthy vessel
Improbable — 25	Construct an enormous fortification under challenging conditions
Impossible — 30	Achieve something beyond what conventional builders can do

Cook

Recovery. Transforming and preserving ingredients for consumption — cooking, baking, butchery, cheesemaking, preservation, confectionery, brewing, winemaking, distilling, fermentation. Trail rations through to feasts, aged cheeses, preserved meats, spirits and wines, and the preparation of edible monster parts and supernatural ingredients where those can safely be eaten.

Difficulty follows the preparation and the intended result rather than the value of what goes in. Ruining an expensive ingredient is easy; turning humble ones into something exceptional is not. Supernatural ingredients add difficulty when their properties have to survive the cooking.

Recovery governs it because food and drink are nourishment, restoration and preservation. In a world where a crafted consumable can do something real, cooking is the trade that makes the things which sustain a body.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Prepare a filling meal or properly preserve common food
Moderate — 15	Prepare a high-quality meal, brew reliable ale, or lay in good provisions
Difficult — 20	Create an elaborate feast, or successfully prepare difficult monster ingredients
Improbable — 25	Turn rare supernatural ingredients into a meal that keeps their properties intact
Impossible — 30	Draw extraordinary qualities from nearly impossible ingredients

Enchanter

Spirit. Enchanters are the odd one out: they do not make mundane items from raw materials. An enchanter takes an already finished mundane item and deliberately attempts to imbue it.

There is no Enchanter imbue chart. The item uses the same chart it would have had when it was originally crafted — a longsword on the melee weapon chart, plate on the heavy armor chart, a ring on the jewellery chart, a saddle on the saddle chart.

Every profession has some chance of an item imbuing naturally during crafting. An enchanter produces that result on purpose, and so has a far better chance of it — at enormous expense. Enchanting consumes valuable magical materials and reagents, and the cost climbs steeply with the rank and quality attempted.

That makes the profession itself brutal to develop. Practising it burns resources, skilled teachers are uncommon, and a high-rank enchanter has little reason to give away the techniques that make their services worth paying for. Finding someone able and willing to teach may be as hard as affording the lessons.

Spirit governs it because enchanting manipulates the supernatural forces behind imbuing directly, and the greater the attempt the finer the control needed to avoid destabilising the item being worked.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Attempt to imbue a simple, low-rank mundane item
Moderate — 15	Attempt to imbue a well-made item with a straightforward property
Difficult — 20	Attempt to imbue a significant weapon, armor piece or implement
Improbable — 25	Attempt an exceptionally powerful imbued item from rare materials
Impossible — 30	Attempt an imbuing whose potential appears beyond conventional enchanting

Jeweler

Speed. Extremely precise work in gemstones, precious metals, engraving and ornamental inlay. Goldsmithing, silversmithing, gemcutting, lapidary, gem setting and fine metal engraving all sit here.

A jeweler might cut a stone, make a gold ring, engrave a medallion, build a jewelled crown, set magical crystals into an object, draw delicate chains, or lay intricate inlay. The trade matters most where a rare material cannot afford to be wasted on clumsy work.

A jeweler works metal, then, but not as a Metal Worker does: theirs is precision, refinement and ornament rather than forging and heavy functional work.

Speed governs it because jewelcrafting depends on exceptional hand control and delicate manipulation. One misplaced cut destroys a valuable stone, and the hardest work demands nearly microscopic accuracy.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Create a simple ring, or polish and mount a common stone
Moderate — 15	Cut and set a valuable gemstone into a quality piece
Difficult — 20	Create an intricate piece with several cut stones and detailed engraving
Improbable — 25	Work an extraordinarily fragile magical gemstone without harming its properties
Impossible — 30	Create a flawless masterpiece from legendary materials

Leather Worker

Speed. Turning hides, skins and fur into finished goods — tanning, leatherworking, cobbling, belt making, fur work, and leather clothing, armor, containers and equipment. Boots, belts, packs, waterskins, sheaths, leather armor, protective clothing, gear made from monster hide.

Saddles, bridles, reins, harness and tack are Outfitter work, even though leather is their main material.

Monster hides carry unusual properties, and keeping them through tanning, cutting, fitting and assembly can raise a project's difficulty sharply.

Speed governs it because leatherwork is careful cutting, stitching, fitting, shaping and tool control. Tough material may take real effort, but precision decides whether the pieces fit and the thing works.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Create a belt, pouch, simple sheath or other basic item
Moderate — 15	Produce sturdy boots, a backpack or serviceable leather armor
Difficult — 20	Create finely fitted armor from a difficult or unusually tough hide
Improbable — 25	Craft equipment from a powerful magical creature's hide, properties intact
Impossible — 30	Transform legendary hide into a flawless creation without diminishing it

Metal Worker

Power. Forging, casting, shaping, joining and repairing functional metal — blacksmithing, weaponsmithing, armorsmithing, bladesmithing, toolmaking, locksmithing, foundry work. Nails, horseshoes, tools, locks, chains, weapons, shields, armor, cookware, gates, fittings.

Not restricted to iron and steel: copper, tin, bronze and supernatural metals all come through the same trade, given the tools and the knowledge.

The trade is functional metalwork. Precious metal, gem settings and ornamental engraving belong to the Jeweler, and the two overlap happily — a sword forged by one may be engraved by the other.

Power governs it because forging demands force, endurance, heat tolerance and controlled labour. It is a foundation, not a substitute: raw strength does not make a smith.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Forge nails, simple tools, cookware or other basic goods
Moderate — 15	Forge a reliable sword, shield, lock or suit of basic armor
Difficult — 20	Create an exceptionally balanced weapon or complex fitted armor
Improbable — 25	Forge a powerful supernatural metal requiring extraordinary technique
Impossible — 30	Forge a legendary weapon from material considered nearly impossible to work

Outfitter

Recovery. The specialised equipment used by archers, riders, mounts and working animals — bowyery, fletching, saddlery and tack — together with the practical knowledge to fit, equip and care for the animals using it. Hunting and war bows, arrows, bolts, quivers, riding and war saddles, bridles, reins, harness, and gear for unusual mounts.

An outfitter understands not only how to make these things but how they interact with whoever uses them. A badly fitted saddle injures a mount as surely as a badly made bow injures an archer.

They also know animal care as it bears on mounts and working animals: keeping them sound, spotting trouble caused by equipment or exertion, preparing a creature for travel or labour, fitting gear to unusual anatomy. That does not replace the core skills used to find, track, calm, capture or understand a wild creature — outfitting concerns animals already under a character's control.

It reaches past horses and livestock. A skilled outfitter might build a saddle for a griffin, a harness able to control an enormous beast of burden, tack for something with the wrong number of legs, or arrows from supernatural woods, monster components and stranger materials still.

Recovery governs it because outfitting runs on patience, consistency, careful material preparation and an understanding of what creatures and equipment physically need. Producing arrows in quantity, tillering a bow, breaking in a saddle, maintaining tack and caring for animals are all processes where sustained attention beats any single moment of strength or precision.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Craft simple arrows, repair common tack, or fit basic equipment to a familiar animal
Moderate — 15	Craft a reliable hunting bow, riding saddle, quiver, harness or quality ammunition
Difficult — 20	Create a war bow, war saddle, or equipment precisely fitted to an unusual mount
Improbable — 25	Craft exceptional ranged gear from supernatural materials, or tack for a dangerous magical creature
Impossible — 30	Outfit a creature whose anatomy or nature makes conventional work seemingly impossible

Textile Worker

Recovery. Turning fibre, thread and cloth into finished goods — spinning, weaving, tailoring, sewing, dyeing, embroidery, sailmaking, ropemaking. Clothing, blankets, uniforms, tents, sails, rope, banners, padded armor, formal wear, garments of supernatural fibre, and the alteration or repair of any of it where real craftsmanship is needed.

