There are five kinds of skills in Telgard: Adventure skills, Career skills, Combat skills, Racial skills, and Scholarly skills. Adventure, Career, Combat and Scholarly skills are simply general categorizations according to the general use of the skill in question. For instance, adventure skills are generally used while adventuring and career skills are generally used to earn a living. In all cases, there is some overlap; a mercenary may use his combat skills to earn a living whereas metalsmithing, a career skill, might be used in the midst of an adventure to patch some armour.

Race skills are the exception. Like the other skills, they cost a skill point to take. Each character may only have ONE race skill, and that will be the skill that applies to his race. For instance, an Elf who spends a point in Race Skill will get the elven skill Lifesong. In addition, a character who says in his character history that he was 'raised by another race,' he may NOT take the Race Skill because it is a skill that must be taught. Race skills are carefully guarded secrets and are never taught to an outsider.

To the left are links to all the skills. Some skills have [[ text ]] after them. That means that you must choose a specification, such as a type of terrain or a type of creature. This can be done in the Specifications box of the Character Form. Players who fail to specify their skill will have their character application returned to them for corrections or rejected altogether.

Note that there are no skills that apply to social interaction such as Leadership or Seduction. These rely solely upon the character's roleplaying skill and so if you want your character to be a leader, you should roleplay him as such.

Skills advance in the following progression:

None (the character does not have a point in this skill)
Novice (the character has one point in this skill)
Proficient (the character has two points in this skill)
Advanced (the character has three points in this skill)
Expert (the character has four points in this skill.)

All skills begin at none. At character creation, the player starts with three skill points, plus a number of skill points equal to his intelligence. Thus a character with an intelligence of 5 will have 8 skill points. The character can increase the number of skills they have during the course of game play.

The player may not spend more than one skill point in any skill at character creation. He must advance his character later in the game; thus a starting character never has any skill higher than novice, with the exception of some Humans. (See the racial skill for more details.) Other than this, there is no restriction where the player may spend his skill points.

Lastly, during the course of game play, no character may become Expert in more than two skills. Magical talents count against this limit as well, so those who become Adept in a magical talent (see the magic section) can only become Expert in one more skill. Expertise reflects a lifetime of dedication and while it is possible that a character is particularly dedicated and can achieve expertise in two skills, it is not possible to go beyond this limit. Linguistics and Racial Skills do not count against the limit of two Expert Skills.

There are no other limits to what levels your skills may go to--there are no limits to how many skills you may possess at Advanced, for instance.