Your first week in Ghelmyon¶

"By Saturday they call you by name. By Sunday they want to know what you actually want."

A handful of shifts under your belt. The innkeeper greets you without looking up. The forge-master's apprentice remembers what you bought last time. Town Square feels smaller - you know which alleys go where.

Week one is when the systems start talking to each other. Skills click into a ladder you can feel. The first faction rep tier opens a door that was locked on day one. A vendor offers you a back-room price for the first time. A multi-step quest chain seeded on day two pays out on day five.

This article is the map of week one - the four major threads (skills, factions, gear, quests) and how they weave.

At a glance¶


Where you are	Days 2-7 in Ghelmyon
What's new this week	Skill tier shifts, Friendly faction rep, named gear, multi-step quests
How many shifts	~5-8 across the week, mostly your class's venue
What to NOT do yet	Leave town for a full day. The road's still risky.

The skill ladder¶

You started with 6-12 ranks scattered across your class's starting skills. By the end of week one those numbers will have moved - but understanding how they move is the single most important thing in this article.

The four rank tiers¶

Rank	Tier	What unlocks
0-10	Apprentice	Starter sub-skills (the verbs you walked into chargen with)
10-30	Journeyman	Intermediate sub-skills, real damage scaling, first specialty moves
30-50	Advanced	Advanced sub-skills, faction-locked techniques become offered
50+	Master	Master-tier moves, the deepest faction unlocks, capstone perks

Every skill in the game uses this ladder. Your class will have a handful of skills at 0-10 (the starter band), one or two at 10-30 (your signature), and everything else empty.

How ranks actually rise¶

Two parallel mechanisms:

1. Use it = train it.

Every successful use of a skill (swinging a sword, brewing a potion, picking a lock, telling a joke that lands) credits a small amount of Skill Point (SP). The SP curve is steeper at low ranks and softens as you climb. Going 0→10 takes a few dozen uses. 30→50 takes a few hundred.

2. Shifts at training venues.

The 18 venues across the BG89 class network credit bulk SP per clean shift - usually 3-6 SP across 2-3 skills, plus a stipend, plus rep.

Use-it-train-it is the constant baseline. Shifts are the accelerant. A player who only fights and never visits a venue will eventually max out their combat skills around rank 40-50 by sheer use; a player who shifts religiously will be at 50 in three skills by the end of week two.

Parent vs sub-skill ramp¶

The full skill model has parent skills (the named trees - axes, discipline, tinkering) and sub-skills under each (the actual verbs - chop, meditate, appraise).

The parent skill is the rank you train. It's the number on the ladder.
Sub-skills unlock as the parent crosses tier gates. chop is available from parent rank 0. cleave unlocks at parent rank 10. whirlwind (master tier) at rank 50.

Training a sub-skill credits SP to its parent. You don't train cleave directly - you train axes, and cleave becomes a tool in your kit when your axes rank crosses the gate.

To check your current ranks:

/skills

The output groups by parent + lists every unlocked sub-skill below. Locked sub-skills show as ??? until you hit the gate.

Faction reputation¶

Trust is the per-NPC bond ladder you started building on day one. Faction rep is the parallel ladder for organizations - the Temple of the Dawn, the Arcane Collegium, the Town Guard, the Thieves' Guild, the River Seers, and a half-dozen others.

Faction rep has six named tiers across a wide rep-point range:

Tier	Rep range	What unlocks
Hostile	< -100	Attacked on sight; vendors refuse
Unfriendly	-100 to -20	Prices marked up 20%; cautious greetings
Neutral	-20 to 50	Default; you exist, that's all
Friendly	50 to 200	Welcomed; standard quest access; first faction-locked notices appear
Honored	200 to 500	Trusted insider; premium services; back-room stock; faction-locked sub-skills teachable
Exalted	500 to 1000+	Member of the family; all unlocks; class-tied perks

Daily rep gain caps at +50 per faction per day; repeating the same quest hits diminishing returns. Most week-one players will land somewhere in Neutral → Friendly with their primary faction by day 7.

