Knowledge#
Without knowing, you live blind to whoever does. All making and all unmaking start with understanding.
The rode of the studied mind. It raises your intelligence, and with it your spells and your eye for what an item is and what a task needs.
Ranks and tests#
Each rank adds to your intelligence: +1 INT at rank 1, up to +5 INT at rank 5. The bonus sits on top of your score and isn’t held to the maximum training can reach. Rodes of the self has the rest of its kind.
- Level20Rank 1: Initiate
+1 INT
Read three books in Valkez's library and teach him one thing from each that he'd forgotten.
- Level40Rank 2: Walker
+2 INT
Name an unknown item and where it came from before the master tells you.
- Level60Rank 3: Keeper
+3 INT
Find a book Valkez has been looking for since before you were born.
- Level80Rank 4: Warden
+4 INT
Solve something the scholars of Karthage gave up on.
- Level100Rank 5: Exemplar
+5 INT
Write something Valkez will put on his own shelf.
The master#
Yendor Valkez keeps a library in Karthage that nobody has seen all of. He lends books on one condition: you come back knowing something he doesn’t.
Find Yendor Valkez at his library in Karthage, in New Saellem. Where the masters teach maps all fourteen.
How it shows#
None of this changes a roll. It’s how the people around you can tell what you walk, if you want them to.
- When you cast, the world slows in a small bubble around you, dust hanging in the air.
- You read anything with words on it: labels, signs, other people’s letters.
Who walks it#
The classes the rode does the most for. Any class can walk it.
Gravedigger
Intelligence is a gravedigger's primary score, the one every skill it uses adds. The rode takes it past where training stops.
Mageling
Intelligence is a mageling's primary score, the one every skill it uses adds. The rode takes it past where training stops.
Elementalist
Intelligence backs an elementalist's strength. The rode takes it past where training stops.
Hermit
Intelligence backs a hermit's wisdom. The rode takes it past where training stops.
Priest
Intelligence backs a priest's charisma. The rode takes it past where training stops.
The rode finder ranks every rode for a class.
What others say#
Valkez lent me a book on tides. I came back with a ship.
Knowledge walkers never stop asking questions. Sometimes the answer is that the room is on fire.
The overdue book
A book Yendor Valkez lent out forty years ago has turned up in a dealer’s stall in Crecia, and he wants it back. The borrower is dead, the dealer has sold it twice since, and the last buyer is reading it to find out why so many people want it.
