At the begining of each month, a bunch of things happen. Some resources get replenished or grow depending on the season, the NPCs (of which there are hundreds... perhaps even a few thousand?) get updated in their position and status, and things happen to you personally, like people giving you things, poisoning you, or, more often than not, begging you for shit even though they outrank you immensely and can easily afford this stupid medicine.
Look at the stats on this old bitch! She's an elder in the sect, and actually a relatively weak one all things considered. But she really is on the verge of death, with only 1 of 3 health remaining. Health isn't the stat that declines in combat, it's your actual lifeline, and some characters have very small caps, especially old or weak ones. Generally you lose health because of have wounds or poison or a severe breath disorder outstanding at the end of the month. But a strong character might have 30 health, so they can be beaten unconscious by bandits and still live for several months with their guts hanging out before they can find or afford a way to heal their injuries. Also, this old cunt has a terrible reputation (rebels tend to since they do evil shit constantly) so giving her the cheapass medicine will lower my own reputation. So fuck her. Hope you memorized all those different stats for the quiz at the end. Moving on!
This is the inventory screen, an example of an item, and the wounds tab selected on the right hand side instead of the stats tab. Yeah, there are 6 different types of poison and subtabs for bodyparts under the injuries since you might end up suffering dozens of them and prefer to have your torso healed over your limbs due to mechanics of some skills or having better armour on your body than your head, etc. How do the toxins work? In a ridiculously complex way where, after being built up beyond your resistance to that particular toxin, they can be triggered during combat by something specific to that toxin type, like attacking, moving, or trying to cure toxins. After being triggered they do something unique to that toxin type and create more toxin of another type in a closed 3 part loop. So it's pretty strong, potentially. I used it to win an hour long fight against a demon with 8 hearts I found at the end of a dungeon. I won't be covering dungeons though, they're too complex to get into. Just the simple things.
This is the talent page for artistries, skills, and arts. The seven furthest to the right all let you craft things, and potentially upgrade them as well by salvaging parts from recyled other items, oh and you can of course envenom your armour, which will be very effective against people using ranged weapons at you while you can't fight back. The other 9 skills unlock buildings, which do boring things like earn you money, prestige, create elixers of youth and help preserve your soul beyond death. Also all of these skills can be used as stat requirements for skills or equipment, and are also used in non-violent competitions, in case you wanted to impress some children without beating them to a pulp.
Here's part of the skills page. Not related to the previous, non combat skills. These are the ones you slot into your character and do things in combat. Some are active, some are passive, some are defensive, some are movement modifiers, some consume movement to attack. Oh, and the inner arts, obviously, increase your internal 5 element energy, which you allocate to your four different forces, which grant bonuses to offense, movement, defense, and breath control. The breath control apparently helps resist status effects in battle, it's hard to quantify vs the others, but it's also used to passively recover from breath disorders. Some skills also get additional passive effects depending on your understanding of them, as opposed to your practical knowledge. Orthodox understandings grant slightly different passives than the heterodox understandings of the same skill. Or you can split the difference and give up both effects in exchange for a more stat based benefit relating to the efficiency of the move, by lowering it's requirements and increasing the cap of the requirements' effect on the skill. Oh, and don't unbalance your energy in the wrong way- focusing on water, wood and fire element will make wood and fire very powerful, but if wood and metal are your first and second most powerful elements far ahead of the others, you'll be put into a crippling state and suffer massive injuries. But that's obvious.
Oh yeah, here's the social screen. This one is boring since my last incarnation got merked by a squad of assassin on behalf of some possessed asshole I finished off. So this guy hasn't mad any new friends yet really. And since she was a refugee, she didn't have all the usual connections most npcs have. First time I passed on the inheritor had a wife and kid I didn't even know about. Obviously this can get pretty complex if you stay alive for more than a few years. Relationships can be very powerful in this game, my first incarnation cozied up to a sect leader and he regularly gifted me huge amounts of money and rare items and skill books while I was hanging out at the sect and training. I also made a doctor my sworn borther and he followed me around without being in my party and often just randomly healed me. Merchants and doctors are great for that sort of thing. Of course, people in your party tend to accrue relationship with you over time, which can also be a great way to learn skills instead of currying favour with the sects or looting the books off bandits or spying on people or robbing weaklings or fighting looting the good guys who become your enemy after doing the things I just mentioned.