Textile work is usually sustained production rather than one moment of craftsmanship. Spinning thread, working a loom, laying rope, sewing hundreds of stitches or embroidering an intricate design all demand consistency over long stretches of repetitive work, and supernatural fibres can make that far harder when the material must be handled a particular way throughout.

Recovery governs it for exactly that reason: patience, consistency, sustained concentration and precise repetition. A large project may be thousands of individual movements, and its quality depends on holding the standard across all of them rather than on any one of them.

Difficulty	Example
Easy — 10	Sew simple clothing, a blanket, a sack or basic rope
Moderate — 15	Create fitted clothing, a durable sail, a uniform or a quality embroidered garment
Difficult — 20	Produce elaborate formal clothing, or equipment from difficult supernatural fibres
Improbable — 25	Weave extremely rare magical fibres into a complex garment intact
Impossible — 30	Create a legendary textile from material conventional weaving cannot handle

Profession crafting

Crafting is measured in successful hours. A project is not one roll: the character makes a profession check for every hour they work. Failed checks cost time and material, and they do not destroy the item or undo progress.

Items do not fail. Hours do.

Every craftable item lists four things.

Value	Is
Crafting DC	The difficulty each hour of work must meet.
Completion hours	How many successful hours complete it.
Base materials	What must be committed to begin.
Hourly materials	What each attempted hour consumes.

Beginning a project

Starting a project consumes its base materials immediately — doubled if untrained. These are components committed to the item, and stopping does not normally get them back. The project is then active, and stays incomplete until it accumulates its full required successful hours.

Each hour

At the start of every hour the character commits the hourly materials — doubled if untrained — and makes a profession check against the crafting DC. Each hour resolves on its own.

	Materials	Progress	Project XP
Success	Consumed	+1 successful hour	+1
Failure	Consumed	None	0

Crafting stations

Every profession needs its tools and its facilities, and not all of them are equal. A crafting station better than the minimum — a guild forge, a properly equipped laboratory, a workshop built for the trade — grants a bonus to crafting checks made at it.

That bonus is what a guild or workshop is actually worth. It does not increase the experience an item pays; it increases how often an hour succeeds, which means fewer wasted hours, less wasted material, and a finished item sooner. A crafter with access to a good station learns at the same rate per successful hour as one working out of a shed, and simply has more successful hours.

The item is not ruined by a failure, and every successful hour already banked remains. The character may commit another hour's materials and try again. A failed hour is wasted material, a bad adjustment, a component that has to be remade, or work that simply did not move the thing forward.

Failure costs time and materials. It does not destroy crafting progress.

Finishing

A project completes when it reaches its listed number of successful hours. An item listed at four hours needs four successful hours, not four hours of work. A skilled professional who never fails takes exactly four. Someone less able may take six, eight or more actual hours to bank the same four.

Pausing, Resuming and Abandoning

A project does not have to be finished in one sitting. Once the base materials are committed, the unfinished item exists as a physical thing, and the successful hours banked into it stay there until it is finished, abandoned or destroyed.

Pausing

A character may stop after any completed hourly check, with no penalty. The project keeps its consumed base materials, its accumulated successful hours and its current state of construction, and consumes no hourly materials while nobody is working on it.

A sword needing six successful hours that has four stays at 4 / 6 until work resumes. The character is free to rest, adventure, gather more material, start something else, or simply leave it.

Pausing a crafting project does not erase progress.

Resuming

A paused project can be picked up again so long as it is intact and the character has the tools, facilities and materials to carry on. Base materials are not paid twice — they were committed when the project began. The character pays the next hour's materials, makes another profession check, and continues from the existing total.

An iron longsword needs eight successful hours. A character banks two and stops for the day, at 2 / 8. Returning the next morning they pay one hour's materials, roll, and on a success stand at 3 / 8.

Ranking up mid-project

A profession can improve while a project is still open, and the two halves of that split apart.

Uses	Which rank
Crafting checks from now on	The character's current rank
Hourly materials from now on	The character's current rank
The finished item's imbue chart	The rank the project began at

Earlier hours are not recalculated and spent materials are never refunded.

So an untrained metal worker may bank enough profession XP during a long project to reach Iron before the item is done. From that point they count as trained: their checks gain the rank bonus and their hourly materials drop to the normal cost. The item itself, though, still finishes on the imbue chart for the rank it was started at — untrained, and therefore 0%.

Crafting checks follow the character. The imbue chart follows the project.

Handing a project to someone else

An unfinished project can usually be continued by another character with the right profession. It keeps its successful hours, and the new crafter uses their own attribute, profession rank, applicable bonuses and material requirements for each hour they personally work.

The original crafter need not stay involved, which is what lets apprentices, workshops, teams and guilds finish work somebody else started. Some specialised projects may state that they cannot be transferred, for magical, personal or technical reasons.

Experience does not transfer with the project. Handing a project on forfeits the original crafter's claim to everything they banked into it, and the character who completes the item is awarded experience only for the successful hours they themselves worked.

A transferred project pays out one XP for each successful hour the finisher put into it, and nothing for the hours anybody else did.

So a longsword needing eight successful hours that changes hands at six awards its finisher 2 XP, not eight. The earlier six still count toward completing the item — they are simply not that crafter's to learn from.

A project therefore has to remember whose hours are whose. In practice that means noting how many successful hours each crafter contributed, which only matters at all for a project more than one person has worked on.

Abandoning

A character may permanently stop work on a project. Doing so loses its accumulated successful hours, ends any possibility of resuming it as that item, and refunds nothing — base materials and every hour's materials already spent stay spent.

It also loses the project XP banked into it. Experience is awarded when an item is completed, so an abandoned project hands over nothing — however many hours went into it.

Both the work and the experience belong to the project until it is finished.

That is what makes abandoning a decision rather than a formality. Walking away costs the materials, the hours, and everything the character would have learned from seeing it through.

Salvage

Base materials count as incorporated into the project once crafting begins, and do not come back automatically when it is abandoned. Some professions may allow a character to salvage usable material, which is its own procedure rather than part of crafting, and follows the rules of the relevant profession, item or material.

How much comes back may depend on the type of item, how far construction got, the materials involved, damage to the project, and the character's profession.

Unless a rule specifically allows salvage, materials committed to an abandoned project are lost.

That is deliberate: it stops a project being opened purely to park or reclaim materials without consequence.

Lost, damaged and destroyed

A paused project is an object in the world. It can be stolen, damaged, destroyed, lost, left somewhere dangerous, or caught up in anything else that happens.

Destroyed beyond recovery, it counts as abandoned: the successful hours and the experience banked with them are both lost. Merely damaged, the Guide may require additional successful hours or materials to repair it before ordinary crafting continues.

Not every interruption harms a project. Leaving a sword unfinished on a secure forge overnight costs nothing. The state of a project should reflect what actually happened to it.

Moving an unfinished project

Whether a project can be carried depends on the item and how far it has got. A half-sewn cloak packs away easily. A half-built wagon does not. A partly forged weapon may have to stay near a forge until it reaches a stage where moving it is practical.

The Guide decides what is reasonable. A project that needs specialised tools or facilities can still be moved — work simply cannot resume until those are available again.

Paused is not abandoned

A project is abandoned only when the character deliberately gives it up, or when circumstances make continuing impossible. Stopping work does not abandon anything.

State	Progress kept	Base materials repaid	Can resume
Active	Yes	No	Yes
Paused	Yes	No	Yes
Abandoned	No	—	No
Destroyed	No	—	No

This is what lets crafting happen across days, weeks or seasons instead of demanding that every project be finished in one continuous session.

The project principle

Successful hours remain with the project.

So does the experience they bank, until the item is finished.

Only the crafter who finishes it is paid, and only for their own hours.

Pausing preserves both.

Resuming continues from where the project stopped.

Abandoning permanently ends the project, and forfeits both.

Characters are free to interrupt their work as often as they like. Abandoning is the only thing that costs them, and it costs everything the project held: the materials, the hours, and the experience.

