Game layer

The **game layer** (also referred to as the **washater** or simply the **game**) is a set of rules superimposed over reality analogous to those found in a tabletop game. The game layer has apparent omniscience and the ability to cause physical effects in the real world, as long as the player (Juniper Smith) completes quests, defeats enemies and makes use of stat points tied to his physical and mental characteristics.

Uther Penndraig might have had a version of the game layer, which he referred to as the "**Knack**". According to Speculator Masters, he could learn any language, trade or magic in a single day - but Juniper thinks the game layer is something different.

## Level ups

The game layer has something like a hidden experience meter that fills up when Juniper defeats enemies or completes quests. Once the meter becomes full, Juniper levels up, with multiple results:

* Juniper is fully healed, from minor damage to illnesses and missing body parts. This healing effect does not extend to soul damage.
* Juniper gets two stat points per level (plus five additional stat points upon reaching level 10). He can spend these points to increase his stats.
* Juniper experiences an addictive burst of pleasure that increases in intensity each level. At higher levels, these can cause him to abandon all rational thought in the sole pursuit of further level ups. This effect can be palliated with soul magic or removed entirely with spirit magic.
* Juniper's body emits a golden burst of light that kicks off some wind. He also hovers a little, maintaining momentum.

The experience needed to level up apparently increases with level (or, possibly, quests and enemies give progressively less points), making it harder and harder to level up with time.

## Stats

**Stats** (also referred to as attributes) determine the physical (PHY), mental (MEN) and social (SOC) abilities of the player.

There are three superstats, each composed of three substats, plus LUK, a stat independent of the rest. The stats are arranged and defined as follows:

* **PHY:**  Physical - Your body and physical existence in the world. Governing stat for all physical skills and the three physical abilities.
	+ **POW:**  Power - How much force you can exert. Used to break down doors, bend rebar, or shove someone out of the way.
	+ **SPD:**  Speed - How fast you move. Used to juggle knives, race over rooftops, or do cartwheels.
	+ **END:**  Endurance - How much you can physically withstand. Used to prevent poisonings, go on forced marches, or tread water.
* **MEN:** Mental - Your mind and mental existence in the world. Governing stat for all mental skills and all three mental abilities.
	+ **CUN:** Cunning - How smart you are. Used to figure out puzzles, learn new things, or decide which wire to cut.
	+ **KNO:** Knowledge - How much you know. Used to make connections between disparate concepts, dredge up old memories, or memorize a ten digit number.
	+ **WIS:** Wisdom - How much you can mentally withstand. Used to prevent stress reactions, make decisions without emotion, or meditate.
* **SOC:** Social - Your personality and connection to others. Governing stat for all social skills and the three social abilities.
	+ **CHA:** Charm - How much people like you. Used to convince princesses, barter with barmaids, or plead for your life.
	+ **INS:** Insight - How well you can read people. Used to uncover a princeling's secret, call a bishop's bluff, or avoid being stabbed in the back.
	+ **POI:** Poise - How well you withstand other people. Used to withstand interrogation, keep a blank face during a hearing, or keep dry eyes during a wedding.
* **LUK:** Luck - How lucky you are. Influences everything, governs nothing.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"

Stats can be increased through points given in level ups. Incresing a superstat takes two points, which increases the superstat and each of the substats by one, or a substat can be increased with a single point; a generalist/specialist trade-off.

Stats are loosely connected to physical reality, being more closely related to the effect the player has on the world (for example, Juniper has strength beyond what his body's muscles should be able to do), though increasing physical stats does have a cosmetic effect on the body.The mental stats work to preserve the player's personality, switching from making the player smarter to simply injecting knowledge into their brain once their MEN goes over a certain threshold.

In addition to the stated description, the LUK stat also grants the player some degree of elf luck, which manifests as a slight precognitive danger-sense accompanied by a concrete path of action to avoid that danger.

