Our First Encounter
Let’s build a simple encounter for Gavrin. Since Gavrin is a Fugitive Mage because of his study of the forbidden rituals of the Astromancer, it makes sense that Gavrin would be hiding from a group of Imperial mage-hunters from the Arlyte Empire (part of the Oradam Rift setting).
We’ll say that Gavrin is hiding in the woods from the team of mage-hunters. If he stays in the woods, he’ll eventually be caught. But there is a nearby community who have no love for the Arlyte Empire and perhaps they’ll hide him from them. He’ll just need to get there first.
So first Gavrin will need to sneak out of the woods without being noticed by the mage-hunters. Looking at the Skill list (starting on pg. 24), Sneak seems like the perfect skill for this situation. Unfortunately, looking at Gavrin’s character sheet, he only has a single rank of Sneak, meaning he will be rolling 1 die for this Skill Test.
Looking through the basics of a Skill Test (pg. 13), the Difficulty of the roll is going to be 15 (the basic difficulty of any Skill Roll) and we need to determine the Resistance (how many dice rolled that meet or exceed 15 needed to succeed). The base Resistance is 1, but there are list of factors that can increase this. None of them look particularly relevant for this situation, we’ll stick with a Resistance of 1. With a Difficulty of 15 and a Resistance of 1, the Skill Test would be expressed as 15/1: 1 roll of 15 or higher needed to succeed.
With our Skill Test figured out, Gavrin rolls his single Sneak die and gets a 20! A roll of a 20 is considered a Strong Hit and would count as 2 hits instead of 1, so even if the Skill Test had been 15/2, he still would have succeeded. If the Skill Test had been 15/3, however, Gavrin would have had no hope of succeeding the Sneak roll without some help.
Escaping the woods, Gavrin finds himself in a small fishing village. He looks around trying to see if he finds anyone particularly kind looking. We’ll say this is a Inspect challenge and since Gavrin is in a hurry to keep ahead of the mage-hunters, we’ll increase the Resistance by 1, to 15/2. Gavrin has an Inspect rank of 3 so he is rolling 3 d20s. He gets a 14, 5, and 10. Ouch. Looking at Gavrin’s Traits, it is likely that his Quiet but Observant trait would help him here, so he uses that to try re-rolling on of his dice and gets a 2. Some of Gavrin’s other Traits might be helpful here, but the rules for Traits (pg. 84) are silent on if having multiple applicable traits allows for more rerolls, so we won’t. Gavrin has failed to find anyone who looks amenable to helping a Fugitive Mage. Instead, he’ll just have to try his luck and approach the first person he sees.
Speaking to a merchant, Gavrin tries to explain he needs somewhere to hide for a minute while a group of Imperial mage-hunters pass by. It’s not the most persuasive argument, but Gavrin has a Talk of 1 and is sheepish, masked Eldash kid, so hopefully the merchant takes pity on him. We’ll set the Skill Test for 15/2 to represent the difficult Gavrin will face to convince the merchant. Gavrin rolls his 1 Talk die and gets a 1. Instead of helping Gavrin, the merchant calls out to the mage-hunters, outing Gavrin in the hope of collecting any bounty they have on the Astromancer. Uh-oh.