Tomes and Tactics

Contents

A Letter to the Adventurer

You hold in your hands a guide to a world that will challenge, humble, and, if fortune favors you, ultimately reward. Tomes and Tactics is a roleplaying game in the oldest tradition, with one departure: you do not walk into the dark alone. You raise a company of three, and you bring all three home or you do not.

The land of Valdremoor is not a place that greets visitors warmly. Its hills are prowled by bandits and worse. Its dungeons have swallowed generations of hopeful souls. Its settlements are scattered thin between forest, fen, mountain and undercity, and each of them sits in the long shadow of something. Hollowbrook, as welcoming as any frontier town can be, has the Grimstone Caverns for a neighbour.

You will steer one of your three at a time. The other two are not baggage. They walk with you, they pick their own fights, they carry their own coin, and they will die of their own accidents if you are careless with them. Learning to think of the three as one thing is most of what separates a company that comes back from a company that does not.

This manual will not hold your hand through every encounter. It will, however, give you the knowledge you need to make informed choices about your characters, your tactics, and when to run.

The World of Valdremoor

Valdremoor is a land of wild contrasts. Ancient forests press against young frontier towns, dungeon entrances yawn open in the sides of pastoral hills, and factions have warred so long they have forgotten why. It is not a world at peace. It is, however, a world worth exploring.

The Hollowbrook Steppes

The steppes are the crossroads of the settled world, and the country a human company wakes in. Five regions ring the town of Hollowbrook, each with its own weather, its own wildlife, and its own reasons to be careful. Where your company begins depends on who you made, and nearly every race wakes in a homeland of its own.

The Wider World

Beyond the steppes the world does not stop. Nearly forty named places are reachable on foot, and a walk between two of them is a real journey rather than a menu. Among the settlements you may come to know:

Between and beneath them lie the wilds and the deep places: The Peak, The Cliffs, the Great Plains, the Valley, Harrowmarch, The Reach, the Umbral Warrens, Smolderdeep, the Grand Cavern, the Huge Graveyard, and a good deal more that this manual will not spoil for you.

The Town of Hollowbrook

Hollowbrook offers what a frontier town can: an inn where you may rest, a general store, a smith, an alchemist, a stable, trainers who will teach you your craft, and townsfolk with problems they would rather pay to have solved. Rest at the inn restores you fully and passes the night.

Day, Night, and Weather

Time passes as you act. Day gives way to dusk and dusk to night, and the dark outdoors is a real dark: sight shortens, and things that sleep through the afternoon come out. Weather rolls across the world on its own schedule. Rain soaks you and douses open flames, which matters more than it sounds when your only light is a torch.

Creating Your Party

A new game does not make a character. It makes three. You will pass through race, class and name once for each member, and only then will the world open. Give the choice its due: these three are the whole company, and the party cannot be enlarged later.

The Process

That last step matters more than it appears. Each race has a homeland, and beginning as a dwarf starts you in the Thuldarin Underkeep rather than on the human steppes. Three characters of three races give you three possible openings to the same world.

Building a Company That Holds

Three characters is enough to cover the three things a party needs and not one more. Something that can take a hit, something that can mend one, and something that can end a fight quickly. A company of three wizards is a legitimate choice and a short campaign.

Levelling Up

Experience is earned by killing and by completing what you are asked to complete, and it is shared: a kill teaches the whole company, not only the hand that struck. On gaining a level every member grows in the attributes their calling favours, and at the tenth level and every tenth thereafter you are given points to place yourself.

The cap is level 60. Reaching it is the work of a campaign, not an afternoon.

The Races of Valdremoor

Eleven races take up the adventurer's life. Each brings a different set of starting attributes, a way of seeing in the dark, a field of view, and traits that influence combat and exploration. Many more races walk the world than these eleven; they are simply not available to you.

Vision Types

Field of View

You see what you face. Most races see a cone of 180 degrees, humans and gnomes a narrower 120, and the races of the deep dark see the full 360 with no blind spot at all. What falls outside your cone is not merely dim; it is a place an enemy can stand without your knowing.

Classes & Callings

Thirteen callings are open to you, though no single race may take them all but the human. A calling decides what you learn, what you spend to use it, and what you are for when the fighting starts.

The Three Purses

Every class spends one of three resources, and which one it is shapes the whole character.

A stamina class has no mana bar at all. Its green bar is not a lesser blue one: stamina refills the same way, and a long fight will hand back a skill you thought you had spent.