Experience from crafting

Each successful hour banks 1 XP into the project. The whole of it is awarded to the crafter when the item is completed.

This applies whether or not the character is trained. A failed hour banks nothing, because nothing was accomplished.

An item must be completed for any of its experience to be earned. The XP sits with the project until then, exactly as the successful hours do, and it leaves with the project if the project is abandoned or destroyed. What a character learns from a trade, they learn from things they actually finished.

Teaching yourself a profession

Unlike a technique, a profession can be learned with no book and no teacher, by experimentation and repetition. This is self-teaching, and it is the only skill type that allows it — with one exception.

Enchanter cannot be self-taught. An untrained enchanter has a 0% chance to imbue anything, and a successful imbue is the whole act of the profession, so there is no successful work to learn from. Iron must come from a trainer or an Enchanter skill book. Crafting sets out why, and what that scarcity does to the trade.

The character works under all the untrained rules — double materials, no rank bonus, no imbuing — and every successful hour still banks 1 project XP. Each finished item hands that experience over, and those awards accumulate toward the experience needed for Iron.

Worked example: teaching yourself metalwork

An untrained character sets out to learn Metal Worker by beating out an iron cooking pot — a rank 0 item, which is what a beginner should be starting on. Its item block lists:

Cooking pot	Listed	Untrained
Crafting DC	10	10
Completion hours	2	2
Base materials	Iron	Doubled
Hourly materials	Forge fuel, flux	Doubled
Imbuing chance	—	0%

They need double the base materials, plus a doubled first hour, before they may begin. The base materials are consumed at once, and then they make hourly checks against DC 10 — on 1d20 plus their Power rank and nothing else, since they have no skill rank to add.

Hour	Result	Progress	Project XP
1	Success	1 / 2	+1
2	Failure	1 / 2	0
3	Failure	1 / 2	0
4	Success	2 / 2	+1

The pot is finished after four actual hours. It needed two successful ones; the two failures added time and two more hourly material costs, and damaged nothing.

Because the pot was completed, its banked experience is awarded and the character gains 2 Metal Worker XP. Had they given up at hour three, they would have gained none of it.

Reaching Iron

The character keeps completing items until the awarded experience is enough to reach Iron. At that moment they have taught themselves the trade and count as trained. The untrained penalties end immediately: normal base materials, normal hourly materials, skill rank added to checks, and access to the profession's imbuing chance. Crafting continues to grant 1 XP per successful hour afterwards, still awarded on completion.

Technique Skills

A technique is a specialised method that cannot be performed meaningfully without instruction. Where a profession can be approached through inefficient trial and error, a technique has to be understood before it functions at all.

A technique cannot be used untrained. Knowing that one exists is not the same as knowing how to perform it.

A character must reach at least Iron in a technique before it does anything, and a technique cannot be self-taught. It requires a skill book or a qualified trainer.

Techniques are not rolled

A technique provides a consistent mechanical benefit rather than a check. Once learned, its effect applies whenever its conditions are met. Techniques are habits, disciplines, instincts and specialised methods practised until they become part of how the character acts.

Nor does a technique depend on favourable circumstances, active casting, or supernatural resources unless it says so. Its benefits remain while a character has reduced attributes, has emptied their mana or stamina, is silenced, or is otherwise cut off from anything that needs active supernatural power.

A character may lose access to spells, activated abilities and resource-driven powers. Their training remains.

The four fields

Field	Improves
Armory	The use of specific weapons, armor, shields, tools or other equipment.
Fighting	Offence, defence, positioning and combat control, persistently.
Mental	Spell construction, potency, limitation, control and aura work.
Supernatural	Rare persistent effects tied to luck, fate, divine influence or astral forces.

Armory techniques

Specialised training with a category of equipment — swords, polearms, bows, heavy armor, shields. Not proficiency: the difference between being able to use a thing and having trained deeply enough to get more out of it. A character may wield a sword competently without a sword technique; a trained swordsman gets something an ordinary user cannot reproduce.

An armory technique is normally tied to a category rather than one item, though a narrower technique may focus on unusual equipment where the benefit is correspondingly stronger. Its benefits last as long as the equipment is in use, cost nothing, and cannot normally be suppressed by anything that shuts off supernatural abilities.

Example	Does
Sword Discipline	A persistent bonus attacking with swords, and better control defending against melee.
Shield Discipline	Improves a shield's defensive benefit and reduces penalties for repositioning while defending.
Heavy Armor Conditioning	Reduces the movement or stamina penalties heavy armor imposes.
Bow Discipline	Improves ranged consistency and reduces penalties from distance or an unstable firing position.
Polearm Control	Improves reach-based positioning and the ability to threaten enemies moving nearby.

Other armory benefits might include improved accuracy with a category, steadier damage, faster weapon transitions, or better handling of oversized or unusual equipment.

Fighting techniques

Where armory techniques attach to equipment, fighting techniques attach to what the character does. They apply whatever is in hand unless the technique says otherwise, and they cover timing, defence, movement, positioning, reactions, pressure and tactical control.

They should give reliable bonuses rather than explosive activated effects. Their value is in always being there. Some reward a particular style — fighting aggressively, staying mobile, protecting allies, counterattacking, holding a line.

Example	Does
Defensive Footwork	A persistent defensive bonus while you can move and are not restrained.
Aggressive Pressure	A small offensive bonus against an enemy you have already struck this exchange.
Guardian's Position	Improved defensive effectiveness while protecting an adjacent ally.
Counterfighter	A bonus attacking an enemy immediately after they miss you.
Unyielding Stance	Resistance to being knocked prone, pushed, pulled or otherwise moved against your will.

Others might reduce penalties while surrounded or injured, improve opportunity attacks, or make a counterattack land harder.

Mental techniques

Disciplines for controlling supernatural ability through trained thought, focus, structure and aura work. A mental technique does not create spells — it improves how a character constructs, limits, strengthens, maintains and manipulates supernatural effects.

They matter most to casters and aura users, because they let training alter the efficiency and behaviour of an ability rather than leaving everything to raw Spirit. A mental technique may let a character deliberately accept a limitation in exchange for more effect elsewhere.

Example	Does
Controlled Casting	Improves the precision of area effects and reduces the risk of catching unintended targets.
Efficient Formula	Reduces the mana cost of a defined category of abilities.
Focused Potency	Increases an ability's effect when its area, range or target count is deliberately reduced.
Aura Suppression	Reduces your aura's detectable presence and makes your strength harder to judge.
Aura Pressure	Improves attempts to impose your aura on weaker or less disciplined opponents.
Structured Limitation	Choose a meaningful restriction when constructing or learning an ability; it gains a corresponding increase in potency.

Although these govern supernatural abilities, the technique itself is still known when those abilities cannot be used. A silenced character cannot cast, but they have not forgotten how to shape a spell. The benefit applies again the moment the underlying ability does.

Supernatural techniques

Rare persistent influences that fit none of the other three — luck, fate, probability, coincidence, destiny. They are frequently not learned through conventional training at all, but granted by divine beings, astral forces, ancient entities, cosmic phenomena, powerful artifacts or an extraordinary experience.

They should be considerably rarer than any other technique, and work well as rewards for a major accomplishment, divine favour, an unusual awakening, or an encounter with something cosmic.

Because they are techniques rather than activated abilities, they tend to alter the rules around a character instead of asking to be switched on. A fortunate character simply has better outcomes. A fate-touched one is harder to kill. Someone blessed by an astral entity meets improbable opportunities others never do.

Example	Does
Fortune's Favor	A limited ability to improve unfavourable random outcomes.
Lucky Break	When a result would be an especially severe failure, a chance the consequence is reduced.
Fated Survival	A rare protection when an attack or effect would otherwise kill you outright.
Serendipity	Favourable coincidences occur a little more often where circumstances are genuinely uncertain.
Astral Favor	A persistent minor benefit set by whatever granted it.

Armory against fighting

Both improve combat, and they attach to different things.

