Downtime Periods

The downtime system is entirely optional. You can choose not to allocate your resources and to simply ignore the entire system, in which case we will do it for you. If you don't care what your character does in between events you can stop reading now.

Downtime is a period of time in which you do not actively play your character. Between games, or sometimes as a time skip within a game, some months of downtime might pass. During this time nothing of much interest happens to your character. Your character can use this time to make preparations for more challenging times. Characters regain all their HP and WP during downtime. You determine what happened during downtime once the downtime period has ended and you go back in character unless a GM tells you otherwise.

Resources

Every character gains 120 resources at the end of each month and you are allowed to spend all these points in one go at the start of the next event. At most your character can have 6 months of downtime in between two events. These 120 resources can be used to do all sorts of things like learning new skills, practicing the skills you already have, working a dayjob, or achieve other kinds of goals during downtime. Healing from an injury or other maladies also often costs resources.

A resources is a very abstract way to measure the time, energy, social contacts, ingenuity, spare change, and other such things your character has to spend each month. But for some players it might help to think about resources as purely time. In that case 1 resource is about 2 to 4 hours.

Cost of living

Every month you lose 400 copper. This represents your character paying for its rent, food, travel expenses, clothing, hobbies, general healthcare. etc. Most characters use a dayjob to pay for this.

You can decide yourself the details of what your character spends their money on. Some characters might give most of it away to charity. Other might support a large family. And some might spend it all on hedonistic excess. Detailing what you character spends their money on is entirely optional but might be interesting to think about for flavour purposes.

If you think the expenses you character makes during downtime are narratively interesting for the LARP events or influence the setting in any way you can discuss this with a GM.

Dayjob

Every resource you spend on your dayjob nets you 4 copper. This is unskilled work; almost everybody can find some form of unskilled work in Heimr. Most characters spend 100 resources on a dayjob to fund their cost of living.

Practicing skills you already have

Every month you will need to practice your skills or they will go dormant. Practicing skills with resources doesn't just take time, but also represents your character keeping his equipment in shape, visiting social contacts, etc.

Practicing a skill costs 1 resource per point the skill costs. Most characters spend enough resources to practice all their skills so nothing goes dormant. You are not allowed to let a skill go dormant and retrain that skill in the same downtime period.

Dormant skills cannot be used during play.

Note: Conditions don't need to be practiced! Only skills!

Training new skills

If you spend 20 resources per point on a new skill. You will have trained the skill. (some conditions can be gained in the same way).

Retraining dormant skills

Retraining skills that have gone dormant is easier than training entirely new skills. It only costs 10 resources per point but otherwise works the same as training a new skill.

Other things to spend resources on

Some skills, conditions and items grant you the ability to spend resources on other things than the ones mentioned above. (For example; the crafting skills will give you the ability to craft items with resources). However if you want to spend resources on an activity that you think of yourself simply send an email to a game master and they will discuss it with you. For example; do you want to research the history of a specific deamon or do you want to spend time collecting rare coins or do you want to spend time in the pub listening to gossip, or anything else? Send an email!

Items

You can buy and sell items during downtime. To buy an item, you must pay its market price. When selling an (undamaged) item you receive 50% of the market price. If the item is broken you receive 5% of the market price. If it is a partially damaged armour you receive 50% of the market price minus 1/3th of the restore price for every counter on it.

If your item is broken or damaged and you wish to repair it you must pay 50% of the market price unless a specific restore price is named on the item card. Please remember that if an item has a Market Price of Var it has special rules governing its market price and may be more difficult to buy or sell.

There are cheaper ways to buy, sell or repair items. Ask characters about it; especially merchant or craftsmen.