Skills and Magic in Covenant & Empire

16 Aug, 2025

My life has been pretty hectic, but somehow I persist and find time to pick away at this.

Since my announcement last time that I was officially working on a variant of Worlds Without Number I've been hard at work adapting my various ideas to fit the character generation concept in the blog post that started this all Initially, I had wanted to keep the 2d6 resolution of WWN, but that just was not working out. I tried several variations, but with three tiers of starting classes the bonuses made more sense to be based around 10 point increments granting +1 each, which made 2d6 seem really silly, as that would make for a bonus of +9 on average.

Skills at Character Creation

At character creation, two skills can be selected to be primary skills, which gives them a score of 30. These are the character's main things that they can do, so a mage would want at least one to be a magic skill, a warrior would want one type of weapon, etc. The player can choose three secondary skills, which begin at 20 - this is where the character concept can expand a little; your mage can use bladed weapons, your warrior a little bit of magic, and so on. Lastly, characters get four tertiary skills which have no bonus and any other skills begin at rank 0 and have a penalty of -1. This concept of a skill beginning at +0 makes a lot of sense in a game with two dice for resolution.

Here's a table:

Dice

Then I had to think -- which dice did I want to use? Immediately I thought of 2d10, after all it was what Socratic-DM suggested when I reached out on Discord about this idea. Briefly I considered using a d100, roll-under mechanic, but there were several considerations that prevented me from doing so. First, setting a target number allows me to call for a check and be granular in a way that I don't think is possible with static targets. Second, there is a certain DnD culture¹ around the "DC." It creates a certain drama that you don't quite get with penalties or bonuses to a static target number. I also thought about the fact that I've run WWN twice at a convention now and a few times in one-shot sessions and in both circumstances there have been people with only one set of polyhedrals, which makes rolling 2d6 difficult because you have to do something cumbersome like rolling a d6 twice or borrowing someone else's, but just about every polyhedral dice set will come with a d10 and percentile -- in other words, another d10. Finally, using 2d10 means that my friends can go back to exclaiming "Nat 20!" Which they love to do. When I was seemingly settling down with WWN, I had suggested "boxcars" for a natural 12 as "Natural 12!" just doesn't roll off the tongue the same. But boxcars didn't, either.

Difficulty

With the resolution decided, I wanted to make a table for myself to quickly decide on how to set a DC. Following WWN as an example, but taking into consideration that the average bonus of characters in Covenant & Empire would be a little higher, this is what I went with:

11 is, of course, the average roll, but most PCs will have at least a +1 in secondary skills. Thinking back to how I run, I mostly call for checks in the (WWN) range of 7-9, so easy-medium to medium-hard. My general philosophy is to not call for a check until I'm absolutely certain that there's a chance of failure -- i.e., I let a lot of things that players say just happen. I don't really see the point in calling for a check if they have a torch lit and say they search for traps. If a turn is ten minutes, then that is a lot of time to be looking at a segment of hallway, and I check for encounters every three turns...That said, if a player just says "I check for traps" then I have them roll an easy check and describe it to them. If they say how they check, there is probably not a check at all -- they either find it or they don't. I know some people, like the wise Ben Milton, say to just lay traps out in the open but I like a simple tripwire sometimes. With all that in mind, I set medium checks at 14, hard at 17, and the really impressive feats at 21 and superhuman accomplishments at 24. There's only a 1% chance of rolling a 20 with no modifier, and I'm half of the opinion that I want to include some kind of critical success/failure mechanic because of that. That said, with the higher possible bonuses in C&E, and my ideas about when and how to call for a check, setting the harder DCs that high is reasonable.

