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.

How training works

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.

The guildmasters

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.

The skills

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.

Fighter

Skill	Class	Level	Cost	What it does
hit	Fighter	1	1	Passive. Once learned, a flat +1 hitroll in every fight – always on, no command and no roll (it applies even on a backstab). Adventurers can learn it too.
dodge	Fighter, Woodsman, Adventurer	3	1	Sidestep a blow – a chance in combat to make an attacker miss outright. (Trains +1% per point, capped at 5% for every class that can learn it – Wizards can't.)
dual wield	Fighter	5	1	Wield a weapon in each hand (see offhand) for a chance each round at a bonus off-hand strike, at full off-hand damage. Off-hand weapons are the light blades – daggers, knives, shortswords. Adventurers can learn it too.
fury (second attack)	Fighter	7	1	A chance each round at a second main-hand attack. Train it as fury or second attack – the very same skill.
whirlwind (whirl)	Fighter	9	1	A toggled stance: while on, every swing flies at a random foe in the room and wakes it – you carve through a pack but rouse everything present. Hit two or more in a round for a bonus strike at half damage. Toggle it out of combat only.
weapon spec	Fighter	12	1	A chance on any attack for +2 hitroll.
strength spec	Fighter	12	1	A chance on any hit for +1 damage.
armor spec	Fighter	12	1	A chance, when struck, for +10 armor (harder to hit) – the exact mirror of weapon spec, and it cancels one.

A note on the fighter's specializations

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.

Woodsman

Skill	Class	Level	Cost	What it does
sneak	Woodsman	1	1	Slip into stealth (type sneak); your opening strike from stealth is a 2x weapon hit – the first blow of the stealth burst (see below). Any action but moving breaks stealth. Adventurers can learn it too.
bandage	Woodsman	1	1	Field medicine. Type bandage to bind 2 wool into a gauze pad (a skill roll can spoil a wool), then apply gauze to heal 1d2. Each takes a moment. Adventurers can learn it too.
dodge	Fighter, Woodsman, Adventurer	3	1	Sidestep a blow – a chance in combat to make an attacker miss outright. (Woodsmen, nimbler, also cap at 5%.)
track	Woodsman	1	1	Read the land: track creature senses the direction to the nearest creature you name – a ring-by-ring search out from you, only where you could walk (no secret or puzzle shortcuts). Adventurers can learn it too.
identify	Woodsman	5	1	Read an item's nature – what it is, what it does, what it's worth. Adventurers can learn it too.
stealth attack	Woodsman	1	1	The second strike of the stealth burst (free): after the sneak opener lands, a chance at another blow for 3x a weapon roll. Landing it carries the chain on to ambush.
ambush	Woodsman	6	1	The third strike of the stealth burst (free): only after a landed stealth attack, a chance at another 3x blow. Landing it carries the chain on to poison. Years of hunting teach the woodsman to lie in wait for the perfect moment.
sneak spec (sneak specialization)	Woodsman	6	1	Passive. Mastery of the shadows, two ways. After a fight ends, a free chance – your sneak % – to slip straight back into stealth, no move and no command. And looting a corpse no longer breaks stealth (but sac/recycle-ing one still does – destroying a body is noisy work).
poison	Woodsman	10	1	The fourth (last) strike of the stealth burst (free): only after a landed ambush, a chance at a 3x envenomed blow (a poisonable blade in hand). Outside stealth, poison instead coats your blade so your next landed hit deals double.

The stealth burst

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.)

Wizard

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).

Skill	Class	Level	Cost	What it does
mana	Wizard	1	1	Attune to magic: your usable mana becomes this skill's % of your full pool (which grows 10 per level). The pool every other spell spends.
mana spec (mana specialization)	Wizard	1	1	Deepen the mana pool itself: a flat +1 max mana per %, up to +100 at mastery, stacking on top of what mana makes usable.
healing (heal)	Wizard	1	1	A healing spell that restores 1d6 hit points for 1d6 mana. Use cast heal.
energy shield (shield)	Wizard	1	1	Cloak yourself in +20 armor until you fall or log out (recast to refresh) – a wizard's stand-in for the armour they can't wear. cast energy shield.
magic bubble (bubble)	Wizard	1	1	Raise a ward that completely absorbs the next blow, then bursts. Only once per fight in combat – but a bubble cast before a fight doesn't count, so you can walk in warded and still raise one more once the first pops. cast magic bubble.
affliction (afflict)	Wizard	1	1	Curse a foe to wither in combat, taking damage every round with no armour to stop it. Damage scales with your Intelligence (up to 9/round). You may stack it – once per combat round – to deepen the rot, and each cast's mana cost equals the damage it adds. cast affliction target.
blink	Wizard	1	1	Dart in a straight line up to 10 rooms one way, stopping at the first blockage (and skipping any monsters in between). *cast blink dir* [distance] – e.g. cast blink e 5**.
teleport	Wizard	1	1	Fold space to the nearest creature you name, landing in its room – only where you could actually walk (no secret or puzzle shortcuts). cast teleport creature.
recall	Wizard	1	1	cast recall to teleport home to the fountain for 10 mana. Unlike the free low-level recall, a wizard's own spell keeps working at any level. Adventurers can learn it too.

Mossworld

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