	Armory	Fighting
Mastery of	Equipment	Combat itself
Modifies	The equipment	The character
Applies	Only while using the associated weapon, armor or gear	Whenever its requirements are met, whatever is carried

Both have six ranks, each an increasingly ingrained piece of training that pays a permanent benefit while its requirements hold. Six is not arbitrary: a technique does nothing below Iron, and Iron through Transcendent is exactly six steps.

Weapon techniques

Weapon techniques apply to the melee or ranged weapons the technique names, and progress through handling, damage-type specialisation, critical strikes, and how long the weapon's afflictions last.

Rank	Reward
1	An equipment mastery benefit, depending on whether the weapon is melee or ranged.
2	A damage specialty benefit for bludgeoning, piercing or slashing.
3	Critical hit range improves to 19–20.
4	Afflictions and conditions applied with the weapon last 1 longer.
5	An improved damage specialty benefit.
6	Critical hit range improves to 18–20.

Rank 1: handling

Rank 1 is about overcoming the weapon's most basic limitation rather than granting a combat bonus.

Weapon	Rank 1 gives
Ranged, with the Reload trait	Reload is removed while you use it.
Ranged, without Reload	Improved effective range.
Melee	The weapon gains the ability to make opportunity attacks.

Damage specialties

Ranks 2 and 5 are mastery of the weapon's physical properties, and depend on its primary damage type. A specialty should change how that damage behaves rather than simply adding more of it. Rank 2 is exploiting the basic characteristics of the type; rank 5 is advanced mastery of the same principle.

Type	Emphasises
Bludgeoning	Impact, staggering, forced movement, disruption, breaking defences.
Piercing	Penetration, armor bypass, precision, weak points, deep wounds.
Slashing	Bleeding, multiple wounds, wide cuts, severing, sustained injury.

The exact rank 2 and rank 5 benefits are defined per damage type, and are not written yet.

Armor techniques

Armor techniques train a character in one armor category — light, medium or heavy — and work by overcoming what that armor costs rather than making it better. The character becomes steadily more able to move, react, defend and resist while wearing it.

Rank	Light	Medium	Heavy
1	The armor may be worn without its untrained penalty.
2	+1 Movement	Remove the Skullduggery penalty	Remove the movement penalty
3	Resistance to bludgeoning	Resistance to piercing	Resistance to slashing
4	Speed saves with advantage	Spirit saves with advantage	Power saves with advantage
5	+3 Initiative	+1 Movement	Remove the Skullduggery penalty
6	Armor mastery — not yet defined, and should differ by category.

The progression gives each category a distinct identity.

Category	Emphasises
Light	Mobility, initiative, speed, avoidance.
Medium	Versatility, freedom of movement, mental stability, balanced protection.
Heavy	Stability, physical resilience, freedom from the armor's own limitations.

Fighting techniques in detail

A fighting technique improves the character, not the gear. It does not care whether they hold a sword, an axe, something improvised, something enchanted, or nothing at all, unless it says so.

A fighting technique should modify	And should leave to armory techniques
Attack bonuses Damage bonuses Defence Reactions Positioning Unarmed attacks Offensive and defensive consistency	Critical ranges Reload Weapon range Armor penalties Equipment traits Damage-type behaviour Weapon-applied condition duration

Martial Artist

A fighting technique for fundamental offensive ability, alternating between accuracy and damage, with unarmed strikes improving alongside.

Rank	Reward	Running total
1	+1 to hit	+1 hit
2	+1 melee damage; unarmed strikes become d6	+1 hit, +1 damage
3	+1 to hit	+2 hit, +1 damage
4	+1 melee damage; unarmed strikes become d8	+2 hit, +2 damage
5	+1 to hit	+3 hit, +2 damage
6	+1 damage, and your attacks ignore bludgeoning resistance	+3 hit, +3 damage

At rank 6 a martial artist therefore has +3 to hit, +3 damage, d8 unarmed strikes, and ignores bludgeoning resistance — all of it belonging to the character rather than to anything they are holding.

Which field is it?

One question separates them.

Would this benefit still make sense if the character changed equipment?

Benefit	Field	Because
Increase the critical range of swords	Armory	It modifies swords.
+1 to hit with melee attacks	Fighting	The character is more accurate.
Ignore the Reload trait of crossbows	Armory	It overcomes an equipment limitation.
+1 damage with melee attacks	Fighting	The character hits harder.
Slashing weapons inflict longer bleeds	Armory	It changes how the weapon's damage behaves.
A bonus against an enemy who missed you	Fighting	It modifies the character's behaviour.

Keeping the boundary lets both fields grow powerful without competing for the same mechanical ground.

Mental and supernatural, told apart

Both reach past weapon training and physical discipline, and they do very different work.

Mental techniques modify how a character controls supernatural power.

Supernatural techniques modify chance and uncertain outcomes.

Mental techniques are learned disciplines — spell construction, ritual execution, limitation, efficiency, aura work. Supernatural techniques are far rarer, and manipulate probability itself through rerolls, fortune dice, forced rerolls, random outcomes, and even the quantity, quality or rarity of a reward.

Combat Ritual Casting

Most rituals are built to be performed away from danger. They want careful positioning, repeated components, controlled mana and unbroken concentration. A practitioner of Combat Ritual Casting learns to compress those processes, recover from interruption, and hold a ritual's structure together under pressure.

It does not remove a ritual's fundamental requirements. Each rank makes them more manageable when everything is going wrong.

Rank	Reward
1	You may begin or continue a ritual in combat without combat conditions automatically disrupting it.
2	Rituals performed in combat have their casting time reduced by 1 step, to whatever minimum the ritual defines.
3	Taking damage no longer automatically interrupts a ritual. Only what would break concentration or prevent the required actions can.
4	Rituals performed in combat cost 10% less mana.
5	You may move up to half your Movement during a combat ritual without interrupting it.
6	Past half its required progress, an interrupted ritual no longer collapses. It keeps what it has accumulated unless the ritual says otherwise.

At low rank this lets a practitioner attempt rituals nobody else could. At high rank it turns ritual magic from something needing a controlled environment into something a trained caster can hold together in a fight.

Aura Command

Every awakened being has an aura, and most control theirs poorly. It swells unbidden when they are threatened, advertises their strength, and flinches from anything stronger. Aura Command is learning to treat it as an extension of the will.

The technique does not create an aura. It improves control of one already there.

Rank	Reward
1	You may deliberately suppress or reveal your aura at no additional effort.
2	Control its size, reducing or expanding its effective area within its normal limits.
3	Advantage resisting hostile aura pressure and attempts to manipulate your aura.
4	Exclude chosen creatures from your aura's effects, where the underlying effect allows selective control.
5	Your aura pressure counts as stronger when contesting another creature's aura.
6	Perfect Aura Control. Your aura reveals nothing of your emotion, power or intent unless you choose, and weaker uncontrolled auras cannot distort or suppress it.

A novice learns to hide their presence.

An experienced practitioner learns to shape it.

A master decides who perceives it at all.

Designing a mental technique

A mental technique should modify the structure, efficiency, limitations or control of a supernatural ability rather than handing out an unconditional number. It might reduce a casting restriction, improve aura control or spell precision, buy mana efficiency, stretch a duration, narrow or widen an area, pick targets out of one, make a ritual more reliable, strengthen an ability through a deliberate limitation, resist supernatural pressure, conceal supernatural information, or hold an effect together in bad conditions.

What has this character learned to do better with supernatural power?

If the answer comes from training, control, discipline, understanding or practised manipulation, it is a mental technique.

Supernatural techniques in detail

A supernatural technique does not usually make a character stronger, faster, tougher or more accurate. It changes what happens when the outcome is uncertain.

A warrior with more training gains +1 to hit from a fighting technique. A warrior touched by fortune rerolls the attack instead.

Supernatural techniques manipulate outcomes rather than statistics.