Warrior

The purest tank in the world. The highest hit points and armour, and the only calling that grows in both strength and constitution as it levels. Battle Cry boosts attack; Shield Bash adds defence; Charge closes distance and strikes; Execute finishes wounded enemies; Taunt blunts what an enemy can do to you. Spends stamina.

Monk

Unarmed master. Fights best with nothing in its hands and cannot wear heavy armour. Feign Death drops it out of a fight that has gone wrong. Spends stamina, and grows in agility.

Rogue

Burst damage from the dark. Backstab is devastating from a flank or from behind, and the longer a rogue goes unseen the wider its critical range grows: watch the sneak pips beside its health. Hides, sneaks, and picks the locks nobody else can. Spends stamina.

Paladin

Holy warrior. Lay on Hands heals to full, once per run. Carries an aura that helps everyone standing near it, and hits the undead harder than anything else does. Divine mana.

Dark Paladin

The mirror of the paladin, and no less effective for it. Harm Touch drains life once per run, and its lifetap and fear magic keep it standing when it should not be. Arcane mana. Formerly known in older notes as the Shadow Knight.

Ranger

Hunter and tracker. Dual wields, shoots better than anyone, and reads the outdoors like a page. In a party a ranger will hold its distance and put arrows into whatever is closest to killing you. Divine mana.

Bard

Twists several songs at once, buffing the party and debuffing the enemy at the same time. Charisma is its engine, which makes it the party's best haggler as a side effect. Arcane mana.

Vampire

A predatory immortal. Drains life, charms its prey, and thrives at night and underground. Daylight weakens it but does not make it helpless. Arcane mana, and agility rather than intellect as its spine.

Cleric

The complete healer, and the single most valuable member a company can carry. Its heals scale the whole way up the ladder, it can turn undead, and it can put a downed companion back on their feet where they lie. Divine mana.

Druid

Nature's guardian. Snares, transports, and hard damage spells. Fights better outdoors than in. Divine mana.

Shaman

Slow is the strongest debuff in the world, and the shaman owns it. Heavy damage over time, and buffs that last. Divine mana.

Wizard

The highest burst damage of any calling, and the thinnest skin. Evacuation and travel magic besides. Arcane mana.

Necromancer

Master of decay, with an undead servant of its own and fear enough to scatter a room. Feigns death when the servant is not enough. Arcane mana.

Attributes & Statistics

Seven attributes describe a character. They are set by race, shaped by calling, and grown every level. Everything else in this chapter is derived from them.

Derived Values

Note what is not in that table. Neither your attack bonus nor your armour class takes any account of your attributes: both are driven by level alone, on you and on everything you fight. An even match therefore stays an even match the whole way to level 60, and a fight you can win at level 5 you can still win at level 50. What your attributes change is how hard you hit, how much you can absorb, and how often you are missed entirely.

Growth

Every level, the four pool attributes (Constitution, Stamina, Wisdom and Intelligence) rise by three, and the three combat attributes (Strength, Agility and Charisma) by one. So everyone grows steadily harder to kill, whatever their calling. Whichever attribute your calling favours gains one point more than its usual rate on top of that, and the warrior is the exception worth knowing: it favours Strength and Constitution both.

At level 10, and at every tenth level after it up to 60, you are handed points to place wherever you wish.

Recovery

Health, stamina and mana all creep back on their own, in a fight as much as out of it. It is a trickle and not a lifeline, but a long fight may hand you one last skill you thought you had spent. What you are fighting mends too.

The Art of Combat

Combat is turn-based and unforgiving. Walk into an enemy to strike it. Every attack is a roll of twenty against the target's armour class, and every point of level on either side moves both numbers together.

Initiating Combat

Walking into a hostile creature attacks it. Walking into a friendly one does not: it tells you they are in your way. Should you truly mean to start something with a neutral party, a second deliberate bump will confirm it, and from that moment they are hostile and need no confirming again.

Facing and Flanking

Where you stand matters as much as what you swing. Every creature faces a direction, and so do you.

This cuts both ways, and an enemy that walks around you is doing it on purpose. It is also the whole argument for a party: three bodies can surround what one body can only face.

Critical Hits

A natural twenty is a critical hit, for double damage. Weapon mastery and a bard's songs widen that window by up to five faces of the die, so a practised hand crits on far more than a twenty. Mastery of the axe deepens the blow itself, to triple and then quadruple damage at the higher ranks. Enemies crit too, on the same terms.