How rep climbs¶

Shifts at the faction's venue. Each clean shift credits 1-3 rep with the venue's home faction.
Quests completed for the faction's people. Notice board quests are tagged. A quest from a Temple-aligned NPC pays rep to the Temple on completion.
Faction-aligned actions. Donating at a temple, fencing through the Guild, joining a Collegium-sanctioned research project - each tracks toward the relevant faction.

Your first week will move one faction toward Friendly (50+ rep). Pick one, lean in, and the back-room price appears once you cross into Honored.

Faction collision¶

The cost: factions watch each other. Climbing fast with the Thieves' Guild knocks Temple rep down. The bigger factions have explicit opposition pairs:

Temple ↔ Bone Chapel (theology)
Town Guard ↔ Thieves' Guild (law)
Arcane Collegium ↔ Wild Coven (orthodoxy)
River Seers ↔ Pale Order (old traditions vs new)

You can play all five townspeople's friend with no collision. The moment you cross a faction boundary, the opposite side hardens. This is fine - most players pick 1-2 factions to lean into and accept the friction with their opposites.

Your first proper gear upgrade¶

The starter kit is meant to get you to week one. By day three or four you should be looking at upgrades:

Weapon: out of the chargen-tier weapon, into a named workshop piece. Common shop stock at this tier is mid-quality but the named workshop tier (one notch above common) hits much harder. The Iron Scale forge bench (Blacksmith venue) carries the cleanest run.
Armor: same story. A common chestpiece works through the first half of week one; replace with a fitted piece by day five.
Charm or trinket: your first +1-to-something. The Collegium top rack is the cleanest source if you're Friendly with them; the fence has illicit equivalents if you're going the other way.

Avoid the named-and-unique tier until you're ready - those carry stories. See Rare and unique items.

Your first multi-step quest chain¶

Most notice-board quests are one-step (fetch, deliver, report back). A small fraction are chains - the giver hands you the first thread, you pull, more shows up.

Chains pay better than 1-step quests by a factor of 2-3 and almost always end in a named gear piece or a faction-rep windfall. By day three or four one of the notices you accepted should have its second beat trigger.

How to know you're in a chain:

The completion text reads more to follow or the matter has a thread.
The giver asks to meet again at a specific phase or location.
Your active quest list keeps the entry but with a new sub-objective.

The classic week-one chain shape:

Day 2 - notice board hands you a small fetch.
Day 3 - completing the fetch reveals a complication.
Day 4-5 - investigation step (often a conversation with a third NPC).
Day 5-6 - choice point (which side do you back).
Day 7 - payout, often with a named item.

If a chain crosses you into a sensitive area (the Velvet Curtain, the Thieves' Guild back-room, a faction whose politics you don't yet understand), feel free to step back. The chain will wait.

Trust tier-up: Stranger → Acquaintance → Friend¶

You'll naturally tier up Trust with 2-4 NPCs by the end of week one without trying. Friend (Trust 25-49) is the real second gate - the one where NPCs share personal stories, where the first major-quest hook drops, and where vendor prices soften enough to notice.

The fastest path to Friend with a specific NPC:

Greet them every time you pass them
Ask them about their job + their family + their hometown
Bring a gift they like (vendors will hint; observation pays off)
Complete a quest from them
Don't lie to them - high-perception NPCs catch you and the Trust hit is real

A player with one Friend-tier bond in week one is doing better than most. Two is excellent. Three is showing off.

What you've just done¶

By the end of week one you should have:

One skill in your class at rank 12-18 (Journeyman tier)
One faction reaching Friendly (~50+ rep)
One Friend-tier NPC bond (Trust 25+)
One named workshop weapon or armor piece
One multi-step quest in progress or freshly completed
A solid 1-2 gold in savings after stipends + sales

If you're below those numbers by Sunday, slow down and shift more. If you're above them, you're playing well - keep going.

What's next¶

Somewhere around hour 50 of play (so roughly day 14-20 of in-game time for most players), the Waning will happen. The weather will change. NPCs will act strange. Dreams will leak.

The First Waning article is what to expect when that happens. It's also, deliberately, the last article in this onboarding series - by then you'll know enough to keep walking on your own.