Everything in Mortmain is an object with an owner, a weight and a price. There are no rewards that exist only on your sheet, and almost nothing is unique. If you have it, somebody made it or pulled it out of the ground, and somebody else can too.
| Slot | Takes |
|---|---|
| Main hand | a weapon |
| Off hand | a weapon or a shield |
| Two-handed | a weapon that occupies both hands, melee or ranged |
| Head | helms, hoods, circlets |
| Body | armour |
| Hands | gauntlets and gloves |
| Feet | boots |
| Cloak and back | what hangs off you |
| Neck and finger | amulets and rings |
| Tool | the implement your profession works with |
| Mount, vehicle, cargo | what carries you and what you carry |
You can equip anything. Nothing checks your class at the moment you put it on. What you do not have proficiency in carries the ordinary penalties: no proficiency bonus on attacks with a weapon you were never trained for, and in unfamiliar armour, disadvantage on the physical rolls and no spellcasting at all.
Quality is how well the thing was made, and it is rolled rather than chosen: the crafter's skill, plus a d20, plus the grade of the material they started with. The same recipe in two pairs of hands gives two different swords.
Six grades: Crude, Common, Fine, Superior, Masterwork and Relic. Each is better than the last, in what it does and what it fetches.
A natural 20, or work far beyond what the recipe asked for, bumps the grade and can leave something on the item nobody planned. Relics are not crafted at all; they come out of the old world in the Marches.
Rarity is a different axis from quality. It sets an item's inherent power and how many runes it will hold.
| Rarity | Power | Rune slots | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mundane | base | 0 | vendors, basic crafting |
| Uncommon | + | 1 | good materials, shallow drops |
| Rare | ++ | 2 | dungeon drops, high materials |
| Epic | +++ | 3 | deep dungeons, bosses |
| Legendary | ++++ | 4 | world bosses and named drops |
| Relic | unique | special | old world finds |
The two stack. A Masterwork Rare and a Common Rare are not the same sword. An inherent +1, +2 or +3 on an item is separate again, and never eats a rune slot.
Gear wears with use and takes damage in a fight. At zero durability an item is broken. Unusable or penalised until somebody repairs it, and repair costs materials and coin.
Your gear takes durability damage when you die, whether or not anybody was there to loot you. A repair kit patches a worn item in the field for less than a smith charges, and does a worse job of it.
The largest category in the game by count. Five tiers, T1 to T5, across six chains. Higher tiers sit behind skill, membership and dangerous ground.
| Chain | T1 | T2 | T3 | T4 | T5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metal | copper | iron | steel | Sundersteel | relic alloy |
| Leather | light hide | medium hide | thick hide | warped hide | relic bound |
| Cloth | linen | wool | silk | eldritch thread | — |
| Wood | softwood | hardwood | ironwood | bloodwood | — |
| Reagent | common herbs | potent herbs | rare reagents | Sunshard dust | relic essence |
| Monster | hide and bone | fang and sinew | cores | warped essence | boss trophies |
Two inputs sit outside the chains. Sunshard is crystallised light, mined in the Marches. Sunsalt is what an Arcanist refines it into, and it is the fuel an arcane caster burns to cast.
Runes are the enchantment layer. They slot into gear at an enchanter's bench and fill the slots your item's rarity gave it. A rune never adds raw attack or damage. That space belongs to the inherent bonus.
| Family | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ward | resistance to a damage type |
| Ward, building-scale | a barrier with its own hit point pool, or an area that negates one damage type outright |
| Edge | a rider that fires on a hit |
| Bearing | a bonus to a stat or a save |
| Labor | raises what a profession produces |
| Carry | utility, including how much you can haul |
| Hold | stops a thing changing over time. Cold storage that does not warm |
| Hearth | keeps a thing running untended. A fire that does not go out, a light that does not |
Hold and Hearth are what a cold room is built around. Enchanting is not only a fighter's trade.
Three rungs per family: Lesser, Greater, Master. The rung sets how strong the rune is and how much Sunshard it costs. Any rung fits any slot. Rarity caps how many slots you have, never what goes in them. Not every family is finished to the top rung yet.
Slotting always works. It costs a bench fee, and the rune then rides with the item wherever it goes.
Pulling a rune back out can fail. It consumes a drawing kit and rolls against the skill of whoever is doing it: worst odds working on your own with no Enchanting, better if you are skilled, best at a licensed enchanter's bench. On a failure the rune is destroyed and the item is not.
A building-scale ward is the one that gets used up. Its pool takes damage of any type and the ward breaks when the pool is gone. A caster who is present can reinforce it mid-fight.
Maldora and the Scholar cities require a magic license to sell enchanting work.
Materials, consumables, ammunition and coin stack. Equipment, quest items and relics do not. Every sword is its own row with its own durability and its own runes.
| Class | Examples | On a death |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary | gear, goods, materials | lootable |
| Special | special equipment, a bag of holding | durability damage only, never lost |
| Quest | an active quest object | lootable, and never tradeable |
| Charters | guild contracts | not traded at all; the Curia issues them and can revoke them |
| Property | shops, halls, workshops, deeds | protected, everywhere |
Property, deeds, charters and your character sheets are never at risk. Not in any fight, in any regime, against anyone. What you can lose is what you were carrying when you lost.
Some things stop being items when you install them. A cold room sunk into a cellar is a fixture: it belongs to the building rather than to your pack, it cannot be taken off you, and it comes back out as a portable object if you uninstall it. Fire is the one thing that takes a fixture.
Monsters drop them on a curve. The ground yields materials to anyone who gathers. Professions turn one thing into another, and vendors sell the basics. Nothing in the store sells you an item that affects power. See Membership & Store.
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