Each adventurer is the sum of two choices: an origin (the body and bloodline you're born into) and a profession (the training and trade you bring with you). Your origin sets your starting body — health, stamina, mana pool, attribute baselines, and natural aptitudes. Your profession layers training on top — stat modifiers, starting items, and a set of initial skill ranks.

Some origins come in several appearances; the one you see is the one others will see.

Three pools drive every adventurer.

• Health ❤️ — your life. Reach zero and your story ends.
• Stamina 💪 — fuel for attacks and heavy actions. Empty stamina doesn't kill you, but it slows you to a crawl.
• Mana 🔮 — required to cast spells. Replenishes more slowly than stamina.

Resting recovers stamina — and, once stamina is full and nothing is in sight, mana. Mana also trickles back on its own, in and out of combat. Sanctuaries refill health and mana in full — out in the wild, potions, a night at a camp, and the odd curiosity are what keep you standing. Run stamina low and you become Exhausted: below half stamina your stride shortens, and at empty you crawl at a fifth of your speed.

You have three core stats — Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence — which influence damage, hit chance, dodging, mana, and many weapon perks.

Most level-ups raise a random stat. Every third character level is a milestone: you choose which stat to raise yourself. Pick deliberately — milestones are the only stat point you fully control.

Skills cover combat (one per weapon family, plus Unarmed), defence (Dodging, Armor, Vitality, Endurance), magic (Spellcasting), and the wild (Survival, Stealth).

Each skill has two states: active and idle. Only active skills earn experience when you use them. When several skills are active at once, the experience from each turn is split between all of them — so focusing fewer skills levels them faster.

Focusing a single skill in the character screen is the simplest way to drive one skill hard. Your origin and profession also give some skills natural aptitudes that quietly speed up their levelling.

Abilities are special actions tied to your skills. As a skill rises, you unlock its abilities automatically — a notice marks each one you learn.

Every ability keeps growing stronger as its skill levels, up to its own mastery level, after which it stops improving. Abilities trade raw power for control, setup, or other effects rather than simply being a stronger version of what you already do — pick the one the moment calls for.

Open the Abilities screen to see every ability for your skills, unlocked or not, with each one's unlock and mastery levels and your progress toward them.

Spells belong to schools. You learn a spell by reading a spellbook (six turns, the book crumbles) or from your starting profession.

Knowing a spell is not enough: you must memorize it in the Spells screen. Every spell costs Attunement equal to its tier; your Attunement grows with Intelligence and Spellcasting. Memorizing is permanent — choose with care.

A silenced 🔇 caster — player or creature — can neither cast nor read a scroll, summon or shout until the voice returns; a thrown flask, a charge and every weapon ability still work.

Casting costs mana 🔮 and can fizzle, wasting part of it. A cast spell never misses and ignores armour, dodge and block — only the target's resistance stands against it. A spell's power rises with its school, Intelligence and Spellcasting until the spell is fully mastered.

Almost everything you do — crossing a tile, swinging a weapon, drinking a potion, equipping armor — costs time ⏳. Time passes for everyone in the world while your action resolves, including the things that want you dead.

Some actions also cost stamina 💪 on top of time. Attacks always do; consuming an item usually doesn't.

Quick, light actions cost little time and resolve fast. Heavy actions take longer and leave you vulnerable while they finish.

Combat is turn-based but not strictly alternating — each actor's next move resolves on its own time clock.

• An attack rolls ⚔️ against the target's 🤸 — higher hit chance and lower target dodge mean cleaner hits.
• 🛡️ Armor reduces damage dealt to the wearer. Some weapon perks cut through armor.
• 🎒 Encumbrance — heavy equipment slows your swings (⏳, +7.5% attack time per point), throws off your aim (🎯, −5% hit chance per point), drains more stamina per attack (💪, +10% per point), erodes your dodge (🤸, −7.5% per point) and makes your spells fizzle more often (🔮, −10% cast success per point). Train Armor to soften the penalty.
• 🪨 Block — equipped shields and bucklers give a flat chance to block an incoming hit cleanly. Block is rolled before dodge. Train Offhand to push your block chance toward each shield's cap and to shrug off shield weight.
• Hitting costs stamina. The less skilled you are with a weapon, the more it costs.
• 💨 Knockback — some blows shove a creature one tile away, cancelling any walk in progress (a readied swing is kept). Pinned against a tree, wall or another body, it takes +50% damage instead. ⏩ Lunge carries the attacker straight through its target, trading places when there is no room.
• ✨ Resistances — magic ✨, cold ❄️, fire 🔥, bleed 🩸, poison 🧪 and necrotic 💀. The higher your resistance (and level) against the caster's, the more of a spell's duration, a bleed's or poison's bite, or a life drain you shrug off. Below zero, those effects lean toward their worst roll. Some creatures are outright immune. Willpower trains magic resistance; Survival adds a sliver of bleed and poison resistance. Only what another creature does to you can be resisted.

Untrained weapons hit weaker, cost more stamina, and take longer to swing. Practice (and the right skill) erases all three penalties over time.

Beyond raw damage, weapons can carry perks that trigger on a successful hit.

