Playing Cards from Your Hand?

[thredge]

New player, and I'm not quite sure about a few general play things yet. These questions deal with when you are allowed to play cards from your hand.

• Turn Phases - on your turn are you allowed to start by playing cards from your hand (item / class / race / go up a level / sell cards for levels) before you kick in the door, or is kicking in the door always intended to be the first action before you do anything else on your turn? The instructions under Turn Phases say, when your cards are arranged the way you want, you go to kick in the door, but I wasn't sure if that meant you could play cards or just change items already in play.

In most cases it seems most of that stuff gets played out at the end of the previous turn, but a few other card play questions we had caused this question to come up.

• Playing Cards Before Game Start – before the first turn in the game, I see everyone is allowed to play class and race cards, as well as any item cards. Are you also allowed to play any go up a level cards or Curses? (so you would start the game above level 1?)
  
  In our very first game, I drew 2 go up a level cards in the initial draw, and we weren't able to determine from the instructions if those could be played before the first turn, or if they could be played at the start of my turn before kicking in a door.
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• Resolving Number of Cards in Hand Before your Turn? - are you required to immediately resolve having too many cards in your hand if you get Charity or help another player in Combat and get treasures from it, or do you wait until Charity at the end of your next turn? Waiting until the end of the turn allows all of those extra cards to be available for you whole turn, or possibly helping others on their turn.