Stances

One key cycles your stance, and it costs nothing to change.

Hands, Shields and Two Weapons

A weapon takes one hand or two. A two-handed weapon hits harder and leaves your off hand empty; a one-handed weapon leaves room for a shield, which is a real piece of armour and not a decoration. The Rogue, Ranger, Bard and Warrior may instead fill that hand with a second weapon, and with the Dual Wield skill learned it swings on its own roll, with its own chance to crit.

Field of View

You see a cone in the direction you face, its width set by your race. An unalerted enemy has a blind spot of its own behind it, and stepping into it is how a rogue earns its living. The member you are steering carries their equipped weapon, angled toward the edge they face, so which way you are pointing and what you are holding are the same picture. Creatures show a small mark on the edge they are watching.

Weapon Types

Weapons fall into nine families: sword, axe, polearm, piercing, blunt, slashing, ranged, shield and unarmed. Each calling is better with some than others, and practice with a family builds mastery in it, which is what widens your critical window and deepens your critical blows.

Status Effects and Traps

Poison, bleeding, burning, stun, fear, blindness and slow are all real and all temporary. Traps in the deep places apply them without warning; a rogue will see them coming, and an ultravision race is simply immune to being blinded. Fire deserves particular respect: a creature soaked in something flammable, yourself included, burns when it meets a flame, and rain will put that fire out.

Your Party in the Field

You drive one member at a time. The other two follow and fight on their own. The panel down the left shows each of them, their health, and the word DOWN or HELD in place of it when they are out of the fight.

Taking the Reins

Three keys, F1, F2 and F3, hand you any member of the company. Switching costs no time. The member you leave does not stop existing; they simply go back to following whoever now leads. If the member you take up is somewhere else in the world, you travel to them.

The Three Modes

One key cycles how the two you are not steering conduct themselves.

In Follow they are not passive. A companion will leave the line to close on whatever the company is fighting, preferring the enemy already in reach of one of you, so that three swords land on one throat rather than three separate ones. They will not wander: nothing more than five tiles from the member you are steering is considered their business, and when the fighting stops they close ranks again.

The back line knows it is the back line. A cleric, druid, shaman, wizard, necromancer or ranger will not stand and trade blows. The dark paladin, bard and vampire are melee hybrids despite their magic, and they fight in the line like anyone else. With something in its face it steps away rather than casting from inside the fight, and it throws from the room it has just bought. Cornered, it will cast from where it stands, and only with nothing left to throw at all will it resort to swinging.

Every Purse Is Their Own

Each member carries their own pack and their own coin. There is no shared bag. What one finds, one owns, and one key hands the selected item to somebody else. Sell with the member who has the highest Charisma and you will be paid more for the same sword.

When a Member Falls

At zero health a member is down, not dead. Their body stays where it fell, and anything that lifts them above zero brings them back. You have three routes:

• Heal them, if anyone in the company can.
• Pour a healing potion into them, standing beside them.
• Lift them onto your back, carry them out, and find help.

Should the member you are steering fall, the reins pass at once to somebody still standing beside you: alive, not walking as a spirit, and in the same place. If nobody in the company answers that description the reins stay where they are, and you take up whoever you want with their own key, which will travel to them wherever they are and send a downed one out as a ghost.

Switching to a downed member instead makes them a ghost at their bind point. Walk the ghost back to its body to rise at half health. A ghost passes through the living, cannot fight, and sees only the dead, and while you walk it the rest of the company waits exactly where you left them.

The body is the person. However a member is revived, they stand up at their body and not wherever their ghost had wandered to. Carrying somebody out therefore shortens their walk back, and leaving them where they fell lengthens it.

Experience Is Shared

A kill teaches the whole company, not only the hand that struck. A member who spent the fight on the floor still learns from it.

Skills & Spells

What your calling can do, it learns from a trainer and keeps in a book. Martial callings keep a skillbook; magical ones keep a spellbook; several keep both.

The Books

Open the skillbook or the spellbook to see everything you have learned, what it costs, and what it does. New entries are bought from a trainer of your calling, and every settlement of any size keeps at least one.

Hotbars

Nothing is used from the book itself. Assign it to a hotbar slot and use it from there.

The two bars are separate, so a paladin has eight skills and eight spells to hand without either crowding the other.

What They Cost

Skills are paid for out of stamina, spells out of mana, divine or arcane according to your calling. A whiffed attempt costs nothing: if the skill cannot be used, you keep the price and the turn.

