A lesson given to children in the port town of Heshkiad:
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A diagram of eleven circles around two touching hexagons, labeled GEN, COH, SKI, POW, CAP, AUR, DEX, REC, MIN, STR, RES [https://images-ext-1.discordapp.net/external/Z1alD1njMNM0DCNFMDe3Wne-AJG_Yh7zYjsHHTmJVwU/https/drive.google.com/u/0/drive-viewer/AKGpihb7qzj26yK-wMbRE9FB_8bvuG7Iupp5o9XbHgCICdvOqXkmcSGh81b5knLrFYcB6y2mp8vVmTvGt6hCpD_V5vXCsZBoRjzgI3Q%3Ds1600-rw-v1?format=webp]
Generation
I’m sure many of you have been told that mana Generation is ‘the most important stat,’ haven’t you? It is, after all, the foundation for all magic. If you can’t make mana, you can’t use skills, you can’t use most enchantments, you can’t do anything. Well, that’s a bit overblown, every stat is important and I hope none of you try to unbalance yourselves! Generation is absolutely important, but it’s got a bit of a reputation for just being boring. Eat your vegetables, go to bed on time, do your homework, assign your points into Generation, that sort of thing, am I right?
But did you know that Generation can be exciting? Even if you never make some massive discovery, get absolute piles of experience, and boost your Generation up so high that you can use skills forever, there’s so much you can do with Generation to either cut down on how many points you need to put into it, or make the points you do put into it so much more useful!
How many of you are familiar with substats? Okay, okay, that’s pretty good. For the rest of you, substats are ways where you can focus the effects of a stat down even more. So, for mana Generation, maybe you focus on substats which increase how much mana you make when you sleep, so you only generate mana while snoozing. If your goal is to be able to Generate mana to refill your Capacity every day, do you know what that does? Yes, it means that you can always track exactly how much mana you have for the rest of the day, for one, but it also makes your Generation more than four times as effective as it would be if you just had it refilling throughout the day! And if you sleep for, oh, about one third to one half of the day, now you’re actually getting more mana than you would otherwise! And, if you ever need to get just a bit more mana, just take a nap and get a bit of mana that way!
Oh, you don’t like naps, you say? Well, that’s fine. What about generating mana based on how much you’re out in the sun? I bet some of your parents do that. After all, if you’re going to be out on a ship deck all day, why not get extra mana for your skills? Of course, then you have to worry about cloudy days, and wintertime can be quite annoying, but the summer is great!
But that’s still not interesting, you say? Well, what about tying your Generation to eating or drinking? Imagine if every glass of water you drank gave you a big bump to your mana! And as long as you could drink, you’d keep getting mana! Or, if you’re a priest, you could tie your Generation to be enhanced so long as you’re in a temple, and look at that, you’ve basically gotten a free boost to your Generation at all times, because when did a priest ever leave their temple?
Hah! Good one. But say you take it a step beyond that. Some explorers tie their Generation to the mana in the air around them. Do you know why? No, it’s not because the oceans are so much richer in mana than land, much the opposite. No, it’s not because of how many enchanted items they have on their ships. It’s because that lets them sense when they’re getting close to a mana spring, or other source of magic, which are almost always close to land, or can be tricky to notice on the seas. There are other ways to do that, but do you see the potential?
Yes! Yes, now you’re getting it! You could make it so that you Generate mana while eating magical foods, or while meditating, while using skills, while in darkness or near fire or out on the ocean. No matter what you want to do, there’s a way to use substats to boost your Generation while you’re doing it.
Oh? You still think that’s boring? Well, what if I told you that some people have synergized their Generation, Capacity, and Skill stats such that they have a precise number of skill uses each day? It’s true! Instead of just having a flat mana amount which can be spent however; they’ve used substats to give them more skill uses, but only in certain proportions. Some of them take it a step further, getting all of their skill uses back at a specific time, like sunrise, or noon, or sunset. Because you can also do that, concentrating your Generation to happen all at once at a specific time. You can even make it so that you regenerate your mana when you run out! I wouldn’t recommend that, because that’s actually less efficient than just regenerating it normally, but if you really want to, you could allocate some of your Generation to be more effective when you’re low on mana. Or high on mana! They both work equally well.
