Training and Mastery

Almost everything a character can do — a skill, a weapon, a spell, a perk — exists on the same simple progression: untrained, trained, or Mastered. This page explains what those three states mean. For the exact numbers behind each one, see the pages linked throughout.

Untrained

You can still attempt almost anything untrained — Untold Epoch doesn’t lock actions behind training the way some systems do. An untrained character rolls a Trial with just their attribute modifier. They can still succeed. They just don’t add Prowess, and they lack the technique that makes success reliable.

Trained

Being trained in a skill, weapon, or spell means you add your Prowess to Trials involving it — see Prowess for the exact value by level. Training represents practiced technique: the difference between swinging desperately and striking with real form. You become trained through your profession, your Path, or specific perk and skill choices made during character creation and advancement.

Training is binary — you either are or aren’t. There’s no partial training, and Prowess is never added twice even if multiple sources would grant it on the same Trial.

Mastery

Mastery is the next step beyond trained, and it works differently from what you might expect: it is never a bigger number. Mastering something always means gaining a new use, technique, or capability — not more damage, not a higher bonus.

This is a strict two-step progression:

• Base (Rank 1): You’re trained. You can do the thing, adding Prowess as normal.
• Mastery (Rank 2): You can do it better, differently, or in a situation others can’t. A new effect or technique — not a bigger number.

There is no Rank 3. Mastery is the ceiling for any single skill, spell, weapon, or perk. This keeps the system from escalating endlessly — depth comes from having many things trained and a few things Mastered, not from stacking one thing indefinitely.

Not everything has a defined Mastery. Mastery only exists where a genuinely new capability makes sense to express — see Skill Trial’s Skill Mastery section and Perks’ Perk Mastery section for how Mastery is actually acquired (both go through the perk system, as a deliberate choice with a real opportunity cost). The one exception is Extra Mastery, a free Mastery granted automatically at level 7 — see /professions/overview.md.

Why “Trained” and “Mastery,” Not “Level”

Only characters have levels. Everything else — skills, spells, perks, features — uses Rank instead, specifically to avoid confusion between a character’s level and a thing’s progression. See the Glossary for how Rank relates to Tier, which tracks something different entirely (a spell’s own power, not how well you’ve trained in it).