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Skills Development

··6 mins

The skills development window as you open it.

This window is used during character creation for steps 11 and 12 (see Character Creation and page 42-45 of the HMK rulebook), or during play when a character receives Skill Development Rolls (or SDR, see SDR below and page 413 of the manual).

Character Creation #

When you are at step 11 in character creation, just after finishing the Birth, Family, & Persona steps 1 through 10.6, you are now ready to choose an occupation (step 11) and spend skill development points (DP, step 12).

The first thing to do is to load the character. For illustration we’ll load Hildegard, which we started in the previous steps of character creation. You select the character from the load menu.

The skills development load menu with Hildegard selected.

And then the character is loaded and their information is shown. On the top left are general information. We see the loaded character’s name, their attributes, age group, folk, background and the number of bonus language DPs allowed if that optional rule is in play (see page 48 sidebar).

The skills development window’s top section for Hildegard.

By default when you load a character the SDR mode is selected.

The skills development buttons for mode selection with SDR selected.

For character creation we want the DP Stages mode instead, so click on that and it will enable the DP Stages.

The skills development buttons for mode selection with DP Stages selected.

Depending on the Folk and the Age Group, some stages will be disabled. On the example above, Hildegard is a mature human (as shown on the left) so the stages for Folk skills and for Old skills are disabled, but Veteran skills are enabled. Now we are ready to continue character creation with step 11: Choose an Occupation.

11. Choose occupation #

You select your occupation in the menu on the right hand side. Some occupations have additional details, for example if your character is a Hunter on a feudal manor, your hunter is also called a Forester, so you would choose the Hunter occupation from the menu and add “Forester” as an occupation detail.

The skills development occupation showing Hunter and a detail of forester.

And this would be shown on the character sheet as this.

The character sheet showing the occupation of hunter forester.

But let’s get back to Hildegard, she will be a Shèk-Pvâr, so she selects this occupation, and a new menu appears to allow her to select a convocation.

The skills development occupation showing Odívshè Shèk-Pvâr.

12. Skills #

The next step is to spend skill Development Points (DP) and this is done in stages as described on pages 45 to 49. This tool is designed so that you can see the current state of the skills at each stage, and even go back to an earlier stage if you changed your mind.

First note that if your character had Spirit bonus DP in step 10.4 these are already applied here, as well as talents and the native language.

The process is to first select a stage, and then click the + button next to a skill to spend a DP in that skill. When you do so, the number of DP spent in that stage is increased, and the skills for which you spent DPs are listed on the stage’s line (except for occupation skills which are listed under the occupation on the right).

If you change your mind just press the - button to recover your DP, but note that if DP STAGE is selected, you need to select the stage at which you added a DP to a skill to be able to reduce it. So if you are, for example, at the ‘optional skills’ stage and you want to change your mind on something you chose in the ‘background’ stage, you first need to click on the background stage to select it, make you modifications, and then select the optional skills again to continue.

Let’s follow Hildegard’s selection. First Arcane Talent: she only received a bonus DP in Spirit and that was already applied, so she has nothing to do in the stage. She selects ‘Family’ and looks at the Woodcrafter’s list on page 44, and first selects Woodworking 2, so she clicks twice on the + next to Woodworking. We see that she has a Skill Base of 11 and this is not a default skill (SM = 0) so the 2 DP applied result in a ML of 22.

The skills development occupation showing the craft skill group and woodworking with 2 DP.

And we see that this choice was recorded in the DP Stage above and that she has spent 2 of her 5 family DPs.

The skills development occupation showing the family DP stage with a woodworking 2.

And the process continues. When you select a skill that has a speciality, you enter it in the lower right section.

The skills development occupation showing specialities chosen.

For the native language, you select either 4 or 5 DP depending on your parent’s class or your Folk as detailed on page 47 sidebar. For other languages, you can check if they receive a regional bonus or a same-family boost. Again, the Regions & Languages tool can help you determine which of these bonuses your character gets.

For ritual, most characters will have 1 “free” DP in a Ritual as discussed under “Native Religion” on page 47. If they receive more, you select 2 DP or 3 DP accordingly for the main ritual. Hildegard, being Karéjian, receives two additional ritual DP bonuses (see page 419): one in a second and and one in a third ritual, so these are handled by adding DP in the family stage, bringing her total to 7 instead of 5.

Occupation Skills are displayed under the menu where you select your occupation.

The skills development occupation showing occupation skill selection.

Language0 is the internal name for native language. When you get to the Sunsign Stage, you can see above each skill group the number of bonus DP you get according to your sunsign (and cusp if applicable). For example Hildegard, being Masâra, has 3 bonus DP that she can spend in the Social group, 1 in Lore and 1 in Nature. For example, this is shown above the Social group as this.

The skills development occupation showing bonus DP for the Social group.

So this is what it looks like when Hildegard completed her selection.

The skills development showing the completed selection for Hildegard.

At this point, when you are satisfied you simply save the character by pressing Save & Close. If you wish to keep a record of the spent DP, you should first press Export DPs, this will also save the character, but it will also create a text file in your downloads folder with the name of the character as the name of the file.

SDR #

After character generation, characters progress using Skill Development Rolls (SDR) instead of Development Points (see page 413). When this occurs, simply open the Development window, load the character and make sure the SDR mode is selected (it’s normally selected by default when you load a character). When this mode is activated, clicking on the + next to a skill will increase the affected skill by one. Save the character when done.

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Denis Ricard
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Denis Ricard
Loving husband, proud father, retired physicist, forever coder, and avid gamer.