As with basically every guide I write, we will be using Rusted Pack File Manager[github.com] as much as possible. Since this guide builds off of unit creation and lord creation, I will not be explaining the usage of RPFM in detail and will assume you understand the basics of adding tables, creating packfiles, etc.

Note that unlike the last two guides, you DON'T need to, and shouldn't necessarily fill out every table mentioned here for everything. Skills, items, and effects all link together regularly but in general you use different skills to grant items than you do to grant effects, and ancillaries can grant effects instead of skills, so it's up to you to scope exactly which tables you need - I just tell you what they do and how.

First, let's discuss the basics of how skills actually work

Every lord and hero has a character skill node set, which lets you connect skill nodes to the character.

Character Skills are defined as their own 'thing', then attached to nodes which are the fancy buttons you see ingame.

Skills can be attached to either effects (stats, abilities, etc) or ancillaries (items, mounts, banners, etc).

Character Skill Nodes can be organized in a variety of ways, such as which row they are in, which other nodes are required and how many of them, organized in sets, made mutually exclusive, and other things.

Essentially, the process of adding a custom skill to a lord involves making the skill, telling the game what the skill DOES, adding the skill to the lord's node set, and then telling the game where the skill should be in the set and what requirements or special mechanics it has, if any. It's not THAT complicated once you wrap your head around it, I promise, but can be a little obtuse starting off.

This is the first and perhaps most important table since huge chunks of it are fundamental to how it functions at all.

Key is the same as it always is - unique and important - whatever you call it, you'll be copy pasting this a lot later so make sure to save it.

Image Path is crucially important, this is what will show up ingame. Compare to vanilla to decide which to use, in general if the skill buffs in battle stats then the name will have "battle_" in it, campaign focused stuff will be "campaign_", self-buffs usually have "character_" in the name, etc. If you're making a new lord trait, look for "innate" in the vanilla "key" section, or "trait" in the image path section.

Localized Name and Description are irrelevant, you'll fill them out properly in loc later.

Unlocked at Rank doesn't actually matter, another table actually defines the unlock level.

Is Background Skill is very important - the starting 'traits' lords and heroes start off with are all actually just background skills, and have nothing to do with actual Traits, which are something else entirely. Don't turn this on for 'normal' skills, only if you want it as a lord/hero's default effects.

Background Weighting is (surprise!) only used for background skills. Higher numbers are more likely. If you're adding a new generic background skill, like Knowledgeable and Tactician, Weight 1 will generally do the trick, but if you want your skill to show up more often you can go all the way up to 9999 for near guaranteed spawn. For legendary lord/hero background skills, it doesn't REALLY matter if it's the only one, vanilla usually uses weight 5 for those though.

The rest of the table is generally irrelevant. Influence cost is a high elf thing.

This table exists pretty much entirely to limit what level(s) the skill is available at. Most of the fields are rarely or never used.

Level is the level of the skill, not character level. Usually just 1 (once you unlock a skill, all levels of it can be bought immediately) but some skills may have different character level requirements for each level of the skill; if so, you will need to define multiple rows for skill levels 1, 2, etc.

Unlocked at Rank references the character level requirement. Notice that it starts at 0 not 1; rank 9 is actually level 10 ingame for example. Otherwise very simple.

This table is the alpha and the omega of skill trees - and needs some explanation before I start.

Visually speaking, the window people see ingame is defined in terms of up to 7 Indents and any number of Tiers. Indents are numbered from 0 to 6 going from top to bottom, while Tiers go from 0 to infinity from left to right. Note that the game autopopulates all of this; if you use Tier 5051 for a skill when the highest vanilla tier in that indent is 12, there won't be 5000+ empty spaces, it'll just show up directly to the right of the next highest tier skill as if it was tier 13 - but if someone else mods in a skill at tier 13, your skill will just show up to the right of it. So for compatibility purposes, higher tiers are usually better.

Only indents 0 through 5 are actually visible in the window, 6 is an invisible indent used for background skills, dummies that grant spells, etc. The window will expand rightward to fit in extra tiers, though I'm sure there's a cap. Now, let's go through this...

Key is actually not used as much as keys usually are; this mostly just exists for node link and organization purposes. But it's still important! Try to name them clearly, it makes node links a LOT less obnoxious to do.

Character Skill Key is where you link the actual Character Skill. This is also where you link a lord or hero's innate 'trait' (actually a background skill as we discussed earlier).

Character Skill Node Set Key attaches this node to the character's node set - I told you we'd need it eventually a guide ago!

