A character has a set of places things go — hands, body, head, feet, and so on — and a pack for everything else.
An item costs you the same whether you are wearing it or carrying it. A sword in your hand and a sword in your pack are the same burden; moving it from one to the other changes nothing about what you can hold.
There are two separate limits, and you can run into either one. How many things you are hauling — a flat count, the same for everyone, which is the real check on a magpie. And how much it all weighs, which is set by Might: a strong character genuinely carries more.
Both counts include everything you have on you. Your sheet shows you where you stand against both at all times.
There are nine places on a character: a weapon hand and an off hand, body armor, a cloak, a helm, gloves, boots, and two accessories.
What goes where is decided by the thing itself — boots go on feet and nowhere else — so most of the time there is no decision to make. The exception is a two-handed weapon, which takes both hands. It remains one object that you are carrying; it just leaves you nowhere to put anything else.
Which makes the off hand the most contested space on a character. A shield goes there. So does the light you are carrying. And a big weapon takes it away entirely. Three good uses, one slot, and whichever you choose is a real decision about what that character is for.
Not everything will go on. Gear can ask for more than a character has — the strength to bear it, most often — and if they fall short, it simply will not be worn.
The game tells you it refused and leaves it there. It will not talk you through the arithmetic, and it will not tell you how close you were. That is deliberate: a refusal says no, clearly, and does not become a tutorial.
What it does instead is make the answer easy to go and find, which is the next section.
Two ways to read an item, and the difference is only how long it stays.
Hovering over something gives you the quick look — what it is, what it weighs, what it asks of you, what it does. It follows your pointer and gets out of the way.
Inspecting it pins that same readout open so you can actually sit and read, compare it against what you are holding, and decide.
This is where the refusal above sends you. If something will not go on, the item itself will tell you what it wanted — the game withholds the reason at the moment of failure precisely because it is never hidden anywhere else.
The card is written for whoever you are looking at it as. It never says a name, but it marks itself against that character. Anything struck through is something the item does that they do not get — armor they cannot carry, a bow's damage they cannot bring to bear. Anything in red under Requires is the demand they fall short of, and if there is more than one, only the one they failed turns.
Anything in gold is costing them right now. Heavy gear can be a burden as well as a benefit, and a cost is paid whether or not you meet the item's demands — so a gold line is never struck through. If a card has no gold on it, it asks nothing of you beyond its weight.
What does not depend on you sits there plainly: weight, what a weapon does, how far it reaches, what it holds. An item nobody has identified yet shows its weight and nothing more — not because the card is hiding a blank space, but because that genuinely is everything hand and eye can tell you.
Some things hold other things, and they work on one rule worth knowing properly: what is inside a container costs you nothing at all. Not weight, not space. A full quiver is exactly as much of a burden as an empty one.
The catch is that a container only works while you are wearing it. Arrows in a quiver on your back are arrows you can shoot; the same quiver in your pack may as well be full of sand. It is still worth carrying a spare — it is just not ammunition until it is on you.
Capacity is real: a container holds what it holds, and when it is full, the overflow stays in your pack rather than being refused outright. And anything you pick up goes into a worn container first if it fits, so you do not have to keep packing things by hand.
A container you take off keeps what is in it. Nothing spills.