A character here is not a fighter or a thief or a mage. Those words do not exist in the game, and nothing you choose at creation will ever put you in a box.
You do not pick a profession and receive its equipment list. You spread a small number of points across attributes and skills, and whatever pattern those points make is the character. Nobody is stopped from learning anything; the only limits are what you can afford and what your race can physically reach.
So a character is defined by specialization, not by title. Put dots into Melee and Guard and you have made a soldier, whatever you call them. Put them into Search, Devices and Survival and you have made the person the party sends first into a room, who is also — if you spent that way — useless in the fight that follows. The game will not name any of this for you. That is deliberate: the shape is yours to imagine, and the sheet just keeps score.
Nine attributes, in three categories. Physical is Might, Grace and Vigor. Mental is Acuity, Focus and Perception. Spirit is Resolve, Fortune and Aether. Everybody starts at the bottom of every one of them and spends up from there.
The spending is where the first real decision lives. You are handed three budgets of unequal size and you choose which category gets the largest, which gets the middle, and which gets the scraps. That single choice does more to shape a character than anything else on the screen, because a category you starve stays starved for a long time afterwards.
Within a category the points are yours to place as you like — all in one attribute, or spread evenly, or anything between. An attribute is never wasted: every skill in the game is rolled as an attribute plus a skill, so the attribute half of every pool you care about is bought here.
What each of the nine actually does is its own page: Attributes & Skills lists every one of them, and every skill, in the game’s own words.
Your race can move the ends of that range. Some races cannot raise a given attribute past a ceiling, ever — not at creation and not later. Others come with a floor: a guaranteed minimum in something, handed over free, on top of your budget rather than out of it.
Eleven skills, each one governed by a particular attribute. Melee answers to Might. Marksmanship and Evasion answer to Grace. Guard to Vigor, Search and Survival to Perception, Devices to Acuity, Abjuration to Aether — and the three magic domains, Solar, Terrestrial and Flow, to Acuity, Perception and Focus respectively.
The full roster — what each skill covers and which attribute it answers to — is on Attributes & Skills.
You get a pool of dots to distribute, and one hard rule: no single skill can start above three dots. You cannot make a prodigy at creation. What you can make is someone with three good things, or five passable ones, or one good thing and a long tail of half-trained curiosities.
A skill with no dots in it is not forbidden — you still roll the governing attribute alone when the game asks. It is simply thin. The difference between an untrained attempt and a trained one is the most dramatic gap in the game, so the question at creation is never “can I do this” but “can I do this reliably.”
Nothing chosen here is permanent in the other direction. Skills and attributes both grow later, bought with the experience your party earns and spent at the guild. Creation sets where you start, not where you end.
Race shifts the ceilings and floors described above, sets how deep your magical reserves run, and grants — for four of the five — an ability nobody else can ever learn. It can still be changed while the character is a draft; once they have spent experience, it is theirs for good.
Human. No ceilings, no floors, no restrictions of any kind, and the shallowest claim on anything special. What a Human gets instead is more training: noticeably more skill dots than anyone else at creation, which is the single most valuable currency on the screen. Their Adapt talents — catching a second wind when they tire, attempting techniques they never learned, pushing past what they should be able to spend — are not gifts. They are bought later with experience, one at a time. A Human begins as the most broadly capable character in the party and the least remarkable one.
Dwarf. Sturdy, and slow. A Dwarf will never be nimble and will never be much of an Abjurer, but starts with guaranteed hardiness and strength, and carries a solid reserve of mana. Their Ward is the party's shield: they throw protection over an ally, and when something gets through the ally's own defense the Dwarf takes the rest of it. Two Dwarves warding the same person take turns rather than stacking up.
Elf. Quick and sharp, guaranteed some grace and some wit, and never especially strong or hardy — and notably unlucky, which is a real cost when luck is the safety net under every roll. They hold the deepest mana of anyone. Their Riposte is a stance: rather than defending broadly, they commit to the counter, and an attack they turn aside comes straight back at whoever threw it.
Half-Orc. Strong and tough by birth, and firmly capped in cleverness and concentration — the shallowest mana in the game and the poorest candidate for the subtler skills. Their Bloodrage is not an ability you use. It is something that happens to you: hurt badly enough, a Half-Orc simply goes, attacking whatever is in front of them at full force every round, ignoring exhaustion entirely, and taking no further orders from you until the fight ends. It is the best damage in the game and you do not get to aim it.
Halfling. Small — genuinely limited in strength and durability, more than any other race — and guaranteed to be lucky and observant, which pays out quietly on every roll they make. Deep reserves of mana. Their Fade removes them from the fight's attention altogether: while hidden, nothing can reach them. If they are the last one standing, the room begins hunting for them in earnest, and their luck is the only thing keeping them unfound.
Three pools come out of the attributes you chose, and you do not set any of them directly.
Health is the simplest: it rests on Vigor alone, and it has exactly one job, which is the distance between you and the floor. It does not make you worse at anything on the way down — a character at a sliver of health rolls exactly as well as one at full. It just runs out.
Stamina is what the game actually spends. Every order in a fight costs some, pushing harder costs more, and the dungeon itself takes its share from difficult ground. It is fed by Vigor, Focus and Resolve together — the broadest of the three pools, and the one that quietly rewards a character who is not specialized into a corner. Unlike health, running low on stamina does cost you dice, and eventually costs you your turn.
Mana pays for magic and for the racial abilities that hold a stance. Every race brings a different base amount, Aether multiplies it, and — this is the part worth planning around — every dot you put into Solar, Terrestrial or Flow raises it too. Training to cast and having the reserves to cast are the same investment.
Spells are not chosen from a general list and they are not granted by being a certain kind of character. They come out of the three magic domains, and the rule is simply: one starting spell for each dot you put into a domain.
A single dot in Flow earns one Flow spell. Three dots earn three — or as many as exist to be had, since the first spells of a domain are a short list and a heavy investment can outrun it. Dots in a non-magical skill earn nothing here, and a character with no domain dots at all simply starts knowing no magic, which is a perfectly ordinary way to start.
What you pick from at creation is the common stock — the spells anyone might reasonably have been taught. Everything rarer is found, not chosen. Nothing here is a permanent ceiling either: what a character knows can grow later, the same way everything else does.