## Skills

*Main article: List of Skills*
The game layer immensely boosts the learning speed of anything it considers one of its 256 **skills**. At the time of Juniper's arrival, 82 of those skills had already been excluded, presumably by Uther Penndraig, and only 40 can be used at a time, swapped in and out with the application of Soul magic. The game conceptualizes skills for companions, presumably for the purpose of symbiosis, but they don't have the same limits Juniper's have. Many of the skills are tied to Aerbian magics (like Wards or Steel Magic) or normal physical skills (like Climbing and Unarmed Combat), but a few are almost exclusively for roleplaying purposes (like Woodworking and Weaving).

Skills can be leveled up through regular use, though they will level up faster when they're used in threatening situations, and to a ludicrous degree when they're needed to survive. Skills can only be leveled up to level 20 through amateur training, which Juniper considers the equivalent to a graduate degree, while he estimates level 40 akin to postdoc.

Skills are tied to their primary and secondary stats, and their levels are capped by them: three times the primary stat or five times the secondary stat, whichever is lower. It is occasionally possible to raise skills past their caps using entads, virtues, afflictions, spells or other special circumstances.

Skills have five or six virtues, which are tied to specific levels (common thresholds are levels 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100) and boost certain aspects of the skill, unlock related abilities that could not be easily learned otherwise, or, at higher levels, physically impossible ones. There are also combo virtues that unlock more unique abilities, but they require several skills that work in concert leveled up past specific thresholds.

## Character Sheet

The game layer comes with a **character sheet** that lists Juniper's attributes and skills, seen whenever he closes his eyes for more than three seconds. This is the state of the sheet as of Chapter 196:

## Quests

*Main article: List of Quests*
**Quests** are tasks given by the game layer which can, when completed, potentially lead to level ups.

The mechanism by which the game creates quests is opaque, but generally they appear when someone tells Juniper something that potentially involves him, or when they ask him to do something. There are some quests that come in parts, with a new quest following a previous quest's completion, as well as meta-quests comprised of subquests. Juniper theorizes that quests don't necessarily need to have reasonable objectives - just possible ones. Quests have historically scaled up to Juniper's power, but there's no hard evidence the pattern will hold.

## Companions and Loyalty

Up to seven people (as determined by the game layer) can become **companions** to Juniper, part of his *kharass,* an elf term for groups of people cosmologically linked to each other through a theme. Amaryllis, Fenn and Grak theorize that theme might be 'princesses', for a loose application of the term.

Companions only become visible on the game's interface once Juniper increases their loyalty, so there's no way to know about them in advance. Loyalty goes up seemingly when the companion in question changes the way in which they view Juniper - though the specific mechanism is somewhat opaque.

Certain unique game features are unlocked upon reaching specific loyalty thresholds:

* **Loyalty lvl 2**: The interface now displays a brief but important biography of the companion.
* **Loyalty lvl 10**: A companion passive is unlocked, usually "Twinned Souls" - this allows Juniper to visualize a link to the companion's soul while using Soul magic. Valencia instead unlocked "Infernal Capture", the Six-Eyed Doe unlocked "Six-Eyed", and Bethel unlocked "Full House".
* **Loyalty lvl 20**: A second companion passive is unlocked, the default being "Symbiosis". Valencia unlocked "Soul Capture", Grak unlocked "Warded", and the Six-Eyed Doe unlocked "Deer to me"
* Companions sometimes come with a companion quest, an important quest that relates closely to their past and circumstances. Once such a quest is completed, it seems to unlock another passive. Amaryllis and Grak's quests have been completed, unlocking "Wardproof" and "Multitasker".

The companion biographies are as follows:

Amaryllis is the most direct descendant of Uther Penndraig, the Lost King, which gives her special claim-in-fact to a fair number of his estates and heirlooms bound along cognatic or enatic primogeniture, ultimogeniture, and gavelkind rules. She was once a keystone member of a bloc of power within the Lost King’s Court, but now she has been cast out through means both semi-legal and downright nefarious. Her homeland of Anglecynn is forbidden to her now, at least until she’s gathered enough power to wedge open some doors.

