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This game keeps asking you for a number. A wall will not open unless somebody in the party has enough Perception to spot the hidden door in it. A door stays shut unless somebody can pick the lock or lift the key off an old man. A ledge wants Athletics, a blocked path wants Trickery, and an army has about forty points of movement to spend before the day ends. Almost everything we have written about this game is either a way of raising one of those numbers, a list of what the numbers unlock, or a description of how to fix the ones you set wrong at character creation.
This page is the map of that coverage, arranged in the order the campaign puts the problems in front of you.
Before anything else: the sheet you are going to live with
Character creation is the one screen in this game that touches every other screen, and our best builds guide works through fourteen finished examples of it, each with a race and background, a spread across the six abilities, a level table that in all but one case runs to twenty, a short list of skills to keep raising, the opening feats, and in most cases a deity. They cover most of the ways to play, from a bomb throwing alchemist and two rogue variants to a monk, a paladin, a barbarian with an animal companion, an evocation wizard, a bard, a bloodline sorcerer, a shaman and two different archers.
If you read the ability tables against each other, twelve of the fourteen sit in a tight band, totalling between 74 and 80 points with a top score between 16 and 20. The other two, the pure archer and the rowdy rogue, come in at 96 and 98 points with a 22 in them, which is far outside what the rest of the list spends. Look twice at those two before copying them, because no other spread on the list comes anywhere near, and take your own starting numbers from the twelve that agree with each other.
Kenabres, and the one door that only opens once
The city holds more than it looks like it does. Somewhere in the northwest of the map is a torture chamber, and behind it the Shield Maze, which stays sealed until two earlier jobs are off your list and then never lets you back in once you leave. Our Shield Maze walkthrough is the one to have open when you go down there, because it carries both the trick that opens the door and the order the coloured gems at the far end want.
Those locked things divide neatly into two kinds, which is how the quest and puzzle guide is arranged: obstacles that want a sequence typed into them, and obstacles that want an object carried to them. It covers the maze, the three keys under Drezen and both of the shifting bridges down in the Abyss, with the exact inputs for each.
Starward Gaze is an Act 1 quest and the one to get done early. It asks you to find two people hidden inside Crusader uniforms, one at the Arendae Party House and one loitering in the Market Square, and the order you meet them in matters, because the first hands over the thing that makes the second talk to you at all. Finishing it also puts a mythic option on the table for later.
The party: who is joining, when, and at what level
Our companions guide covers three characters who pay you back in three completely different ways, which is why a plain roster list would have been useless here. Thall hands over a mythic road rather than a place in the party. Arueshalae joins in every playthrough, and the only thing in question is whether you do the altar work in Act 2 and get her two levels earlier, or let her find you in a dream later on. Lann is a plain recruit whose page skips the finding entirely and sets out two long level plans instead: three levels of monk in both, and then either a hunting cat and the War domain, or the judge road, which front loads Use Magic Device across its opening levels and takes Skill Focus in it at nine.
Gear: who has it, and what it does to your dice
Two of our longest running pages for the game sit here. The best rings list runs to thirty-one entries with effects, locations for most of them and one alignment requirement, and the Magic Essence locations page walks the six vial route that the Storyteller sets you on for his broken buckle. The items guide puts them together by custody, separating what a named person is holding from what is lying in a room somewhere, and it flags the handful of rings we rate without saying where any of them are.
The practical thread through both pages is that skill bonuses bought early pay for themselves. A good part of the loot in this game sits behind a Perception or Trickery threshold, and one ring on the list, the Conman's Ring, raises exactly those two at once, so the shopping trip is what makes the hidden doors findable later.
Drezen, and the point where you stop being an adventurer
Taking the citadel changes the shape of the game. Inside Drezen there is a wall with a passage behind it and three Dretches holding the keys, which our Drezen Citadel guide walks through building by building, and Citadel Drezen is the stated home of two rings on our list as well. Once the city is yours, Queen Galfrey puts the Fifth Crusade under your command, and a second game begins on top of the first one.
The Crusader armies guide is our main write-up of that layer, from reading the army screen to merging legions, recruiting generals worth having, spending the three resources and keeping the morale banner out of the red. Our mechanics guide takes the same material from a different angle, asking which of those decisions can be walked back and how long each one takes to come good.
Deeper in: the Abyss and the late shops
Down in the Abyss the puzzles stop being about knowledge and start being about bookkeeping. The Abyss bridge puzzles are two spans that have to be rotated into line a section at a time, with party members used as anchors to stop the finished pieces turning again, and the second of them asks for at least five of them to be there. The ring list ends up in similar company: a cluster of its entries come out of Blackwater, the Midnight Fane and the Ivory Sanctum rather than from any trader.
When the sheet turns out to be wrong
It is worth knowing this before you start rather than fifteen hours in. Retraining exists, Hilor handles it at Defender's Rest, and it is only available if you turned the option on in the settings before beginning the campaign. Our respec guide covers the switch, the conversation and what happens to a companion who goes through it. Turn it on now, even if you are sure about your spread, because it costs nothing and the alternative is starting again.