Indent was discussed in detail earlier. All skills with the same Indent will be in the same row. Remember that Indent 6 is not visible ingame!

Tier MUST BE UNIQUE IN THAT INDENT - if two skills both have Indent 2 and Tier 2, one will not appear ingame! You can have the same Tier in different Indents, though; one skill at Indent 0 Tier 0 will coexist fine with a skill at Indent 1 Tier 0.

Points on Creation is mostly used for legendary lord innate background skills and for dummy skills that give access to spells. 'Normal' skills start with 0 points invested.

Required Num Parents is where you define how many points the player needs to put into skill(s) to satisfy the conditions laid out in character_skill_node_links. 0 for most skills but be careful how you fill this one out.

You know how in vanilla, you usually have to waste 1 skill point in the leadership skill to unlock the rest of the basic red line abilities, then ~6 points in them to unlock Rally, then that unlocks the rank 7 buffs? That's all done here.

Child and Parent keys link two skills together; if you have four rows that say skills 2, 3, 4, and 5 all require rank 1, the game will realize "ok, the player needs to put points in skill 1 before they can get any of the others." How MANY points you need is defined elsewhere, this just tells the game there's a link.

Link Type is the... type... of link... yeah. There are two that you'll be using;

• REQUIRED means that the child key requires the parent key.
  
• SUBSET_REQUIRED means that any parent keys in this set count for unlocking the child.

To use our above example, that crappy leadership skill (Skill 1) is a Required Parent for all 6 of the initial red line skills - you can't get any of them without knowing it. Meanwhile, those 6 skills are all SUBSET_REQUIRED Parents of the child Rally skill (Skill 8), while the leadership skill isn't - the game only cares that you know the leadership skill to unlock skills 2-7, and then it turns around and only cares that you put points into skills 2-7 to unlock skill 8, Rally.

If my explanation didn't help, just go look at the vanilla entries, it'll make sense pretty fast.

Nice simple table. Rarely used, but fun to play with.

The first column asks for a character skill node key, while the second column just asks for a character skill key.

Note that you will need one row for each part of the relationship - in other words, if two skills are supposed to be mutually exclusive, you'll need two rows. If you have six mutually exclusive skills, you'll need five entries for EACH skill node, for a total of 30 rows. Needless to say this climbs very rapidly, and it's easy to forget, so it's usually best to keep mutually exclusive skills to sets of 2.

This table links skills to effects. What are effects you may ask? I... strongly suggest reading my effects guide. Seriously though, the short version is that effects tell the game WHAT to do and how; this table on the other hand tells you how much to do with the effect. I'll go through it in parts.

Character Skill Key is - well, the key I told you to save earlier.

Effect Key I will go into a GREAT amount of detail on later, but there are a ton of useful vanilla effects that you can filter by and use for many simple purposes. If your new skill is just supposed to add +500% hp to your lord, wh_main_effect_character_stat_mod_unit_health is a vanilla effect that will do that no questions asked. Want melee attack instead? wh_main_effect_character_stat_mod_melee_attack. Want to add melee attack to Norscan warhounds? wh_dlc08_effect_skill_melee_attack_increase_warhounds. We'll get into scope very soon, don't worry...

Level is the skill level; you need to define each effect at each skill level you want it available at. For example, if you have a 2 level skill, and it gives melee attack to the character, you'll have two different rows, each with the same skill name and effect, but one will be level 1 and the other will be level 2.

Effect Scope is quite frankly obnoxiously complex and you will probably bork it up at least once while modding if you try ANYTHING fancy. My #1 piece of advice is to blatantly rip off the closest vanilla thing - you don't have to UNDERSTAND what faction_to_faction_own_provincewide is, but if a vanilla skill uses it in a certain way... yea. I'll list some of the most commonly useful scopes here.

• character_to_character_own is used for self-buffs and unlocking abilities/attributes for the lord/hero learning this skill alone.
  
• general_to_force_own is used for buffs that apply to the entire army or segments of the army based on the effect - if the effect is attached to a unit set, only those units will get the effect's.... effects, otherwise your entire army will.
  
• character_to_force_own_unseen is mostly used for Winds of Magic buffs
  
• general_to_force_enemy_regionwide applies to all enemies in the region, used mostly for reducing enemy WoM or morale.

There are MANY others but most are used in other contexts, those are the big 4 for character skills.

Value is very straightforward - what is the value of the effect? If you're boosting Melee Attack, 5 means +5 melee attack. If your effect is a % boost, 5 here means 5%. Mostly self explanatory, I'll go A LOT more into detail on effect shenanigans later.

