What is Teiravon 3

Cities

In addition to the various races and cultures, your character will also have a home town where they will begin their adventure. In addition to the wealth of information about the world around you that you'll gain, starting cities also confer a perk to the characters that start there, (Available from level 0)

Classes

Everyone begins the game as a level 1 adventurer with no particular direction in which they are pushed. It's up to you as soon as you begin to select what you want your first class to be. Levels are gained once you gain a sufficient amount of Experience and once obtained can be spent into any class for which you qualify.

You can spend your currently available levels using the "]Level" command and track the progress of your experience either with the "]exp" or "]expgump" commands.

Each level spent into a class will yeild increased stats and skills dependant on which class you level and how many levels you have in that class. The more you level up in one class the higher the stat bonus will become but the lower the skill bonuses. Additionally, every 5 levels spent into a class will unlock a special ability, unique to that class at that level.

There are 6 Base Classes which everyone qualifies to level into at any point, each and ever level may be allocated where ever you wish and there is no obligation to continue spending more levels into the same class simply because you already have done so. But in addition to the Base Classes, there are also 30 Prestige Classes. A Prestige Class is a class that must be unlocked first by having a sufficient level in two of the other base Classes, one at Level 10, and the other at Level 5. Every combination of a base class at 10 and another at 5 will result in a valid Prestige Class that levels may be spent into.

Prestige Class Combinations

Skills

Skills are divided into two major classifications. There are Class skills, these are skills which are gained by leveling up a class, they cannot be gained in any other way but do not obey any caps.

Common Skills are those skills which are not gained from leveling a Class, they are instead gained through using them and they obey the standard skill cap of 100 for any given skill, but a total skill cap of 300 for all common skills. Only Common skills will contribute to this cap.

Most Common skills are associated with either gathering materials or crafting, though some are also investigatory or ancilary support skills. Several skills have been significantly altered from their original function or are entirely unique.

Camping

A common skill which helps recouperate after combat. Securing your camp will increase all regeneration rates significantly son long as you are not currently in active combat.

Enchanting

The skill used to apply elemental materials to metals (and rumors have it a special sort of wood). Also used to gather elemental materials from corresponding elementals, as well as elemental vortexes.

Aim

A class skill required to successfully strike any target outside of melee range with a weapon attack, difficulty of successfully aiming is based upon distance, the further away the harder.

Weapon Skills

A group of class skills encompassing wrestling, swordsmanship, macefighting, and fencing. Advancement in this skill is responsible for two things, qualifying for the requirement to use special weapon attacks, and decreasing your likelyhood to be struck in melee combat. Weapon Skill calculation is entirely defensive, having more skill will not make you more likely to hit your opponent, simply to defend yourself from their attacks.

Stealth

A class skill which has absorbed the function of hiding. Responsible both for rendering yourself unseen as well as granting the ability to move while hidden. The difficulty of movement is based upon current encumberence levels.

Awareness

A common skill which helps to notice things moving unseen around you. Grants a passive perception chance to notice indications of a stealthed movement near you, making only the sound of footsteps and a twinkle on the screen. Active use will reveal targets in an area around you, difficulty dependant upon your distance from the target and if you are facing them.

Intimidation

A class skill which causes the target to suffer temporarily reduced skill values and resistances. Effect mirrors the "discordance" ability but has no association with musicianship.

Peacemaking and Provocation

A group of class skills which previously were based upon musicianship skill but now have no other skill dependancy nor any need to carry a musican instrument.

Assessment

A class skill which allows the user to gain a sense of the current health and stamina of the target. Also used by Archers to find the weak point in their target's armor.

Dodge

A class skill which triggers any time the target is attacked which may allow them to completely avoid taking damage in exchange for the stamina cost of evading the blow. Only usable when not weilding a shield.

Block

A class skill which allows the user to intercede their shield in the way of an attack, causing first the resistance of the shield to reduce the damage before then falling through to whatever armor the attack would have struck.

Tracking

A class skill which allows the user to detect the footsteps of passersby, every creature leaves footsteps as they travel, the tracking skill reveals these footsteps and shows a general direction of travel.

Equipment

Equipment has undergone some rather drastic changes, and will likely continue to as the beta progresses. Begining first with Locational Armor. Meaning that any attack dealt to you will neccesarily target a specific part of your body and is resisted by the armor at that specific location. Your chest armor therefor does not grant any special protection against attacks to your head, or vice versa. Not all locations are equally likely to be struck however, as the most common area for an attack to land is the chest, followed by the legs, arms, gloves, helm and neck. With chest being struck fully 35% of the time and progressively less likely from there.