Fenn is a half-elf born to an elven father and human mother. Her childhood was spent with alternating months in the Isle of Eversummer and the colony of Rogbottom. While her ears marked her as exotic and dangerous among the humans, her teeth marked her as a hideous disgrace among the elves. She has never felt at home in either world and pretends to understand less than she does in order to highlight her differences before anyone can call her on them. After she reached maturity she held several odd jobs until settling into a dangerous, solitary life entering into the Risen Lands exclusion zone to take whatever wasn’t nailed down. That life ended when she was arrested selling contraband to a fence. When Anglecynn needed a guide through Silmar City, she was pulled from prison and given a second chance.

Grakhuil Leadbraids comes from the largely parthenogenetic clan of dwarves in Darili Irid (loosely, Gold Hole). Due to da nad skill in the game of Ranks and overall empathic nature relative to da nad kin, Grak was selected to leave Darili Irid for the Athenaeum of Barriers with the plan that da would return and become the next master warder of the clanhome. Upon returning home, da was entered into a rare arranged pair-bond with another dwarf, and fled from Darili Irid after refusing the Kiss on da nad bond night. Da has spent da nad time looking to make amends for the damage da nad absence caused to da nad clan.

*[I’d closed my eyes and paged through after my little experiment in experiencing awe and wonder, only to find that instead of text, the Six-Eyed Doe had a picture that expanded outside the box it was meant to be set within. This was the first time that the game interface had shown me anything other than text, symbols, or lines to make boxes.*

*The picture had various scenes, devoid of any clear chronology and bleeding into each other where they met. When I looked at it, the view zoomed in, leaving the rest of the game interface behind and filling my vision with only the pictorial story of the Six-Eyed Doe. Most of it signified little to me, because it was focused on rivers and forests, with the occasional animal. I focused in on people, where I could find them, and ended up looking at a full-on orgy with writhing, naked bodies of a hundred different species. To one side of it, up and to the right, armored men were coming in and slaughtering the people, but toward the bottom there were a handful of pregnant women sitting around, and beneath them various women giving birth, with naked children walking away through the woods, and some donning leather armor of their own to fight off the attackers.*

*This was the story of the locus, as told by some insane artist who had the ability to paint photorealistically at a yottapixel scale but lacked any idea of how to tell a coherent narrative. It took me some time to find the bottle, which sat all by itself, away from everyone. There was no attempt at being literal; it was only barely big enough to contain Solace, who sat with legs folded and her staff across her lap. It was such a small thing, in comparison to the rest, and that was probably the point.]*

Valencia is a nonanima, a humanoid without a soul, created by the essentialist Fallatehr Whiteshell in the Amoureux Penitentiary where she lived for the first seventeen years of her life. Until recently she was subject to repeated possession by demons and devils at random intervals, but now, touched by your magic, she has become something to be feared, for much different reasons than she was before. She is nearly a newborn, in some ways, trying to find her feet.

Bethel is not just an entad, but a meta-entad, capable of taking magical items and adding them to itself. Initially created by Omar Antoun using funds and labor provided by Uther Penndraig, it stood empty for several years until Uther returned. Once he discovered the house’s abilities, he began adding entads to it, eventually raising it to a sort of sentience, and after that, despite its objections and pleas. Five hundred years later, it had sequestered itself partway down the Boundless Pit, until you came along.

Raven was always the weakest of Uther’s Knights, and now she is the last of them. As an Ell, her life has been stretched out to the extremes. As the Head Librarian of the Infinite Library, she has seen thousands of futures. Since she was a young girl though, there has been one constant in her life, Uther Penndraig, who even now, in his absence, defines her.

