Skills & crafting
Skills start vague at tier one and sharpen as you meditate on them.
Skills do two things: combat and support (aim one at a target in your node) and crafting (blend a skill with two inventory items and a vivid description).
Unlocking a higher tier never removes the lower ones, and each tier can resolve as a different roll type. That's what the :tier suffix is for: pick exactly the
version of the skill you mean.
Suppose a hero knows a skill called join. Pick a tier to see how the same word
can resolve differently, and notice what goes after the !.
You have an uncanny knack for fixing things so they just kind of stick together. You press two broken pieces in place, and sometimes, against all odds, they hold. People think it's just good glue technique, or maybe you're blessed with steady hands.
join:1 wound ! press the two broken halves together and hold them until they catch Read the description above, then the part after !: “press the two broken halves together and hold them until they catch”. That sentence is how you execute the skill at this tier,
and the game judges whether it fits what the tier actually does. It is not the
tier's name, and a pitch that drifts from the description scores poorly.
Bare join uses your highest unlocked tier; add :tier to pick a lower
one, handy when a lower tier maps to a different roll type than a higher one.
Crafting
To craft, name two items you actually carry and describe how your skill fuses them: skill ! item ! item ! how you combine them. You don't pick the result. The AI
judge weighs your skill's whole evolution and rates whether the combination is plausible. A good fit forges something real; a stretch fizzles. Try it:
join ! Riverstone Head ! Ironwood Haft ! how you combine them
a smooth, heavy stone ground down to a blunt, weighty wedge
a straight, close-grained length of seasoned ironwood
The game judges whether your join skill can plausibly fuse these two materials,
scoring a fit rating from 0 to 5, then forges the result from your description. Eloquence won't
rescue an impossible combination; fit is what counts.
The join skill is built to fuse materials, and a stone head seating onto a wood haft is a clean structural fit.
A heavy maul whose riverstone head sits seamlessly on its ironwood haft, the join so clean there is no visible seam.
- Type
- Weapon
- Level
- 3
- Primary
- strength
- Secondary
- vitality
:tier doesn't apply to crafting (it weighs every unlocked tier) or to meditation
(which always pushes your highest tier forward).