Monsters settle in the counties of the world. While one stands, its country is a little poorer; when one falls, the people who brought it down share what it was carrying. Hunting them is how a character gains levels, and levels are a thing apart from strength.
You will find it at War → Monsters. Nothing about monsters is drawn on the map, and your character sheet shows your level and nothing more: the Monsters tab is where every monster, and every strike, is.
Every character has a level, from 1 to 60, and begins at level 1 with no XP: born, founded, or alive when hunting came into the world. The next level costs 100 XP for each level you have: 100 from level 1 to 2, 700 from 7 to 8, 5,900 from 59 to 60. At 60 there is nothing left to gain.
Level is the hunt's and strength is war's. Your level decides what you deal to a monster and nothing else: not a swing on a front, not a duel, not a training. Your strength, however high, deals nothing to a monster. Your level is public, as your strength is; your XP is your own.
A monster stands in one county and never moves, and no county holds more than one. The world keeps between 10 and 40 of them standing, one for every two characters that players play, and tops up a few each day as the day turns.
How strong they come follows the players. No monster appears more than two levels above what the strongest tenth of players has reached, so a young world holds only young monsters. Below that ceiling the weaker are always the commoner, and the deeper a county lies, the likelier it is to hold something strong: a county of reach 4 averages nearly twice the level of a county of reach 0. Each kind of monster lives in its own climates and at its own levels, and four kinds roam everywhere; the bestiary at the end of this chapter lists all twenty-seven.
A monster does not stay forever. A level-1 monster leaves after 10 world days, the strongest after 30, and those between in proportion. One that leaves unslain takes nobody's XP away and pays nobody.
You strike a monster in a county you can reach: you stand in its region, and have stood there at least as many world days as the county's reach (see counties). Anybody may strike any monster, whatever their citizenship.
A strike deals 10 for each of your levels, plus 10 for each tier of the weapon you spend, plus the hunt bonus of the relics you hold. A weapon spent is consumed, as it is in war. A weapon counts for a fifth of what it does on a front, so that your level, not your purse, is what a hunt is decided by.
A strike costs 10 health, and one more for each level the monster stands above you, up to 30 at most. Health is the whole of the cost: a monster never wounds you and never kills you. Nothing else limits how many strikes you take, and food is what buys more of them.
| you | the monster | a strike costs |
|---|---|---|
| level 10 | level 10 or below | 10 health |
| level 10 | level 25 | 25 health |
| level 1 | level 40 | 30 health |
A strike earns XP equal to the damage it deals, and the last strike earns only what remained of the monster. A monster more than ten levels below you earns you no XP, though you may still strike it, and still share its hoard.
A monster has a pool of health that grows faster than its level: about 11 strikes from a hunter of its own level at level 1, about 55 at level 30, and 100 at level 60. A strong monster is work for several hunters, or for one over several days, and because XP is damage, it holds that much more XP for whoever takes part.
While monsters stand in a country's counties, they take a share of every sales tax the country collects: a twentieth of a percent of the tax for each level of each monster there, at most 10% in all. A level-60 monster alone takes 3%. The buyer pays and the seller receives exactly what they would without it; what goes is part of what the treasury would have had. Small sales give the monsters nothing at all.
That share goes into the monster chest, one purse for the whole world. When a monster appears it takes its hoard from the chest: a fifth of a percent of every currency in it for each of its levels, so a level-60 takes 12%. When the chest is empty a monster appears with nothing, and is still worth its XP.
When a monster falls, its hoard is shared by everybody who struck it, in proportion to the damage each dealt, each currency rounded down, with what the rounding leaves going to whoever struck the last blow. A hunter who died before the kill is left out. A monster that leaves unslain returns its hoard to the chest. No money is made or destroyed in any of this: it moves from treasuries to the chest, to hoards, and to hunters.
The Monsters tab shows what the chest holds and, for a realm you choose, how much its monsters have taken from its sales tax.
A monster slain is recorded in the world's chronicle, naming the kind, its level, where it stood and who struck the last blow. A monster appearing or leaving is not recorded.
Every kind of monster there is: the levels it comes at and the climates it lives in. A kind that lives in every climate is one of the four that roam everywhere.