Full details of the companion passives are as follows:

***Twinned Souls:*** *Fenn is a loyal companion, now formally part of your kharass, and will never lag behind you in relative power, so long as she is a member of your party.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 31: "The Loyal Elf"

***Infernal Capture:*** *Valencia is a loyal companion, now properly part of your kharass, though she is still without a soul. The non-anima is grasping, reaching, an unnatural construct trying to find its way in the world. Power has, for the first time in her life, found its way into her hands.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 68: "Seeing Red"

***Six-Eyed:*** *Any attempt to use any system in a non-standard way will be considered one degree more reasonable than it otherwise would be. Any existing virtues, entads, or effects that specify a degree of reasonableness are increased by one degree of reasonableness in your favor (calculated after all other effects). The Layman will look more favorably on your attempts to argue definition.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 139: "Piece of Mind"

***Full House:*** *Bethel knows the location of every entad inside her, even if she wouldn’t otherwise. Bethel can use the powers of any entad inside her, so long as it remains inside her.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 127: "Full House"

***Symbiosis:*** *You and Fenn are connected on a deeper level now, with the last vestiges of reluctance stripped away. When together, you may both use either your own skill, or half the skill of the other, rounded down, whichever is higher.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 66: "The Long Night"

***Soul Capture:*** *If Valencia has access to a soul, the anima exa, she can imbibe it in order to take whatever power it possesses, similar to the Essentialist practice of Soul Scaphism, but with more breadth and depth. Duration depends largely on how intensively she uses the soul in question.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 86: "Headwater"

***Wardproof:*** *Grak can selectively ignore wards that would apply to di, the things da wears and carries, and up to one other person (at a time). This ability activates automatically when the effect of the ward would be undesirable and can be selectively applied to any ward Grak chooses.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 137: "Darili Irid (Chapter)"

***Warded:*** *Grak is slowly coming to an understanding of di era and da nad place within the world. Grak can create wards around da nad own body which follow the contours of da nad skin as easily as if it were a cube of equal volume, and anchor them to di era as easily as da can anchor to Aerb. If warding is ever excluded, Grak’s ability to make wards will not be affected. Grak no longer needs a wand to make wards.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 192: "Cooldown"

***Multitasker:*** *Amaryllis can split herself into multiple independent clones, with each clone taking eight hours to create, though this takes no real effort on her part. Clones can also be recalled (with or without merge) from any distance with another eight hours each. Given ten minutes of concentration, Amaryllis can integrate with a clone, either merging her essence into a clone, merging a clone’s essence into herself, or doing a bidirectional update. If any clone dies, all clones die. If Amaryllis dies, all clones die. Clones cannot do magic or use entads. Clones automatically roll 0 with a total modifier of 0 for any combat roll. No more than thirty clones at a time can be created in this way.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 195: "Family"

## Virtues and Afflictions

Sometimes, depending on Juniper's actions, the game layer decides to reward him with a **virtue** (not to be confused with skill virtues) or punish him with an **affliction**. Afflictions can also come from illnesses, emotional states or status effects. Virtues give positive skill or stat boosts, while Afflictions do the opposite. Afflictions can level up, which increases their negative effect.

The mechanism by which the game layer decides when to reward or punish Juniper is unknown, though it seems it punishes passive or unheroic play.

A full list of virtues is as follows:

* Ruthless: Unknown effect. Unlocked when Juniper snapped the rope, letting half of Fireteam Blackheart fall to their deaths. ELEVATOR facts Taken away when he unlocks Conscientious.
* Conscientious: Flattery +5, Romance +5. Unlocked when Juniper gracefully told Clara to leave the room so she wouldn't be caught in a fight between Juniper and Larkspur Prentiss. Don't Split the Party
* Mercy: CHA+1. Unlocked when Juniper mercy killed Superbia Laquis, one of Larkspur's allies. Copse and Robbers

A full list of afflictions is as follows:

* Cowardice: No effect at level 1, WIS -1 and POI -1 at level 2. Unlocked when Juniper makes a particularly unheroic choice and taken away when he does a heroic one. Taking the Fall Thickenings
* Broken Bone: No effect beyond the physical. Unlocked whenever Juniper has a broken bone. Solely Responsible
* Sprained Ankle: SPD -2, Athletics -5, Dodge -5. Unlocked whenever Juniper's ankle is sprained. Goraion
* Rat Rot: END -1, CUN + 1. The only Affliction with a positive effect, unlocked when a rat scratched Juniper at Silmar City. Sewer Rat
* Blood Loss: END -1 at level 1; PHY -1 and END -1 at level 2; PHY -2, END -1, MEN -1 and SOC - 1 at level 3. Unlocked whenever Juniper is in a state of blood loss. Sewer Rat
* Hungry: PHY -1, MEN -1, POI -1 at level 2. Unlocked whenever Juniper is hungry. Sewer Rat
* Drained Bone: Unknown game effects. Bones become brittle. Unlocked whenever Juniper drains his own bones. Rocket Man
* Goodly: Unknown game effects. Nudges Juniper's thoughts and actions in the direction of Good. The Soul of Discretion
* Overcapped: Skill will decay at 1 per 10 minutes until under cap. Applicable when putting skills over the stat cap with soul magic. Rule Zero
* Double Overcapped: Some level of skill decay (greater than Overcapped). Applicable when putting skills over twice the points of the stat cap. Rule Zero
* Overmaxed: Some level of skill decay. Applicable when putting skills over 200 points. To Know One's Onions
* Skilled Trade: Skill will decay at 1 per 10 minutes until returned to baseline. Applicable when putting points in skills with soul magic. Rule Zero
* Scaphism: Skill points from soul scaphism will decay at 1 per 10 minutes. Applicable when draining skills and using the points using soul magic. Rule Zero
* Griefstricken: MEN -1, SOC -2. Unlocked when one of Juniper's Companions died. Depths
* Bad Dreams: Juniper gets nightmares for weeks that fade away with time. A consequence of wearing the Crown of Malingering Thorns. Deceptions

## Achievements

*Main article: List of Achievements*
**Achievements** are notifications received as part of Juniper Smith's **game layer** upon completing an optional milestone or performing actions recorded by the game as special or unique. Juniper theorizes they're largely jokes at his expense, reminders from the Dungeon Master that his life isn't truly his own.

It's unknown whether or not Achievements grant any experience points upon completion, or if they're purely cosmetic.

## Settings

The settings page is a semi-hidden portion of the game layer that Juniper may access by inputting the beginning of the Konami Code with his eye movements. The function of the majority of the options is to control the degree to which Juniper's life on Aerb plays like a video game or tabletop game rather than a bare, real-life experience. Some options are locked.

Settings

The current settings for Juniper, as of chapter 10, are such that dying on Aerb is almost as impactful as dying would have been on Earth: he has one and only one 'life' according to the game, he has no opportunity to retry or to do anything over should he die, and death on Aerb means the death of his real life body. These settings cannot be undone. However, there is one key difference - Juniper has checked the Helldiver option, meaning that should he die, he will continue to exist for an indefinite period of time in one of the nine thousand hells.

Juniper is also locked out of the mapping, fast travel, and quest marker features due to Verisimilitude Mode being enabled, a setting that also cannot be undone. However, Juniper has access to numerical representations of his health and mana points, and he also receives information from the game layer's quest logging that, in some cases, he otherwise would not have had.