They interact with rerolling your own dice, forcing an opponent to reroll, adding fortune dice to a roll, granting them to an ally, spending them for a specialised effect, subtracting them from an enemy's roll, replacing or improving a result, influencing a random table, and raising the quantity, quality or rarity of what is found.

These effects generally have limited uses rather than being permanent bonuses — once per rest, several times per rest, or a pool of dice that comes back when the character rests. The technique itself stays learned; only its uses run out.

Fortune dice

Some supernatural techniques grant special dice, known collectively as fortune dice. They never replace a d20 roll — they influence other rolls and uncertain outcomes, and the technique granting them decides their size, their number, which uses apply, and how they come back.

Use	A fortune die is
Guidance	Added to one of your own rolls.
Inspiration	Given to another creature and added to one of theirs.
Exploit	Spent to trigger a specialised effect of the technique, much like a manoeuvre.
Misfortune	Subtracted from another creature's roll.
Fate	Applied to some other explicitly random outcome the technique defines.

That gives supernatural techniques a shared language without forcing every one of them to work identically.

Gambler's Luck

Probability simply tends to favour this character when it matters. Coins land the right way. A blade that should have missed finds its mark on the second attempt. A desperate leap succeeds when it had no business doing so. They are not more capable than anyone else — they just keep getting another chance.

Rank	Reward
1	Once per rest, reroll a d20 you rolled. You must take the new result.
2	Once per rest, a d4 luck die: after a d20 roll but before it resolves, roll and add it.
3	The reroll becomes twice per rest.
4	The luck die becomes a d6, and may be given to a creature you can perceive instead.
5	Once per rest, when a creature you can perceive succeeds on a d20 roll, force a reroll. The new result stands.
6	The luck die becomes a d8, rerolls become three per rest, and when rerolling your own die you may keep whichever result you prefer.

It develops in three stages — reroll → fortune → misfortune. The character first learns to escape their own bad outcomes, then to improve uncertain ones, and finally to turn fortune against someone else. Even at rank 6 nothing is guaranteed; there are simply far more chances to make chance cooperate.

Scribe of Fate

A scribe does not merely enjoy good fortune. They exert quiet influence over which possible version of an uncertain outcome becomes the real one.

Nothing is conjured that could never have existed. Fate arranges that another usable fang survived the fight intact, that the recovered material happens to be exceptional, that the treasure in the ruin turns out rarer than anyone expected.

Rank	Reward
1	One d4 fate die per rest: after a creature you can perceive makes a d20 roll but before it resolves, add it.
2	Once per rest, reroll random loot quantity and choose either result.
3	Fate dice become d6, and you gain two per rest.
4	Once per rest, reroll random loot quality and choose either result.
5	Fate dice become d8, and may now be added to or subtracted from a d20 roll by a creature you can perceive.
6	Once per rest, reroll random loot rarity and choose either result. You also gain three fate dice per rest.

Its influence over rewards climbs deliberately — quantity → quality → rarity. How much is found, then how good each result is, then how extraordinary it can become. A scribe creates no treasure from nothing: there has to be an uncertain reward for fate to work on.

Reward manipulation

Supernatural techniques are the field that can reach random rewards, in three categories.

Category	Determines	A technique might
Quantity	How much is obtained.	Reroll the materials recovered, increase the number of consumables generated, improve a loot roll, or roll twice and take the greater.
Quality	How good the result is within its category.	Reroll item quality, improve recovered equipment's condition or generated materials, or roll twice and take the better.
Rarity	How uncommon the reward is.	Reroll a rarity result, roll twice and take the rarer, offer a chance to climb one rarity, or improve the odds of Rare, Epic and Legendary results.

Because rarity drives a reward's power and value directly, rarity manipulation should sit at higher technique ranks. In every case the technique manipulates the existing reward system rather than declaring that better treasure appears.

Designing a supernatural technique

It should manipulate dice, probability and random outcomes, and rarely hand out a flat number. The distinction holds cleanly across all four fields.

This	Is	And this	Is
+2 to hit	Fighting	Reroll a missed attack	Supernatural
+2 defence	Fighting	Force an attacker to reroll a hit	Supernatural
Increase a weapon's critical range	Armory	Force an enemy to reroll a critical against you	Supernatural
Increase a spell's potency	Mental	Add a fortune die to a spell's attack roll	Supernatural

It holds outside combat too. Becoming better at searching for valuable materials is not a supernatural technique. Influencing a random treasure roll so that what is found is more plentiful, better or rarer, is.

How does this character manipulate chance?

The answer will be personal fortune (reroll your own), shared fortune (give dice or rerolls away), misfortune (force enemy rerolls or subtract from their results), fortune dice (a limited pool influencing uncertain outcomes), reward fortune (quantity, quality, rarity), or probability control (roll several results, replace one, or choose between them).

The four fields, in summary

Field	Territory
Armory	Weapons, armor, equipment traits, critical ranges, damage specialties, weapon-applied conditions, equipment limitations.
Fighting	Accuracy, damage, defence, reactions, positioning, unarmed combat, martial consistency.
Mental	Spell construction, potency, limitations, mana efficiency, ritual casting, supernatural control, aura manipulation.
Supernatural	Rerolls, fortune dice, forced rerolls, probability, random outcomes, reward manipulation.

Armory modifies what you use.

Fighting modifies how you fight.

Mental modifies how you control power.

Supernatural modifies chance.

Principles for writing a technique

Principle	Meaning
No d20	A technique either applies or it does not. Write its effect as a persistent rule.
Training, not resources	Unless it says otherwise, a technique costs no mana, stamina or anything else expendable.
Persists through impairment	Attribute penalties, empty pools and silence do not remove it. The character may be unable to perform the action it modifies; the training stays.
Rewards specialisation	Heavy investment in sword techniques should feel different from merely knowing how to hold one, and an aura specialist should reach past what raw Spirit gives.
Modifies, rarely replaces	A technique improves attacks, defence, equipment, spell construction, aura work or probability. It should seldom behave like a separate activated ability.
Rarity follows access	Armory and fighting techniques are the most reachable through training, mental ones need specialised magical instruction, and supernatural ones may be unobtainable by training at all.

Learning a Non-Core Skill

Method	Profession	Technique
Skill book	Yes	Yes
Qualified trainer	Yes	Yes
Self-teaching	Yes, except Enchanter	No

Once the skill reaches Iron it becomes an ordinary part of the character's skill progression.

Skill books

A skill book holds the knowledge and practical understanding needed to learn or advance one named skill. It may contain a profession, a technique, or an advanced version of either.

A skill book
Is consumed when activated. It works once.
Advances its named skill by exactly one rank.
Cannot raise that skill above the book's own rank.
Resets the skill's experience to 0 after the advance.

Books cannot skip ranks. A Silver Metal Worker book used by an untrained character takes them Untrained → Iron, not to Silver. An Iron character using the same book goes Iron → Bronze. Each rank has to be gained in order, and the book's rank is only a ceiling on how far it can ever take someone.

Trainers

A profession or technique can also be learned from another character. A trainer must stand two ranks above the rank being taught.

To teach Untrained → Iron, a trainer needs Bronze.

An Iron practitioner understands the fundamentals. A Bronze one has moved far enough past them to spot mistakes, explain principles and guide someone else through. The requirement holds at every rank: the trainer stays two ranks beyond whatever the student is working through.

Training experience

Training under a qualified instructor provides 1 XP per hour toward the skill being taught, and requires whatever the skill actually needs — a forge for a metal worker, laboratory equipment for an alchemist, weapons and a safe space for a combat technique. Knowledge alone is not always enough.

A character gains training XP from no more than 8 hours of instruction in any 24-hour period.

Training is not crafting

A student is shadowing someone who already knows the work, so training does not run the crafting procedure at all.

	Training	Self-teaching
Roll	None — no check is made	A profession check every hour
XP	1 per hour, guaranteed	1 per successful hour, paid on completion
Materials	None consumed	Doubled while untrained
Produces	Nothing	The item
Costs	Whatever the instructor charges	Materials

Training therefore trades money for certainty. An hour of instruction always advances the skill, where an hour at your own forge might fail, and might belong to a project that is never finished. What training does not do is put anything in the character's hands: they leave with experience and nothing to sell.