Altering Skill Check Outcomes

Something that comes up a lot at my table is players wanting to assist in a skill check. I haven't necessarily had a problem with skill-dogpiles because I typically try to explain a failure as some kind of circumstance that makes it impossible to attempt without being beyond the skill level of the PC that failed. Either that, or I'll just use whatever help rules exist. But a lot of my friends like to have their PCs help in some way. I think the WWN help rules are a bit...bloated. If they're just helping in some simple way² I'm going to just grant a +1, no matter how many of them help out. Or maybe it could be that for every two additional helpers there's an additional +1, because getting a whole village to push a door should be different from one person helping. A more complicated way of helping will require a skill check, though, and success means the initial check is made with 3d10, keeping the higher two dice. This does somewhat go against my earlier statement of wanting players to be able to use only one set of dice...but if a PC is getting help then the game has already slowed way down - and it would be thematic for the helping player to lend their comrade their extra d10.

Opposing a skill check is just the standard procedure - each rolls the applicable check, highest wins. PCs always win ties.

The Skill List

I thought long and hard about what skills should be in the game. This is mostly based on the Daggerfall skill list, with some additions that I feel are necessary in a tabletop fantasy game. Generally, I wanted them to be rather narrow as opposed to WWN's very broad skills, so I went ahead and gave each a specific attribute that modifies checks made with that skill. There's a bit of worldposting ahead, so be forewarned.

Things like Dodging, Critical Strike, Swimming, and Climbing got either lumped in with other skills or are handled by other mechanics like Armor Class. Shoutout to the Physical Combat And Armor Overhaul mod, but I want some DnD genes in my game still, so AC is dodging and not damage reduction. The speech skills are generally self explanatory, but I decided which attribute to be assigned to a language based on a little bit of research. In my game, the human cultures are based on hypothetical speakers of reconstructed languages; this lets players play whoever they want to represent them without me going in and using tropes about any specific, modern day group of people. I did some research to try and understand how the cultures descended from these prehistoric people groups perceive less-than-perfect speakers of their language and went off of that. So in some cultures of my game setting, if you're charismatic enough they'll forgive the wrong verb tense or noun gender but others will forgive your foreign mannerisms if your vocabulary and pronunciation are flawless.³ Tenevric, on the other hand, is basically the "monster taming" skill. Most of the monsters in my games are either from other worlds or the discarded genetic experiments of planar outsiders. I reinterpreted Streetwise and Etiquette somewhat from their Daggerfall incarnations, and also incorporated a separate Speechcraft skill because I think it makes sense for there to be separation from knowing which fork is which and being able to express your ideas clearly. This, of course, is all separate from Leadership, which I may find that I'll have to break out into several other skills.⁴ While the skill list is quite long, players get their pick of nine skills. As skills are the only way to level up, access to them should be gated somewhat. Speaking of levelling up.

Skill Advancement and Increasing Level

I don't have much to add here. As the game progresses over the course of the night, I will make note of three skills that were used successfully. The player rolls a d100, and if they roll higher than their current skill rank they gain 1 point in that skill. As stated in the original post, for every 10 points gained in a primary or secondary skill that character gains +1 XP. It's an elegant system and, most importantly, it works like TES. My only qualm is that I had developed an XP system based on 3d6 DTL's "Feats of Exploration" mixed with WotC's old Unearthed Arcana, Three-Pillar XP. I may bring this back in some way to make a system out of giving out feats/foci/specialties/perks or whatever I end up calling them. For simplicity's sake, I'll set a level cap at 10. As for domain play, I'm not sure how exactly I want to incorporate it. Seeing as levelling is slower than normal, giving out a fief at level 3 to enterprising players would make sense.

Magic

As you can see in the skill table, magic in Covenant & Empire is simply another skill. There are four schools of magic, each of which is its own skill: Animancy, Invocation, Mysticism, and Thaumaturgy. Spells have a magnitude score representing their general power and complexity. A grimoire has a maximum magnitude equal to its creator's intelligence attribute. Some origins get a modifier to their arcana or some way to augment it, making them better at casting spells. There are also magical means of expanding the arcana available to you.

