📈 Advancement

This campaign does not hand out a weekly pile of points to spend wherever you like. Advancement flows through several parallel channels, and the biggest one is tied to what your character actually does. Fighters get better at fighting. Riders get better at Riding. A leader who keeps struggling with command slowly becomes the commander the party needs. Over time, your character sheet should read like a record of your character's experiences — not a shopping list.

Learning by Failure

Every time you fail a meaningful roll during a session, your character learns something. Each failure earns a hash mark on the specific trait that failed — Broadsword failures mark Broadsword, Riding failures mark Riding, Diplomacy failures mark Diplomacy. When a trait collects 3 hash marks, they convert into 1 CP invested in that trait, and the table announces it in chat.

That CP is restricted: Broadsword CP buys Broadsword, and nothing else. You cannot move it to another skill, an attribute, or an Advantage.

The one exception is the Learning queue: your Advancement window shows partial progress on skills you're picking up by doing — skills you don't have yet that haven't produced their first point. Marks on the skills you already know stay hidden.

The Fine Print

• One CP per trait per session. Once a trait converts its marks into a CP, further failures with it that session teach you nothing more. This keeps a heavily rolled combat skill from sprinting ahead of everything else.
• Marks carry over. Finish a session with two marks in Riding and you start the next one needing a single Riding failure to convert. Nothing is ever lost — quiet sessions just bank progress.
• No per-scene limit. Legitimately fail Broadsword three times in one desperate battle and that battle alone can produce the session's Broadsword CP.
• It has to be a real roll. A meaningful challenge, at stake, during play. Rolling Lockpicking at your own front door twelve times is not advancement — the GM will strike farmed marks without ceremony.
• Attribute checks count too. A failed Will, PR, or KN check marks the attribute itself. At 10 CP per level, attributes rise slowly this way — a long, background accumulation.
• Untrained rolls teach the skill you tried. Fail a skill you never learned (rolled at its default) and the skill you were attempting earns ⅓ of a mark — ½ while a 🎓 trainer is coaching you in the field. Nine honest untrained failures (six with a trainer) add up to that skill's first point. The attribute you defaulted from gets nothing.
• The Art learns upward. If a spell is already at its cap, the mark flows to its Path skill; if the Path is capped as well, it flows to QN. A practitioner always learns something from a botched working.
• Self rolls don't count. A roll made with the chat Self Roll visibility never generates advancement — practicing in front of a mirror is free. And if you roll the wrong thing by mistake, hit the 🚫 button on that roll, then roll the right one; the mis-roll is struck from advancement entirely.

Notice who this system favors: the struggling. Low skill fails often and learns fast. A master at Broadsword‑15 learns nothing from easy fights — but in the dark, wounded, on bad footing, effective skill drops, failure returns, and so does growth. Characters learn fastest when pushed past their comfort zone. That is exactly the intent.

General CP — Steady Growth

Attendance CP: every PC who attends earns 1 general CP per session, automatically. General CP is freely spendable under normal campaign rules — skills, attributes, Advantages, anything permitted. A talky, investigation-heavy session with barely a roll in it is never a "no advancement" session.

Disadvantage Awards

Meaningfully roleplaying your Disadvantages earns additional general CP. "Meaningfully" is the operative word — the Disadvantage should influence a decision, create a complication, cost your character something, or close off an option you wanted. Mentioning your Code of Honor while doing the convenient thing anyway earns nothing.

Milestones

Major campaign achievements bring milestone awards of roughly 5–10 general CP — closing a chapter of the story, pulling off something transformative. These are deliberately large: they exist so you can occasionally afford a 10‑point attribute level or an expensive Advantage like Combat Reflexes without hoarding single points for months.

Treasure — Rewards from the Story

Not every improvement is purchased. Some of the most valuable things your character can gain — an Ally who owes you their life, a Contact cultivated over months of favors, a Patron, a Reputation, Status, Rank, a title — can be earned directly through play.