Combining methods

Self-teaching and training feed the same progression. A character does not lose practical experience by later finding an instructor: an untrained metal worker with 12 XP from completed work trains under a master and continues from 12, then returns to the forge and earns more by finishing more items.

Skill books are the exception, because using one resets the skill's experience to 0 after the rank it grants.

Iron is the threshold

	Below Iron	At Iron
Profession	Usable: double materials, no rank bonus, 0% imbuing.	Normal materials, rank applies, imbuing possible.
Technique	Unusable.	Usable, with its listed benefits.

From Iron onward both advance by the ordinary rules: practical use where the skill grants experience for it, allocated experience, continued training under someone two ranks ahead, or an appropriate skill book.

Profession against technique

Rule	Profession	Technique
Usable untrained	Yes	No
Self-teach through use	Yes	No
Untrained material cost	×2	—
Untrained imbuing chance	0%	—
Untrained rank bonus	None	—
Becomes trained at	Iron	Iron
Skill book	Yes	Yes
Trainer	Yes	Yes
Trainer requirement	Two ranks above the rank being taught
Training XP	1 per hour guaranteed, 8 hours a day, no check made
Advance through use after Iron	Yes	Where applicable
Advance through allocated experience	Yes	Yes

Three paths into a profession

Path	Needs	Costs	Gives
Skill book	An appropriate book	The book, consumed	One rank, experience reset to 0
Trainer	Someone at Bronze or better	Time, facilities and the instructor's fee	1 XP per hour guaranteed, 8 a day. No check, no materials, no item.
Self-teaching	Tools, facilities, materials	Double materials throughout	1 XP per successful hour, on completion

A technique has only the first two.

Crafting at a glance

Event	Materials	Progress	Profession XP
Begin a project	Base materials consumed	Project opens	—
Successful hour	Hourly materials consumed	+1 successful hour, +1 project XP	None yet
Failed hour	Hourly materials consumed	None	0
Abandon a project	Base materials stay committed	Project ends, banked XP lost	None
Reach the completion hours	—	Item completed	+1 per successful hour you worked
Take over someone else's project	Your own rates from here	Their hours still count	Their banked XP is forfeit

While untrained: base materials ×2, hourly materials ×2, no rank bonus, 0% imbuing.

In short

Professions can be discovered through practice.

Techniques must first be taught.

Successful work creates experience.

Items do not fail. Hours do.

Acquiring Skills

Skills are learned rather than awakened, through training, instruction, repeated practice, specialized organizations, mentors, professional experience, rewards, supernatural instructional resources, or skill books.

How a skill becomes available depends on the campaign and the circumstances. Finding someone able to teach an unusual skill may itself require exploration, reputation, favors or payment. A master swordsman may teach Martial Arts; a wilderness guide may teach Wayfarer; a physician may teach Treatment; a skilled artisan may offer crafting instruction. Learning a skill should make sense within the world.

Training

Training is learning through time and instruction, and it becomes a permanent part of what the character can do. For a profession or technique the terms are exact — a trainer two ranks ahead, 1 XP an hour, eight hours a day. For a core skill the Guide sets what is required from the complexity of the skill, the availability of a teacher, access to equipment and the character's circumstances.

Skill books

A skill book is a supernatural instructional item containing the knowledge, technique and structured experience needed to teach a particular skill. It is not simply a written manual: its supernatural nature lets the user internalize understanding that would otherwise require extensive teaching and repetition, so training that would ordinarily take significant instruction is accelerated dramatically.

A skill book identifies the skill it contains. Depending on the book, it may teach a completely new skill, improve an existing one, provide access to a specialized technique, or contain advanced instruction unavailable through ordinary teachers. A skill may be common while a book teaching it is expensive, because the book removes the difficulty of finding instruction at all.

Learning from one does not mean the character remembers reading pages. Supernatural instruction becomes practical understanding — a character learning a combat skill does not merely know about the technique, they understand how to perform it. Knowledge becomes capability.

What a book does mechanically — one rank, never above its own rank, experience reset to zero, consumed on use — is set out under Learning a Non-Core Skill. The items themselves, and what one costs, belong to Skill Books.

Improving Skills

Skills improve as characters continue training and using them, and an increased skill rank represents greater mastery. For a check skill, higher rank improves the d20 result. For a bonus skill, higher rank directly increases the benefit.

This allows deliberate specialization. Consider two characters of equal Speed: one has invested heavily in Skullduggery, the other has only basic training. Both benefit from their overall experience, but the specialist keeps a significant advantage from the higher skill rank. The same applies in combat — two characters may carry identical weapons while one has far greater Martial Arts training. Their equipment is the same; their practiced capability is not.

Skills and Character Rank

Character rank does not contribute to a skill check. A check adds the skill rank and the governing attribute rank, and nothing else. Character rank has exactly one thing to do with skills, and it is a limit rather than a bonus.

A skill rank may never exceed the character rank by more than one.

This is the same ceiling Rank applies to every track: nothing sits more than one rank above the character. A skill at that ceiling is capped and cannot take experience at all — not at a reduced rate, not at any rate — until the character rank rises and the ceiling moves with it.

Character rank	Highest possible skill rank
Unranked	Iron
Iron	Bronze
Bronze	Silver
Silver	Gold
Gold	Diamond
Diamond	Transcendent
Transcendent	Transcendent

The ceiling is what stops a character pouring everything into one discipline and arriving at a Gold-rank skill while the rest of them is still Iron. It does not reward broad development — it simply refuses to let one line run away from the character carrying it.

Beyond that, the two are unrelated. A high-rank character with no training in a discipline gets nothing from their rank when they attempt it: they roll the governing attribute alone, exactly as any untrained character does. Training is what skills measure, and only training and the attribute behind it appear in the roll.

Skills and Abilities

Skills and supernatural abilities may interact. A skill can improve an action used as part of an ability where the rules logically apply: an ability requiring a melee attack may still benefit from Martial Arts, because the character is making a melee attack.

Likewise, supernatural movement does not necessarily replace skills associated with movement. A character capable of supernatural leaps might still make an Physique check for a particularly difficult maneuver after landing.

Skills improve learned actions. Abilities create supernatural possibilities.

When both clearly apply, both may matter. When an ability replaces the need for an ordinary action entirely, a skill may not be relevant. The Guide determines unusual interactions.

No Conversational Skills

This game deliberately does not include permanent skills for Persuasion, Intimidation, Charm, Deceit or similar conversational influence. There is no Persuasion rank to add to dialogue, and no permanent Intimidation bonus because a character invested in being intimidating.

Conversation is influenced too heavily by who is speaking, who is listening, what has happened, and what the target already believes to be represented by a permanent universal bonus.

Social influence is situational

The Guide determines conversational advantages and disadvantages from the situation.

Factor	Why it matters
History	How the target has been treated before. A trusted ally responds differently from someone the character betrayed.
Affiliations	Known membership in an organization, guild, faction, military force or family may dramatically affect the response.
Recent actions	Defeating a dangerous monster in front of witnesses is a significant advantage when intimidating those witnesses immediately afterward — and means nothing to someone who never heard of it.
Renown	The famous and the infamous get very different reactions depending on who recognizes them. See Renown.
Deity affiliation	Open association with a particular deity may bring immediate respect from one person and suspicion from another.
Evidence and leverage	Information, proof, threats, favors, debts, secrets and demonstrated capability may matter far more than personality.

Temporary bonuses

When uncertainty still requires a roll, the Guide may assign a situational bonus or penalty from these circumstances. Such modifiers belong to the interaction. They do not become permanent character statistics.

A character might receive a significant intimidation advantage immediately after publicly defeating a terrifying monster. They do not permanently become better at intimidating every merchant, king, child, monster and deity they ever meet. The context created the advantage; when the context changes, so does the modifier.

