Professions
Everything you can be is a profession — warrior and healer, miner and smith. Your character can walk many of them, each leveled in its own right, switching freely between them. Names and paths are a work in progress and subject to change.
The Six Archetypes
Every combat profession belongs to one of six great archetypes. Professions are earned in the world, not picked from a menu — every adventurer begins as a survivor of the calamity, and takes up whatever professions their people allow. The active profession drives your abilities and strengths; some peoples keep paths all their own.
Vanguard
Hold the line; protect and draw the enemy's wrath.
Mender
Restore, bless, and ward the living.
Reaver
Blades, fury, and relentless momentum.
Evoker
Call down arcane and elemental ruin.
Adept
Hexes, wards, and enchantment — bend the weave.
Skald
Banners, rallying cries, and command of the field.
Some paths are sworn to the Light or the Dark — not every people may walk every road. And the peoples of the world keep professions of their own: arts no outsider is taught, and masters whose lessons are found only by earning them.
Three Steps of Growth
Base Profession
Find an archetype's master out in the world, prove yourself, and take up the calling.
Path
Practise it, and its masters may one day judge you ready to walk one of its paths.
Specialization
Paths deepen into specializations, found only by meeting the people who teach them.
No one hands you a list of what is out there. You learn a path exists by meeting the person who teaches it.
You Earn It By Playing
Every level belongs to a profession. Practising one earns ability points for that profession, and you spend them in its ability tree. Trees branch and come back together, and some arts need roots in more than one profession, so two players of the same profession rarely end up with the same build. Nothing is handed out for simply levelling up: everything your character can do, you chose.
Titles prove a deed, not a rank. Earn one as one profession and it can open arts in another. The champions who travel with you can teach you, too, once your bond runs deep enough.
The Trades Are Professions Too
Miner, logger, smith, woodcrafter — the trades are professions in full: leveled by working them, with ability trees of their own and the finest recipes and richest veins earned through practice. The world broke; somebody has to rebuild it. Trade mastery is where the strongest gear comes from — optional, never demanded by the story.
Changing Paths
Nothing you earn is ever lost. Swap your active profession freely — at camp, in town, mid adventure — and every profession you've walked keeps its level, its abilities, and its gear waiting for your return. A stray detour never closes a door.