The River and the Road: Skills (Part 1)

An introduction to basic ideas, to be filled out with actual crunch soon.

Like I said in this week's Mon/Fri, I pored on how to handle this sort of thing within the setting of a game system I want to be more of a pamphlet than a full book, and wound up with a good framework and rubber duck-style pitch for how this is all going to work. So enjoy! This week, we take what we have here, and put it into more functional rules!

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Skills

The River and the Road has a way of teaching you things, things you might never had imagine you’d learn. This is how the Nomad life changes you: during the normal course of your day and your work, something happens that requires improvisation, and through the course of just trying to get your bit in and done, you wind up learning something. The dock manager that learned the shipment of hard liquor you’re picking up is, in fact, hard liquor, and drank himself unconscious because it’s ‘meant-for-highland-taun-hard’ liquor, and thus could not unlock the stockyard for you- that was where you learned to pick locks. You gained a minor understanding of mechanical devices when following the gears and pulleys of a machine you discerned to be a trap waiting for you, when you realized the end effectors were spikes, in the ceiling above the room you were supposed to enter through. You may have even learned the means to play a magic fiddle that shoots fiery lashes when it hits certain notes, because this is what the River and the Road can send you when you need a solution to a problem, and it’s on you to make what you can of it.

Skills are the things that you come with, and pick up along the way, knowledge that can be applied to situations to solve problems. Skills are learned through events called Learning Experiences, which can either be explicitly triggered as a result of your day-to-day on the River or the Road, or awarded naturally by the Narrator finding reason within the scenario to count for one. This can include having the necessity to learn how to do a thing come up, or from learning a transferable skill as part of learning more specific information- like learning mechanics from disarming a trap you’re standing on the pressure plate of, without injury. This can also be because you earned some time off, and as a result, decided to take time learning something useful.

Skills come in three varieties, representing three different applications: Disciplines, which cover the passive understanding of certain topics, like science and medicine, providing a bonus to any check that can be spun or pitched as being related, and also serving to measure how much you know about that given topic; Styles, which are actual moves that can be performed in the roleplaying or tactical spaces; and Magic, powers which can be harnessed by an individual with the proper insight and practice, which are composed of both passively and actively used aspects, and require Magical Aptitude to learn.

Skills are also rated for your degree of expertise in them, across 3 levels: Basic, Expert and Master. Here’s the way to lay out these degrees of Mastery:

• Basic mastery is the ability to identify function, if not properly name in a specific nomenclature the parts of a system- this is a person that can teach you something about an engine, in addition to being able to maintain and repair an engine.
• Expert mastery is the ability to teach someone untrained about the parts of a system, someone whose knowledge is not total by any stretch, but comprehensive- this is a person that can take apart an engine, examine the pieces, and reassemble it, and provided it was in working order, it’ll work better having given the once over by an Expert.
• A Master has the ability to not simply work with the parts of a system, but revise, innovate and theorize new branches of a system- this is a person who designs engines, including ones that don’t typically work to typical standards and conventions.

A Learning Experience can take someone untrained in a Skill to a Basic level of Mastery. To raise from one level to the next, you have to make a case to the Narrator that you’ve practiced the particular Skill enough, and had a Learning Experience using that Skill that was sufficiently difficult to challenge you- you, as a mechanist disarmed not a trap, but something more akin to a self-destruct device threatening to bring down a castle around you; or you, a weapon-master, using a technique you’ve used many times before, to defeat a greater enemy than you’d ever faced before.

Disciplines

Many schools exist in the Converged Worlds, teaching a wide variety of topics. Some will teach you how to read and write, to know your history and to cultivate critical thinking, and these are schools that people want in their community. Some of them teach how to pick locks, which while useful, is also not the sort of school that people want to have a high student population at in their community. Most folk on the River and the Road have the sort of learning down to keep them apace with each other. It’s the specialty training that tends to vary.

Each level of Mastery within a Discipline provides a +1 Bonus to any checks involving that area of knowledge, and gives your character an appropriate degree of understanding over that topic.

Healing: Knowing how to treat injury and sickness, including the simple but important task of restoring Health lost from combat and dungeon crawling. 

Survival: The know-how to survive without the comforts of home when in the wilderness, be it in finding shelter, foraging for supplies, avoiding hungry wildlife, or just finding a way.

Diplomacy: Negotiation when there’s stakes on the line, be it in terms of valuables, people-power, or lives, conducted over a table, over a contract, or over drawn weapons.

Mechanisms: The understanding of more complex devices that have parts that work in a sequence to perform a specific function, like the sprung hinge of a beartrap, or a lock.

Sciences: Knowledge of how the natural world works, in terms of concepts like physics, geology, zoology and meteorology.

Lore: Knowledge of the strange history of the Converged Worlds, in terms of things like regions, monsters, ruins and dungeons.

