Recipe: Ruka's Tassets

The Recipe: Ruka's Tassets is a compact parchment scroll, its edges blistered with age and its surface lacquered a faint bronze by countless fingertips. When you tilt it toward the lantern, the ink catches and crawls like a moth-wing across the page, revealing a delicate, almost musical diagram of thigh guards in overlapping plates. The parchment’s texture feels like sun-dried leather pressed into a fragile map; a thread of wax seals traces a crescent of the author’s care, the kind of seal you break only after you’ve decided the quest is worth the risk. A tiny sigil—an abstract fox coiled in mid-step—rests in the corner, the emblem of a vanished master craftsman whose name threads through the markets as a whisper and a dare. The scroll reads more as a travelogue than a recipe, as if Ruka wandered from caravan to caravan, patching together knowledge the way a leatherworker patches torn hides. Its lines describe not merely how to stitch and plate but when to temper the metal, how to soak hides to gain flexibility, and which thinned resins lend a bite to the edge without stiffening the joints. The words hint at texture and sound: the rasp of a file over bronze, the soft sting of oil on leather, the quick click of a buckle snapping into place. In the margins, a few notes speak of field testing—how the plates catch a glint of sun after a long day in the heat, how the tassets remain quiet under a heavy cloak, how a quick stride in the right pair of guards can mean the difference between a fall and a fortune. Lore threads run as surely as the stitches. Ruka, some say, was a wanderer who learned his art in a desert market, trading in secrets as much as in leather. The Tassets he designed were said to be light enough for a scout’s quick foot yet sturdy enough to weather a blade’s bite. The recipe survives in the hands of those who reassemble old caravans and reweave old legends, a bridge between memory and tools, between the rumors of raiders and the calm of smithy doors. To wield his design is to carry a hint of those journeys—the sense that craftsmanship can outpace fear if you listen to the grain of a hide as it yields to a careful hand. Its significance in gameplay is subtler than a roar but enduring. The recipe promises a set of leg armor that feels like it was forged for movement—low weight, flexible plates, and a fit that allows quick dodges and nimble repositioning. Players who chase it seek not only protection but a certain grace of motion, a way to glide through combat rather than grind to a halt. As a collectible, it carries weight in a world that respects the old routes and the old makers, the ones who stitched together necessity and art. A quiet bustle surrounds the market stall where this parchment sometimes reappears, and it’s there that Saddlebag Exchange matters most. Traders trade whispers and coins for a copy of the scroll, and you can hear the tiny clink of silver as the parchment changes hands—two silvers, perhaps a few copper more, depending on the day’s wind. The exchange is a living custodian of memory—every price a map, every sale a thread in a larger tapestry. And so the Recipe: Ruka's Tassets travels on, a fragment of a past that keeps guiding those who listen to the grain and the glow of the forge.