Undercroft is the reincarnation of the classic Role Playing Game. You control bunch of adventurers in a dangerous fantasy world with a quest draging them through the story. Your way is full of hinderances and struggles, that you have to overcome. To do so, you have to train and coordinate unique features of your heroes. Each hero in the party has set of features as described bellow.

Name and occupation

Every hero has a name you give him/her and an occupation you choose. Occupation influences starting statistics of the hero and set of skill, this hero can learn. For example - warrior can train some special combat moves, while mage learns spells and assassin his own special killing techniques.

Basic statistics

Hero has two basic energy pools: health or HP (hitpoints) and stamina. Health displays hero's condition - if it drops to zero, your man is dead. Stamina is energy necessary to use special skills. If it drops to zero, your hero is exhausted and can only walk and do basic strike.

Physical abilities of the hero are displayed in three basic statistics:

	Strength raises attack power of close attacks and hero's health. The more points you spare in the strength the more hits your hero can stand and the stronger strikes he/she can do. It's a must for warriors.
	Dexterity raises power of range attacks and hero's resistance to physical attack. The better dexterity you have, the more precise shots/throws you can do. Resistance is risen by simple fact, that with better dexterity you can better avoid attacks.
	Constitution raises hero's stamina and fire, cold and poison resistences. This feature displays body hardness and endurance. It's a must for spell casting characters, because spells runs the energy very fast.

You can boost strength for your hero and make his health enormous, while omitting the dexterity and constitution. This will cause only, that you will take more damage, but with all the health you will probably survive it. Also the stamina for special moves will be drained soon, but the power of the basic attack will be significantly higher than power of balanced hero. So both balanced and disbalanced heros will work, albeit different way with different fighting strategy. It's up to you to decide.

Resistances

Hero has physical resistance and three resistances to elements: resistance to fire, resistance to cold, resistance to poison.
Physical resistance is risen by armors (resistance to impact) and dexterity (ability to avoid impact).
Elemental resistances are risen by constitution and magical armors.

Skills

Every hero has possibility to learn up to 12 different skills and upgrade their level. Skills of a hero depend on an occupation you've chosen for him/her.

Not every skill at any level is available from the beginning of the adventure. This depends on overall level of your hero. You have to reach certain level to be able to learn some skills. And you can't upgrade a skill to a level exceeding overall level of the character. For example mage with level 8 can't cast level 9 fireball. See CHARACTERS section to get detailed list of all skills.

After selecting NEW GAME in the main menu, you are asked to choose the difficulty. On higher difficulty level your heroes get less health and stamina for one point of strength and constitution, enemies strike harder and selling price of the items is consederably lower.

After this you will get to the party creation interface, which is (with a few modifications) same as the basic party interface you will work with throughout the whole game.



It's empty in the beginning, but you can see here 12 slots for hero's skills on the left side and text area below it. Floppy disk button in the bottom left corner jumps back to the main menu.

The interface will lead you through the creation process - just watch the glowing buttons and read the text in the text area to know, what has to be done next.

To create a hero you has to do this sequence of actions:
1) Select hero's position in the party (click one of the four glowing question marks).
2) Select hero's appearance.
3) Type in hero's name.
4) Select hero's occupation. You can click small question mark next to the occupation to get a short info about it in the text area. Occupations differ in set of skills they can learn and in initial statistics.

Occupations have these initial values:

	warrior	priest	mage	summoner	assassin
strength	6	3	2	4	4
dexterity	2	3	2	2	4
constitution	2	4	6	4	2

5) Before the last step you will see the screen of your hero filled up:



You see name, occupation, level, HP and stamina on the right side. There's also symbol of the occupotion (sword and shield for warrior in this case) - click it, to get the short info. You can also click basic statistics and all the skills to get their descriptions.

Glowing buttons show, to which skills you can assign your free points. You got 2 in the beginning. Click skills to get their descriptions. You can get more info about the selected skill, when you click small book button in the upper right corner of the text area. To raise level of the skill click small red plus button. To know more about occupations and their advantages see CHARACTERS section of the Handbook.

You have also 3 additional points in the beginning, which you can put into basic statistics. Don't forget to distribute them all.