Update - 30/05/2022
Hello! I hope everyone had a great weekend! I spent mine watching the new season of Stranger Things (same old, but it's really fun to watch) and playing both WFRP and D&D with my group, so it was a pretty geeky weekend! I also got some work done on the next Patreon content drop, the character advancement rules for Empire Undying.
After a lot of back and forth, I finally settled for a mixed progression system: you need to pay a trainer to increase your skills (melee combat, languages, etc.), but the mastery over both weapons and sorcery comes purely from direct experience. So if you're wielding a one-handed sword and defeat your opponent, you gain XP to improve your skills with one-handed swords, for example. Each weapon and sorcery "school" (it's actually different types of spirits you'll have bound to you) has a sort of skill tree separated into three different tiers; in order to reach tier 3 you need to first go through tiers 1 and 2. For now, there's a max of 15 different skills, and you can select 10 at a time, so there are 5 you'll never be able to unlock. I say for now because I'll probably increase this number, either before release, or in future expansions. The way I want this to work is that you essentially unlock a new skill (active or passive, up to you) each time you level up, as long as you have the weapon or spirit equipped, you benefit from the weapon's passive traits and can use its active skills. A character's level is determined by their highest Weapon Mastery plus their highest Sorcery Mastery; this means that right now max level would be 20 (10 from a weapon + 10 from a spirit). It's not an accurate way of really measuring your power, because you might have all other weapons and spirits levelled up to 8 or whatever, but it does help. You aren't really capable of wielding several weapons or spirits at once either way so it should all be quite balanced!
This starting week I'll continue working on EU stuff, as well as editing Across a Thousand Dead Worlds. We're in the middle of chapter 5 and I expect it to be done this week, so we're getting close to being done. I'm so excited!
That's it for now, have a great week!