System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Oaths

Sixteen self-imposed combat challenges, sworn at a hidden stone — break one and your progress goes back to zero

Somewhere on Earth stands an Oath Stone — a leaning stone with a rusted iron ring set into it, standing alone on open ground further out than almost anything else in the world. Press [R] to turn the ring through the sixteen oaths and [E] to swear whichever one it's currently pointing at — a specific, self-imposed rule about how you're allowed to kill things, held until you either fulfil it or release yourself from it. This isn't a quest with a reward attached; it's a discipline the game asks nothing of you for keeping, and it watches every kill you make while you hold one closely enough to know the instant you break it. Keeping an oath drives an iron rod into the ground at the stone for it, permanently — all sixteen rods together is the full ring.

A sample of the sixteen

The other six cover height (fighting from above or below), timing (day instead of night), and positioning in front of the camera when a kill lands — sixteen entirely different constraints in all, each needing between 12 and 40 qualifying kills depending on how restrictive its terms are.

Decisions, not damage

The game's own development notes frame this as the answer to a long-standing gap: fighting is what a player spends the most hours actually doing, and yet a fight in this game had reduced to "point, click, watch a number go down" — the only real decision made once, in the hotbar, before the fight ever starts. Oaths don't add a weapon, a stat, or a skill; they add the missing verb. Under the Solitary Oath, a kill only counts with nothing else alive within 25 paces, so a pack has to be broken up and picked off one at a time — something the game had never once asked a player to do before. Held together (up to three at once), oaths compose: Solitary, Still and Far sworn simultaneously is described in the source as "a completely different game played with the identical weapons and the identical numbers." A block, dodge, or brace verb was considered and rejected outright for adding new defensive power rather than just a new decision — the explicit design goal here was a verb with no capability attached, which is exactly why the whole system pays nothing at all.

How it actually works

• Hold up to three at once. Swearing a fourth is refused until you release one.
• Every kill you make while an oath is held gets judged against its terms — not just kills you might think are relevant. A qualifying kill adds one to that oath's tally; reach the target and the oath is kept, permanently, the moment it happens.
• A disqualifying kill breaks the oath outright — its tally resets straight back to zero, and the break is permanently recorded even after the oath is eventually kept. Two oaths held at once are judged independently, so the same kill can keep one and break another in the same breath, and the game reports both honestly.
• Releasing an oath yourself costs nothing. Walk back to the stone, press [E] on an oath you're currently holding, and you're free of it — tally reset, no penalty, nothing held against you.
• [F7] opens the Oath Roll — every one of the sixteen oaths, its exact terms, its current tally, whether it's currently sworn, whether it's ever been kept, and how many times it's ever been broken.
• It pays nothing but a title. No cash, no item, no experience — the only reward is a rank shown against how many of the sixteen you've ever kept: UNSWORN, THE FIRST WORD, THE SWORN, THE STEADY HAND, THE TWICE-SWORN, OATHKEEPER, and — for all sixteen — THE WHOLE RING.

Version history

• The Oath Stone system introduced, travelling with the player anywhere on Earth — the stone itself only ever appears there, but a sworn oath is judged wherever you actually are.
• The exact oath and title counts finally published, so the guidebook could stop describing the whole system as three words in a list ("oaths sworn and kept") and instead state real numbers — read live from the system itself rather than typed by hand, the same mistake this project kept making with other counted lists.

Trivia

• The Oath of the Same Hand and the Oath of the Stranger are direct opposites of each other — one demands total focus on a single creature type, the other forbids repeating one at all — and both can theoretically be held at the same time, since neither one's terms actually conflict with the other's.
• Because a break is recorded permanently even after an oath is later kept, a veteran's full record on an oath can honestly show it took several failed attempts to finally get right — nothing about the history is ever hidden or overwritten.
• "A vow" is one of the twenty-four things an apprentice at The Prentice Step can ask to be shown — taking an oath while a child is watching satisfies it.