ThessyraCodex
The overview says what Thessyra promises. The Codex shows how each system keeps that promise. Entries are added as systems take shape.
Agency and consequence
Two forces shape every character, and only one of them answers to you.
The first you command. A blade practised until the swing needs no thought, a spell studied until its shape settles into memory, a lock picked so often your fingers know it blind. That's skill, and it's yours to direct. Hours spent mastering one thing are hours never spent on another.
The second doesn't ask. Take a hundred wounds and live, and your body learns to be harder to break. Carry burden after burden and your back learns to bear more. None of it was chosen; it was lived through.
Chosen
Every skill, whether blade, spell, trade, or trick, is trained through deliberate use, spending a measure of mastery that is always scarce.
Endured
Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma shift on their own, shaped by what a life in this world does to a person.
The body remembers
You aren't one number that runs out. You're seven places that can be hurt, and each keeps its own account.
A blow to the arm is not a blow to the heart. Head, chest, gut, and each limb are tracked on their own. Break an arm and the arm fails you; it doesn't, on its own, end you.
But nothing wounded is safe to ignore. Left untreated, a ruined limb poisons what's nearest to it, and the hurt spreads inward toward the places that matter.
The vital places
Head, chest, and gut. Break one entirely, and the next blow to land there ends you.
The limbs
A shattered leg won't carry you and a ruined arm won't hold a blade, but a festering wound won't stay put.
Reading a wound
A glance says how bad things are. A closer look, taken deliberately, says exactly what's wrong and where.
"Men walk away from a gut wound and die a week later from an arm they never thought to bandage."