Progression
Build a name, not a character preset.
There are no classes and no prescribed path. What you become is the accumulated result of what you learned, what you carry, and who has reason to trust you.
Growth without classes
No rigid classes. No prescribed path. You grow through knowledge, equipment, reputation, professions and the people who come to trust your work. There is no point at which the game hands you a role and asks you to stay in it.
Capability comes from four things that are all visible and all tradeable in some form: what you know how to do, what you have the tools and materials to do it with, what standing you have with the people who would let you do it, and what experience you have actually doing it. None of those is a bar that fills on its own.
The absence of levels is not an absence of progress. It relocates progress from a number on a character sheet to a position in the world — which specialisms you have depth in, which workshops will take your work, which roads you know, which people answer your letters.
Property, enterprise and legacy
Establish a home, run a workshop, hold land, grow an enterprise and create something that leaves a permanent mark on the world around you. Ownership is meant to be the long game — the thing that makes a location yours rather than a place you happen to be standing.
Property is an obligation as much as an asset. A holding has upkeep, a workshop has stock, an enterprise has people depending on it. That is deliberate: things that cost nothing to keep are things nobody defends, and a world where nothing is defended has no history worth recording.
The intent is that a player can leave something behind that stays behind — a building, a business, a route, a reputation attached to a place — and that it persists as part of the world rather than as an entry on a personal profile.