The world of Erinev consists of three planes (called Visible World – physical, Invisible World – magic, and World of Deities – ethereal). The economy and technology is based on the early middle ages, gold is really valuable, equipment can be quite expensive (depending on the labor needed to produce it).

 Even though the names of the basic four species in ANDERS may sound familiar, they are a bit closer to the original fairy tales than to Tolkien’s version of them, and as such all have their very specific advantages and disadvantages in certain regards (more player species will be available later on as expansions).

A character can have up to three professions (starting with two on the 1st level, adding another on the 10th level). Each profession comes with a certain set of skills, which can partly overlap between them.

Guilds are multi-national and powerful entities, and they try to make sure that certain skills are not used by non-guild members (your character can learn some of these skills nevertheless, but it will be dangerous for them to actually train or use these openly if they are not a member of a matching guild)

ANDERS uses Goal Achievement Points (GAP). To level up, 100 GAP are needed (overflow GAP can be saved or used to further improve skills after an adventure). GAP are not given for just killing beings (if one kills the wrong beings, one will actually get less GAP at the end of an adventure than possible).

ANDERS does not use something like "hit points" to define how healthy a creature is. Instead, a being’s health status is only defined by the number of wounds (and their severity/level), sickness levels, and conditions.

Instead of combat rounds, ANDERS uses a "combat tick" system. In this system, every action during combat takes a certain predefined amount of tick, where each tick equals ½ second, and is defined as "one specific (major) movement". For example, drawing a sword will take 2 ticks: The first tick to move your hand to the sword hilt and grab it, the second tick to actually draw it out of its sheath.

The order of action in combat depends solely on how long the different actions take (weapon attacks get faster and deadlier when leveling up, while spells and prayers get more powerful, but always take the same time — one always needs a certain amount of time for the gestures and intonation).

Casters can cast any spell they know as often as they want, but casting gets more difficult when wounded, and prayers can be spoken as often as wanted, but a being’s number of concurrent spells is limited, as is the number of prayers affecting a single being at the same time.

Every single spell or prayer is a separate skill which can be improved when leveling up. Failing to cast a spell can wound the caster, failing a prayer has most often no consequences besides the time wasted to pray, but can anger the respective deity if a character does not get the deity’s “hint” and repeats the same failed prayer too often in the same way, which can have some bad consequences.