Roleplaying matters

Removing conversational skills does not remove uncertainty from social encounters. It changes what determines the outcome.

Players should explain what they are trying to accomplish, what argument they are making, what they reveal, what they offer, what they threaten, and how their history supports their position. The Guide then considers the target's goals, fears, loyalties, knowledge, relationships, personality and current circumstances.

Sometimes the result should be obvious. A loyal friend may not require convincing. A sworn enemy may refuse regardless of eloquence. A merchant may happily accept a clearly profitable deal. When genuine uncertainty remains, the Guide may call for a roll and apply situational modifiers.

The roll resolves uncertainty. It does not replace the conversation that created it.

Building a Skill Set

Skills let players decide what their characters have learned beyond their supernatural abilities. One character may invest in Skullduggery, Wayfarer and ranged technique. Another in Martial Arts, Power Strike, Physique and physical professions. Another in Treatment, Analysis, Crafting or specialized knowledge.

These choices differentiate characters who might otherwise possess similar essence sets. Two essence users may both hold Fire; one is a trained martial combatant, one an expert tracker, one a craftsman.

Essences establish supernatural identity. Abilities define supernatural capabilities. Skills represent the things the character has actually learned.

Summary

Kind	Rule
Check skill	1d20 + skill rank + governing attribute rank. Skullduggery = 1d20 + Skullduggery rank + Speed rank.
Bonus skill	Add skill rank to the specified roll or value. Martial Arts adds to melee attack rolls; Power Strike adds to melee damage.
Conversational influence	No permanent skills. The Guide sets temporary modifiers from the actual circumstances.

The world should respond to what a character has actually done, not to a permanent number written beside Persuasion on a sheet.

Still to write

Status: draft. How a skill works is settled. What skills exist is not.

~~Combined skills are used before they are defined.~~ — defined, and quantified. A supporting skill adds its own skill rank to the check. Primary and supporting are settled, one supporting skill at most, and a supporting skill must be trained where a primary one need not be.
Which skills are check skills and which are bonus skills. The distinction is mechanical and load-bearing, and there is no way to tell which a new skill should be except by judgement.
What a skill costs to acquire. Difficulty is now set at 10 / 15 / 20 / 25 / 30, but nothing says what it takes to learn a skill in the first place.
What a skill costs to raise. Rank already prices it — 50 experience to reach Iron, doubling each step — but nothing says how a skill is first acquired in experience terms, or whether training and skill books bypass the cost entirely.