• Critical 💥 — a chance for a strike to land for extra damage.
• Armor penetration 🛡️↘️ — ignores part of the target's armor.
• Disturb ⏳↗️ — adds time to the target's next action, breaking their rhythm.
• Cleave 🪓 — chance to sweep through and strike extra nearby foes with a free swing.
• Stamina drain 💪↘️ — saps stamina from the target on hit.
• Bleed 🩸 — opens a wound that drains health over several turns. Stops at sanctuaries (or with a bandage).
• Poison 🧪 — venom that gnaws at health over several turns, much like a bleed. Cleansed at sanctuaries.
• Corrosion 🫧 — acid that eats away armor and weakens the strength of every blow.
• Pierce 🎯↘️ — ignores part of the target's chance to dodge. Always-on.
• Quickdraw ⏳↘️ — on hit, a chance to gain a short burst of speed where your strikes ready faster.
• Vampiric 🧛 — on hit, a chance to drain the life you deal and heal yourself for part of it.
• Knockback 💨 — on hit, a chance to shove the target one tile away. Pinned against a tree, wall or another body, it takes +50% damage instead.
• Lunge ⏩ — on hit, a chance for the attacker to bound straight through you to your far side — or trade places when there is no room.

Some perks scale with strength or dexterity; all of them grow stronger as you level the matching weapon skill.

The world is full of things that can stick to you — good and bad. A blessing might quicken your travel; a bleed might drain you while you fight; spoiled food might cramp you for many turns.

Effects tick at their own pace. Each tick can wound, heal, or buff you, and after a fixed number of ticks the effect fades. Some effects refresh if reapplied. Others stack up, piling on more punishment the more they hit.

Sanctuaries cleanse most negative effects. Some items, like a bandage, cleanse specific ailments on demand.

Your pack holds items you can carry. Each item lives in a slot; stackable items share a single slot when their kind matches.

Items in the pack can be:

• Consumed — eaten or drunk, gone after one use.
• Used — pointed at a target (a bandage on a wounded ally, a potion on yourself).
• Equipped — moved to an equipment slot (mainhand, offhand, head, torso, hands, feet). Equipped items apply their stats and stay there until you unequip them in the equipment screen.

Destroyed items are gone forever — there's no undo. Stash anything you can't bear to lose in your Vault before the next risky descent.

The old spirits of the forest keep shrines. Kneel at one and you may pledge yourself to its god. Only one god will have you at a time; pledging to another forsakes the first.

A god measures you in piety 🙏, earned slowly with experience. Piety climbs through ranks, each with a title and a blessing: passives work quietly on their own, actives sit on your character bar and spend piety — fall below a rank and its blessing waits until the piety returns.

Gods have conducts: do what yours dislikes and piety drops. Abandon a god, or offend it below nothing, and its wrath follows you for a long while — no god hears a pledge while it is angry with you. The Piety screen (P) shows your standing, your blessings and the way out.

Old fire pits lie scattered through the wilds. Walk up to one to make camp. Each camp serves you once, takes a good while, and leaves you open — nothing can be done at a camp while an enemy is in sight, and an attack will cut the rest short.

• Repose — a long rest that restores health and stamina. Companions at your side rest with you.
• Meditate — quiets the mind, refilling mana in full and restoring a little health, and the calm lingers as a slow mana trickle. Companions meditate alongside you.
• Scavenge — search the surroundings for food, sticks, stones, and the occasional rarity.
• Cook — turn firewood and raw ingredients into a meal. A cooked meal grants a lasting benefit; only one meal works at a time. Tannenhall's public hearth cooks too — as often as your pack allows, no camp needed.

Choose wisely — once the fire has served you, it will not serve again.

Sanctuaries are the safe places on the map — villages, halls, hidden glades. While you stand in one:

• Your health and mana refill in full, and most negative effects are cleansed.
• Vendors trade goods (food, weapons, armor, the occasional rarity) and buy from your pack at a fraction of value.
• Bankers safeguard your Vault — items you deposit there survive your death.
• A public hearth lets you cook meal after meal without spending a camp.
• NPCs sometimes have offers, bulletins, or companions willing to join you. Read every notice; help every soul who asks.

Hostiles will not enter a sanctuary. You can step out whenever you choose to leave.

Every location is a field of tiles. Left-click a tile to walk there — your adventurer finds the path and follows it step by step, stopping at once if something hostile comes into view. Walking costs time but no stamina, and every step moves the world along with you.

• Sight 👁️ — how far you can see. Tiles you have never seen stay black; tiles you saw once but can't see now fade to grey, and creatures last spotted there linger as faint shadows until you look again.
• Move 🥾 — tiles per turn. Diagonal steps cost a little more. Low stamina makes you Exhausted and slows every step.
• Camera — the view follows you. Scroll the wheel or press Shift+Q / Shift+E (or Pg Dn / Pg Up next to the numpad) to zoom; hold the right mouse button to look around, release to snap back.
• Right-click a creature to inspect it. Left-click a hostile within reach to attack it — or arm an ability first and then pick the target.

Chests, encounters, and townsfolk are reached the same way: click them and your adventurer walks over and opens the interaction. Nobody shares a tile — a foe standing in your path has to be dealt with, or walked around.

