Beginners' Guide

## Beginner's Guide to Vagrus – The Riven Realms

Welcome to the beginner's guide to “Vagrus – The Riven Realms”; made by fans, for fans. This guide is meant to help you navigate the challenging landscape of the game by explaining some of the most important mechanics of the game, as well as provide you with detailed tips on how to optimize your game play.

### Disclaimer

While we, as players, are in the enviable position of being able to play this game while it is still in development, allowing us to interact with the developers themselves, it also means that the game is in a constant state of change. The game is being updated regularly, new content is added, and the very balance of the game is bound to flip around at any given time. This means that the information provided here may be outdated. We advise you to be observant and learn the game as it evolves. Remember to give feedback to the developers on what you find, such as bugs and balance.

Even though this guide is focused on the mechanics of the game, it is important to remember to enjoy the game as well. There are many things to find and plenty of interesting stories to discover. The developers have gone all-out to provide us with a fully immersive experience. Don't let the initial challenge discourage you, it is all worth it in the end.

Let's get started!

### Managing your comitatus

Arguably the most important thing regarding your success in the game is managing your comitatus. Traveling the world comes with many dangers, most of which have nothing to do with monstrous creatures or bandits. Moving around unprepared can lead you into unrecoverable situations, where supplies dry up, money runs out and your subordinates leave you.

#### The three most important aspects of running a successful comitatus:

Optimizing movement

Managing the well-being of your crew (Vigor, Loyalty, Nutrition and Obedience)

Planning ahead

#### Optimizing movement

As you will find out quite soon after starting the game, running your comitatus is expensive. This is mostly because of the cost of supplies, and the wages of your crew. Therefore, it is imperative that you try to minimize the time it takes for you to reach your destination. The less days you spend on the road, the less you have to pay wages and the less supplies you consume. In simple terms, you should always try to travel as far as possible during any given day.

Your daily movement total consists of two types: movement and march.

Movement points make up most of your normal daily movement range, while march points show how far above their limits you can push your comitatus. Using marching points will have negative effects on morale, vigor and obedience, and it is not advisable to overuse them unless necessary.

How often and how much of your march points you should use depends on the way you have chosen to manage the well-being of your crew. There are a few ways to go about this, which will be elaborated in the next section. As a general rule, try not to use more than one march point each day, unless you are able to reach a settlement doing so.

#### The Well-being of your crew

There are four attributes to manage when it comes to the well-being of your crew: Morale, Obedience, Nutrition and Vigor.

Out of these, Morale and Vigor provide outright bonuses, whether positive or negative.

Morale is probably the easiest of these to uphold. As long as you pay wages on time and don't march your crew for more than one point per day, loyalty should never fall. You should always keep loyalty at 9 (the maximum) because of the impressive bonus it gives. Paying double wages increases loyalty by 2 each time, and it is advisable to do that every time it drops to 7.

Obedience determines how willing your slaves are to follow you. Low obedience leads to slaves running away, causing other trouble along the way. Keeping obedience above 3 is enough to avoid problems most of the time. The main ways of increasing obedience are through the liberate slave and discipline slaves actions, as well as keeping nutrition high.

Nutrition affects the recovery rate of your vigor. It also helps keep your slaves obedient. Nutrition naturally gravitates towards 5, so having a high nutrition value is only possible through increasing rations, and resting at settlements.

Vigor is somewhat harder to uphold than Loyalty. Whenever you spend all your movement points (or even most of them) during a given day, vigor gravitates down towards 5. If you also spend more than one point of march, vigor can drop even further down at an accelerating speed the more march points you use. Vigor is recovered through resting mostly (best in settlements), keeping nutrition high, or through certain other settlement interactions.

How to manage these attributes depends on your chosen play style. If you don't have any slaves, you don't have to worry about obedience. If you have plentiful money already, you can afford to increase rations and wages, therefore increasing nutrition and vigor. You may even choose to spend less than the maximum movement in a given day to keep vigor up that way.

Usually, running a small crew is easier than a big one.

#### Planning ahead

####

After learning how to manage your crew and movement, the most important thing to do is to plan your travel. You should avoid going to places where you have nothing to do, especially early on. At the start of the game, information is scarce, so following quests is a good way to start. They usually provide good rewards, and you will learn about the different locations while doing them.

#### Trading

When going to different settlements, try to bring as many goods as possible with you, if you know for sure that they can be sold for a profit. Cheap goods tend to have higher profit margins than expensive ones, often selling for twice the amount in the optimal trade destination. Expensive goods have lower margins, but take up less room in your cargo hold. In the beginning, trading in low to mid priced goods is generally advisable. When you have around 100 bross worth of money, you should consider trading in high value goods, such as silver. Try to make sure that you maximize cargo space and available capital by stocking up on as many goods as your funds/cargo space allows.

