Areas of Expertise
Not many abilities have areas of expertise, this includes Crafts Performance, and Ride. Your character receives a +1 penalty or at the game master's discretion, a +2 penalty for using your ability outside his/her area of expertise.
Note that the difficulty modifier never applies to magical rolls that use one of these abilities, mainly for
divine Crafts. It doesn't matter if your character is a blacksmith or a leatherworker or a beer brewer, any skilled focus on a craft is enough to be a catalyst for divine craft magic.
Areas of Expertise are easy for characters to expand on. Your character's first area of expertise is free. Second and subsequent areas of expertise cost a mere 1 experience point though you cannot have more areas of expertise than you have dots in the ability.
Crafts
Crafts covers everything practical a character makes with his/her hands including but not limited to leatherworking, bowyer fletcher, carpentry, blacksmithing, weaving, stone mason, and brewer.
It is highly recommended to make these areas of expertise broad. You don't have to have a Craft area of expertise in "weapon smithing" if you want to make your own weapons. Weapons are
specializations of blacksmithing, not areas of expertise. While technically, making wine, beer, and spirits requires different processes, in game terms, a "brewer" can make all three of these things with the same area of expertise, but they can buy a specialization in whatever their favorite alcoholic beverage is.
Ride
For well over 90% of Scarterran PCs and NPCs, the assumed the area of expertise for Ride is "horse riding". In game terms, this also covers ponies, donkeys, and mules. If the character wants or needs to ride something else later, they will have to buy a second area of expertise.
This does not include horse-like magical beasts such as hippocampi and pegasi. This is a separate area of expertise. The vast majority of pegasi riders learned to ride regular horses and
then learned to ride flying horses later. Same thing for the rare Scarterran who learns to ride a hippocampus.
At any given time, you generally count the number of dragon riders in Scarterra on one hand. These legendary heroes and villains probably also got their start riding horses.
Camels are also a separate area of expertise. The best camel riders in Scarterra are the
Mereshnari and most of them cross-train with horses so most of them have two areas of expertise in Ride.
For the
Zegdelian gnomes and a few gnomes in northern regions of
West Colassia, reindeer riding is their normal default. A few north dwelling barbarian humans and orcs also learn to ride
giant reindeer as their default area of expertise for Ride but not many.
Performance
Scarterra doesn't have Internet, movie theaters, televisions, or even radios. Most Scarterrans are metaphorically starved for entertainment. That said many Scarterrans are more concerned with
avoiding actual starvation than avoiding figurative starvation so a lot of Scarterran entertainers have to work hard to make ends meet. That means most performers cross train in multiple things. That's why they only get +1 for acting out of their preferred medium rather than +2 which would be more realistic.
Areas of Expertise for performance include but are not limited to storytelling, singing, stringed instruments, wind instruments, and percussion instruments, dancing, among others.
There are some redundancies. You can tell compelling stories with Expression and you can dance expressively with Athletics. You can juggle and do fake magic tricks with Legerdemain.
Specialities
Specialties are pretty easy to understand. You get a bonus die on all rolls involving your specialty. The first specialty for an ability only costs one experience point. A second specialty costs two, and a third and all subsequent specialties cost three.
Getting a first specialization is usually a no-brainer for a player character that keeps doing the same thing over and over. This is a rare case where roleplaying and metagaming are in sync. Specializations add flavor to your character while also optimizing your build.
While a first specialty for your core abilities is a great idea, but buying subsequent specialties takes some thought. There is no limit to a number of specializations you can take for one ability. You can get four or five specialties if you really want to, but who really
needs that many specialties?
Specializations in Combat Abilities
Most professional soldiers take a specialty in their favorite weapon or their standard issue weapon. If you have Dexterity ●●● and Melee ●●● and a specialty in "swords" your character rolls seven dice when attacking, parrying, or trying special maneuvers with a sword and six dice when doing anything else in melee combat. It is pretty common for adventurers/PCs to want to buy a specialty in their favorite weapon or weapons.
It is also a valid strategy to specialize in a combat maneuver. If a character in an adventuring party is a support character that doesn't need or want to output a lot of damage, it behooves them to take a specialty in "parrying". That is a cheap and easy way to make sure if the character fails to avoid combat entirely, they don't immediately get cut down by the enemy.
A melee combatant that favors nonlethally ending combats might specialize in "disarms".
You are not allowed to take a melee specialty in "strikes" or "attacks", that is too broad. You can specialize in "duels" or "crowd control".
For dodge, you can specialize in types of attacks, so you can have a dodge specializations in arrows (which also includes crossbow bolts), thrown weapons, magical rays, area of effects, brawling attacks, or melee attacks.
In theory you can take a dodge specialization in "ducking" "sidesteps" or other physical actions, but that can get messy. Why not side step
all attacks. You could do that in theory I suppose, but would you want watch an action movie where the protagonist only sidesteps attacks. That violates
the Rule of Realism AND the Rule of Cool.