Of course, moderation is key, and while my illustrations are extreme, you shouldn’t put all of your generation into only a single strategy. Perhaps you’ll split it between general Generation, with extra speed while you’re sleeping, and, if you really want to, maybe a few points dedicated to increasing your Generation when you get low.
Cohesion
Now, mana Cohesion is often overlooked, next to its flashier and “more important” neighbors, but is certainly not something to be disregarded. While having dozens or hundreds of skills and utilizing them constantly is more desirable upon its own, Cohesion is vital in ensuring that your skills will actually work as you desire them to.
See, on its own, mana likes to run everywhere, like trying to pick up water or dry sand. You can’t get any kind of grip on it, you can’t use very much of it, and you certainly can’t build anything with it. But Cohesion makes all of your mana a lot stickier. No, not like honey where you can’t get it off your hands, but like wet sand. Wet sand you can build sandcastles out of, it holds its shape more, and it’s going to do a lot more work for you overall.
If you have enough Cohesion, then your mana will be like sandstone. Not only is sandstone much, much easier to build something impressive out of than even wet sand, but it’s so much more solid and that solidity makes it powerful. Would you prefer to have a shield made out of paper, or out of steel? Cohesion is much the same way. Any experienced explorer can tell you, reliability is the absolute king when out in the unknown, and cohesion is how you get that reliability.
But Neshia, I can hear you saying, I don’t want to be an explorer! I’m just going to stay home and make personal discoveries to grow! Well, little one, then you want Cohesion even more! Because Cohesion is also essential for proper mana control. Trying to really push your skills, figuring out new uses for them and pushing for them to evolve, all of that is best done when you have excellent control over your mana, pushing and pulling your skill every which way. As your parents can tell you, just having a skill doesn’t make you a master of it, but how do you expect to master a skill if you can’t control it? Believe me, you don’t want to be the unfortunate person permanently stuck at a low level because you don’t have enough control to make any discoveries with your skills! Very few people get experience by making big, grand discoveries of new laws of magic, new species, new lands or hidden coves. Most of us just level by making the small discoveries, learning about ourselves and our skills, and maybe teaching one or two people to keep growing, but if you can’t control your skills, how will you ever learn about them, hmmm?
Skill
Of course, everyone wants skills, but don’t be so hasty in just trying to get hundreds of skill slots, then fill them all up as fast as you can. Your Skills stat governs everything about your skills, and proper distribution of substats can make the difference between an absolute hero… and some poor level zero! As you increase your skills, make sure that you also improve the quality of your skill slots, not just their quantity. Did you know it’s possible to very nearly upgrade a skill, just by putting it into a properly-managed skill slot? Imagine that, getting a brand-new skill and instantly having it be twice as strong as normal, with room for a dozen new subskills. It’s like leveling any skill you put into the slot, whenever you want!
Also, this is where you can do fun stuff with the Skills themselves. Most skills don’t require much to use, that’s true. But did you know you can reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of a skill if you modify the slot it’s in to require you to say the name of the skill being used? You can do all kinds of tricky modifications to make the skill harder to use, in exchange for it being stronger when you do use it! That’s why you’ll see so many spellcasters chanting in preparation for some massive skill, they’ve used their Skill substats to empower the skill if they chant! Whether the chant has to mean anything isn’t particularly important, it can be gibberish or fully meaningful, it just depends on how the skill is modified. You can even overlap that with boosts to Cohesion and Power… but I’m getting ahead of myself!
There’s even some tricks you can pull with the Skills stat that allows you to speed up how quickly you can move skills around. One of my more advanced students has a single skill slot which is immensely powerful, with double strength and half cooldown and plenty of other very potent enhancements, then she increased her skill-moving speed so she can change her primary skill depending on the weather! Isn’t that cool?
