Character Creation

A character is defined by their Statistics, Skills, Advantages, and Knacks. Statistics are the mental and physical attributes of the character. Skills are what areas of knowledge and ability the character has trained in. Advantages are other assorted mundane traits that a character possesses, such as monetary wealth, security clearance, or fame. Knacks are the magical abilities of those familiar with the praetermundus. A character may also have a race other than human (these are really mixes, mostly human with a little bit of blood from some other race lost in the mists of time); being another race is treated like a knack.

Luck

Each character also has a pool of luck points. There are two kinds of luck: standard luck and earned luck. Each character begins every game with exactly four standard luck points. Characters can receive earned luck points as awards from the GM's. The main mechanism for this is that the GM's have a list of actions which award luck points; some of the items on the list will be public, and others won't. When someone does one of these things, they'll get an earned luck point.

Once spent, an earned luck point is gone, but, unlike standard luck, they roll over to the next game if they aren't spent, so a character can wait several games before spending one of their earned luck points.

Experience Points

A player specifies that a character has a given stat, skill, knack, or advantage by spending experience points to buy that trait. Each trait has its own cost, specified in the page for that kind of trait. A new character begins with:

• 114 experience points that must be spent on stats (this is exactly enough to buy a 10 in each stat, so it may be convenient to start from that assumption and get points back by reducing some scores to improve others)
• 75 experience points that must be spent on non-combat skills
• 24 experience points that must be spent on combat skills
• 5 experience points that must be spent on knacks
• 50 experience points that may by spent on anything

Any experience points from the dedicated pools which aren't spent during character creation are lost, but some of the 50 experience points may be saved to be spent later. Experience points from the dedicated pools can be combined with the 50 experience points to purchase individual items (for instance, a character who has spent most of their points on stats may have 8 left, but need 12 to raise a particular stat; they can take their last 8 points from the dedicated pool and combine them with 4 of the general points to get that 12).

Gaining Experience

A character can have up to 10 additional experience points for every month it has been in play. The easiest way to earn these is by attending games: characters get 5 experience points for every game they attend.

But sometimes players can't attend every game, so there are other ways of earning points. For example, player who writes a detailed description of what their character has been doing outside of games can receive as much as 5 experience points.

These additional actions need not be done in the same month that the player misses a game. After missing a month, you can go back later and do things to make up the experience points for te month that you missed.