You gain 2 spells for every magic skill you choose for your primary skills and 1 for every secondary magic skill. You can inscribe new spells as long as you have not exceeded your grimoire's magnitude, otherwise you must create spell scrolls, a new grimoire, or find some way to add new pages to your grimoire. You do not learn new spells when you level up - they can only be acquired through play, whether by being found or by paying a tutor or serving under a master. Succeeding on a magic skill check while learning a new spell reduces the time by 1d6 days, otherwise it takes a full week. Before a casting can even be attempted, the prospective mage must have their grimoire readied and in the process of casting the spell the mage expends arcana - the energy required to use magic - and physically reaches out to grab the spell. Much like items, spells are can be readied or "stowed" - in this case, they are "known." A mage can ready a number of spells equal to half their Intelligence or Charisma; readying or changing a spell can be done as an On-turn action. The spell must be physically held in one hand, which appears as a harmless visual effect to the unaided eye. A character's arcana is equal to their charisma score + character level and any other bonus they may have. Spells have an arcana cost equal to their magnitude, which is reduced by -1 per every 10 points in the relevant magic skill. Once the arcana has been expended, the mage makes a skill check against a difficulty corresponding to the spell's rank. If the casting is successful, the spell functions as it is described. If not, the arcana is spent and the spell does not take hold. Arcana regenerates at a rate of 1d6 + character level per turn.

Some spells will require Effort to be committed. Your character's effort is equal to their their intelligence modifier + their character level. This score is a measure of a character's inner mental focus and energy, while arcana is that character's Esoteric power.

I think this system overall is pretty intuitive. I took inspiration from Mythras Imperative for how I wanted magic to fail, which feels very Daggerfall/Morrowind to me. It might make casting a little clunky, but I have a few ideas about how to mitigate that -- namely, making spells do less overall since a magic-user can cast at least a few given their arcana reserves are of at least average size.

Spells

I haven't really sat down to think about spells quite yet. I'm not sure if I want them to be like a standard AD&D spell that does something a little more than throwing bolts of fire around, or if I want to go in on TES-inspiration and make magic rather straightforward. Yes, you can get up to some shenanigans with Drain Attribute and Fortify Attribute but that's really...video game-like. I want the vibe of the game, not its jank.

Kevin Crawford's advice on magic spells is summarized thus:

• Spells should not offer simple numeric bonuses.

• Spells should not offer cheap and easy combat damage.

• Spells should not create permanent magical effects or valuable matter.

• Spells that buff a target shouldn’t last more than a [turn].

• Spells should not be petty.

I generally agree. I might take WWN's Hurlants and turn them into spells of varying circles and provide them some effect to make them distinct from firearms. Further, I'm now looking at my Birthsigns and thinking I should revise them...again...to be that slight numeric bonus that would be missing from magic, just to free up some design space. That being said, these maxims were written with the assumption that a mage would cast two spells a day at first level, when mine can cast as little as four or as many as six depending on their arcana reserves. But, to be honest, spells can easily be tweaked. For now, I'm focusing on the larger systems of the game and I think I'm off to a good start.

Conclusion

I've been in a bit of a hex-keying slump lately, but recently got back into it after discovering a few cool adventures with many locations. I haven't talked about it in some time, but my hexmap has over 800 hexes⁵ to be keyed and I'm only a third of the way through that. If you know of any cool adventure locations or modules that I can put in my game, let me know! I'm working on an Obsidian database where I'm linking all the keyed adventures together. Planning on making my own, too, once I feel I've exhausted my current library. I'm still posting these a little behind my actual work. I've been thinking over combat lately, and though my initial draft is just an attempt to put the ideas all down to paper and make them roughly fit together, I'm also thinking about what role player information has. Does the player need to know about how the system functions outside of their actual character sheet? I'm not sure. I know the Alexandrian has some posts on this topic, but if there are any other good ones out there let me know. For now, I'll keep hammering away at this project. If you have some ideas, feel free to pierce the veil of Strages and find me on Discord⁶ or comment/DM me on Bluesky. Until next time, keep your eyes on the skies.

Footnotes