## References

1. ↑ “Can you not call it a game?” asked Fenn. She took off her glove and tossed it to the ground.
“Sorry,” I said. “The … interface?”
“No, something better than that,” said Fenn. “How about washater, does that work for you?”
“More elfish?” I asked.
“It means something like game or system,” said Fenn.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 55: "Bond Girl"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 That last message came with a sensation that I can only describe as orgasmic. Golden light burst forward from me in a wave that kicked up wind and I briefly lifted up off my feet. It was like someone had jabbed a live wire directly into the pleasure center of my brain.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 1: "Taking the Fall"
3. ↑ “Masters mentioned that Uther had something called the Knack,” I said. “He could learn things faster than anyone could reasonably be expected to, without any apparent magical aid. I … don’t think that I have whatever he had.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 114: "The Meeting of Minds"
4. ↑ “I wish we had a way of tracking experience points,” said Amaryllis with a frown. “It would help inform what we did.”
“That’s backwards,” I said. “Or, backwards from what I tended to do as DM. Experience points are to reward you for doing the things that you set out to accomplish, they’re not really meant to give you the incentive to go out and fight things.” I paused. “It’s somewhat a question of the philosophy of DMing.”
“So if we want you to get stronger …” Amaryllis frowned. “We just do whatever we want to? We ignore the game, the narrative, and the Dungeon Master?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 85: "The Great Train Robbery"
5. ↑ I scrambled to my feet, looking down at my left hand, which was … well, whole again, but still as numb as it had been before, and there was something else off about it, like it hadn’t been replaced quite properly. Even just looking at it, I could see that it was not right somehow, proportioned slightly wrong, making the skin look loose in some places and tight in others.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 51: "Blood in the Water"
6. ↑ “One sec,” I said. I closed my eyes for three seconds and brought up the character sheet, then stopped for a moment on the screen with my skills and abilities. I had leveled up twice, which meant that I should have seen a ‘+4’ floating in the upper right corner, just outside the character sheet proper. Instead, it said ‘+9’. I’d gotten five extra points from somewhere. Hitting tenth level? That seemed likely, but the game was as always stubborn with giving me information, and there was still no game log to look through.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 34: "Weik Handum"
7. ↑ I wanted to level up, more than anything. I wanted to feel that feeling of transcendent, universal bliss flowing through my veins again. Immediately going to kill all the librarians wasn’t likely to accomplish that, just as killing tuung hadn’t given me a level either. At the end of slaughtering them, I would be left with a bloodied sword and only incremental progress toward my goal, having burned through resources that were likely necessary toward completing the quests I had available to me.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 133: "The Critical Path"
8. ↑ Once I could see more of the threads, it was easy enough to trace back and see which one needed to be restricted. I squeezed it down, as I’d done with the meme that still laced through my spirit, until there was practically nothing left. The ‘Level Up’ value was still increasing, but some more debugging of my soul/spirit let me fix that too; it was ticking up because I had the memory of ecstasy. That was easy enough to change, once I had found it, though I opted to strangle the spiritual connection between the memory cluster and the spirit, rather than at the endpoint where the spirit touched back into the soul.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 136: "Krinrael"
9. ↑ I lifted out of my seat, only slightly, and came back down without losing my balance. Amaryllis must have felt what was happening to me, because she turned the soulcycle then overcorrected the other way, leaving us briefly wobbling as she regained control.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 6: "Cold Comfort"
10. ↑ “I know. I don’t want to lose myself though. I don’t want my identity to be stripped away, not more than it already has been. The levels have been getting further apart, but they’re ramping up in intensity. If you hadn’t been there ...”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 107: "Name of the Beast"
11. ↑ The aspects that Bormann described pretty clearly mapped to the attributes on my character sheet, minus the social attributes, the umbrella attributes, and luck (maybe, unless they categorized those differently).
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 16: "Kindly Bones"
12. ↑ When I tried to put a point in PHY, I saw them both vanish, moving it up by one, which cascaded to the other three abilities and increased those by one as well. Ah . That seemed like a pretty good deal to me; I was basically getting double the number of points, or maybe only half again if PHY didn’t actually do anything on its own. If the game design were sensible, then this was probably a generalist/specialist trade-off, but in order to meet the immediate (and largely unknown) problems I was facing, a generalist approach was probably right.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
13. ↑ One of the interesting things about the soul was that attributes stayed static even when the body changed. If I’d given myself the body of a child, I’d have still had the same attributes, at least according to my soul. The differences in how I would actually move through the world were handled by other game systems, either Afflictions or some other, less game-like mechanism. It seemed as though there was probably some way to break the system, given what I knew about it. Logically, if stats were independent from physical reality, or only loosely connected, then there were probably some benefits to minmaxing.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 119: "Depths"
14. ↑ So after reviewing my questions again and finding nothing really worthy of note, I closed my eyes and put another two points into MEN, increasing my mental stats by one yet again.
*WARNING: COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT HAS CAUSED PERSONALITY NETWORK TO EXCEED HOLISTIC INTEGRITY THRESHOLDS. REVERSING AND REFACTORING EMULATION TO WITHIN HOLISTIC INTEGRITY THRESHOLDS. ENABLING TRI-STRATUM PSEUDO-INTELLIGENCE INJECTION SETTING TO COMPENSATE.*
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 36: "In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet"
15. ↑ I concretely felt the effects of LUK for the first time, as a path of concrete action opened up in front of me, a step to the side that felt so alien I almost stopped myself. A spinning staff scythed through the trees, slowed by the wards but not stopped entirely, and it would have hit me if I hadn’t moved in anticipation of it.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 50: "Copse and Robbers"
16. ↑ ***Warning: Skill changes can be done once per (100 levels / skill in Essentialism).***
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 64: "In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet, Again"