Power
Power is, naturally, how much mana you can use at a time, how much force you’ve got with your magic. It’s the muscles of your soul, the oomph behind all of your skills. ‘Course, I bet I don’t need to tell you all about that now, do I? Not when you can all see the flashy lightning bolts and giant cannon-shots of the strongest explorers out there. But, what you might not be aware of is how important proper power substat distribution is! It’s all well and good if you’ve got hundreds of Power and every skill you have is going to rival dragons, but if you’re quick and clever you can get that much oomph with just a handful of power, maybe just a dozen points, the sorts of thing you could manage if you’re really dedicated to your studies and eat all your vegetables.
The trick? Proper specialization. Substats aren’t just about focusing on one aspect of a Stat over another, like making your arms stronger than your legs, or your Generation only happening while you sleep. Say you’re going to master the use of a cutlass, so you want to make sure that you can use every bit of power possible with your sword skills. Well, you can specialize your Power so that, instead of only having say… five Power, you could get ten, twenty, thirty or even more Power behind all of your skills that you use through your cutlass. Sure, you might not get as much Power to your running skills, and you’d want to make sure you also have either general Power, or stats dedicated to your pistol, but that’s why you make sure you still have some general Power, and overlap your specialties wherever possible. Just like with the other stats, an extra ten Power for cutlasses, and an extra ten Power for fire, is an extra twenty when using a fire skill with a cutlass!
One path that I do wish to warn you away from however, children, is being too specific with your Power. The temptation is there with the other stats as well, of course, but Power is the most tempting. There’s always some poor fools who think they’re so clever, choosing a specific object as a focus. Maybe it’s their grandpa’s wand, or their first pistol, or their mother’s necklace. They get incredible bonuses while using that item, of course… and then they outgrow their wand. Or they lose their necklace, or their pistol misfires and blows itself up. Then, all of that experience they spent improving their Power that way? Gone. Just like that. The same sort of thing can happen if you try to give a lot of Power to a specific skill. It’s fantastic for getting more experience with that skill, but then what happens if you evolve the skill? Or in some cases, just upgrade it? All of a sudden, that skill is no longer has a massive specialty bonus, it’s just the same as any other skill.
So heed my words, children. Specialization is your friend, but all things must be done in moderation.
Capacity
Just talking about mana Capacity might seem a bit boring after that, doesn’t it? Well you’d be wrong! Hah! Everything you can do with Power, you can also do with Capacity. The exact way it interacts with your mana Generation depends on how you set that stat up, but as for how it feels, if you’ve got an item tied to your Capacity it tends to feel like you picked up a battery. You use a necklace as a Capacity specialty, if you’re wearing a necklace then it feels like you can draw the extra mana out of the necklace itself. Of course, the way to get the most out of that is to also make that mana only usable on skills with that item as well. You use a staff to channel your skills? Well, why not make the mana which you can only reach while using a staff, only be able to be used on skills while you’re holding a staff? Yes, you can do that. This is why System education is so important, because while yes, the first person to discover that got incredibly powerful as a result, that’s both from the earned experience and the use of that trick. So now, when you follow in their footsteps, it’s like you’re getting experience points for free!
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Just like with Power, you don’t want to dedicate Capacity to a single skill. Instead, what you’d do there is synergize your Capacity and Skill such that you have a certain amount of mana Capacity dedicated to only be used with that skill slot. Yes, it’s not as good as directly dedicating it to a specific skill, but it’s far better than never being able to evolve the skill again. This is, as I alluded to previously, the synergy by which you would have a finite number of skill usages per day, which restore themselves daily.
Another thing you can do if you want to get tricky with Capacity is, much like with the physical stats, you can make your mana storage overlap with a certain part of your body, or hover just outside of it. If you do it right, you won’t even lose the mana if you lose the body part. Most of the uses for that come with Aura, but there are some very interesting consequences to changing where your mana is stored. Even if you don’t plan on becoming a Chakra initiate, or developing a Mana Core, there are many cases where using stats to expand or reinforce the natural mana pathways that flow through your body can be useful.
