Skills

Skills are the trained abilities that set the professions apart – a fighter's opening strike, a woodsman's eye for an item's true worth, a wizard's spells. You learn and sharpen them at a trainer (a guildmaster) by spending skill points.

• train – also practice, prac, or pr – on its own shows your skill points, the skills you already know (with your current %), and, if a trainer is here with you, what that trainer can teach.
• train skill learns a skill you don't yet have, or improves one you do, for one skill point. Each session nudges your proficiency upward (most skills by a random slice) toward 100% mastery.
• train all spends one skill point but scatters it across several of the skills you already know, a percent at a time and at random – so one point trains a handful of skills a little each. Nothing is ever pushed past a skill's cap, and a percent is only wasted once every skill you know is already maxed. Run it again to spend the next point. It never learns anything new – use train skill for that.
• train str|int|wis|agi|con|cha instead spends a point to raise an ability score by 1.
• You start with 5 skill points (Adventurers 7) and earn 1 more every level, so spend them with a little care.

Each profession has its own guildmaster, who teaches that class's skills. The Adventurer is the generalist: an adventurer – and the Adventurer guildmaster – can learn any class's skill that is level 5 or below, except a skill a class keeps for its own (a class's deep craft, and the whole wizard spellbook, are locked away). In practice the shared basics an adventurer can pick up are hit, dodge, dual wield, sneak, bandage, track, identify, and the wizard's recall.

Seek out the trainer for the craft you want:

• Silas – the Adventurer guildmaster, on Main St. West.
• Ellie – the Woodsman trainer, in her shop on Main St. East.
• Gorin – the Warrior trainer, in his shop on Main St. East.
• Wizzy the Wizard, Master of Magic – in his emporium (“Wizard Stuff”) on Moss St., just south of market square.

A class is the profession whose guildmaster teaches the skill natively. “Level” is the character level you must reach before a trainer will teach it; “Cost” is in skill points. A skill marked Adventurers can learn it too is one of the shared basics the generalist may borrow; everything else is that class's own craft.

Weapon spec and armor spec are a matched pair on the same to-hit maths: +2 hitroll is +10 on the attack roll, and +10 armor is +10 the other way, so an armor-spec defender exactly cancels a weapon-spec attacker. Strength spec adds flat damage instead – kept to +1 on purpose, since flat damage on every hit is worth far more than a like-sized swing to a roll.

You open the burst by backstabbing – backstab (or bs) with a sneak-marked blade (a knife, dagger, or short sword) in hand while hidden. A plain kill or attack never opens a stealth strike, even when you're stealthed: to assassinate you must backstab.

The burst is a chained flurry of up to four blows: sneak (2x) → stealth attack (3x) → ambush (3x) → poison (3x). It is a strict chain – each strike rolls its own skill and fires only if the one before it landed (and you've trained that skill): miss a link, or lack it, and the flurry ends there (no ambush without a landed stealth attack, no poison without a landed ambush). Against an unaware foe a landed strike can't be dodged. Only the opening sneak strike costs a move (1); every chained follow-up is free. A fresh woodsman lands just the sneak strike, adding the later links as those skills are trained – so a true assassin trains all four, in order. (Too winded for that one move? A hidden opener via a plain kill/attack falls back to a single strike with a +sneak% bonus instead – but an explicit backstab/bs refuses (“out of breath”) until you rest.)

A wizard learns differently from the martial classes: every wizard spell is available from level 1. A wizard's power isn't in unlocking new spells over the levels – it's in how deeply each spell is trained (its %). A fresh wizard can reach for the whole spellbook at once, but each spell is feeble until the points go in. Casting a spell costs mana (see Classes) and takes a brief beat afterwards where you can't act. Of the whole kit, only recall can be borrowed by an Adventurer – and not mana, so a non-wizard who learns recall must fuel it from a mana-granting item (Wizzy sells a wand and a hat that grant mana).

• Classes – the four professions and how they play
• How to Play – moving, looking, fighting, resting, the basics
• Social – chat, channels, and customizing your character