	* 256 skills, 82 (!!!) excluded, 40 at one time for J, unrestricted # skills for others (why?), no limit for others (incl. self) (why?)
	—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 105: "Notes"
18. ↑ There were other skills that I had already known I didn’t have, and which weren’t assigned, more of what I considered arts-and-crafts, the sort of thing that you took more for roleplaying purposes (and/or to piss off Reimer because they were suboptimal), things like Weaving, Foraging, Tailoring, and so on, maybe a few dozen of those.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 64: "In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet, Again"
19. ↑ I didn’t like the skill-ups. They were coming a bit too fast now, and I thought that I knew why; they came faster when I was threatened, when the skills were being put toward something vital, rather than trivial.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 72: "Tripartite Talks"
20. ↑ Being capped at 20 because of how I was training was shockingly bad for me. It meant that I couldn’t just train up my Dodge skill against Fenn and hope that our Twinned Souls would allow her offensive power to keep pace so that she was a challenge. The word ‘amateur’ implied that a professional could still help me train, while the word ‘training’ implied that I could still get skills from actual combat, or maybe from other methods.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 37: "Paths"
21. ↑ Granted, neither of them were proper swordsmen, but if lvl 20 represented something like a graduate degree, then an equivalent of lvl 40 in Two-Handed Weapons was well into whatever the postdoc equivalent of hitting people with a sword was.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 56: "Vacation Vocations"
22. ↑ Skills have primary and secondary attributes and are capped at three times primary or five times secondary, whichever is lower. There were a few ways to raise skills above that, whether by virtues/afflictions, entads, spells, or special circumstances.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 144: "Skewered"
23. ↑ It seemed like the level 20 virtues were (debatably) stronger, but they weren’t at the upper tiers of what I knew was physically possible on Aerb, and I was pretty sure that at some point they would allow things that were literally impossible for a mortal man, not just improbable or difficult.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 37: "Paths"
24. ↑ “Skills get skill-specific virtues at either level 10 or 20, then every twenty levels beyond that, with the final one coming at level 100. They got better as they went, usually, except for a few times you misjudged what was good and what was objectively terrible. For Woodworking, they were all about being able to be a better woodworker, or carpenter, or whatever, and the capstone virtue was that you could make anything out of wood.” He raised an eyebrow. “*Anything.*”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 144: "Skewered"
25. ↑ The second level of the blade-bound virtue seemed really, really good to me. I had gotten the original Nascent Blade-bound virtue from increasing Parry; I frowned for a bit trying to figure that out. The best I could come up with was that it took some combination of skills raising above a certain amount to get the blade-bound virtues.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 56: "Vacation Vocations"
26. ↑ “There are either five or six virtues per skill,” said Reimer. “Five point five, call it. There were two hundred and fifty-six skills. That’s what, one thousand four hundred and eight *before* getting into all the combo virtues? Not to mention that you never told us them unless we got there, which we mostly didn’t. So if you don’t know, then I don’t know what to tell you, they’re either in the big book, or you never wrote them down because you didn’t think that anyone was actually going to take Accounting.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 144: "Skewered"
27. ↑ The character sheet appeared whenever I closed my eyes for three seconds. That’s not me being casual with my language, I sat there and timed it after the first time it came up.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
28. ↑ “How are new quests formed?” asked Grak.
“I’m not too clear on that,” I said. “Sometimes I’ll get one when someone tells me something, or when they ask me to do something, and there are some quests that come in parts, meaning that I get the next one as soon as the first part is done.” I took a breath. “So if anyone has anything they think is a quest, you can try to offer it now and expand our options.” [...] “That … actually worked,” I said. “I think maybe the difference is that I was invited? It switched from being something that he was going to do on his own to something we’re going to do together?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 43: "In Search of a Quest"
