Estari XP & Leveling

When you gain a level you may declare a path: one row you intend to chase. Name a secondary as well if you want one. Both are locked until your next level-up, so declare for the campaign you expect, not the session you just had.

• Showing up and your roles are never paths. Both pay in full whatever you declared, so a session that ignores your path still pays for turning up and for the week's work.
• Tripled XP counts against the session cap of 30. A specialist reaches the ceiling on a good night, and what is over the line buys Light and Dark Points rather than levels.
• Declare Combat, then spend the night in a courtroom, and you earn almost nothing. You cannot re-declare until you level.

Two numbers per column. Take the lower one. Take the higher when it cost you something you had: resources spent, real risk run, a line struck off your sheet.

One claim per row, per session. Pitch your best moment in that row. The rest of them are worth nothing.

Judged on tonight. If you cannot point at it before the session ends, it does not count. No row asks what it will be worth in ten sessions.

What the evening was worth. It sits outside the chart, runs 1 to 5, and everybody claims it.

A 1 is automatic. Turn up and you earn something.

The work the table runs on, done in the week between games. Each role you hold pays 1 to 5 XP by tier. Hold several and each one pays separately.

• Claimed once per session, for the work done since the last one, pitched like anything else.
• Roles sit outside the chart. A path neither triples them nor kills them.
• Role XP counts against the session cap like every other source.

"Combat, 7. We were two levels under the encounter and down a body from round one, and I dropped the caster before the second wave landed."

• Max XP per session = 30, all sources included, at every level. What you claim past it is not lost — see Overflow.
• One event, one row. If a moment fits two rows, you pick which.
• It has to have mattered. If nothing was at stake and nothing changed, there is no claim in it.
• The 9–10 column is reachable. It means nobody did that better tonight, not that the campaign turned on it. Somebody should be going for it most weeks.
• A natural 20 on a significant check is +1 XP off-chart, at the GM's discretion.

XP you claim above the session cap does not disappear. Every 3 XP past 30 buys 1 point on the Light & Dark track, to a limit of 3 points a session. Round down. You take the points at the start of your next session and choose Light or Dark as you spend each one.

Claim 40 against a cap of 30 and you are 10 over, which is 3 points. Claim 32 and you are 2 over, which is nothing. The limit binds before the arithmetic does: 60 claimed is 30 over, and it still buys 3.

The cap decides how fast you level. The chart decides what else you walk out with.

Keep your level. Convert only your progress toward the next one. Work out how far along you were as a fraction of the old price, and take that same fraction of 90.

Say you are 8th level with 90 XP banked of the 240 the old table asked for. You were 37.5% of the way, so you start again on 34 XP of 90. Round up on anything fractional.

Leave your lifetime XP total alone. It is a record of prices that no longer apply, and converting it would hand you levels you did not play for — 1,980 XP at 12th level reads as 23rd against a flat 90. Nobody's level changes. Start the new count from your current one.

• The whole table converts in the same session. Convert first, play second, and claim that night under the new cap.
• A new or replacement character starts at party level with 0 XP toward the next.
• At 3rd level nothing moves at all. The old price of the next level was 90 and the new one is 90.

Changed 2026-08-08. Delete this block once every character has converted.