All that mostly happens on the map of course, which is broken up into tiles. How many tiles? I dunno, I estimated around 30-40 on a side, so somewhere in the 1-2 thousand range. They have different terrain types with predilictions for certain types of resources of course, and the towns and dungeons and random events like merchant caravans and cricket hunts occur. There are only 3 towns on a map, including the sect. Those three icons in the bottom don't correspond to them though, they correspond to the three maps within each region, of which there is one for each sect, for a total of 45 maps. Hopefully the RNG put the sect hub near a travel station so you don't have to spend and extra month hoofing it every time your travel there, since travelling between maps already takes quite a while.
This is the main reason you want to travel to the sects, at least in the early game where I'm at. Lots of skills to learn, and you can see most of them ahead of time to plan your education, instead of having a ton of random shit. Accruing approval with the sect can be done in 4 different ways, and some ways are easier than others with each sect, since they correspond to the natures. The extreme natures like to fight, but you can also pay some people off or befriend them. Also, joining some sects have requirements. Assassin sect doesn't want your pansy ass fucking with their hardcore rep, so you might need to abduct some children, poison a few people, or just generally be an ass for a long time. The themes of the sects are pretty important, so it's a good idea to pick a good match. Joining the poison sect when you have no talents in that area can be a big waste of time, while a character with a lot of talent in that area but no knowledge yet can acquire the books there and the martial arts will be stronger for them as well. Of course, this applies to your heir as well. You can be fucked pretty hard if you specialized really hard into one area and your heir has no talent there, even if the knowledge does carry over. Of course, that can be a good excuse to branch out elsewhere. Unless your heir was just a worthless shithead.
Fortunately, even worthless shitheads can wander around and gather resources, which is very time consuming, much like developing your village. You obviously get your own village. This isn't mine, it was far away when I decided to write this up. Mine has blackjack. No hookers yet. Also most of the villagers died since I didn't hang around to give them medicine or recruit a doctor or build a hospital. Anyways, you don't need to focus on your village, since all the sects have training rooms and crafting/training rooms for the specific arts they specialize in. Training is, of course, very simple.
This is one of the three parts of the training process, where you play a minigame to perform a potentially deadly breakthrough to gain practice in a martial art or skill. Breakthroughs are only necessary to get past specific points- you can get up to 50% of the lowest grade skills without doing one, for example. However, breakthroughs are also generally the most time efficient way of gaining practice in a single skill, if you do them well and play a bit risky. Overextending your efforts can give you huge returns, which is especially tempting on high level skils that cost a lot of xp to train, doubly so if you get a potentially lucrative board that especially rewards over extending and injuring yourself. Of course, you also need to read the books to gain knowledge, which has it's own minigame and some related stats and buildings, and the books themselves have their own stats, so browsing around amoung the disciples for the right book to research a particular martial art or mundane skill can be worthwhile.
This is like that first screen except we're bothering an npc instead of the other way around. This is of course just a sub option, showing 6 of the 25 options I have with this specific npc. More options are available with partuclar people like sect leaders or town mayors or doctors, or if you have created a specific kind of relationship with that npc by wearing certain clothing (like pedlar, merchant, civilian, fighter, doctor, beggar, hunter, etc.) and interacting with them repeatedly to unlock certain options, some of which only work on specific npcs (like the fighter persona can do a performance in town to gain money and xp, but only with the permission of high level officials in that town) and other kinds of interactions like adopting children if you're middle aged, getting married, recommending your allies to be inducted into a clan, and so forth.
Oh year, this game has combat too. This is the pre combat screen, which lets you set up things before the combat starts, in case you want to change your equipment. You can equip martial art manuals to train them a bit if you win the fight in case you don't want to or can't read them in the training room. You also get to view your opponent's stats before hand, so you can change to gear with a different type of poison or something that attacks or defend something effectively in the fight. Also you can use a consumable before the fight like that fucker is, and there are 5 special options before the fight that give you small up front advantages like starting in melee instead of ranged or with a full focus bar.
This part is self explanatory.