The line is the GM's to draw, and it works like treasure: if you want an Ally, you may buy one with general CP under the normal rules. But if the relationship arises naturally from events and it fits the story to grant it, the GM may simply award it — no CP charged, the same way a magic sword taken from a vault costs nothing but the getting. Your character's point total still rises to reflect what they now possess; it measures what your character is, not merely what you paid for.

The knife cuts both ways: the fiction can also alter or remove traits when circumstances genuinely change them. Burn your Contacts, and they are burned.

Training with a Teacher

There are three roads to a new skill: learn by doing (the untrained marks above), study with a teacher (this section), and the story itself (the GM directing awards toward something you are working on). Most characters use all three.

How Long It Takes

A dedicated week of training is about 60 hours of instruction and practice. The first point of a skill, with a teacher:

• Later points beyond the first can be earned by study, at twice the first-point hours per CP, as long as your teacher can still teach you. They arrive as CP restricted to that skill.
• Intensity changes the calendar, not the hours: half-time study takes twice as long; on the job (an apprenticeship) takes four times as long and is paid in labor instead of coin.
• One skill at a time. You can train many skills — one after another. Starting a new course pauses (or abandons) the current one; paused study keeps its banked hours.

Who Teaches — and How Far

A teacher can train you up to their own level, and no further. You can't outgrow your teacher in a classroom; past that, you need a better teacher, a bigger city, or the hard road of experience.

You only pay for the teacher you need: a beginner studies with a journeyman even in a city.

What It Costs

Teachers bill about twice the local hourly wage (a month's average pay ÷ 200 hours; Basic Set B514/B517), times their tier. In 2096 the average month is $2,600, so a journeyman bills about $26 an hour. For the first point, with a journeyman:

• An expert doubles those prices, a master quadruples them, a grandmaster costs eight times as much — or names their own price.
• Group classes (6–10 students) cost a fifth of private tuition, but they sell first points only, and they exist only where there are enough students and it's legal: broad-demand skills in a town, most legal Easy and Average skills in a city, most legal skills in a metropolis.
• Guild members learn one-to-one at about the group rate, and only members are taught the guild's gated skills.
• The GM may double or triple any price for the situation: the only teacher in town, a teacher who knows you're loaded, a crackdown on the trade.
• For scale: an ordinary Status 0 lifestyle costs about $600 a month (B265), so a Hard skill's first point eats several months of what's left after living costs — a serious purchase.

Other Ways In

• Apprenticeship — on-the-job training paid in labor: slow, cheap, and you work for your master.
• Militia muster — the basics of soldiering and the community's weapons, taught free to those who drill and serve.
• Criminal skills — lockpicking, forgery, smuggling and their kin are taught one-to-one only, by people who need an introduction before they'll admit they know anything. Payment comes in cuts and favors.

The Art

• Paths are taught by traditions, and only to members. Members pay in the tradition's own coin — dues, oaths and service, quests, favors. Outside a tradition, a hedge-teacher might show you the lowest rung at three times the price, if one can be found at all.
• Rites take a week per M-level to learn from a mage who knows them; an M0 cantrip takes two or three days. A master's weeks are precious, and they expect serious compensation: quests, favors, secrets.
• Grimoires can stand in for a teacher where the tradition allows book-learning: twice the time, at your own pace. A good grimoire is treasure.
• Magery cannot be bought at any price. It comes through milestones, the Seeking, and the story — never the classroom. Classroom magic stops at the best living master.

In Foundry, the Training part of your Advancement window prices any skill for you — teacher, fee, hours and calendar — and shows what you're studying. The GM starts your training and logs the downtime as it passes.

Spending Your CP

• Restricted CP spends only on the trait that earned it.
• General CP spends on anything the campaign rules allow.
• Skill levels typically cost 2–4 CP, so restricted CP often accumulates for a while before it can buy the next level. That running balance is kept for you.
• Learning something new? Tell the GM. If you're deliberately working toward a skill or spell you don't have yet, awards can be directed toward it before it ever appears on your sheet.

Mechanically: check your Advancement window in Foundry for your available CP, make the purchases in GCS, then re-import your character in Foundry. The table reconciles what changed against the CP you've earned — if the numbers don't line up, the GM gets a note, so keep your spending inside your balance.