The forge gave the Penitent seventeen skills. This round gives each of them three faces. Fifty-one runes now exist — three per skill — and a rune isn't a stat bump, it's a re-imagining. Slash's spinning finishers can sweep a wider tide of steel. Judgment can trade its focused sentence for a colossal single blow that costs the earth, or a wide arc that condemns the whole crowd for less each. The whirlwind can become a tighter, thirstier cyclone or a broad, cheap gale that pulls in a bigger mob.
The marquee runes are the elemental ones. Because Dreadmark already tracks damage by type — fire, cold, lightning, poison, each with its own ailment — a rune can simply convert a skill. Emberslash makes every basic swing burn. Frostcleave turns the great arc to ice, chilling what it hits and freezing the ones it hits hardest. Stormeye makes the whirlwind crackle and leaves everything inside it shocked. Plague Censer weeps venom that stacks. Twelve skills can be re-tuned to a whole new element this way, ailment and all — and a build that stacks that element's damage feels every point of it.
Choosing them is its own screen. A new skill window lays your kit out like the classics did: pick a skill on the left, and its runes appear on the right — each shown large, with its real resulting numbers, so you can theorycraft at a glance instead of guessing. Pick the one you want and drag the skill onto your hotbar, rune baked in. Your loadout is saved to your character.
But nothing here is handed to you. Skills unlock as you level — reach the level, gain the skill. Runes cost rune points, a currency you earn a little of every level and find as Rune Shards dropped by elites and bosses. You will not unlock everything on one character; you'll spend on the runes that make your build, and the strongest, widest runes cost the most. The demo hands you a real, satisfying slice of this — but the biggest area-of-effect skills and the best runes sit further up the ladder than a short run can reach. That's on purpose. There's a full game up there.
Under the hood, the automated test bot cast all fifty-one runes at a dummy to prove none of them break, and the whole loadout — every slotted skill, every rune you've unlocked, every shard you've banked — rides along in your save. The kit is finally yours to shape.