Aura
But overwhelmingly, you’ll do so because you want to do something in particular with Aura. Aura is a tricky stat, all things considered. It’s the only stat that’s both physical and magical, and I’m sure all of your parents have told you the stories about what that means. I certainly won’t be repeating them here, not least because I don’t want to make most of your parents mad at me for telling you the wrong thing, so I’ll focus on what it means, System-wise, for your Aura to be the bridge between your body, your magic, and the world around you.
If you just put stats directly into Aura, without any direction or specialization, it will make your body and your magic more in-sync and materialized. What does that mean? Well, practically speaking it means that for you physical-types, your body-based skills will get more of a benefit from your physical stats. In addition, you’ll find anything you wear or wield is hardier and more effective, as your Aura applies a portion of your physical stats to things that are magically close enough to you. Enough Aura and Recovery, and you might find that your clothes start fixing pulled threads on their own, or knives sharpening themselves… but that takes a lot of Aura, or some dedicated substats.
You magic-types, it helps out your body with your magical stats. An excessive amount of mana Generation will help soothe physical aches, using a lot of magic at once will be less likely to cause you backlash, and your skills will recover faster and with less strain.
In addition, it will help your presence, your influence upon the world. That is… an entire lecture unto itself, but you know how experienced explorers, and nobles, will have that draw to them, the way in which they seem more real than everyone else? That’s Aura. It will also help you sense mana better, perceive your skills better, and many other minor things which everyone loves.
But, you want to find out the interesting things you can do, what benefits it gets from mana Capacity? I thought so. Aura is how you can turn yourself into a magical creature. Oh, you don’t understand? Except you, young lady, you can stop saying you want to be a unicorn. It’s not quite like that.
Aura, as a bridge between the magical and physical, lets you make your body magical. It’s not quite a Skill, but if you push mana Capacity into your hand, your hand can become magical. Maybe it starts glowing, maybe it lets you stick to things to climb them, maybe it can start to phase through thin objects to touch something past it. There’s a lot you can do with Aura, though it’s less versatile than a proper Skill, of course. But, naturally, if you have a Keen Eyes skill, and you use your aura to assign that to your eyes, then that skill will be more effective!
Oh, ohohoho! Good catch, boy, good catch! You caught me out, you shouldn’t use aura to tie a specific skill to a part of your body, I misspoke! You should assign a specific skill slot to a body part. A visual Skill slot can be tied to your eyes and you’ll be perfectly safe. You wouldn’t want to put a swimming skill into that slot, but any number of visual skills would work great!
And then, Aura is also why high-level beast parts are magical. A unicorn’s Aura is predominantly focused in its horn, so that’s the most magical part of it, even after the unicorn is dead.
But you don’t want to die to be useful, you say? Well, you don’t need to be dead to, say, cut your hair. If you have a Smooth Thread skill, perhaps you use your Aura and Skill to assign that skill to your hair, and then you can cut your hair to get a lot of permanently smooth threads. With the proper care, you can even change yourself, using an Iron Skin skill to permanently transfigure your skin to iron, reshaping your body even after the skill itself has been evolved or abandoned, and getting some of the effects even without active mana expenditure, though usually with some amount of stat expenditure.
And it continues on as well. Do you know how artifacts are made? Not just enchantments, but proper artifacts, the sorts which are inherently magical, empowering people for centuries. Yep! That’s Aura too. At a high enough level, anything you use will become slightly magical, but soul-smiths will assign Aura to a specific item, alongside other stats, maybe even a Skill, and then leave it like that, permanently giving those magical properties to the object. It often requires a Skill to actually make that change entirely permanent, but that’s how it’s done!
Also, Aura is how familiars are made, diverting a portion of your stats to a lower-level creature… but that’s certainly more advanced than this class is meant to be!
Dexterity
Now, the physical stats I hope you’ll all be a bit more familiar with? If we follow the pattern around, what comes next? Yes, Dexterity! And Dexterity helps with… That’s right! Self-control. No, no, not like that. It’s control over your body. Dexterity is what helps you do clever tricks with your writing, or flick a rope into a knot from ten feet away, or to do a triple backflip from a handstand upon a mast. It’s how graceful you are, and how precise your finger-wiggles are if you want to use a modified skill.
