I got my hands on the Stonekeep Official Strategy Guide recently, and I was reading through it when I came across a section on page 34 that refers to a trait that I had never heard of before in the game. "Weapon Familiarity". I'll transcribe what it provided. But I have no clue if this is something the writer(s) of the book made up or not.

"Each Weapon Skill and Weapon Familiarity has a counter. This count increases by 1 point each time you successfully "use" a weapon, shield, or runecaster. What constitutes successful use? For a weapon, it's a hit that does damage. For a shield, any blocked blow. For a runecaster, you get a point any time you cast a spell.

When you reach the magick number (see the following table), the skill or familiarity rating increases by 1 increment and the counter resets to zero. As you can see from the table, Familiarities increase at a faster pace than skills.

Note that changing weapons does not change the Familiarity or Skill counters for the previous weapon.

Level - Familiarity - Skill
1 - 2 - 20
2 - 4 - 50
3 - 10 - 110
4 - 24 - 225
5 - 52 - 500

Remember, hits do not accumulate from level to level. The counter resets to zero each time you reach a new Skill or Familiarity rating."

So yeah, is Familiarity real in Stonekeep, or is this a crock?

Also, I haven't experimented any with counting out attack successes to see if the table is accurate for skill ups. But if someone else wants too, then feel free to do so and get back to me on that too.