29. ↑ “They don’t have to be personal quests, right?” asked Fenn. “They can be anything?”
“Based on the evidence, they just need to be something that I can accomplish.” I rubbed my neck. “So far as I can tell, they don’t even need to be particularly reasonable for a person to do.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 43: "In Search of a Quest"
30. ↑ “We don’t know,” said Amaryllis. That was more or less true. Power scaling, if it existed at all, was a mystery. I was pretty sure that attempting to go into Fel Seed’s exclusion zone would get me killed though, at least as I currently was, which was the primary reason I wasn’t doing it.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 142: "Sound and Silence"
31. ↑ “How many companions are you going to have?” Fenn asked the ceiling.
“Uh,” I replied, because that wasn’t where I saw the conversation going at all. “Uther Penndraig had seven, so that’s not a bad guess.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 31: "The Loyal Elf"
32. ↑ “So,” said Fenn as soon as we were through the door to our room. “I finally figured out what this companion thingy reminded me of: a kharass, an elf cultural thing. Basically, there are groups of people who are cosmologically linked to one another by a wampeter, which I guess is their … purpose is close, but *theme* might be closer. I’ve always been garbage at translating.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 17: "Voting Blocs"
33. ↑ “So from a certain perspective, the kharass is composed almost entirely of princesses,” said Amaryllis. “And given the criteria you’ve outlined for a potential new companion, I thought that I would bring this particular princess to your attention.”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 82: "Aboard the Lion's Tail"
34. ↑ “Um,” I said. “I just got a loyalty message, which typically seems to mean that something has changed in how you view me, or something like that, but I have no idea what I just said that would have resonated with you. Surely I’ve called this place beautiful before? Or, was it that I expressed my own form of beauty?”
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 139: "Piece of Mind"
35. ↑ The first thing I saw when I arrived at the other end of the line was Amaryllis, naked, and above her a floating mass of points and lines, and to the side, text and numbers. This, then, was her character sheet. Twinned Souls, that had linked us on more than just a figurative and mechanical level, it had opened up her soul to me. The other line would be the one belonging to Fenn. I backed out of her character sheet almost immediately, not stopping to look at anything there, not wanting to accidentally hurt her, or change her from the way she was.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 64: "In Which Juniper Stares At His Character Sheet, Again"
36. ↑ ***Affliction: Cowardice lvl 2! (WIS -1, POI -1)***
“How is that cowardice?” I asked, but I soon realized the answer. I’d gotten ‘Cowardice’ when I had run away from the girl getting attacked by four zombies, right when I’d landed. Here I had been presented with another girl running from both the scary guys with mohawks and a monster, and I hadn’t even spared a thought to running to her rescue. “That’s not cowardice, that’s selfishness, if anything,” I said to the air. There was no response, not that I had expected one.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 2: "Thickenings"
37. ↑ But I’d gotten the two levels of ‘Cowardice’ affliction for what I thought were self-motivated but completely rational decisions. I’d been scared when I’d seen that girl surrounded by zombies (and the memory of her bones cracking made me wince) but I didn’t think that was what had motivated me to run. The problem was, if I was going to get punished by the game layer for not running in to be a big damned hero, then maybe the calculus slid the other way.
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 3: "Solely Responsible"
38. ↑ My mind went back to the achievement I’d gotten, ‘La Petite Mort’, and the other one I’d gotten a progress update on, ‘A Key For Seven Locks’. There were a lot of things about Aerb that made intuitive sense to me, things that had a clear cause and effect. Other stuff … not so much. Those achievements seemed scummy for the sake of being scummy, intrusive and invasive just to show me that my life wasn’t wholly my own. It was the Dungeon Master whispering in my ear, just a bit, saying, ‘this is a game’. What was the point though, especially when I’d already rejected that notion?
—*Worth the Candle* Chapter 117: "Beast of Burden"