Shattered Kingdoms

[Editted] Pushing40's advice to find out in an inn is better than what I was going to suggest.

But if you can't find anybody, not even a mentor, try "who" to look at people's titles. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out who might help you. You can then send them a "tell", which is handled as in-character telepathy.

yes, I've tried that. Usually they drag me up to Teron to the goblins. I take it then it's not worth staying in Zhenshi?

Zhenshi's Novice-level areas just aren't that good, compared to what other countries can offer. That'll change once you get to Initiate.

Learning what levelling areas are good for your specific race and class is part of the game's tactics. Don't expect areas to be equal; always look for advantages to exploit.

When looking for places to level the Area command is your friend. Make sure you look at the places level range as well when you do that. As you will fast become aware that areas level effectiveness drops off after you have gotten a few levels there (not just because your a higher level). After looking at the area list you can ask more leading questions like "Where might I find the bakemono caves." for example. Not every where listed there is considered a leveling area to all chars (area includes cities). As for build of a char my advice for quick leveling is back train skills and spells that you dont expect to use much. Not only will the skills cost actually less later they also cost relative less later. For a warrior a good example of this is disarm and parry, there are few low level NPCs that use weapons so you can wait till higher levels to train these skills. Where something like fast healing helps you level so you should train that when you can. Try to guess what is useful and what is not before you train it. Also an important thing to remember is at first level of a status the later end of the training of skills and spells of that status is still costing you more XP than it would if you back build so read the message of how much effort your putting in to keep track of it.

I would never train a skill before you were supposed to, unless its like one level and you will be in that status. The changes to familiarity just make that a huge huge waste of EXP.