Skills and training

Your three Skills — Body, Mind and Soul — say what you're like. Training says what you've learned, and it's how you get better.

There are no levels

Nobody levels up. The Narrator decides how many training points each character starts with, and hands out more as the game goes on. Points are a reserve to spend on training — but you still have to find a chance to train, in the story. You don't just wake up one day more powerful.

In most games, getting better is bookkeeping between sessions. Here it's something that happens in the story: you find a teacher, you earn access, you put in the work, and then you're better.

Training points

You earn training points for what you did, not for what you defeated. As a rough guide, the Narrator gives about one a session, and more for a moment that mattered.

Points sit unspent until you find somewhere to spend them. You can't spend them alone in a field. You need a person who knows the thing, a book that teaches it, a place that trains, or a situation that forces it.

That turns "I want to get better at this" into a reason to go somewhere.

What points buy

A bigger die. Move a Skill up the ladder: d4 to d6 to d8 to d12 to d20. It costs the difference between the two dice — 2 points from d4 to d6, 8 points from d12 to d20.

A step back down. Characters change: age, maturity, wisdom, injury, a new focus, a tragedy. If the story earns it, you may drop a Skill one step and get those points back.

A floor. Training doesn't raise your best roll; it stops you falling all the way down. With 5 points of training on a d20, your highest roll is still 20, but your lowest is 5. A trained d20 and an untrained d20 have the same best day. Only one of them has bad ones.

That pairs with stamina: training is a floor, exhaustion is a ceiling, and they close in on you from both ends. A tired expert and a fresh amateur can end up rolling in the same narrow band, for opposite reasons.

What everyone can already do

Everyone can swing a sword. They may not be any good with it, and they may be as much danger to themselves and the people nearby as to the enemy, but they can swing it. The same goes for everything else, magic included.

Nothing on your sheet is a permission slip. Anyone can try anything. Training isn't access, it's reliability: the difference between having a go and being someone the party can depend on. An untrained attempt is never refused. It's just a roll with no floor under it.

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Paths

A class is simply a training path. You don't pick Warrior and become one. You spend your training on martial things, and people start calling you a warrior. The label describes what you've done, after you've done it.

So there are no rules for multiclassing, because there's no class to multiply. There's only where your points went. Everything relevant to you, even a hybrid, is an option on your own path.

What a path costs

Breadth isn't free. The deep end of any path needs most of your points to have gone there. Nothing forbids you from dipping into something else; you just can't dip in and come out with its best tricks.

A hybrid will never fight as well as a pure fighter. But a hybrid isn't a worse version of either specialist: there's always something they can do better than anyone else, the thing that sits between the two.

Martial

Unarmed, then melee or ranged, then a specific family of weapons: swords, hammers, bows, thrown.

Arcane

The five schools of magic are the five dice, which are the five Platonic solids, which are the five elements — and each carries a planet. The dice on the table are the cosmology of the world.

School	Die	Planet
Fire	d4	Mars
Earth	d6	Jupiter
Air	d8	Mercury
Aether	d12	Earth
Water	d20	Venus

General

Everything that's neither martial nor arcane: subterfuge, performing arts, medicine, survival, languages, engineering, riding, boating, swimming.

Naming what you do

Your path names what you produce. A wizard casts spells. A cleric offers prayers. A bard gives performances. Orders, songs, stories: mechanically they're identical, and the name tells everyone at the table who your character is before you describe anything.