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One final note - for most skills you will want to add an extra row using the effect wh_main_effect_agent_action_success_chance_enemy_skill. Most vanilla skills have this effect attached; it is why higher level lords/heroes are typically more resistant to enemy agent actions. There is a similar but opposite effect called wh_main_effect_agent_action_success_chance_skill which only needs to be used for agent skills that increases action success chance. Both effects use the scope character_to_character_own and typically have the same value (albeit negative) as the skill level, ex. a skill with two levels will have -1 at level 1 and -2 at level 2.

You do not NEED to do this for a functional skill, however I suggest getting into the habit of doing so. It's a good habit to get into and I feel it shows that you care enough about your mod to not halfass skills.

Thankfully we're back to another easy table. I'll touch a lot more on ancillaries later, but to briefly summarize; items, mounts, and banners are all ancillaries.

Similar to last table this one is just a basic link. I believe this table is only necessary for actual items, like weapons and talismans; mounts can skip this table.

DO NOT check the "enable quest for prefix" field unless you're actually doing a quest battle. Way way way way waaaaaaaaay easier to just give the item for learning the skill.

Two different prefixes, name and description as usual.

character_skills_localised_name_
character_skills_localised_description_

The AI by default seems to just pick skills out of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hat, so if you want them to prioritize your skill this is the table to do it with. It's... fairly self explanatory. You have your five default dropdown options with clear names - USEFUL_ALWAYS obviously makes the AI prioritize it, USELESS_ALWAYS is the opposite.

Far as I can tell, this works on a multiplier system - USEFUL_ALWAYS is defined as 100x multiplier in cai_personalities_character_skill_selection_policies_skill_utilization_hints_junctions_tables so... obviously the AI will prioritize it. USELESS_ALWAYS is 0.1, so 10% of the chance of picking it.

You can define your own using character_skill_utilization_hints_tables and cai_personalities_character_skill_selection_policies_skill_utilization_hints_junctions_tables if you really dislike the vanilla ones for whatever reason. I personally find this extremely useful when adding skills that may not be instabuy but are useful, however USEFUL_ALWAYS is a great tool for getting chains started. Synergy happens in the next table.

Another CAI table, yay! This one is super simple and easy for once, it just helps the AI understand that two skills are good together. It's surprisingly poorly used in vanilla, which is probably why the AI picks such a ridiculous clusterfraggle of skills, but one of the few good vanilla uses is that if a caster learns Earth Blood, they should try to pick up Life Bloom as well.

This gives you options in trying to make the AI work with your skills intelligently - you can also use USEFUL_ALWAYS for each skill in a lord unique chain to make sure they always get them, or use this table to nudge them into picking certain combinations of spells together without messing with their base weighting. Or maybe you're adding combat doctrines, and a skill that focuses on bonuses to infantry might go well with the redline skill for infantry for that faction - you probably don't want to edit the vanilla redline skill's value, so just use a synergy to help nudge them in the right direction!

Note that as with many CAI deals, you can create your own by using the definition table (in this case, cai_character_skill_synergy_levels_tables) and setting a custom value. Vanilla only has a single option available, "medium" which is a 1.5x boost, but maybe you want to make a custom "high" that is 2.0, or "GET_THIS_YOU_STUPID_WANNABE_SKYNET" which is 100 to really drive home the synergy.

So in this series of guides I've talked a lot about all the things you can do, but now let's try a practical example - we want to give Karl Franz a custom skill that grants 10 armor and 5 Melee Defense to Halberdiers.

As an important caveat, you can do this is any order - I will just suggest the order that I would do it in to minimize how many red boxes you see along the way.

First of all, we make the effects and ensure there's a functional unit set. The effects are easy; create one for armor and one for melee defense, ripping off similar vanilla effects.

We then skip on over to unit_set_to_unit_junctions to look up vanilla unit sets; search Unit Record by Halber - oh hey we can already see there's an "emp_halberds" set, copy that and search by unit set... ah hell, that includes the halberd wielding demigryph knights. So do you want to buff them too? If so, we can just use this set. Otherwise, if you ONLY want Halberdiers to get the buff, we make a custom set in unit_sets, ex. emp_halberdiers and then go back to junctions and ONLY add the unit record wh_main_emp_inf_halberdiers to our new unit set.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Now we need to attach the effects to actual stats - which, as we discussed earlier in the guide, is done in effect_bonus_value_ids_unit_sets for this particular example. As usual you'll shamelessly plagiarize similar vanilla effects to find the Bonus Value IDs you're looking for; searching effects for "armour" (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Britbongs) will reveal that the necessary ID for armor is armour_mod and doing the same with melee stats reveals melee_defence_mod for MD. So we create two new rows in our mod's version of the table, and attach the effects we made two paragraphs ago to the bonus value IDs we just found, and then put the relevant unit set on the right - either emp_halberds or emp_halberdiers depending on your decision above.

