Progression: Ascensions
Sooner or later a character runs out of room to grow: skills near their caps, the lifetime XP budget spent (see Skills), nowhere left to climb. Ascension is the way through. You reset your character back to the beginning and start the climb over, but you come back permanently stronger and able to reach higher than you did before.
If you've played MUDs, this is remort. You give up your hard-won progress and run it again, except each loop leaves you with a little more than the last.
What resets, and what you keep
The reset is real — most of what you built is wiped. What survives is the part that compounds.
| Wiped on ascension | Carried forever |
|---|---|
| Earned XP (back to zero) | Permanent attribute points |
| Every trained skill | Installed cyberware |
| Purchased advantages | Mutations |
| Gear and possessions |
You keep your stuff and your body, and you lose your training. That split is the whole strategy of the system, and the two sections below are why.
The standing reward: raw attribute points
The bonus you ascend for is permanent attribute points. They stack across every ascension, never reset, and are the most valuable kind of power in the game — for a specific, mechanical reason.
Cyberware and mutations add into the capped ±30 modifier on a check (see Augmentation and Skill Checks). Ascension points instead raise the raw attribute itself — the value that gets weighted and blended into every check that leans on it (still capped at $100$). So a handful of attribute points:
- lifts a whole family of related skills at once,
- never bumps against the ±30 modifier ceiling, and
- is felt on every single roll that touches that attribute.
Skills you can lose to a reset. The attribute floor you stand on only ever rises.
The XP-cap staircase
Each ascension also raises your lifetime XP cap, turning a hard ceiling into a staircase. The cap starts at 25,000 — enough to take a single skill to roughly expert level, or to spread across several — and climbs with every run:
| Ascensions | Lifetime XP cap |
|---|---|
| 0 | 25,000 |
| 1 | 30,000 |
| 2 | 40,000 |
| 3 | 60,000 |
| 4 | 100,000 |
The rungs get bigger, but so does the grind to fill them — each higher cap takes meaningfully more playtime to spend, so veteran power is paced rather than allowed to run away. (These are the target rungs; like every number in these docs they get retuned, but the shape — a widening ladder — is the design.)
The loop
Why it works this way
(conjecture) Ascension exists to solve the problem of a character who has finished growing. A flat XP cap (see Skills) means ordinary progress eventually ends; ascension turns that endpoint into a fresh run that starts from a higher floor. A few deliberate choices hold it together:
- Power gating. Each cap is tuned to allow the build it's meant for with a little breathing room, while keeping the next tier of skill just out of reach. You're always climbing toward something rather than handed everything at once.
- Bounded accuracy survives. Attributes still cap at 100 and the difficulty curve still tops out at a 95% ceiling, so ascension widens your reach without breaking the math. A sharp, well-built character who has never ascended stays genuinely competitive — veterans pull ahead by degree, not by leaving everyone else in the dust.
- It rewards dedication without trivialising it. Permanent attributes and a rising cap keep every ascension paying out long after the run that earned it, while the growing grind provides natural diminishing returns.
The track is also built to branch: not every ascension need be identical, which leaves room for different kinds of ascension with their own requirements and rewards.
Ascension vs. augmentation
It's easy to lump ascension in with augmentation — mutations and cyberware — but they're separate tracks, and the reset is exactly what tells them apart:
| What it changes | Survives a reset? | |
|---|---|---|
| Ascension | Your raw potential (attributes, XP cap) | It is the reset; the bonus is the whole point |
| Augmentation | Your body (soak, stats, abilities) | Yes — chrome and mutations carry across |
Because augments persist through ascension while skills and advantages don't, they're the long-term play: before an ascension, advantages are rented power you'll lose, while implants and mutations are permanent investments. A character planning to ascend often leans into augmentation for exactly that reason.
See also
- Progression: Skills — the trained, capped half of progression that ascension resets and extends.
- Augmentation — mutations and cyberware, the power that survives the reset.
- Skill Checks — where raw attributes, the thing ascension raises, turn into outcomes.