Yes, Dexterity is an excellent pair for those skill modifications. If you want anything more complex than a finger-snap, it can be useful if your hands are already ahead of you! Not that you have to focus Dexterity just on your hands, of course, though plenty of people do. Dexterity helps your entire body, your balance and your sense of touch. It’s mastering your body, and that extends to every part of you! That’s why it’s popular for announcers and singers, your voice is a part of you too! Bards love their Dexterity, for its aid to their fingers and their tongues alike.
Rumor has it that with enough dedicated Dexterity, you can even move your eyes and nose and hair, changing what you look like! I don’t know if that’s true, no. Do you think I’d have this much gray hair if I could change its color? Ha!
Oh, and did I mention that Dexterity pairs exceptionally well with Aura? That’s what being neighbors will do for you, I suppose. But no, it doesn’t just make your clothing more flexible- though it does do that. But it also helps extend your precision of movement to your surroundings. With just a bit of Dexterity and Aura synergizing, you’ll find that your floorboards no longer creak if you don’t want them to. A bit more, and you’ll be climbing up rigging without the ropes sagging. More, and you’ll be walking along the top of sails like they were a solid deck. I’ve even heard that if you get loads of Dexterity and enough Aura to pair with it, you can walk on the water itself. Personally I think she cheated with a Skill, but that’s beside the point. There’s no most useful stat… but Dexterity is a favorite of mine.
Recovery
Can anyone tell me what Recovery does? Yes, it helps you recover when you’re out of breath. Yes, it helps you heal after you get hurt. But what else… You! Yes, you. That’s right! It also helps you live longer. Now, I’ll keep this simple, but all of your organs, your squishy bits inside of you, that’s right, those are all empowered by Recovery. It doesn’t just help you recover from things, but it also helps keep everything running smoothly. It’s not Resistance, which will keep you exactly the way you are, but it’ll help keep you the way you should be, and do it faster. If you’ve got lots of Recovery, you’ll be able to eat a lot more because it speeds up how quickly you can eat. It also makes everything run much more effectively, your eyes brighter, your sleep more refreshing, all of that!
And yes, of course you can apply substats. You can do substats with everything. One of my favorite tricks to do with Recovery is to assign a conditional for something you won’t do while recovering, because it’s much more passive. So maybe if you say you won’t eat a certain type of food, then all the times you aren’t eating that food, you get a boost to Recovery! Yes, yes, you can do that with anything else, but what makes Recovery special is that with the proper substat distribution, you can use it to never sleep again. After all, Recovery is all about restoring yourself to the way you should be, and while it can require quite a few points, more than you’re likely to be able to manage, it’s possible to replace basic needs with simple stat distribution! Tell me that isn’t neat.
Yes. You do need to be very careful, because Recovery can certainly depend on your biological functions to work. You need a set of very dedicated substats providing your body with the replacement for sleep, or food, or water, breathing, or anything else like that. But, once you get there, you have an immensely powerful tool which you can use for all other substats! You know about oaths, I’m sure? Well, those are just substat distribution, giving someone a boost to their stats so long as they never tell a lie, or faithfully serve the king, or never harm a patient yes. But, a very potent oath is one of the eternal fast, getting a huge boost to your stats, so long as you never eat. Once you eat, those stats are basically gone for good. Yes, like if you focused your magic stats on a single skill then evolved it, just like that. But it’s worse, because you can’t un-eat, so those stats are just gone. It’s very powerful, and of course is offset by the fact that most people don’t live for very long if they stop eating. But if you manage to get your Recovery stats to replace your need to eat, eh?
Have I done that? Goodness no! I love my food too much, and boosts to my stats aren’t worth my sanity, no thank you. Besides, I’ve had better things to do with my points than put a bunch of them towards not eating! I don’t even know the math, if I have enough stats that I would have come out ahead on that trade. Perhaps if I had some other pressing reason, like if I were one to embark on long voyages often, being able to reduce how much food I need to consume would be a welcome addition.