Well, now we have the effects, but no way to apply them, and even if we did they wouldn't have any text. So let's take care of the first bit - applying them.

As we discussed earlier in the guide, first we make the skill in character_skills, and add an entry in character_skill_level_details for the level requirement. We then move to character_skill_level_to_effects_junctions where we add three rows, each level 1 - two for the effects we made in the last section, with scope general_to_force_own, and in the third row we use the vanilla effect wh_main_effect_agent_action_success_chance_enemy_skill (scope: character_to_character_own), set to -1, which means that learning that skill makes it slightly harder for enemy agents to cuck us - vanilla skills do this and it's a good habit to get into. Then we put the actual values of the effects on the far right (again, 10 for the armor one, 5 for the MD one).

If your skill is gonna have two levels, repeat these steps with three new rows each set to level 2 and higher values for the effects. Maybe you want 20 armor and 10 MD when maxed. Whatever. You do you fam.

Unfortunately the skill isn't actually ATTACHED to anyone, so now we have to go to character_skill_nodes. First off we need to figure out what the heck Karl Franz's character skill node set even is, so filter by that and look for some variation of his name; thankfully his, wh_main_skill_node_set_emp_karl_franz includes both halves of his name - some lords don't! Balthasar Gelt, for example, is wh_main_skill_node_set_emp_balthasar and searching by "gelt" will bring up nothing.

Now that we know what Franz's skill node set is, we can look over it and see how it's laid out. Army buffing unique skills are usually in indent 1, and we see that indent 1 tier 0-5 are all taken by vanilla skills. So you can either go for Indent 1 Tier 6, or if you're concerned another mod will overwrite it, you can go for tier 128 or some BS number. If you're making generic skills, for the love of god, use a high number for compatibility, but lord unique skills are generally fine at low numbers. Anyways. For the sake of this guide, we'll just use Indent 6.

So here, we're gonna use the key of the character_skills entry we made earlier for the character_skill key, whatever we want for this table's key (I'd use wh_dlc08_skill_emp_lord_unique_karl_6 personally), make sure it's attached to Franz's character skill node set, and doublecheck to make sure it looks similar to his existing skills. If you want to test the skill, you can put points into it at creation so you can go ingame and check, but be sure to remove them when you release the mod.

Ok, the skill works now, but if you test it you'll see it doesn't have jack for text. Woops. Let's fix that. You're gonna want to create/import a couple loc files, nothing too much. Rename them when you create/import them so they don't overwrite vanilla ones.

character_skills.loc
effects.loc

character_skills is easy to fill out; just append the skill name after the last underscore for each of the two rows you need

character_skills_localised_name_
character_skills_localised_description_

So say your skill is named karl_franz_halberdiers, your keys will look like

character_skills_localised_name_karl_franz_halberdiers
character_skills_localised_description_karl_franz_halberdiers

Fill out the flavor text however you want, but try to spellcheck it for everyone's sake.

Effects are pretty easy; you only need one row for each of the two effects we made, in this format

effects_description_

So say the first effect is emp_halberdier_armor, we're looking at

effects_description_emp_halberdier_armor

As we discussed above, you'll be looking to fill out the text field with something like;

Armor: %+n for Halberdiers

You can fluff it up a bit if you want, but something along those lines. Repeat for the MD effect, and you should be good to go!

Since End Times is the pinnacle of literature, we're gonna go nice and simple here and give Karl Franz the skill that grants the spell Urannon's Thunderbolt, which is totally lore friendly to him being the Incarnate of Heaven or w/e that plot point was.

As you'll know from reading the character skill nodes section of the guide, we first need to find Karl's nodeset to add anything to him. How you do so is up to you; my default solution is to change the filter to "Character Skill Node Set Key" and type in "karl." Sometimes that won't work due to weird naming, ex. you may have to search for 'franz' instead. In this case though, it's nice and simple, wh_main_skill_node_set_emp_karl_franz