Styles

People in the Converged Worlds know many ways to start a fight, and as many ways to end them. A Kith can teach you how to draw a blade and strike through your target in one motion, while a Mereid can teach you not to thrust in for a decisive strike with a spear, but ride it in with your weight behind it. A Taun can teach you how to shoot at sound, rather than a visible target; this is not something to put into practice unless you’re absolutely sure of what you’re shooting at, otherwise, it’s just an advanced hunting accident technique. You’ll find myriads of these fighting styles on the River and the Road, emphasizing the use of certain techniques or weapons. Here, they’re grouped into Styles.

Each level of Mastery within a Style provides a +1 Bonus to noted checks with particular weapon types, including your own hands and feet. You also gain an additional ability that you can use with weapons of that type, either in combat or the roleplay space.

Finesse: A style that emphasizes speedy attacks with light weaponry, as well as moves that allow the attacker greater mobility when moving between enemies on the battlefield.

Power: A style that emphasizes the use of large and heavy weapons, attacks that fall like hammer strokes, as well as attacks that forcibly smash enemies around the battlefield.

Reach: Fighting with staves, spears and other weapons that allow you to reach out and jab someone in the head from safety, while using moves that keep you out of harm’s way.

Shield: Fighting with the addition of a shield or other, similar defensive weapons, allowing new methods of intercepting enemy attacks, and countering with blunting bash attacks.

Archery: Training to nock, aim and loose from bows, crossbows and similar weapons, and not just hit a standing target, but hit a moving target, a hiding target, a charging target.

Musketry: Training to load, present and fire muskets, blunderbusses and other combusting ranged weapons, both to hit the target, but scorch it with fire and deafen it with blast.

Magic

The Converged Worlds are described as having Architecture, by those who can perceive it, as though certain forces are drawn into the “picture” of the world, like the precise lines of a blueprint. But it’s not simply lines that they describe, but multiple colours of them upon onion-skin paper, drawing the outline of concepts as abstract shapes, which only become perceptible things, weighty and real, when all of the coloured layers are overlaid each other, and the blueprint is complete. The Indivisible Eleven are pretty staunch about their plans for the Converged Worlds remaining set to their specifications, but even so, they’re secure in their designs, and don’t mind much if people find ways of redrawing the lines in some fashion, because in time, all will go back to how it was supposed to be. It’s in the design, with proper purpose.

Each level of Mastery within a form of Magic provides one Subtle, one Overt and one Ritual manifestation that can be harnessed and cast forth to do arcane work for you, at different scales. Subtle manifestations allow for simple, functional spells to be cast, many of which are not taxing and can be performed passively, without effort. Overt manifestations are more direct, and are cast with a Spellcasting check, allowing the caster to either attack or perform some constructive or supportive function, or perhaps both when put to different tasks. Ritual manifestations are grand scale works of magic, which require some setup, a concerted effort, and might require a sacrifice of reagents, and will either unleash some large scale effect, or bind some greater force to a person, place or thing, as enchantment or a power to be released later.

In addition to Learning Experiences, characters require a point of Magical Aptitude, which are awarded when they undergo experiences that bring them close to the bared nature of the Converged Worlds. These can be near-death experiences where the veil is momentarily drawn back by getting too close to mortality, or moments where profound and universal truth is revealed, beautiful, terrible and without argument to the contrary. They can also be moments where a character demonstrates the ability to apply their logic arcanely, by solving a puzzle that required a leap beyond normal logic. For each applicable Learning Experience, a point of Magical Aptitude must be spent in order to gain a new level in a Magic Skill. In addition, if you have Magical Aptitude when you create a character, you can choose to take any levels desired across any of the schools, 1 for each point you have.

Potential: Living energy permeates the world, glowing with a vibrant green. Those of this school can raise this energy to vitalize the dying, or ignite it to bring death to an enemy.

Inevitability: Nothing is constant but change, and so the Architecture has space to facilitate it, marked in a deep blue. If Fate can be tempted, this school can draw Fate’s attention.

Reality: Matter, mass, material, that which is hard, fluid or ethereal but Is Real is drawn in lines of an ink-like brass. If it has shape in space, that shape can be bent, if only for a time.

Time: The new and old, the passage between, and the strange curves that allow loopholes marked in ink that begins blood red, and darkens with age- things within this school’s reach.

Control: Force of will that defines itself against natural chaos, forming systems, repeatable phenomena, logic that can be altered and enforced with the School of Silver Ink, Control.

Entropy: Natural tendencies towards disorder, chaos that the old can sink into, and the new can grow out of- transmutation. The blue of Inevitability, the red of Time, the violet of Entropy. 

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Next Week: We'll come back to this, and see how everything shakes out into stuff you can play with dice, paper and pencils. See you then!