Because armor only effects attacks against a specific location, this has allowed individual armor peices to have anywhere from the entire 0-70% resistance. Armor by default will have higher base resistances inkeeping with their ranking in the armor enum. Meaning that while the weakest armors, leather, will have perhaps 6-8% resistance, ringmail will have nearly 40% resistance per peice. Even the weakest shield has fully 50% resistance, making block a very reliable source of early game protection.

Encumberence

These changes are also joined by a new system called "Encumberence". All armor has strength requirements to equip it. For each peice of armor an adventurer has equipped, it's strength requirement is divided by their total strength. The result is multiplied by 25% and added to the Encumberence rating for the player. For example, a player with 20 strenght who equips only a single 10 strength requirement peice of leather would add a total of 0.125 to their encumberence rating.

For each step or swing taken by the player, their current encumberence total results in a chance to lose stamina. This chance is equal to the encumberence value. a .125 encumberence would have a 12.5% chance to lose a point of stamina per step. Or roughly speaking once every 8 steps. Any total greater than 1.0 guarantees at least 1 stamina lost, in addition to any remainder proceding to the above stated calculation.

The result of this system is that strength continues to be significant well past the point that you qualify for the minimum stat requirement of the armor. Additionally, the Fighter ability "Armor Proficiency" halves the contribution to encumberence from 25% to 12.5%.

Materials have also been significantly overhauled. Metals, both the base metal and the component alloys only effect the following 4 traits.

• Maliability
  • Augments the skill requirement for gear crafted with this metal.
• Durability
  • Augments the total hitpoint values of gear crafted with this metal.
• Lightness
  • Augments the stat requirements for gear crafted with this metal.
• Attunement
  • Augments the skill requirement for enchanting gear made with this metal.

This means that metals have no impact on either the damage types, nor the resistance types of gear. Additionally, repairing gear is inheirently finite, each repair action performed on a peice of gear will irrevocably reduce the total hitpoints of the item.

Finally, gear now has 3 total levels of quality. Common, Exceptional, and Masterwork. Exceptional gear now offers a percent increase to resistances rather than flatly distributing points of resistance across the gear. Additionally, Masterwork items grant even more than Exceptional items. Masterwork gear is crafted only 10% of the time that exceptional gear is.

Magic

Magic in Teiravon is divided into two different styles, Arcane and Divine.

Arcane Magic

Arcane magic is practiced by Mages and those classes derived from Mages. Arcane is typified by the ability to channel mana, augmenting the power of the spell by continuing to push more and more mana into the spell beyond the minimum amount required to target the spell.

Arcane spells can hold a hypothetically infinite amount of mana and will continue to scale without limits. The limit lies not in the spell itself, but the mage's ability to channel, based on their magery. Increased magery skill means the ability to continue to concentrate with higher and higher mana values stored in spells.

Additionally, Arcane Spells are Memorized prior to use. Only a certain number of spells may be held in memory at a time (based on the level of Mage the adventurer has), but those memorized may be cast as many times as the magic user wishes. New spells can be memorized by locating an available Arcane Tome and meditating over its contents.

Arcane spells may be found in Tomes, but there is no obligation to carry any sort of arcane tome around with you, There is no central spellbook neccesary for casting, nor do any tomes ever contain more than a single spell. The mages own mind is where the spells are stored, and they are accessed with the Magery skill.

Divine Prayers

Prayers are no less magical than Arcane magics, however its source is otherworldly in nature. Rather than channeling their own mana into reconstructing reality, Clerics beseech the gods to intercede on their behalf. Every Cleric has access to 7 total prayers depending on their skill.

• Aid
• Smite
• Bless
• Curse
• Boon
• Sanctify
• Ressurect

The actual function of the prayer depends entirely upon the religion of the cleric. Each of the 10 total pantheons have unique interpretations of these 7 prayers, for a total of 70 unique prayers.

Prayers rather than consuming mana will drain the cleric's stamina. Prayers additionally are unique from arcane magics in their scalability. Prayers are always as powerful as they will ever be. A level 30 cleric's smite is no more or less powerful than a level 1 cleric's smite. Both are equal in their power since the source of the power is the god answering the prayer. The major difference that scales with the skill of the cleric is how quickly the prayer is answered.

