Downtime

If you find yourself with time between adventures, there are several activities you can participate in to stay productive. You might perform work to earn money, though such work often comes at the cost of stress. You might build a bond by getting to know a person, place, or thing, though opportunities for such intimacy are rare and may require time. You might partake of local amenities to provide aid and comfort on your future adventures. If you have access to the right supplies, you can craft elixirs that provide powerful temporary effects. Or finally, you might hone your equipment or techniques in order to upgrade your skills.

Work

The most straightforward downtime activity you can perform is honest (or not so honest) work. First, you must find someone willing to pay for your services. The nature of the work they offer will determine the type and difficulty of the roll you will need to succeed. Then, you will roll to determine how well you perform the work.
If the roll results in a failure, you earn no money; your performance was too poor to earn pay. If the roll result is mixed, you earn silver equal to the roll’s total. If the roll is a success, you’ve worked well enough to earn a bonus and you are payed gold equal to the roll’s total. Note that more difficult work has a higher potential payout, but is less likely to be successful. The GM is unlikely to impose setbacks as a result of mundane work, unless it is particularly risky. Work is often stressful, even if you perform is successfully; the GM will determine how much stress you suffer.

Building Bonds

With the right time, determination, and insight, you can get to know a new person, place or thing like the back of your hand. When you want to build a new bond, tell the GM who or what you are interested in learning about. This might be an intriguing NPC, a familiar travelling companion, a fabled beast, a quint town, a bustling city district, an untamed wilderness, a strange tome, or even a mysterious legend. However, you don’t need to tell the GM you want to build a bond beforehand; the GM may determine that your past actions are worthy of a new bond.

Each bond you might build has a requirement you must meet to do so, determined by the GM. Places often take time to understand: perhaps a day for a building, a week for a city district or village, or a year for a vast stretch of wilderness. People are often reluctant to trust strangers with their deepest hopes and dreams, so you will often need to earn a person’s trust to build a bond with them. Learning about a legendary sword might require looking up it’s history in a library, or finding the smith who forged it.

All these requirements will usually involve direct access to information regarding the person, place, or thing you want to learn about. You can’t really get to know someone just from talking to their friends, nor can you learn about a place just by hearing a guide’s description. However, the GM may make an exception if a secondary source is particularly detailed, like a whole book on the subject.

Once the GM determines that you have built a new bond, write it down as a permanent part of your character! You can leverage that bond to gain a boon to any roll related to the subject, and contribute +4 to any lore check related to the subject. You will hopefully build many bonds over the course of your adventures; when you finally retire, you can look back at all the growth you’ve seen along the way.

Amenities

Amenities are beneficial effects you can find that will aid you during your adventures. Most, but not all, amenities can be acquired from civilized society at a price of gold or platinum. For example, you might visit a gourmet restaurant, grandiose performance, or a luxurious bathhouse, or holy sanctum to acquire their unique amenities.

One you acquire an amenity, you can expect the benefits to stay with you through your adventures until you suffer an affliction. Once you suffer an affliction, all your amenities are removed. Certain results the GM derives from the doom pool might also take away your amenities. You can only benefit from three amenities at a time; if you acquire a fourth amenity, you must choose one of your acquired amenities to lose.

Amenities can have a wide variety of different effects. Some examples include:

• Increase Your base poise, momentum, or focus.
• Increase your stress tolerance.
• Gain a boon to certain types of rolls.
• Gain immunity to certain conditions.
• Gain resistance to certain tags.
• Gain the choice to add certain tags to your skills.
• Temporarily gain access to unique skills.

Make sure to attend each city’s attractions to find amenities that will aid you on your quests, and keep an eye open for amenities hidden away in unlikely places!

Elixirs

Elixirs are alchemical concoctions that can be used for a wide variety of temporary benefits. Each elixir must be started with a flask of alkahest, which can be purchased from most alchemists for the price of a few gold. Once you acquire a flask of alkahest, you can begin adding ingredients to it in order to make an elixir.

In the course of your adventures, you will acquire ingredients, materials infused with alchemically useful properties. Each ingredient contains one of 10 elemental essences: fire, water, earth, air, ice, lightning, caustic, mental, holy, or unholy. If you have access to an ingredient, a source of heat, and a flask of alkahest, you can extract the elemental essence of the ingredient into the flask over the course of an hour. Doing so destroys the ingredient, but creates or adds effects to an elixir! Elixirs may be composed of one, two or three ingredients, and the number and type of ingredients determines their effects.

Single and double ingredient elixirs can be used in one of four ways, all of which consume the elixir:

• As a maneuver, you may drink the elixir or administer it to a character within one pace. Drinking a fire, lightning, or mental elixir removes the confused condition from you and grants you +4 focus. Drinking a water, air, or caustic elixir removes the reeling condition from you and grants you +4 poise. Drinking an earth, ice, holy, or unholy elixir removes the knocked-down condition from you and grants you +4 momentum. Drinking an elixir with two ingredients grants both effects, resulting in +8 defense in total.

• As an action, you may coat one of your weapons, or one weapon held by a character within one pace. Doing so grants skills with that weapon the tag(s) of the elixir’s ingredient(s) for one minute. For example, a fire elixir would grant your weapon’s skill the fire tag.

• As an action, you may coat your armor or that of another character within one pace. Doing so grants resistance to the tag(s) of the elixir’s ingredient(s) for one minute. For example, a fire elixir would grant you resistance to the fire tag.

• As a maneuver, you may throw the elixir at a character as a thrown ranged:10 attack maneuver with 8 threat per ingredient. If the target yields, no dice are rolled but you automatically affect the target with one cunning effect of each of the elixir’s tags. For example, a fire elixir would let you either inflict burning or blinded on the target.

Elixirs with three ingredients transform into something else entirely. All combinations of three unique ingredient essences have completely different and distinct effects. Explore the world and experiment with ingredients to discover all 120 elixirs!

Upgrades WIP

Through careful craftsmanship or rigorous training, you can alter the way that your skills perform. With access to appropriate crafting tools and several gold worth of materials, you can upgrade one skill granted from one weapon, or other equipment that you posses. With appropriate training facilities and 2 experience points, you can upgrade one of your class skills. Both of these approaches take 3 days to complete; if this process is interrupted, you must start it again. Each skill can only be upgraded once; although you can replace one upgrade with a different one. If a piece of equipment has multiple skills, you can upgrade each of them separately, as long as the GM agrees that it makes sense.

When you complete the upgrade process, you may choose the form your upgrade takes:

• If the skill is ranged, increase the range by +5.
• Shift the skills defense cost by one point, e.g. from -2 to -1 or from +3 to +4.
• If the skill is an attack, increase skill’s threat by +2.
• If the skill is an attack, increase or decrease the yield dice by 1 size, e.g. d4 to d6 or vice versa.
• Change one of the skill’s tags to another one that makes sense, e.g. replace a skill’s blunt tag with piercing by adding a spike.
• Grant the skill a boon when used at a specific time, e.g. grant a fire skill a boon when you’re standing in burning terrain.