Starting Specialties¶
Blitz Eternal: Adventures Beyond the Mists — v0.3 Draft¶
Every Character begins play with 3 Advancement Points to spend before the first session, drawn from a short menu specific to their Class rather than the full Advancement list. This gives a new Character real flavor to lean into without asking a new player to weigh every option in the book.
Starting Specialty is a one-time creation choice made before the Level ladder begins at Level 2. It is not folded into or replaced by the Level system.
Guild entry is never on this menu. A Character begins Guildless by design (see character-creation, Advancement); that stays true regardless of how the starting 3 points are spent.
What This Menu No Longer Does¶
Dice-granting options were removed from this menu on 2026-07-31. They are not deferred or pending; they are gone.
Under the retired freeform economy, this menu was how a Character reached the "typically 2 personal dice" baseline: six of the eight Classes had a bonded companion here adding a die at Untrained. The Level restructure moved personal dice onto a fixed, non-purchasable schedule specifically so that raw power could not compete with Bond, Guild entry, and traits for the same currency. Leaving a die on the starting menu would have reopened exactly that competition at creation, and would have contradicted the 1-personal-die Level 1 baseline every class's Level math is built on.
The companions themselves were not thrown away. Guardian Spirit, Falconry, Warhound, Familiar, A Palfrey, and A Hunting Hound now serve as the flavor of a Class's first additional personal die, granted automatically at the Level its own table names. See bonded-companions.md.
A Character begins play with 1 personal die. Full stop. That is the baseline the whole roster is calibrated against.
The Menu As It Stands¶
Updated: the per-Class Level 1 Starting Specialties menus now live in each class file, and menu entries are priced on the standard Specialty tiers (see character-creation, Advancement, and specialty-tiers-and-pricing.md). The two options below predate that system. They are kept as the original two models to build the rest from; both are now ordinary priced entries on their Class menus rather than the only survivors.
Errant — Never Alone¶
3 points (Tier 3). Once per adventure, if this Character would Fall with no Company, no Squire, and no ally to catch them, a debt from the road is called in. Someone the Errant once helped, or once owed, appears just in time to carry them from the field. The Fall and its cost (a Life) still apply as normal; only the Falling Alone consequence, the player having no fallback at all, is softened.
Chancellor — Extended Command¶
3 points (Tier 3). Split Cap rises from 2 to 3 immediately, letting a third Detachment act in a turn instead of two. This is the same Split Cap increase already noted as the Chancellor's natural advancement in companies-and-command, made available from the start.
Still to Build¶
The per-Class menus are being filled and finalized class by class in the class files. Where a class file's menu is still thin, closing it is the remaining work; Never Alone and Extended Command below are the templates. Tracked in open-questions.
Each Class needs 5 to 8 options. Likely categories, none of which touch personal dice:
- Armor, as extra Hit Points.
- Retainer Bond, starting one Retainer above Bond 0.
- Class-specific abilities in the vein of Never Alone and Extended Command, which are the two models to build from since they are the two that were designed under this constraint from the start.
- Skills, if a creation-time Skill is judged distinct enough from an ordinary Advancement purchase.
- Archetype gear flavor, such as the Named Bow variant granting movement rather than a die, floated in the Ranger's notes and never built.
Tracked in open-questions.
Note: fighting with two one-handed weapons is the Twin Blades Kit, chosen free at creation. It no longer grants a die; see kits.md. A Named Weapon remains a 3-point Advancement purchase, not a starting option.