A cleric can only have one active prayer at a time, and until the prayer is answered, any new prayers cast by the cleric will simply supercede the last prayer. Additionally, clerics have the ability to craft "Talismans", small scrolls or totems which contain within them a single use of a prayer despite the user not ordinarily having acess to them.

Churches

Religion plays a major part in Teiravon, both mechanically and politically, and the central point of this is the Church system. Churches are like guilds but don't replace the ordinary guild system. Pantheons determine what the effect of clerical prayers will be and joining a church sets your pantheon to that of the church.

Churches can be founded by any level 15 Cleric who himself already has a pantheon, the new church will share the pantheon of its founder but in the event he changes pantheons or churches later he will be resigned from this church. Any member who joins a new church will automatically resign their old one.

Churches have two major mechanical benefits. Firstly, for each member, the church receives a bonus into their total "Faith" pool. Clerical members contribute more and sufficiently highly leveled clerics contribute yet more still. Faith is a pool of virtual prayer skill that is distributed by the church. Each church may decide how it wishes to rank its members and how to distribute that faith amongst the ranks. Ranks collectively contribute anywhere from 0 to 100% of their share of the total pool as well as having the option of being "Greedy" meaning that they retain their own personal contribution (5 per regular member, 10 per cleric, and 50 per level 25 cleric). A Rank may be simultaniously Greedy and allocate 0 from distribution, this would mean that they only receive in faith what they put in but do not contribute to the greater total, this would be considered a largely non-participatory rank. Whenever a new member joins, an old member leaves, or the ranks are adjusted, the bonus is recalculated and redistributed among its members.

Why would a non-cleric care about having bonus prayer skill? Talismans. Talismans are like prayer scrolls, single use instances of a given prayer which are cast using the prayer skill of the user. Most commonly these will be blesses or aids, but its possible for a church to allocate its faith in such a way that non-clerics could, through talismans, have access to the entire pool of prayers. It's also possible for a church to structure itself so that all members simply donate their faith to their central founding figurehead, the "cultist" model. In this scenerio each member would be adding another 5 prayer skill to the leader.

But lets say you don't care at all about being able to pray for miracles, leave all that divine stuff for the clerics. Churches have another benefit, Traditions.

All members of a church benefit from their church's tradition, so even if the benefit of spirit speak isn't appealing, odds are there is a church somewhere with a benefit that an adventurer wants. Conversely its attractive to all churches to increase their membership both for the contribution of faith and for the political implication of leading a sufficiently populous group.

Systems

In addition to all the major areas of changes I've already described, there are a few more that are otherwise uncatagorized but still require explaination. That happens here.

Unconciousness

When your hitpoints reach 0, rather than falling dead, you will instead be rendered unconcious, the screen will darken, you will be unable to speak or act, and the damage you sustained will do battle with your own personal regeneration rate. You remain unconcious until such time as you have regenerated a sufficient amount of hitpoints and stamina or you ultimately succumb to your wounds. Since you are entirely helpless at this point and since access to regeneration is somewhat limited, its prudent to adventure with a partner to watch over eachother incase of sudden forcible loss of conciousness.

Nods

In addition to the ordinary means of gaining experience such as killing monsters or crafting items. Players can contribute experience to eachother in a system called "Nodding".

Giving a nod to a player is an act of recognition for their actions, rewarding good roleplaying, doing you favors (You can give out quests with nods as the reward.) The individual value of a nod is based upon how many nods the player already has, scaling geometrically. The more nods you have, the more each nod is worth. You may give out an unlimited number of nods, however any given account may only nod a character single time for the given nod period.

Nods pay out their exp value at the end of a 3 day period, all the nods you've accumulated during that time are cashed in and their exp value paid, before reseting the nod total back to 0 and allowing anyone who previously granted a nod to you to now nod again.

Nutrition

Food you consume has nutritional value. What good is that? Why do you care?

Each nutrient confers benefits to you as a character except for the dreaded 5th nutrient, Fat.

Foods contain various combinations of these nutrients and can be discerned using the tasteID skill. (Soon using the tasteID skill on a player will reveal info about their current nutritional levels) Beware of heedlessly stuffing your face however, as all nutrients decay as your hunger levels build back up but fat decays slowest of all.