Every power in the dex is one row of the economy. When you write one, you are pricing a thing players will hunt, claim, buy, or fear — design it as a row, not as a paragraph of cool.
The five fields that do the work
- Category —
ability, skill, spell, passive. The choice is mechanical before it is flavorful: passives cannot be witnessed, only endured (they mark only when a body is directly affected), which makes them the engine of the flee-and-return hunting loop. Everything else marks on sight.
- Keyed stat — decides which slots the art fills on its holder, and which stat it marks on the marked. Pick one stat and mean it. If an art could plausibly key two ways, the GM rules it at the table anyway — so give your entry the stat you would rule, and write the description so the stat feels inevitable.
- Tier — the rung on the ladder, one through five:
trick, craft, moderate, singular, legendary. Skew the pool toward the lower rungs: most of the dex should be tricks and crafts — affordable, anonymous, dependable. A moderate is the ceiling of the market's steady stock. A singular is campaign-shaping by definition and carries the balancing cost below.
- Acquisition —
purchasable, teachable, or nature. Purchasable anchors to the price ladder in the Shopper's Market chapter (a moderate passive is 20–60 silver and a season). Teachable means weeks and coin — and the willingness gate: nobody sells their finest art. Nature means grown, not learned — regeneration, flight, a hide that turns steel — and the only road to it runs through the spoils rules.
- Tell — leave empty for tiers 1–3; tricks, crafts, and moderates should be anonymous. A singular power requires a tell: what it looks like in use, and who in the world would recognize it. The tell is what starts manhunts; writing one is writing a fuse.
The five-tier ladder
- Trick — a knack. One narrow situational edge, learnable in days, worth a handful of silver, always anonymous. Sleights and palming, small dodges and recoveries, minor social flourishes, tiny one-use charms. A lone gimmick, not competence.
- Craft — trained competence. A profession's working edge, a minor taught art, a small utility spell; weeks of practice and modest coin (the 5–20 silver band). Most
-Craft, -lore, -reading, -eye, and -ear entries live here. Useful, unglamorous, dependable — the dex's floor and its bulk.
- Moderate — seasons and serious silver. Real capability with teeth: combat arts that change a fight, spells that reshape an encounter, passives that rewrite what a body can do or endure. The ceiling of the market's steady stock, and the top rung you can simply buy.
- Singular — campaign-shaping by definition. A tell is mandatory and is the fuse; it is never sold at any price; it arrives roughly one satchel in ten, and hunting it is a story.
- Legendary — once-in-a-realm arts that reshape borders: the kind whole orders are founded to guard, priced in years and bloodlines rather than silver. The dex holds none, and should hold almost none — write one only when the campaign itself needs a relic-power, and expect the GM to make it rumor before it is ever a card.
The ladder's rules: tiers 1–3 are anonymous (no tell); tier 4 requires a tell; tier 5 requires a tell with a history — who has died holding it, and what was founded to keep it. When torn between two rungs, author the lower one. A correct ladder makes a modest thing exciting; an inflated one makes everything noise.
The supporting fields
- Carriers — who typically wears this power in the wild. This is the dex's market-maker function: a GM reads
carriers to know what hunts it, and a player reads it to know where the road leads.
- Weapon family — for weapon arts only. It pairs with the family damage table in the Combat chapter; an art that "calls itself a blade art" works with Blades numbers, and its description says what it adds.
The description convention
A good description states what the power does, what it adds, and one concrete anchor — a name, a price, a habit, a place it is taught. ("A season of lessons, paid in tanned kid-leather.") Write in the world's ledger voice, not in rulebookese. And apply the only real test: write a power you would pay to own. If you wouldn't spend a season and sixty silver on it, no player will spend blood, a mark, and a slot on it either.
What a new power costs the game
Every power you add is a thing that can be marked, claimed, and used against its next owner. A singular with a sharp tell is a story you have committed to running. A purchasable passive is a price you have committed to honoring. Neither is wrong — but both are debts, and the dex remembers them.