Auras

The paladin, dark paladin and cleric carry auras, which are not cast so much as worn. An aura is on or it is off, it costs while it burns, and it helps or harms everyone within its radius. One key cycles which aura you have lit.

Sneak Pips

A rogue that has not been seen charges. Small pips beside its health fill the longer it stays unseen, and they widen its critical window when it finally strikes. Being seen bleeds them away again. This is why a rogue that opens a fight from the dark hits so much harder than one that walks in.

Damage Types

Spells deal fire, cold, lightning, poison, nature, arcane or divine damage, and creatures resist them unevenly. What bounced off the last thing you fought may end this one. The bestiary remembers what you have learned about each creature, and is worth consulting.

Inventory & Equipment

Every member of the company carries their own pack and their own purse. There is no shared bag, and no weight limit: what you can pick up, you can carry.

Item Actions

Note that using an item and consuming one are deliberately different keys, so that a misplaced finger cannot drink the potion you were saving.

The Interact Key

One key gathers everything you could act on, starting with the tile underfoot, then the tile you face, then everything else around you, and lists it. Talk to, trade with or train under a friendly soul. Loot a corpse, or bury it and what it carries, though a body still holding something a quest wants of you is not offered for burial until you have taken it. Lift a fallen ally onto your back, or set them down. Take a wall torch off its bracket. Close a door you opened. Opening the list is free; choosing from it costs the turn.

Materials

Weapons and armour are named for what they are made of, and the ladder is worth learning because it tells you at a glance whether a find is an upgrade. Metal runs copper, bronze, steel, darksteel, mithril and wyrmsteel. Wood, leather and cloth climb their own ladders alongside it.

Special Properties

A weapon or a piece of armour may carry a property, marked with a star in the detail panel.

Potions, Food and Tea

Healing potions climb a ladder of their own: Health, Strong, Greater, Superior and Grand. Stamina has its own line of potions, and a poured potion is how you get a fallen companion back on their feet when nobody can heal.

Teas are the patient alternative. Herbal, Bracing and Mindful restore health, stamina and mana respectively, slowly, over thirty turns. They are cheap, and drinking one before you open a door is often better economy than drinking a potion after.

Selling

Merchants buy what you have no use for, at a price bent by the seller's Charisma. Since every member keeps their own purse, it is worth walking the bard to the counter.

Light & Darkness

Light is not scenery. It is the resource that decides how far you can see, and in the deep places it is the difference between a fight you chose and a fight that chose you.

Sources of Light

Outdoors

Daylight is free. Dusk shortens your sight and night shortens it further, and what hunts at night is not what hunts at noon. Rain and storm dim the world further still, and rain will douse a burning torch outright. A lantern is hooded and does not care.

Underground

Dungeons are dark by default and stay dark. Some chambers hold their own light: braziers, glowing growth, statues that have not gone out in centuries. These are worth walking toward, and worth remembering.

Seeing Without Light

Infravision adds two tiles to what you can make out in the dark. Ultravision does away with the problem entirely, and its bearers are immune to being blinded besides. A party can be built around this: a dark elf scouting ahead of two humans is a company that needs one torch instead of three.

Fire and Liquid

Fire spreads to what will take it. A creature doused in something flammable, and that includes you, will burn when it meets a flame, and will keep burning until the fire runs out or water puts it out. Rain does the job. So does stepping into deep water, which washes a soaking off you as surely as it ruins your torch.

Locations & Travel

The world is walked, not selected from a list. Zones join at their edges, and stepping off one map puts you on the next. The world map shows you where you have been and how the pieces fit.

Getting About

Dungeons

Dungeon entrances are scattered across the world, and each descends through floors that grow steadily less forgiving. Among those you may find: the Grimstone Caverns beneath Hollowbrook, the Well of Hollowbrook, the Hollowbrook Catacombs, and the deep works below the dwarven hold. A dungeon floor is dark, populated, and does not care that you are only visiting.

A staircase sets you down on the staircase at the other end, so the way you came is always under your feet. The price of that is a step: to turn straight around you must walk off the stair and back onto it, where once a single bump would do.

Every way out leads where it looks like it leads. A place with two mouths, as the catacombs have, returns you to the one you actually climbed, and not to whichever you first came in by.

Pack Animals

A stabler will rent you an animal, and it follows the company wherever you go, dungeons included. Its saddlebags are extra pockets you did not have to carry.

