This year we’re releasing a shitload of Tier 1 Personas for our badass game, Exiles. But if you don’t live and breathe Exiles, you might be wondering what the fuck a Tier 1 Persona is.

A Persona, of course, tells you what kind of Exiles character you’ve got.

Your Persona gives you a list of skills to buy with your Learnin’ and tells you how much those skills cost. Your Persona also tells you how much Mustard and Cheatin’ tokens you start with.

When we launched Exiles back at Gen Con 2016 we released all of our Regular Personas (Bandit, Doctor, Gentleman, Gunslinger, Rowdy, and Trapper). A Regular Persona just means you’ve got a badass of the regular, frontier variety.

A Tier Persona, on the other hand, means you’ve got a strange, unusual, weird, accursed, or Wastelandy badass! Consequently, we group these Personas into three tiers of ascending weirdness and badassery, so you have a rough idea of how fucked up your game is about to become!

We also have a system, called the Learnin’ Bank, that keeps all this weird and fucked up shit properly rare in your campaign.

If you’re following teh rulz, the Learnin’ bank is how you earn the privilege of playing a Tier Persona character in your Exiles campaign. Here’s how it works:

Every time your character earns Learnin’ from playing a game, that Learnin’ should also go into your Learnin’ Bank. When your character dies, gets boring, gets too badass, or otherwise leaves the game, you get to transfer all your Learnin’ Bank to a new character and keep going.

You can spend your Learnin’ Bank to buy access to a Tier Persona character, meaning your current character and all his shit is out of the game forever and you start a brand new character from a Tier Persona, with 45 Learnin’ to buy skills and 10 Johnsons to buy stuff!

We like folks to pay 100 Learnin’ per tier, so if you’ve got 120 Learnin’ in your bank, you could spend 100 of it to start a brand new Tier 1 Persona character, and put the remaining 20 Learnin’ back into your Learnin’ Bank.

The Learnin’ Bank is awesome because it not only encourages healthy character turnover by giving you a badass reason to start a new character, but it also gives you a reward that isn’t tied to a specific character. Let’s be honest, Exiles characters come and go, and it’s real nice to know that you don’t up and lose everything when a stick of dynamite lands the wrong way!