KINDRED GUIDE

A run begins by rolling a Founding Four. Each character is built in the same order: Kindred species, attributes, build specialization, skills, and starting gear. Three intake modes exist and all three produce a legal character.

Nothing about creation is cosmetic. Species changes your abilities, the build changes your active and passive skills, and personal values decide how a companion reacts to your decisions later.

Attributes range from 3 to 8 at intake (2 + d6) and rise slowly through Molts. Every skill check draws on exactly one attribute.

A Molt is the growth event that follows enough survived pressure. It grants +2 to attributes and +2 to skills, distributed by the character's build tendencies.

Species is biology. It is independent of faction — a Corvid can serve the New Democracy, the Wild, or nobody at all. Each Kindred carries attribute leanings, a passive, and a signature ability.

Humans are playable and mechanically distinct: +1 PRESENCE, −1 INS, and Human Adaptability, which grants a +10 bonus to any skill in which the character has no ranks at all. Humans are generalists who never have a dead skill.

Every Kindred has three build specializations — twenty-four in total. A build fixes one active ability and one passive, and biases skill growth. Humans, for example, choose between Vanguard (rally and adaptability), Enforcer (Rage and grit), and Grappler (holds and improvisation).

Builds are chosen at intake and do not change. A party of four identical builds will hit a wall; a party covering melee pressure, ranged control, technical work, and negotiation will not.

Skills sit in five groups: Street, Field, Technical, Combat, and Feral. A skill's effective value starts from a trained-adult baseline of 30, adds the governing attribute, adds ranks, and adds situational modifiers from gear, build passives, and species traits.

You keep a roster with no fixed ceiling, and at most seven characters deploy at once. The Founding Four are simply who you begin with — recruit companions, world NPCs and contracted mercenaries as you find them. Anyone not deployed is in RESERVES at base: fully recruited, keeping identity, level, XP, gear, progression and injuries, but earning no adventuring XP until they are back in the field. Rotating the active party — and paying a base medic to stabilize a seriously injured character into the recovery track — happens only at a base. Death is still permanent: the dead leave the roster, and a healthy reserve can be promoted into the opening.

Credits are the universal currency: pay, gear, ammunition, medical work, and contracts all draw from the same party purse.

Combat is turn-based and fought across five physical lanes. A unit's range band — Melee, Short, or Long — is derived from the distance between its lane and its target's lane, not chosen freely.

There are thirteen weapon families. Mastery in a family persists on the character and accumulates through use, adding +1 damage per ten mastery points. Switching families constantly means never being good at any of them.

Condition is the health pool. As it falls, characters move down an injury ladder: Healthy, Wounded, Unconscious, and beyond. Wounded characters bleed each round until treated, and bleed-out does not pause for the fight to end.

Death is permanent. A dead character does not return, and their gear, mastery, and relationships die with them. The party carries the vacancy, and the Dossier records the burial.

Succession fills a vacancy in the active party from the reserves, capped by loyalty rank: Veteran reconstitutes at 100% of level, Lieutenant at 90%, Recruit at 50%. A Rookie cannot reconstitute at all.

Companions hold four ranks: Rookie, Recruit, Lieutenant, and Veteran. Recruit is the first meaningful threshold — it unlocks trading with the character and rank tolerance, which dampens loyalty loss from decisions they ideologically oppose.

Encounters are driven by exposure — time spent in the open — not by how many tiles you cross. An interior move costs roughly 0.15 hours; a world-map move costs eight. The same journey taken carelessly costs more than the same distance taken with a plan. Hours also matter back home: benched characters recover while the active party is out, and they gain no XP for those hours.

Each location carries an encounter profile that modifies exposure and danger. Generated encounters scale to map layer, time of day, regional danger, and party level. Nothing on the roads is set-dressing.

Story tiers in FERALITY describe levels of understanding, not locked doors. You can walk into late evidence early — you will simply record it without knowing what it means. Geography, keys, and earned trust are the real gates.

When the missing pieces finally arrive, the Dossier retroactively connects them: a fight you already won gets explained by a document you find afterwards. Collect first. Understand later.