Walk the animal back to the stabler alive and part of the fee is returned. Lose it in a dungeon and it is simply lost, along with everything in its bags. The donkey is slower and carries more; the horse is faster and carries less.

Deep Water

Water that is merely shallow is walked through. Deep water is a decision. You may leap it, which asks something of your Agility, or you may swim it, which asks something of your Stamina and leaves you fighting badly until you are out. Neither is free, and neither is a good idea with a fallen companion on your back.

Only the member you are steering may make the crossing. The rest of the company stops at the water and waits on the bank, however they are set: the check is yours to pass, and nobody is carried over on the strength of it. To bring the company across you take each of them in turn and cross again. A rented animal is the exception: it tries the water after you, on a roll of its own constitution, and one that fails the roll balks and waits on the bank until you come back for it.

Quests

Townsfolk have problems. The quest log holds what you have taken on, and the journal beside it records what you have learned along the way. A tracked quest shows its next step on the main screen, so you need not keep opening the log to remember why you walked all this way.

Death & the Ghost Realm

Death in Valdremoor is a setback and an errand, not an ending. Your character does not vanish and your progress is not wiped. What you lose is your position, and a great deal of walking.

The Corpse Run

A fallen member who is sent out as a ghost wakes at their bind point with the clothes they stand in. Their body, and everything on it, stays exactly where it fell. Walk the ghost back to the body to rise again at half health.

Being a Ghost

A ghost passes straight through the living and cannot be stopped by them. It also cannot fight them, and it cannot see them: the world of the living is invisible to a ghost, and only the dead are visible. What a ghost can do is fight other ghosts, by walking into them, which is occasionally necessary because the ghost realm has its own residents and some of them object to visitors.

A ghost has one skill of its own, which locates its earthly vessel. Use it when the walk has confused you, and it will.

The Bind Point

Your bind point is where you return. It is set in settlements, and moving it is worth doing before a long descent: a bind point two zones from the dungeon you are working through turns every death into an afternoon.

When Everyone Falls

If the whole company goes down at once, every member ghosts individually, each to their own bind point, each with their own body waiting where it fell. This is the worst afternoon the game has to offer, and it is survivable.

Factions & Standing

Almost everything that walks belongs to something. Factions remember what you have done to them and to their friends, and they act on it.

Standing

Your standing with each faction runs from open hostility, through wariness, to friendship. High standing opens quests, opens shops, and keeps swords in their scabbards. Low standing does the reverse, and a faction that has decided about you will attack on sight.

Standing moves when you complete work for a faction, and when you kill its members. It also moves when you kill the members of its allies and its enemies, which is the part that surprises people: doing a favour for one party in an old war is a statement to the other.

Standing Is the Company's

Reputation belongs to the party, not to the individual. You cannot send the polite one in to trade after the other two have made enemies of the town.

Your Race Precedes You

Some factions have opinions about your bloodline before you have said a word. A dark elf will find doors closed that a halfling walks straight through, and there are settlements where the reverse is true. This is worth weighing at character creation, and it is one of the arguments for a company of mixed blood.

Keybinding Reference

The game is played entirely from the keyboard. Everything below is the shipped default, and almost all of it can be rebound from the options screen, movement included. A numpad scheme is offered as a preset for those who prefer it. The fixed keys are the ones the rebinding screen itself relies on: F1 to F3, Tab, Enter and Escape.

Movement

The Company

Fighting

The World

Screens

Tips for the Wise

What follows is the accumulated advice of those who came back. It is offered in the knowledge that most of it will be learned the other way regardless.

• Buy light before you buy anything else. A party that descends without it does not descend twice.
• Use Hold at doorways. Parking the company and stepping out alone turns a room full of enemies into a queue of them.
• Fight with your back to something. Flanking works on you exactly as well as it works for you.
• Set your bind point before you descend. The walk back from the wrong bind point is longer than the dungeon.
• Carry your dead out. A body brought home is a short walk back for its owner; a body left on floor four is not.
• Let the charismatic one do the selling. Every purse is separate, so it costs nothing but a moment to hand the loot over first.
• Rest before you open the door, not after. Resting is interrupted by damage, which means it is useless once the fighting has started.
• Read the bestiary. It remembers what resisted what, which is cheaper than rediscovering it.
• Retreat is a move. Flee mode exists because one member deciding to take one more swing is what keeps a fight open while you are trying to leave.
• Watch your standing. A faction you have annoyed will remember it in a town you have not visited yet.