#### Passengers

If there are passengers going the same way you are, take them with you. But remember that passengers will require you to provide them with supplies, so it may not be worthwhile taking them if you have to make a detour because of it. Different passengers give different levels of payment. Traders are usually good, urchins are more than likely charity work. It is entirely possible to lose money taking passengers, if you are not efficient with your travel.

#### Crew size

Because of how expensive maintaining a big crew is, you should not be afraid of downsizing. If you are going on a quest to the far reaches of the map, there is no need to bring 5 beasts of burden with you. It is relatively cheap to fire a few scouts and fighters while trading, and hire them back later when you are on a quest that requires them. Always try to keep your crew size to the smallest you can get away with.

#### Hunting

Depending on where you are operating, the local price and or availability of supplies, and how pressed you are for time, hunting is a viable way to reduce the cost of supplies in many regions. Building up a large force of scouts can even make a comitatus self sufficient for supply in certain regions. However, this will slow you down, because you'll need to leave some movement at the end of the day or else you'll lose 1 vigor, and forced march is out of the question if you plan on making a journey this way. This method will require far more wages, and so whether or not this is economically worth it depends on the price of supply in local regions: if supply costs 1 changer and you have relatively few crew, don't bother. On the other hand, if supply costs 3 changer and or is unavailable in large quantities, foraging and hunting will likely save your comitatus from certain death by starvation.

#### **Faction Relationships**

While operating as an independent trader is enough to scrape by in the harsh world of the Riven Realms, the real money comes from scoring well paying contracts from the rich and powerful. Trading suffers diminishing returns on an already thin margin to begin with. You are usually one or two mistakes from complete ruin. After a while, you may have already felt the pain of supply prices increasing in locations like Tor'zag's shelter to 2 changers, which will do murder on your bottom line.

The real money that comes from faction jobs only comes with a sufficiently high relationship, but you can only get certain jobs if you have a high enough relationship to begin with. That means whenever you have the opportunity in the early game, take every opportunity you can to gain relationship with a faction until you can get access to the high paying jobs. Delivering goods for factions has the dual benefit of usually being more profitable and increasing faction relationship, which is your golden ticket to swimming in bross down the road.

Some factions are enemies with other factions. For example, trying to gain relationship with all trading houses will lead to you at most middling with most of them. Why? Because every time you gain relationship with a faction, you will *lose* relationship with their enemies (you can see it in the factions tab). The two churches are a fairly good choice to court, because they have few enemies and thus are relatively easy to gain relationship with. Freeing slaves will raise abolitionists relationship, which will *lose* relationship with almost every other faction. Don't do it unless you have to.

#### Faction Jobs

So how do you get those high level contracts? You may have already taken a few contracts in the early game to shore up the bottom line, and those will be enough to sustain a small comitatus. At this point, you are likely still running a relatively thin margin. As time goes on, however, the early game contracts will pay less and less, from 8 bross per unit cargo down to 4 bross cargo for something like a trip for Arken to Tor'zag's shelter as the situation changes. Unless you have a particularly profitable route in mind, in most of the major cities, you should be filling up your comitatus with faction jobs, and if there is space left over, you can then consult the ledger and fill up the odd gaps with goods.

Higher level faction trading can generate up to and around 8 bross per cargo for a trip between two major cities, but unlike in the early game, where contracts are two or three cargo, you may find that one contract is enough to fill up the entire comitatus. Fighting contracts can pay even better, with hundreds of bross for single contracts, either due to difficulty or distance, but in that case, you'll do well to drop everything and focus on combat, and you'll still end up with more bross than you know what to do with.

#### Benefits of Factions

With a high enough relationships (usually around 3 or 4th tier), you'll find that you have access to factions personal trading goods stock. Though prices are a little *worse* than on the open market, they never suffer diminishing returns or any price changes, and so if you are running a large comitatus, it is essential to have access to this additional source of supply, as they are an essential supplement to the open market and making your comitatus profitable.

The most important reason to court a faction to their maximum level, however, is their benefits in evading the worst possible threat to your financial stability: tax collectors. With a high enough relationship with the church or one of the trading houses, you can gain exemption from taxation! In the late game, these crooked men will be taking hundreds of hard earned bross per encounter, which you can prevent by showing your official tax exempt status from any of the major factions.

Faction rewards are a nice benefit on top of their other benefits, but they usually aren't profitable to go for on their own. If you are deciding which house you want to court, consider choosing one that synergizes with your comitatus composition; ie, if you are a mostly slave based comitatus, house Darius's slave benefits can increase your margins.