Progression & Milestones
How You Level Up
No XP. No individual tracking. The guild levels together.
Characters level up when the guild achieves defined mission milestones. All 10 players advance simultaneously — Active and Bench alike. Miss a session and you still level up with everyone else when the milestone is reached.
Combat, roleplay, and Garrison contributions all count equally toward the guild’s progression. The milestone triggers when the guild achieves something meaningful as a whole, not when enough monsters have been killed.
Guild Rank
Guild Rank is the guild’s internal hierarchy — separate from character level but advancing alongside it. As the guild earns trust and proves itself to the Staircase and to Silas, new capabilities open up.
What’s interesting about Guild Rank is that these aren’t simply rewards or promotions. The Staircase itself has been damaged — abilities and systems that should have been available to your characters from the start are locked or suppressed by the instability. As the guild stabilizes more of the Staircase and demonstrates its reliability, those hidden or disabled capabilities unlock. You’re not earning new privileges. You’re recovering what was always there.
Guild Ranks
Initiate Where every Key begins. You are new to the Staircase’s systems, and those systems don’t fully trust you yet. Foundational Garrison Tasks are available, and the Bastion’s core functions are accessible. This is the beginning.
Journeyman The guild has proven itself. More of the Staircase’s systems become responsive — additional Garrison Tasks open up, and deeper Bastion operations become possible. Silas begins treating you as operatives rather than recruits.
Vanguard Full operational access. The guild has demonstrated enough stability that the Staircase releases the last of its locked task systems. At this rank you have access to everything the guild has earned. Silas treats Vanguard members as genuine partners.
Sentinel The rank that marks the conclusion of the guild’s first major arc. What the Staircase unlocks for Sentinels is something to be discovered when you get there.
Resonance Locks
Silas controls how deep you go.
The Staircase’s damage isn’t uniform. Deeper floors of any given Door carry more instability — and pushing into them before the guild has done sufficient preparation risks fracture events that Silas is not willing to permit.
Before the active team can descend to a new floor within a Door, the bench team needs to have completed enough preparatory research through Garrison Duty. Silas tracks this and will tell the active team what is and isn’t accessible before they go through the Door.
Coordinate with your bench players before the session. Know what floors are unlocked before you step through. Silas will communicate any locks in character — if he says the lower levels are dark to him, that means something.
Emergency access exists, but it comes at a cost to the team. Do not count on it.
What Progression Feels Like
The guild starts small and grows — in power, in access, in what the Staircase trusts you with. Every rank advance is earned collectively. A player who has been benched for five sessions advances to Journeyman at the same time as everyone else. The guild rises together. That is the point.
Silas will deliver rank advances in character. You will know when you’ve earned one.