But such is not my lot, I am simply here to enlighten you to everything the System can do. Certainly speak with your parents before making any oath, or really assigning any stats in general! They know what you want better than I do.
Mind
Mind is a tricky stat, because you can screw yourself up real bad with it if you aren’t careful. Fortunately, if you don’t delve too deep into substats, and you content yourself with what mostly amounts to improved senses, faster reflexes and thinking speed, and better memory, you’ll do fine. But with the right teachers to help you with what you need to do, and I certainly am not qualified to do so, there are so many things you can do. I’ve heard of people getting the ability to think two different things at the same time, be able to hear and process everything said within an entire city block, or be able to tell what people are thinking just from looking at their faces.
It can make you better at math, it can make you intuitively know where you are across the worlds just by looking at the stars, it can make sure you never forget something ever again… and it can also make you incapable of saying the letter ‘E,’ sleeping without reciting the alphabet backwards, speaking at anything resembling a normal speed, tearing your gaze away from a particular green pebble, or a thousand and one other ways in which you can permanently mess yourself up. For this one, just go with the base stat and don’t try to get clever, in more ways than one.
Strength
Strength is the other stat you need to be careful with, but this time it’s more a matter of making sure you don’t have too much of it! As I’m certain you’ve been told, if you don’t have enough Resistance, you could hurt yourself with your own Strength. If you don’t have enough Dexterity, you could hurt something or someone else with your Strength, when you didn’t mean to.
However, the danger is… somewhat overstated. Don’t get me wrong, Strength is tremendously useful and powerful, and with power comes danger, and Strength must be carefully balanced to make sure everyone is safe. But what you may not know, clever substat usage can help with that! If you, say, focus on the Strength substats pertaining to lifting stone, then you don’t have to worry about breaking your arms… so long as you don’t drop them on yourself. Similarly, if you focus on being able to deform metal, you don’t need to worry about breaking someone’s hand when you greet them, unless their Aura has made their bones into solid steel. If you are a sailor, dedicate your Strength to being aboard a ship and docks, so that you are stronger than ever when on duty, yet never need worry about harming your family when you come home.
Another approach which some take, particularly those more inclined towards magic but nonetheless with brief moments wherein Strength would be useful, is to tie your Strength to mana expenditure. Similar things may be done with other stats, of course, but Strength is uniquely useful in that not having too much of it can be just as great a boon as having a large amount of it.
For those less interested in spreading your stats even thinner, to have both Strength and magic, there is always the option of setting your substats in a way that you will tire yourself out much faster when using your greater Strength, that it requires a conscious effort to call upon the stat. The reverse is also true, naturally, in that you may make your Strength far more natural to call upon even without increasing your maximum power, never tiring under the heaviest of loads.
Naturally, such usage of Strength can be dangerous, but it is most useful when remembering that Strength is also internal, and it is the Strength stat which you must explore if you wish to run as fast as the wind, or be capable of barreling through walls. However, with both of those examples, Resistance is to be a close ally and dear friend, ensuring that you do not harm yourself with your own might.
Resistance
Resistance is the final stat, before we return once more to Aura. It is, of course, your body’s ability to resist harm. Be it the claws of a cat or the blade of a mugger, the heat from your oven or the ravages of the plague. Resistance is all that stands between you and everything that wishes to harm you, from your own Strength and elemental Skills, to the weather, monsters, and your own fellows.
Naturally, its substats are as versatile as anything else. Specialize your Resistance against metal shot to turn aside pistols yet fall prey to knives, or enhance your body while wearing armor. Enhance your armor itself together with Aura, Resist the persuasive words of a conman or a siren to ensure you cannot be forced to break an oath or vow. Empower yourself to Resist the elements while outdoors, or protect yourself from your own Strength. Delve deep into it and discover its intricacies, for there exists an infinite amount of potential, an endless well of experience, and it’s waiting for each and every one of you to piece it all together.