While it is possible to have a Melee specialization in "swords" or "axes" and include several types of "swords" or "axes" you are not allowed to take an Archery specialization in "bows" or "crossbows". You have to be specific and specialization in the type of bow or crossbow.
You can also specialize in situations regarding archery. Situational specializations for Archery include but at are not limited to "flying targets" "running targets" "point blank shots", "mounted archery", "into melees" or "aimed shots" among others.
Politics
You cannot specialize in "nobles" with the Politics ability that is too broad. You can specialize by country or region such as "Borderlanders" or "Fumaya" or "Swynfaredia". You can specialize in "temple" or "ecclesiastical" to cover politics with any
Nonagon player.
Even if you don't have a regional specialization in the politics of the area you are in, the difficulty for most Politics rolls is assumed to be dependent on familiarity. A character that grew up in Fumaya is going to have a much lower base difficulty for Politics rolls regarding Fumayan power dynamics than a Penarchian visiting Fumaya for the first time, but a character with a high Politics rating can figure out new power structures relatively quickly because the same basic power dynamics replay themselves around the world.
You can also specialize in "heraldry" which assumes your character made it a point to learn heraldry not just from their local area but from around the world in places you've never been. That sort of thing is easier to study from far away places than the nuances of power structures because generally the owners and creators of heraldry
want to broadcast their symbols and sigils far and wide.
Lying liars who speak lies
You cannot take a Subterfuge specialization in "lying" that is just too broad since almost everything in Subterfuge involves lies, but you can take an empathy specialization in "falsehoods" to detecting lies is very important but it is not the end all be-all of the Empathy ability.
Subterfuge specializations must involves types of cons such as "fast talking", "plausible cover stories", "sales puffery", "seduction", and the like.
"Poker face" is a Subterfuge specialization that doesn't involve lying directly but is important for characters that regularly dive deep into intrigue.
You can also specialize by "the mark". "Humans" and "elves" are too broad. You can specialize in a race of people if they are both relatively uncommon and relatively uniform such as "satyrs" or "kalazotz"".
You cannot specialize in "men" or "women" as it is too broad, but you can specialize in "nobles", "merchants", "farmers", and the like.
Examples
Nilen the cobbler has Crafts ●●●, so he is pretty good at his family trade of making shoes, and has Intelligence ●●● and Dexterity ●●● which are the two attributes mostly paired with Crafts, but he is not limited to shoes.
His
area of expertise is "leatherworking", not "shoe making" or "cobbler". Nilen has a
specialty in "shoes". Nilen is more than capable of making leather pouches, bags, jackets, hats, sheathes, saddles and more and he has six dice to make most leather items, and he has seven dice to make shoes with.
Normally, it would be a waste of time to roll dice for every routine order he completes for a customer, but it is assumed that he does a good job with any leather order he is given, but he can make shoes much faster. Normally, one would only roll out Nilen crafting special orders.
Lets assume after becoming an adventurer, Nilen develops an interest in weapons and armor. He is still familiar with most basic tools and is good with his hands, so it's not a big stretch that he can pick up a second area of expertise in blacksmithing for a mere one experience point though he would need to take a bit of downtime to justify this.
Even before buying a second area of expertise, Nilen can probably do very simple metalworking things like beating a bent rod back into shape or sharpening a dull blade. He could do basic rapairs and maintenance with his Crafts skill at +1 and try his hand at crafting weapons or weapons at +2 difficulty.
After taking a separate area of expertise, if Nilen wanted to specialize in making swords, he would need to pay two experience points for the specialization rather than one because he already has a specialization in "shoes". Even though "blacksmithing" and "leatherworking" are separate areas of expertise, it still one Crafts skill.
After gaining lots more divine magic, lets say Nilen wanted to take a third area of expertise, lets say in "weaving" so he can craft a magic cloak later, he would only need to pay one experience point to do it. Still if he wanted to buy a third specialization in say "torso clothing" it would cost three experience points because "blacksmithing", "leatherworking", and "weaving" are all part of one Crafts skills and he already has two specializations.
In combat, Nilen mainly wants to stay alive and is not concerned with killing the enemy. Initially, he just wanted to not die and let his allies do most of the smiting of the enemy. Later as he developed magical abilities, he still didn't want to attack much, so he took a specialization in "parrying" early in his adventuring career for one experience point.
As Nilen gradually transitions from "reluctant adventurer" to "crusader for Mera" he starts fighting regularly with a two-handed sword (he is a gnome so he wanted a bigger weapon for more reach and power and a spellcaster, a shield is not always practical). Thus he spent two experience points for a specialization in "swords".
Multiple specializations never stack. Nilen does not get two bonus dice when parrying with a sword, only one.
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