Part Two: The Rules
Chapter Seventeen: Advancement
Part Two: The Rules
"The Codex does not grade intentions. It records what you practiced until it became true."
A Profession is what you have been trained to do. Trainings are the training.
Each Profession contains ten Trainings, and each Training conveys a specific, permanent capability: a sharpened skill, a bent rule, a technique nobody outside your Profession can perform. You choose them in any order. There is no required path and no required count. Two Personas holding the same Profession can be built so differently that they only recognize each other by the oath, and that is by design.
This chapter explains how Trainings are acquired, how they grow, how Titles are earned, and how a Persona reaches beyond their Profession's walls.
Acquiring Trainings
Story Points are the currency of growth. Every new Persona begins character creation with 100 Story Points to spend, and earns more through play once the story starts.
| Purchase | Cost |
|---|---|
| A Profession | 10 SP (includes your first Training in it, free) |
| Each additional Training | 4 SP |
| Upgrading a Training's die one step | target level × 2 SP (d6 costs 4, d8 costs 6, d10 costs 8, d12 costs 10) |
| Raising a Skill | target level × 2 SP |
| Raising a Trait | target level × 3 SP |
Trainings can be taken in any order, but some carry prerequisites: a minimum Trait or Skill score, stated at the front of the Training's description. Prerequisites are not gates for gating's sake. They are the Codex's way of saying that some techniques cannot live in a body that has not yet been built to hold them.
Roughly half of any Profession's Trainings are available the day you qualify for the Profession itself. The rest demand escalating investment, and the final two, the Capstones, demand that you have genuinely built your Persona around this work.
The Four Kinds of Training
Every Profession's ten Trainings follow the same anatomy: three Core Skill Boosters, three Mechanic Modifiers, two Signature Abilities, two Capstones.
Core Skill Boosters are your bread and butter. Each grants a Training die (starting at d4, upgradeable to d12) to a specific Skill in a specific context: the Knight's shield-work, the Scout's pathfinding, the Witch's Sight. These are the techniques you use every session, and the ones most worth upgrading.
Mechanic Modifiers bend the resolution engine itself. A reroll where none existed. A rule that stops applying to you. A cost someone else pays instead. This is where Personas of the same Profession begin to diverge.
Signature Abilities are the techniques nobody else gets. The Bounty Hunter's Locked On. The Wondermancer's Machina Strike. The Assassin's Mark. When another Persona watches you use one, they are learning what your Profession actually is.
Capstones are mastery, locked behind serious prerequisites. Immunities, transformations, guarantees. A Capstone is the Codex acknowledging that you have finished becoming something.
Ability Tags and Recharge
Every active Training and Title declares its cost with a tag.
| Tag | Cost |
|---|---|
| [Action] | One of your two Actions. Subject to the No-Repeat Skill Rule. |
| [Beat] | One of your two Beats. Exempt from the No-Repeat Skill Rule. |
| [Reaction] | Triggered automatically by its stated condition, outside your turn entirely. |
| [Passive] | Always on. Costs nothing. |
Abilities that cannot fire every turn carry a Recharge value, counted in your own turns. Recharge 5 is a major ability: once in a standard encounter, twice in a long one. Recharge 3 fires roughly twice in most encounters. Recharge 1 simply cannot be used on consecutive turns.
Titles
Trainings are what you can do. Titles are what the world starts calling you.
Every Profession carries five Titles, earned automatically at two, four, six, eight, and ten Trainings. A Title is not purchased and cannot be traded. It is recognition, logged by the Codex, and each one has a specific mechanical shape:
| Tier | Earned At | What It Gives You |
|---|---|---|
| I | 2 Trainings | A new way of seeing. Information the untrained simply do not receive. |
| II | 4 Trainings | Protection from the thing that most reliably kills your way of fighting. |
| III | 6 Trainings | A reward for skilled play, triggered by margins of 10 or more. |
| IV | 8 Trainings | A trump card. Once per encounter, the momentum changes hands. |
| V | 10 Trainings | The action economy itself bends. This is the ability people tell stories about. |
Titles III, IV, and V carry one more thing beneath the story: a floor. From Tier III onward, your Training dice earned through that Profession can never roll below a fixed minimum, no matter what the physical dice show, 2 at Tier III, 3 at Tier IV, 4 at Tier V. The natural roll is always shown at the table; the floor simply refuses to let mastery this deep be undone by a bad throw. Depth protects itself.
A Persona who has earned every Training in a Profession has finished that Profession's grid, and the Tier V Title marks it. In the Sanctuaries, Tier V Titles are announced when their holders walk in. That is not a rule. It is just what happens.
Flex Slots
No Profession is an island, and no ten Trainings cover a life.
Each Profession grants two or more Flex Slots: picks from your ten that may come from outside the Profession's own grid. Flex Slots draw from two pools. Your Archetype pool holds trainings shared by every Profession of your archetype: combat fundamentals for Martials, frequency-craft for Mystics, fieldwork for Specialists. The All pool holds universal competencies available to any Persona: survival craft, first aid, languages, general social technique.
Flex Slots do not cross archetypes. A Knight can learn a Martial fundamental or how to suture a wound; a Knight cannot borrow the Witch's Evil Eye. Professions with three or more Flex Slots (the Contender and most Specialists) are exactly the ones whose work rewards range over depth.
The Archetype and All training pools are published in Appendix B and maintained in the companion app.
A Second Profession
A Persona may purchase additional Professions at any time, for the standard 10 SP, provided they meet the requirement. The new Profession opens its own grid of ten Trainings, its own Titles, its own Flex Slots. Nothing about the first is lost.
Two things do not carry over. A Profession's Original Loadout, including a magic-using Profession's starting spells, belongs only to your first Profession; enter a second one and you buy every capability at full price. And Titles never blend: you are a Squire of the Knights and a Rascal of the blade separately, each earned on its own grid, each announced in its own voice.
A Persona who spreads across two Professions grows broad and flexible; one who drives a single grid to ten Trainings reaches a Tier V Title, and Tier V is where legends are minted. Neither choice is wrong.
The Shape of Growth
Every point of growth in Sundered Earth is a specific spend: this technique, this die, this discipline, purchased with Story Points earned by living in the world. A Persona's build is a biography. Read someone's ten Trainings and you know where they have been and what they decided never to be caught without again.
That is the design's whole argument, and it is the same argument the combat engine makes: preparation beats luck most times.