Skills, Career, and Culture

Standard Skills
Standard skills are common; everyone knows how to do these things to some degree. They're still highly useful, but they do not require specialized training or education - everyone starts with base values for all Standard skills.

Professional Skills
Professional skills are more specialized, generally requiring training through a career or other background. Characters only have Professional skills that they choose during character creation, or are trained in during play.

Culture (where characters come from, their customs and social norms) and career (their professional training) may have an influence on which skills a Character has. Work with your Game Runner to choose a culture and career.

There are two ways to choose skills when creating a character in Casus Mus:

The Skill Pyramid (faster)
Skills can be chosen freestyle. A career may be used as a guideline for skills if desired.

Detailed Culture, Career, and Skill Allocation (good for developing a backstory)
Choice of skills is guided by the character's cultural and career.

Whichever method is used to choose skills, it is recommended that at least one Combat Style be chosen as part of the character's skills, and if a Character is a spell caster, one or more of the Magic skills should be chosen.

Culture and Careers on The Hill

Mice on the Central Hill are Civilized and tend to be Farmers, Crafters/Artisans, Soldiers (of the Central Hill Legion), Herders (of various insect flocks), or Bankers (Officials). There's some Scholars, Politicians, Physicians, and Merchants.

Mice on the Western Hill are Civilized and tend to be Hunters, Scouts, or Soldiers (of the Western Hill Legion, the Rangers). There's some Bounty Hunters, Merchants/Traders, and Brigands (Thief).

Mice on the Eastern Ridge are all members of the Church of the Great Hawk - they're Civilized, and most are Farmers or Crafters/Builders/Metalsmiths. Some are Priests of the Church, who are to be feared.

Not much is known of the Eastern Hill forests.

The Skill Pyramid

For convenience and rapid Character creation, use the Skill Pyramid method detailed here.

The Skill Pyramid divides 350 points into four levels of pre-chosen skill values:

It can be visualized as a pyramid:

    40 40
 30 30 30 30
20 20 20 20 20
10 10 10 10 10

16 individual skills are chosen, using the breakdown above.

• All points from the pyramid must be used
• Only one allocation should be used per skill
• Native Language and Customs receive +40% automatically; other allocations can be made as desired
• No Skill can be made to be over 80%
• Five of the allocations must go to Professional skills
• Career/culture can be chosen normally; players may use those sets of skills for allocation or choose freely
• Remember to calculate base values for each skill before you allocate points to it
• Remember to calculate base values for all Standard skills, whether you allocate points to them or not

See the tables below or the section on Skills for starting values.

Detailed Culture, Career, and Skill Allocation

The Skill point pool comes from three sources:

Culture
Characters grow up within a culture, and it shapes their development. Cultural lifestyles, religious practices, traditions, etc. lead to a commonly used set of skills. Culture provides training in both Standard and Professional skills.

Career
Career or profession is naturally a significant source of training or practice in skills. Career provides training in Professional skills, but also in those Standard skills that are relevant to a career.

Bonus
Every character gets a bonus pool of skill points that can be allocated across existing/already chosen skills. The idea is that a character isn't just where they come from and what their profession is; they also have interests and hobbies, and these lead to more Standard and Professional skills.

Detailed Skill Allocation Steps

1. Choose a Culture (On the Hill, you'll be Civilized). Distribute 100 Skill Points as described.
2. Choose a Career. Distribute 100 Skill Points as described.
3. Distribute 150 Skill Points across any skills that already have points allocated from the previous steps.

• No skill should be allocated points more than once per step
• No skill should be made to be over 80%
• Remember to calculate base values for each skill before you allocate points to it
• Remember to calculate base values for all Standard skills, whether you allocate points to them or not

See the tables below or the section on Skills for starting values.

Standard and Professional Skills

See Skills for detailed descriptions of skills.

Standard Skills

Professional Skills

Based on Mythras Imperative, Written by Pete Nash and Lawrence Whitaker, and published by The Design Mechanism, Copyright 2023.

Material on this site not covered by other ownership or copyright statements is Copyright © 2024 Robert Prince.