Charters: the direction so far
TCM is the skill system: twenty-two trades, Untrained to Grandmaster, practice logged through the day and settled overnight. Charters is the part that was missing from it, which is other people. This page is where the design stands as of 10 September. All of it is design; none of it is code yet, and nothing on the server changes today.
Guild is the law's word. Company is the workshop's.
A master ran a shop and trained the next ones
You found a Company at Master I, on the way up, and growing it is how you become a Grandmaster.
Not a reward for arriving. The road.
A charter is the document that founds a guild. The institution it founds was called a Company in English, which is also the older sense of the word: people keeping company while they work. Both meanings are doing work here.
In TCM, Grandmaster was always meant to be a declared ascension rather than a number you cross. You take a commission, make a masterwork, hand it over, and you lose the piece. But that is only half of what a master actually was. A master was not somebody who had practiced a great deal. A master was somebody who ran a shop and trained the next ones.
- Teaching is the economy. An apprentice working beside you banks practice faster, and what they bank mirrors into your teaching ledger, which discounts what you owe at your own ascension. It never zeroes it. You have to be present and working yourself; a hall does not pay an absent master.
- Breadth beats headcount. A Company's standing counts the distinct trades it has raised somebody to Journeyman in, not how many members it has. Five smiths score one. A smith, a forester and a tailor score three.
- The roll. Every Company keeps a public ledger of everyone it taught. Graduates carry "formerly of [hall]" until they found their own, and the old hall records that one of its own went out. Halls end up with lineages.
- The best tools cannot be made alone. A tool is a head, a handle and a binding, each carrying the quality of whoever made that part. Nobody masters more than two trades in a lifetime, so a full masterwork wants three people, and a hall is where the three of them are.
Hands remember. Minds must be taught.
A class is who you were, not who you are
Character creation stops asking what you are, and asks who you were before this incarnation.
Born with a constitution, never with knowledge
Charters is taking over classes. The class you pick becomes a past life: it says what came easily to your hands once, and it starts you ahead in those trades. What it no longer does is hand you a private recipe list on day one. A past life grants a constitution at birth: what comes easily to your hands, how your body carries the trade, what it will never manage. It grants no knowledge. Every recipe, workstation and method a trade keeps to itself is earned in this life. Always.
The concepts and classes come from Specialized Classes, recycled into this system with quilladile's blessing, and reworked along one hard rule: a class exclusive must add something to the world, never shortcut past the world's own gates. If a recipe lets a class skip a progression step everyone else has to earn, it gets rebuilt or dropped. Credit to Vinni for pushing hard on exactly this.
Since this page first went up, the rule has gone one step harder. Every past life will be the best in the world at exactly one thing and unable to do exactly one thing, and both halves will be real mechanics you can feel, not percentages on a character sheet. The strength and the inability are a pair: one is the price of the other. The Vintner, further down this page, is the first life built to the rule.
Heritage · the kits
Knowledge with a lineage
Recipes, workstations, the ways of a trade. You either know one or you don't, and it reaches you through a person.
- Taught by someone with the right to teach it
- Unlocks at a rank floor: knowledge waits for hands that are ready
- Or read from a written work, slower and harder
Depth · the familiarity
Knowledge from the work itself
What you learn from the crops you grew and the metal you worked. Earned by doing, personal to you.
- Anyone who knows it deeply can give you a head start
- A head start is all teaching gives: depth is lived, never handed over
- Two masters of the same trade still trade knowledge, because no one lives long enough to work everything
The one thing teaching can never move is rank itself. Hands are trained, not given.
First is a fact, not a rank.
Forerunners are earned, not picked
An earlier version of this page had Forerunner seats claimed at character creation, first come first served. That model is gone, and what replaced it is better. You become a past life's Forerunner by being the first on the server to reach Master in one of the trades favored by that life, through ordinary play. Nobody can squat on a seat, because the seat cannot be held by anyone who has not lived the trade.
The seat is recognition, not power. Anyone of the line who reaches Master in a favored trade can teach it. The Forerunner is simply the first: they keep the title, and the Annals keep their name across every season and wipe afterward. At character creation the game tells you plainly whether a life's seat is already taken, and there is no scoreboard of who is close. The race runs in the world, not on a ticker.
Teaching itself is a working session, not a menu. Master and learner stand at the master's own station and make one piece together, both present start to finish. After it, the knowledge is yours, and each part of the kit wakes as your own rank reaches its floor. Teaching what you have not practiced yourself stays impossible at any rank.
And one server setting decides how strict the whole system is. On the open setting, anyone who picked the life can reach the full kit alone, slowly, with teachers and books as the fast road. On the strict setting, knowledge moves only through teaching or a surviving book, and an art really can be lost for a season. The Quire's own default is being settled by a poll on the Discord.
Paper burns. The Annals do not.
Knowledge survives its holder only if written
A Forerunner can set their knowledge down as a written work: a physical block in the world, written in-game through Illuminated, read where it stands. A book teaches in the author's absence, at a higher rank floor than a living hand would ask. A season has no books until somebody takes the time to write one.
And books are not protected. They can be destroyed. They can be stolen, and a stolen book still teaches wherever it ends up. A line whose Forerunner is gone and whose writings are ash is an art lost to time, until the world sends the memory again: depending on server rules, an abandoned line's seat can reopen for a new soul at character creation. The Annals remember every first name regardless, across seasons and wipes. History survives; standing does not.
First
The read
Each life opens with one narrow perception nobody else has: a thing only this trade can see. Earned early, never handed out at creation.
Second
Use
Work at the trade's stations and benefit from its methods. An untaught hand at a foreign station still works, badly: waste, spoilage, slow going, and the failure says why. A ruined batch teaches better than a locked door.
Third
The methods
The trade's improved recipes, taught and then earned at their rank floor.
Last
Construction
Build the workstations and make the exclusive pieces yourself. The deepest gate, and the last one a line opens to you. What a line makes, anyone may buy and use; only the making is theirs.
The no's are the design.
What it deliberately does not do
- No guild levels, no perk tree, no guild-only recipes, no gating of ordinary content behind membership. A Company makes work cheaper, better taught and better remembered. It never holds the only key to anything.
- No class ever gets a cheaper path around a gate everyone else has to earn. Exclusives add; they do not skip.
- No computed identity. The game never tallies your ranks and tells you what you are. You declare what you go by, and the marks on your work are the proof.
- The solo road to Grandmaster stays real, if brutal.
- A past life is permanent. The Quire will honor one character reset per player, ever, and it is an admin matter, not a menu option.
Still being argued, honestly: what combat styles look like as a trade's heritage; whether another life's exclusive goods show in your handbook before you have ever held one; and exactly how much of what a master knows can be passed in a lesson before it stops being teaching and starts being magic.
The lives, as they finish
Each past life goes through a slow design pass, one at a time: its favored trades, its gift, its price, its ladder, and what it inherits from Specialized Classes, kept, reworked or dropped. Pick a life below.
Locked means the design is settled. Numbers, recipes and exact floors are build work, and none of this is code yet.
Where this came from
The original push for Charters came from Thalius, and the apprentice-learns-faster-beside-a-master idea is his. The classes and their concepts are quilladile's, from Specialized Classes, recycled here with her blessing. Vinni's pass on what class recipes do to the game's difficulty curve set the curation rule. JuiceFruit argued the teaching model into better shape in one afternoon, including the point that even grandmasters should have gaps worth trading over.
Status: design written up, zero lines of code. Charters will depend on TCM and Illuminated, and the class work lands with a season wipe, not before. Happy to argue about any of it; the Forerunner seats especially.