Everything you do makes noise 🔊. A step is quiet, a fight is loud, a spell louder, and an explosion louder still — while a potion or a scroll is barely a whisper. Sound crosses open ground a tile at a time; a lone tree or a chest muffles it, and a wall nearly stops it.

• Hearing 👂 — how many tiles away you hear a fight in the open. Keen ears reach further than eyes do; quieter sounds carry less far, louder ones further.
• Investigation — a creature that hears you but cannot see you walks over to find out what made the sound. Fight behind a tree line and the forest comes to have a look.
• What you hear — a sound beyond your sight shows as a ripple on the map and a line in the log, naming the direction and how loud it was. Both last until your next action.
• Shouting 🔊 — the Shout button in your character bar raises your voice on purpose. It is as loud as a summoning call: anything within earshot that cannot see you comes to find out what made the sound. Use it to pull a pack out of its lair one curious head at a time — or to call the whole forest down on you.
• Sleepers 💤 — some creatures are found asleep, a stream of z's over their heads. A sleeper takes double damage and neither dodges nor blocks — but any noise you make nearby wakes it, a footstep within sight range included, and so does any hit. Strike first and strike hard.

Short blades are the quiet weapons; the great sweeping strikes are the loud ones. Boars stomp, lynxes pad, and moths hear everything.

A creature that can see you does not always notice you. With the Stealth 🥷 skill, every creature in sight rolls each turn to spot you — the closer it stands and the higher its level over yours, the likelier. One that has not noticed you yet wears a small ? on its tile; it goes about its business and leaves you alone. The moment one does, the whole pack in sight knows.

• Sneak attack — your first melee strike on an unaware creature lands for double damage, like a hit on a sleeper; a dagger does more still. Then you are seen.
• What gives you away — any swing, hit or miss, any spell, a thrown flask and a shout reveal you to everything in sight. Noise you make draws creatures that hear it, and they come to look — then roll to notice you like any other.
• Armour and rage — every point of encumbrance costs half a point of stealth and makes you louder; a raging character has no stealth at all. Stealth also hushes your noise 🔊, a little per level.

Your stealth value sits in the character screen under Speed & Senses.

Each location has exits along its edges — marked, labeled tiles that lead to a neighboring place. Click one as your destination to travel. Merely walking across an exit, or ending up on it mid-walk or after a shove, does not trigger it — step off and click it again. A new location is laid out fresh every time you enter, and whatever was chasing you stays behind; only companions close at your side come along.

Fleeing is always allowed, but the road out is part of the fight — anything within reach keeps swinging while you run for the edge.

Explore (O) in your character bar walks you toward the nearest ground you have not yet seen and keeps going, leg after leg, until something turns up: a creature comes into view, you spot a chest, an exit or someone, you are attacked — or nothing you can reach is left to see. It never sets out while a foe is already in sight, and it ignores ground you cannot get to. It is an ordinary walk, so companions follow and the way is picked around fire.

The map shows the places you have visited and the paths between them. The further from Tannenhall you roam, the harder the wilds become.

Sanctuary NPCs each have a role:

• Vendors — buy and sell. Each one accepts only certain wares; check what they're after.
• Bankers — keep your Vault , an account-bound stash that survives death. Buy more vault slots as your fortunes grow.
• Quest-givers — offer trades and tasks. Some require a specific item or companion; others unlock the moment you arrive.
• Bulletin boards — short notices about the world, the people, and the things lurking just off the path.

Speak to everyone. The Black Forest keeps its secrets, but its people seldom do.

Up to three companions can follow you — hired hands, tamed beasts, raised servants. They wear a small green mark on their tile so you can pick them out of a crowd, and while any follow you, a Companions column appears in your character bar: the count, one portrait per companion (click it to look their way), and three orders:

• Rally — everyone breaks off and comes to your side, then carries on as usual.
• Go to — pick a spot you could walk to; they head there.
• Attack — pick a foe in sight; they hunt it until each has struck once.

An order costs you half a turn and is absolute: a companion under orders walks past whatever is snapping at it. It gives up only when the way is barred, the foe is gone, or the chase runs too long — and every order is forgotten when you travel. The mark on their tile shows the order they are still carrying out.

Out in the wild you will stumble on curiosities — a chest in the moss, a tethered animal, a body slumped against a tree. Most curiosities reward investigation, but some demand the area first be safe — nothing opens while a hostile lurks close by.

Open every chest. Approach every encounter. The handbook can't list every possibility — that's what the journey is for.

Some choices in the world unlock new origins and professions for your account. Reach a remote sanctuary, finish an offer, defeat a particular foe — and a new option appears in your character creation forever, even after you die.

You start with the Human origin and the Beggar profession. Every other origin and profession waits to be discovered.

When your health runs out, your adventurer's story ends. Their gold, their pack, their hard-earned equipment — all left behind in the dark.

Your Vault survives. Items you deposited with a banker are still yours when you build your next adventurer. Plan for the worst; the forest will deliver it eventually.

When the death screen appears, the only path forward is the Abandon button — it returns you to the welcome screen, where a new character awaits.