What you actually do
Beasts drop material, material becomes equipment, and equipment is how you survive the next world along. Everything else is built on that loop.
Hunting & Materials
A drop is not a number. Every material carries a grade from the Beast that gave it and a purity from how the fight went — whether it touched you, whether you finished the combo, whether you overkilled it.
Fight badly and you still get the material. You just get worse material.
The Forge
Work moves through a furnace, an anvil and a quench, and only advances while you are standing at the right one. What comes out is an instance, not a recipe — two people can make the same plate and hand you different armour.
It carries your name as the maker. Permanently.
The Still & the Fire
Two trades beside the forge, each opened by a trader's quest. Herbs grow by region, and the still behind each city trader brews them into a batch of potions that leave you hitting harder for a while — an edge shop stock never carries.
Cooking works at any fire, even one you light yourself. A meal heals half at once and the rest over time, and eating at a fire feeds everyone standing at it.
Traits
Properties live on the material, never rolled onto the finished item — so forging is sourcing and judgement rather than a slot machine, and a market has something to price.
Signature traits carry a skill that replaces whatever the recipe intended. One named Beast, one named drop, guaranteed.
Factions
Five ranks, and each one demands a combat achievement and a non-combat one and an investment at the same time. A faction of nothing but hunters does not climb.
Ranks buy facilities: a shared forge, a deeper vault, a trophy hall of every record your members hold.
Expeditions
Instanced runs for up to five. The mouth seals behind you — it warns you first, and it is never locked, because a party that can neither win nor leave is worse than a lost run.
Pressure rises while you dawdle and falls with every kill, so the clock is one you can argue with.
Quests you find
Nobody hands you a list. Work comes from a person who wants something, from a page taken off a body, or from walking somewhere you have not been — and it only enters your log when that happens.
The journal still shows every quest in the game with what it needs and where it starts, because the mountain is worth seeing from the bottom. It just will not do it for you.
PvP, by geography
Consent is where you stand, not a setting. The hub is duels only. The frontier lets you raise a flag — slowly, both ways. The far worlds are open ground.
Nothing is PvP-exclusive. A kill moves material between players; it never creates any.