Aetrimonde

Today’s post will cover the skills, perk, and languages of Etterjarl Ragnvald, the dwarf fighter I’ve been building.

Skills

Aetrimonde’s skills are things that adventurers commonly need to do, and can be trained in. Things that require raw talent, like lifting a heavy object, aren’t skills, they just use a character’s abilities. Nor are a lot of uncommon things that not every adventurer would find a use for (these are covered by perks, so read on…).

When a skill comes into play, the GM will call for a skill check: this means to make a core roll and add your modifier in the relevant skill. This modifier is a relevant ability (each skill specifies one) plus an additional bonus if you are trained in the skill, and at higher levels potentially some other bonuses. I will save calculating this for a later post in which I do all of the math, though.

Preferred Skills

As we saw in the previous post in this series, a character’s culture, stratum, and class give them certain preferred skills. There are 18 skills in total; a character is automatically trained in one skill determined by their class, chooses four others from their preferred skill list, and can then choose one final skill that can be any of the 18.

The 18 Skills

Acrobatics (GRA)	History (INT)	Persuasion (CHA)
Arcana (INT)	Insight (WIS)	Religion (INT)
Athletics (STR)	Intimidate (CHA)	Society (INT)
Deception (CHA)	Medicine (INT)	Stealth (GRA)
Endurance (CON)	Nature (INT)	Subterfuge (DEX)
Engineering (INT)	Perception (CUN)	Warfare (INT)

Ragnvald’s preferred skills list includes:

• Endurance and History, from the Dwarven Federation culture.
• History and Society, from the Aristocrat stratum.
• Athletics, Endurance, Intimidate, Medicine, Perception, and Warfare, from the Fighter class.

There are overlaps here! Ragnvald gets History and Endurance from two different sources; this does nothing special, although there is a feat (more on this in the next post) that would benefit this kind of doubling up.

Ragnvald is automatically trained in Athletics, per the Fighter class. He will also be trained in Endurance, History, Perception, and Society, from his preferred skill list. And for his final trained skill, he will choose Persuasion.

For the most part, I’m going to leave the math of character creation for a later post, but I will calculate skill bonuses here. A skill bonus is equal to the relevant ability, plus a character’s expertise bonus if they are trained in the skill. For skills based on physical abilities (Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, or Grace), a character may incur an encumbrance penalty from wearing armor or carrying heavy loads. Ragnvald will be wearing heavy armor, but thanks to being a dwarf can ignore encumbrance.

This is the first time I’ve mentioned the expertise bonus, which is the sole factor in how characters scale with level. A character’s expertise bonus starts at +2 at level 0, and increases by a further +1 for every 5 levels they have. Aside from skills, the expertise bonus is always used to calculate defenses and hit points, and characters can apply it to attack and damage rolls in areas they specialize in.

So, at level 0, with his +2 expertise bonus, Ragnvald will have the following bonuses in his trained skills:

• Athletics (Strength): +6
• Endurance (Constitution): +5
• History (Intelligence): +1
• Perception (Cunning): +3
• Persuasion (Charisma): +3
• Society (Intelligence): +1

In all of his other skills, Ragnvald’s skill bonus will just be his ability bonus.

Perk

A perk, in Aetrimonde, is a more narrow area of specialization than a skill, and one that often doesn’t have the detailed rules that skills do, with predefined things it can be used for and Difficulties for the various tasks. Although some perks have rules, you can also choose to define your own, like “Frequent Traveler” or “Cosmopolitan Upbringing.”

Aside from any specific rules, a perk allows you to add your expertise bonus when making any ability check or skill check that you aren’t trained in, or gain favor on any that you are trained in, if you can convince the GM that the perk is related to the task at hand.

Many of Ragnvald’s skills are chosen to reflect his background as a lawyer in training and his clan’s deep fixation on their glorious past. Rather than double down on this, let’s give him an unrelated perk that broadens his character. In fact, let’s use the perk to give him a dark secret foreshadowing some eventual character development: despite his outwardly traditional appearance, Ragnvald is fascinated with sophisticated clockwork (decidedly not a traditional dwarfish craft) and has started tinkering with it in private. This will be represented by the Craft [Clockwork] perk. (See general rules for Craft perks, left)

This will allow Ragnvald to construct clockwork devices like stopwatches cheaper than he could buy them. He can also apply the perk to, for example, Engineering checks made to repair a clockwork device, or History checks about the development of clockwork through the years.

Languages

The last things I’ll cover in this post are the languages Ragnvald knows.

Every PC in an Aetrimonde campaign is assumed to speak one language in common. The Aetrimonde setting recommends that this be Westerling, the language of the Kingdom of Waystone and of diplomacy, commerce, and academia across the continent, but the GM can adjust that for campaigns in a different region.

Aside from the common language, characters speak another language determined by their culture. In the case of Ragnvald, hailing from the Dwarven Federation, that language is Low Dwarven, which is used in Dwarven culture for matters of everyday importance. (As opposed to High Dwarven, which is spoken for matters of law and ceremony, and which Ragnvald didn’t get to before he had to leave law school.) Because he is trained in History and it is classed as an archaic language, Ragnvald could eventually learn High Dwarven; this is one thing perks can be used for, and he will eventually get more perks.

Languages of Aetrimonde

Languages in the Aetrimonde setting include:

• Mundane languages, which are spoken in everyday life in various parts of the setting. Any character can learn these languages using a perk.
  • Examples: Gobol, Liturgical Auric, Low Dwarven, Modern Auric, Modern Elvish, Urkund, Victish, Westerling.
• Archaic languages, which are older forms of modern languages, or simply went extinct. A character trained in History can learn these with a perk.
  • Examples: Ancient Elvish, Classical Auric, Gobol Eld, High Dwarven.
• Magical languages, which are spoken in the other planes connected to Aetrimonde, or otherwise associated with magic or magical creatures.
  • Examples: Draconic, Demonic, Gravespeech, Sidhereal.

Up Next

The next post in this series will cover the last set of choices Ragnvald needs to make: powers, a feat, and some starting equipment. There won’t be any more character-building polls until I start building the character you requested, because I will need to show off some mechanics first. Once I do, though, the polls will start up again giving you a chance to weigh in on what this character should specialize in. And the ancestry and class polls remain open! If you haven’t voted yet, now’s your chance.