Nobody in this game levels up. Characters improve one deliberate purchase at a time, paid for out of a single pool of experience that also has to cover everything else they might want — and the pool fills slowly, on purpose.
Attribute dots, skill dots, and everything a place of learning has to teach all draw on the same experience. There is no separate budget for training and no category that comes free with age. After creation, every single improvement a character ever makes is bought.
That is what makes the pool interesting. Raising Vigor is not competing with some other attribute — it is competing with a skill dot, and with the lesson you have been saving toward, and with the same three choices on the other four characters in your party.
Experience comes from winning fights, and it is split evenly across the party — including anyone who fell during it. A character who died in the first round still learned something, and still takes their share. There is no bonus for surviving and no penalty for being carried.
What lands on the sheet is a large, raw number, and it grows fast enough to look generous. It is not. Which brings us to the part that surprises people.
Raw experience is not what you spend. It converts into points, and the rate is a thousand earned experience to one point. Everything priced below is priced in those points.
This is the single most important number in the progression system, and it is set where it is deliberately. The intent is that a party is played for a very long time — not finished, put down, and replaced — so a character improves in small, real increments rather than arriving at the best the game has to offer within a week. Weeks of play move a character noticeably. They do not transform one.
Anything short of a whole point simply waits. There is no partial spending and nothing is ever lost; the remainder sits on the sheet until the next fight pushes it over.
Skills rise in a straight line. Each dot costs a little more than the last, at a steady, predictable rate, and it stays affordable the whole way up. A skill is the approachable investment — the thing you can keep feeding for a character's entire life without ever hitting a wall.
Attributes climb steeply. The cost of each attribute dot rises sharply against the rating you already have, so the early dots are cheap and the high ones are genuinely punishing. Maxing an attribute is not meant to be a goal you casually reach; maxing several is not meant to be reachable at all.
The practical read: skills are where a character grows, and attributes are where a character is shaped — a handful of expensive decisions made rarely, mostly early, mostly in service of a build you already committed to at creation.
There is one exception to the gentleness of skills. Opening a skill you have never had costs far more than the first dot would suggest, and it is gated: you need three dots in the skill's governing attribute before you may open it at all. Both the price and the gate exist to stop leftover experience from quietly turning every character into a generalist. Raising a skill you already own is never gated.
Dots are not the only thing worth buying. A place of learning — the guild in town, today — also has things to teach: techniques, refinements, and the first spells of each magic domain.
What it will teach you depends on what you have already learned. Every lesson sits behind a skill rating, and until you meet it the lesson is not offered. Reaching a new rating opens a door; walking through it is a second purchase. Being good enough to be taught something is never the same as having been taught it.
Lessons also cost silver, drawn from the party's shared purse rather than any one character's pocket — so training one member is a decision the whole party pays for. The exception is the Human's own toolkit of talents, which costs experience and nothing else.
The list is live while you plan. Raise a skill to a new rating on the training screen and anything it qualifies you for appears immediately, before you have committed to anything; take the dot back and it disappears again. You can stand there and map out what a character could become long before you can afford any of it.
Training happens somewhere. It is not something a character does from the sheet in the middle of a corridor: the guild is in town, and a party still underground cannot train at all. Nor can a character who is committed to a fight or to a camp round — whatever is happening finishes first.
So experience accumulates while you are down there and is spent when you come back up. The walk home is part of the system, not an inconvenience around it.
Everything is staged first. Add dots, take them back, add a lesson, change your mind — nothing is real, and nothing is charged, until you save. The running cost updates as you go, so you always know what the whole basket comes to before you pay for it.
Saving is final. There is no refund, no respec, and no undo; a dot bought is a dot owned forever. Two things happen the moment it lands:
A dot that raises one of your pools raises the pool and what is currently in it, by the same amount. Training makes a character measurably healthier or steadier on the spot — you do not have to rest to feel it.
And a character who has spent so much as a single point can no longer be rebuilt. Up until then a character is still a draft and creation can be reopened; the first purchase ends that, permanently.