Next, we need to know the skill key to use. Again, you can do this a few ways, like looking in character_skills_tables, but for simplicity I'd just change the filter to Character Skill Key and search for part of the spell's name, like "urann" or "thunder" or "thunderbolt" if you aren't sure how to spell Urannon. Whatever the case, it shouldn't be too hard to find the skill key... but wait, there's two of them? wh_main_skill_all_magic_heavens_05_urannons_thunderbolt and wh2_main_skill_all_magic_heavens_05_urannons_thunderbolt_lord? You can look at the differences in character_skill_level_to_effects_junctions_tables, but for the sake of the guide I'll just say that the lord version is what we're looking for; lord version usually only takes 2 skill points, hero version takes 3. So we're going with wh2_main_skill_all_magic_heavens_05_urannons_thunderbolt_lord

Now, we need to figure out what indent and tier is free on Karl. Make sure you're looking at Karl's nodes (filtering by node set key) and then click on the Indent column to sort the table by it; you can see all of his indent 0 skills in order, all of his indent 1 skills... etc etc. Indent 3 looks pretty open, and most spells are in tier 2 or 3 anyways, so let's use indent 3. Since there are no other skills to worry about in that indent, you can use tier 0 if you want, or a higher number for compatibility with other mods that add skills to his indent 3.

The Key doesn't really matter for this example so name it whatever you want; I would personally go for something simple, like karl_franz_magic_1 or crys_karl_thunderbolt, doesn't matter, just something unique and unlikely to be incompatible with someone else's mod.

Add all that to your mod, make sure "Visible in UI" is ticked on, and you're good!

Let's say you want to add the full Lore of Death to Volkmar (????), or maybe you want to add a set of unique skills to your custom lord. Whatever the goal is, this is different from the previous section in that if you want your various skills to link to each other, either mutually exclusive or requiring previous ones, you'll need to worry about skill node links or locks.

First off, we'll repeat the steps of the last section. You'll want to know the skill node set name of the lord/hero you're working with, as well as each of the skill keys you want in the chain. For the sake of this example, I'm just gonna use Volkmar and the vanilla Lore of Death, because irony is delicious.

Again, we need to decide what indent and tier to put the spells in. Skimming his vanilla entries, it looks like all of indent 3 is open, so you could start with Indent 3 Tier 0. For mod compatibility, I'd suggest starting higher, like tier 60 or 100, but for this guide I'm going to assume you're lazy and will just start from tier 0.

Our initial goal is to just get all of the skills there. The easiest way to do this specific example is just to copy the list of skills off of someone else with the Lore of Death, say, Arkhan. Indent 3 Tier 0 goes to Spirit Leech, Indent 3 Tier 1 goes to Spirit Leeching, so on and so forth. Remember that you need to use unique Keys for the column on the left - keep it simple, for this example something like volkmar_death_magic_0, volkmar_death_magic_1, etc. Or volkmar_death_0. Whatever.

Assuming you did everything right, the skills will all show up in game, unattached to anything, with no level or previous skill requirements. You may want to test just to see.

All that link stuff, as mentioned earlier in the guide, is mostly handled in character_skill_node_links_tables. You can look at how Arkhan is set up; his initial skill 0 is the Parent of a Required relationship with the next 4 skills in the tree, and skills 1-4 are all Parents of a Subset Required relationship with skill 5 (evasion). If you go back to character skill nodes, you'll notice that skill 5 has a 4 in the "Required Num Parents" column, and as we just saw, skills 1-4 are all 'parents' of skill 5. Note that there is no required num parents for skills 1-4, just the basic link. Thus, just putting a point in Spirit Leech unlocks all four skills, but you need to put 4 points between those skills in order to unlock Evasion. This pattern repeats in the section bit of the tree; 6-9 are all children of 5, and 10 is the child of 6-9, with 10 again requiring 4 skill points in the previous four.

Note that Arkhan also has a 'dummy' lore ability - that is used to give him the Spirit Leech and Aspect of the Dreadknight spells he starts off with.

If you want to LOCK two mutually exclusive skills, this can be done independently in the character_skill_nodes_skill_locks_tables table. Note carefully that the first column asks for a character skill node key, while the second requires a character skill key, NOT a character skill node key. Keep in mind you'll need an entry here for each side; if you want Fate of Bjuna and Purple Sun to be mutually exclusive, you'll need to have each of them lock the other out.

Yes, I'm shilling another guide, deal with it. Seriously though, character skills, abilities/phases, effects, and ancillaries are definitely linked heavily to each other, but I wanted to split them up into separate guides for readability. Hence, we have abilities and phases guide! If you want to make custom(ish) spells, tinker with existing ones, or just give your dude a buff that grants him 50 million MA forever, check it out! ...Please don't do that last one tho.

This Effects guide covers our handy dandy little effects in much more detail, though I gave a pretty good overview in character skills to effects.

This Ancillaries guide covers how to make custom items, followers, mounts, etc.