Open questions

~~How a specialised skill outside the twelve gets an attribute.~~ — answered for professions. Each of the eleven names a default attribute, spread three Spirit, three Speed, three Recovery and two Power. Techniques still have none, which matters less because a technique is never rolled — but a technique that ever wants a check will need one.
Gathering has no home. Professions explicitly exclude mining, herb-picking and hunting, and send them to "the appropriate core skills". Wayfarer covers foraging and tracking, and Physique covers exertion, but nothing among the twelve obviously covers mining ore — which every Metal Worker project needs.
~~Enchanter is the only profession that produces nothing.~~ — answered, and made deliberate. Crafting confirms an enchanter cannot self-teach, for exactly the reason the gap suggested: an untrained enchanter imbues nothing, so there is no successful work to learn from. Iron must come from a trainer or an Enchanter skill book, and those books are produced mainly by enchanting. The profession gates itself on purpose.
Two chapters set crafting difficulty differently. Crafting gives every item block a fixed Crafting DC; this chapter has the Guide judge difficulty from the finished creation and the conditions. Both use the same ladder, so they reconcile if the item block is the standard and the Guide adjusts — which is worth saying somewhere.
The rest is now load-bearing and still undefined. Every limited use in Gambler's Luck and Scribe of Fate recharges on one — rerolls, luck dice, fate dice, all three loot rerolls. Rest currently appears only in Races, on a handful of racial traits, in four different phrasings, and nothing anywhere says what one is or how long it takes. Two entire techniques are priced against a unit the book has not written.
Random loot does not exist to be manipulated. Scribe of Fate rerolls loot quantity at rank 2, quality at rank 4 and rarity at rank 6, and Rarity defines the five rarities without any procedure that rolls for one. Quality is new entirely — a third axis beside rarity and quantity that nothing else in the book uses.
Luck dice and fate dice are presumably fortune dice. Fortune dice are introduced as the collective name, with five defined uses, and then neither technique that grants dice says it is granting them. Gambler's luck die is Guidance then Inspiration; a scribe's fate die is Inspiration then Misfortune. Saying so would let a reader apply the shared rules without inferring it.
Combat Ritual Casting reduces a casting time by "1 step", and steps are not a scale. Nothing says what the steps are or what a ritual's minimum looks like. Spells and Magic in Play are both stubs, so ritual casting time exists only as something this technique shortens.
Aura is now the most heavily specified thing in the book without a home. Aura Command gives it size, suppression, selective exclusion, contested pressure and concealment of emotion, power and intent, across six ranks. Aura is also two of the fifteen ability types and how a developed Spirit shows. Nothing still says what an aura is, how large one is, or how two are contested.
~~Armor techniques name two statistics armor does not have.~~ — added. Movement Penalty is now one of Armor's eight statistics, and the untrained penalty is a universal −2 to Armor and −2 to Movement applied on top of whatever the armor already costs. That prices rank 1 of any armor technique at exactly +2 Armor and +2 Movement, which is the first armory rank anywhere with a number. Armor techniques still never remove the Infiltration penalty, though they remove Skullduggery's twice.
Six new combat mechanics arrive here first. Critical hit ranges, opportunity attacks, saves, advantage, initiative and damage resistance are all used as though defined, and Combat is a stub. So is the Reload weapon trait, which Weapons owes alongside Fixed.
Movement is counted in a unit nothing else uses. Armor techniques give "+1 Movement", while every other distance in the rules is in feet — 5, 10 and 15 on the synergy scale, 100 pounds per rank of carry. Either Movement is measured in squares or the +1 is a rate this chapter has not named.
Six ranks fits the ladder exactly, and it is worth keeping that way. A technique does nothing below Iron, and Iron to Transcendent is six steps, so technique rank 1 is Iron and rank 6 is Transcendent. That agrees with how Crafting numbers an item's rank, and disagrees with how attribute requirements are numbered in the same item block.
Aura has mechanics now and no chapter. Three mental techniques suppress it, project it and impose it on weaker opponents, which implies an aura is something measurable that can be hidden, read and pushed against. Aura is also two of the fifteen ability types, and Attributes says a developed Spirit shows through one. Nothing anywhere says what an aura is or how one is contested.
Structured Limitation is a player-facing version of the whole design. Accepting a restriction for more potency is exactly how Rarity describes higher-rarity abilities, and how the Game Master's Guide describes restriction synergy. Letting a player choose that trade deliberately is a good idea, and it needs a rate before it can be used: what a given restriction is worth in potency is the same unwritten number in all three places.
Silence is used as a condition and is not one. Techniques persist through it, which is one of the clearest statements of what they are for. Conditions is a stub and does not list it.
Supernatural techniques are granted, not learned, which breaks the acquisition rules. Every other non-core skill comes from a skill book, a trainer, or self-teaching. These come from deities, astral beings and cosmic events, so they arrive outside the three paths — and nothing says whether they then advance by the ordinary rules, or how a granted technique reaches Iron when nobody can teach it.
Self-teaching a profession is 50 successful hours. Rank prices Iron on a skill track at 50 experience, and a successful hour is worth 1. With untrained failures on top, a first trade is something like sixty to seventy hours at the forge — which is a reasonable answer for a trade and worth knowing was never chosen deliberately. It falls out of two numbers set in different chapters.
Training does not scale. At 1 XP an hour and eight hours a day, Iron takes about seven days. Reaching Diamond on the same skill costs 1,550 experience, or roughly 194 days of full-time instruction. Training is how a skill starts, and it cannot be how a skill finishes.
Nothing above Diamond can be taught. A trainer must stand two ranks above the rank being taught, and the ladder stops at Transcendent — so a student reaching for Transcendent would need a trainer beyond it. Transcendent in any profession or technique has to come from use, allocated experience, or a Transcendent skill book.
~~Crafting DC 12 is off the ladder.~~ — resolved. Crafting puts crafting DCs on the same 10 / 15 / 20 / 25 / 30 ladder as everything else, and the worked example here now uses a real item block: the cooking pot at DC 10.
Imbuing now has a chart, and still has no definition. An untrained crafter has a 0% chance to imbue; a finished item resolves on the imbue chart for the rank its project began at, so there is a chart per profession rank. What imbuing produces, what it costs, and what any of those percentages are belong to Magic Items, which is a stub. It is the single largest undefined thing this chapter depends on.
The imbue chart locks at the start, which creates a real decision. Checks and material costs follow the crafter's current rank, but the chart follows the project. A self-taught smith who reaches Iron partway through a long project finishes it on the untrained chart at 0%, so anyone close to a rank should finish learning before starting anything they want imbued. That is a good decision to have in the game and it is currently only implied.
~~Who is awarded a transferred project's experience?~~ — answered. The finisher is paid for their own successful hours and nobody else's, and the original crafter forfeits what they banked. That closes the gift case cleanly: handing an apprentice a nearly finished project teaches them almost nothing, because there is almost nothing left to do.
What a crafting station is worth has no number. A better station grants a bonus to crafting checks, which is the whole reason to work at a guild forge rather than a shed. How large that bonus is, and whether stations come in grades, is unwritten — and it is the figure that decides whether a workshop is a convenience or the difference between a viable trade and a hopeless one.
Self-teaching now arrives in lumps. Iron costs 50 experience and only completed items pay out, so a smith learning on two-hour cooking pots needs twenty-five finished pots rather than fifty loose hours. That is a better shape — it rewards finishing things — and it means the size of the item chosen decides how granular a character's progress feels.
Crafting materials are a resource the game does not have. Iron and leather are spent by the hour, and nothing anywhere describes acquiring, pricing, carrying or tracking them. Equipment and Inventory Management are where that has to live, and a weight now exists to hang it on.
A skill book can cost a character experience. It grants a rank and resets the skill to 0. A character 49 experience into Iron who reads a book gains the rank and loses the 49 they had banked toward Bronze — so the book is worth most to someone who has just advanced and least to someone about to. That is a real decision, and it wants saying out loud somewhere a player will see it.
A combined check is the largest number in the chapter. Attribute rank plus two skill ranks runs from +3 to +21, against a difficulty ladder that stops at 30. A Transcendent specialist meets an Impossible task on a 9. The rank ceiling keeps that in check for most of a campaign — a Bronze character caps at +12, where Impossible still needs an 18 — but the top of the range is worth looking at before monsters are priced against it.
Which attribute a cross-attribute combination uses is an inference. The rule gives one attribute rank and two skill ranks, and says nothing about whose attribute applies when the two skills answer to different ones. This chapter uses the primary skill's attribute, because the alternative is either two attribute ranks or an arbitrary choice. Two of the six worked combinations cross attributes — Treatment with Arcane, Physique with Coordination — so it comes up immediately.
Combining is now strictly better than not combining. A supporting skill adds rank and costs nothing, so a player has every reason to argue one into every check. The gates are the Guide's judgement, the training requirement, and the one-supporting-skill limit — all three are qualitative, and they are the only thing standing between this rule and a permanent bonus.
Passive Vigilance is the first passive score in the game. 10 + the total bonus, compared against a difficulty without a roll. It ranges from 11 for an untrained Unranked character to 24 at Transcendent with Transcendent Vigilance — so an Improbable concealment at DC 25 can never be noticed passively by anyone, and a Difficult one at 20 needs Recovery and Vigilance both around Gold. That is a coherent curve, and it is worth checking against the monsters that will have to beat it.
Active Vigilance can be worse than doing nothing. A roll replaces the passive score even when it is lower, and on a d20 that happens just under half the time. The rule is deliberate and stated plainly, but it makes the free action a genuine gamble rather than a free upgrade, and a table may need telling that once.
Turns and bonus actions are borrowed from a chapter that does not exist. Active Vigilance is once per turn, lasts until the start of the next turn, and costs no action or bonus action. Combat is a stub, so none of those units are defined — and bonus action appears here for the first time in the book.
Chained checks multiply failure. Two checks in one action means two chances to fail it. A character with even odds on each succeeds at both only a quarter of the time, so chaining should stay the exception the section says it is — and a Guide who chains freely makes actions much harder without changing a single difficulty number.
The character sheet still adds character rank to a skill total. A skill check here is 1d20 + skill rank + governing attribute rank. The sheet computes character rank + skill rank + the governing attribute rank + any matching training bonus. Two corrections have now passed over this: the first replaced character rank with attribute rank in the formula, which justified a term the sheet had always added; the second removed character rank from skill checks entirely. That turns the disagreement from a question of how many terms into a flat contradiction — the chapter says character rank is not part of a skill check and the sheet adds it. For a rank +2 character with a rank +3 skill governed by an Iron attribute, the chapter gives +5 and the sheet gives +7, or +9 with a matching Iron fighting style. The sheet is the thing that has to change, and the training bonus needs deciding at the same time.
~~Four of this chapter's own example skills have no governing attribute.~~ — resolved. Athletics, Stealth, Survival and Tracking were used as worked examples and appeared in no attribute list, which made them unrollable once a check began adding the governing attribute. The core skill list absorbs all four: Athletics into Physique, Stealth into Skullduggery, and both Survival and Tracking into Wayfarer. The examples throughout this chapter now use the real names.
~~Tracking and Survival are also awakening stones.~~ — resolved by the rename. Neither is a skill any more; both are covered by Wayfarer, and the Tracking and Survival stones keep their names uncontested. Martial Arts and Crafting remain near misses against the Martial essence and the Craft confluence, and neither is a core skill.
Arcane and Divine still collide. Both are core skills now. Arcane also names a familiar type in Familiars, and Divine is the whole subject of Deities. Being skills makes them more likely to be said aloud, not less.
Bonus skills, fighting styles and techniques may be one thing under three names. A bonus skill adds a flat benefit to an action rather than making a check. A technique is defined the same way — no d20, a persistent benefit whenever its conditions are met. The character sheet already implements training entries that add a rank-scaled bonus to a category of action: melee, ranged, magic, defence, general — which is close to the four technique fields, and exactly what Martial Arts and Power Strike do. Either these are all the same mechanism, or the book is carrying three that do the same job. This is now the largest structural question in the chapter.
Martial Arts and Martial Artist are the same thing with different arithmetic. Martial Arts is this chapter's worked bonus skill: add your rank to melee attack rolls, so rank 3 gives +3 and rank 6 would give +6. Martial Artist is a fighting technique whose table gives +1 at rank 1, +2 at rank 3 and +3 at rank 5, capping at +3. Same name, same job, and at rank 6 they differ by double. One of them has to go, and the technique is the one with a written progression.
Some techniques scale by rank and some do not. The armory and fighting tables give a specific reward at each of six ranks, which is a different shape from a bonus skill adding its rank to a roll. Mental and supernatural techniques have neither — their examples say "a persistent bonus" and stop. Whether every technique gets a six-rank table, or some simply add rank, is the thing that decides how much of this chapter still has to be written.
Does removing conversational skills leave a gap on the sheet? It is a deliberate and unusual stance, and a strong one. But a player who wants to be the party's negotiator now has nothing to point at, and the burden moves entirely to Renown, affiliations and history — none of which is written yet.

Already implemented

The character sheet carries skills and learned spells as a repeating section: name, source, governing attribute, rank, training category, experience, and a computed total. Fighting styles and training are a second repeating section with five categories that feed into that total.