The Heartlands

The Ringbound Dominion covers six hundred miles of good country. Turtle-groves drift west through their own weather. The crystalline north chimes faintly as its snow falls. East, a desert where mirages show places that exist elsewhere, existed once, or might yet. Wetlands to the south run through channels nobody has fully mapped, and beneath all of it lie caverns of memory-stone.

At the centre, frozen and enormous, sits the Still Ring.

Most people live in the borderlands between. They farm, they trade, they walk to market. The roads are safe enough that a courier travels them alone, the taverns are warm, and the bread is good.

Perhaps one person in ten thousand wakes one morning connected to something that should not be reachable at all.

Aura

Aura is not a power you have. It is a connection you have.

Somewhere outside the world sit the source planes: Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light, Darkness. You cannot walk to them. They are conditions more than locations. A practitioner has glimmers, apertures in the soul opened by whatever broke them or made them, which reach through and hold on.

You do not contain power. You draw it.

That distinction carries further than it sounds. Growth is not accumulation. A practitioner who has doubled in strength has not filled a larger vessel. The connection itself has restructured: the aperture widened, or deepened, or turned. What comes through afterward differs in kind, not in amount.

It also means no two practitioners look alike at work. Two people who both channel Fire will not resemble each other doing it. One carries heat in the blade. The other is the fire in the air. The shape a connection takes carries two seeds, who you are and what broke you open.

There are no categories. Only fingerprints.

And beneath whatever a practitioner has been taught sit three things they cannot remember learning — one attached to the body, one to the mind, one to the soul. A House places them in a child before the connection has finished opening. Where nobody was there to place anything, they surface anyway. Every practitioner has three. Nobody has four.

What practitioners are, in the world

A newly awakened practitioner already stands out to the people around them. A farmhand who lifts what four men could not. A courier somehow always ahead of the weather. Whole villages go generations without one.

They are not gods. They eat and sleep and can be killed. Iron, rarer than gold in the Heartlands and prized well past its usefulness as a metal, cuts through everything Aura can do. A dozen ordinary soldiers carrying iron blades pose a real threat to someone the Registry would classify as a strategic asset.

The Registry of Gifted Souls tests, licenses and ranks practitioners. Every House trains its own. A great deal of quiet politics runs through all of this and very little of it reaches anyone's day.

At the highest tier a practitioner can no longer hide what they are. They radiate, and people feel them enter a room. That cost arrives whether they want it or not.

The Deepening

Before the Four sealed it, corruption pooled in wounded places. The seal holds, though not perfectly.

Where it runs thinnest the Deepening seeps into broken ground, severed connection, betrayed trust. It stands opposed to Aura in the most direct way available: where Aura joins, the Deepening separates. Its worst act is not killing a practitioner but tearing the glimmers loose, so the connection is gone and cannot be remade.

This is rare and it is localised. Most people never see it, and most stories in the Heartlands are about something else entirely.

Travellers still avoid sleeping in scarred ground, and some doors stay shut.

What this game is about

Wonder comes first here. Danger turns up occasionally.

The Heartlands is built to be wandered. Every region keeps its own shrines, its own legends, its own heroes and its own liars. The interesting question is rarely how to survive something. More often it is what that is, who put it there, and what they wanted.

Almost immediately you will be among the most capable people in the setting. You will also still die badly if you are careless around the wrong metal, and the game intends both of those things.

Begin in the light, then go looking.

Every player character is a practitioner. There is no mundane path — mundane people exist in enormous numbers, and none of them are you.

Step 1 — Say who they are

One sentence, before any numbers. A scout who is always three steps ahead. A frontier warden who does not leave posts. A scholar who reads stone.

Most of the choices below will fall out of that sentence.

Step 2 — Choose an Origin

Your House, or the pointed absence of one. Origin gives ability increases, a heritage trait, a cultural proficiency, a nudge toward a Source, and access to a technique library.

→ Chapter 3

Step 3 — Choose an Archetype

How you deliver power. Six of them, arranged on a wheel: Warhand, Spook, Channeler, Breacher, Warcaster, Hazewright.

Archetype sets your hit points, which abilities are cheap for you to learn, and your Path abilities. It does not lock you out of anything.

→ Chapter 4

Step 4 — Choose a Background and your Awakening

Where you came from, what you can do because of it, and — the important part — how you broke open. Trained into it by a House, or split open by something that happened to you.

That one choice decides which Foundations you carry, so make it before Step 8 rather than after.

Your Background seeds your first Belief.

→ Chapter 5

Step 5 — Choose a Source and write your Expression

Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light or Darkness. Your Origin nudges you; nothing binds you.

What an Expression is

Your Source is the plane you are joined to. Six of those exist and thousands of people share each one.

Your Expression is what that connection turned into when it came through you — and no two are the same, because the shape a connection takes carries two seeds: who you are, and what broke you open.

Two Fire practitioners stand next to each other. One of them carries killing heat in the edge of a blade and keeps her blood warm in the Chiming Snow. The other one is the fire — it leaves her entirely, it does what she is feeling before she has decided to feel it, and standing near her in an argument is genuinely unwise. Same plane. Nothing alike.

Write one sentence describing what yours looks like at work.

An Expression is not a technique and it grants you no effect of its own. It does two jobs, and neither of them is doing something.

It decides which tasks you may channel into — where you can spend your Aura modifier in place of the ability a check would normally use, which is Chapter 6. You still roll. You are just rolling with the best thing about you.

And it decides what everything you channel looks like. Two Fire practitioners with the same technique on their sheets do not produce the same thing in the room. Techniques are what does the work; your Expression is why yours does not look like anybody else's.

Get it right once and the table stops negotiating it, for the whole campaign.

Three worked examples

Each runs in three parts: what broke them, what it looks like when they channel, and which checks it reaches. The break comes first because it is the reason the shape is that shape and not another one. The reaches are checks, never effects: they are the tasks this practitioner may roll with Aura instead of the usual ability.

"Fire remembers my name."

She walked out of the fire that took her village, alone, and has never been able to say why it let her.

In any room with an open flame the fire leans her way, and lamps brighten as she passes. Her techniques draw off the nearest flame rather than out of her hands, and anything she sets alight burns toward her instead of spreading away from her.

Reaches: frightening a man in a room with a hearth in it, because every flame turns toward her while she speaks (Intimidation) · working out where a fire started, hours after it went out (Investigation) · crossing a burning hall to reach somebody (Athletics).

Does not reach: warming a cold house · anything at all in a room with no fire in it · setting something alight where there was no flame to begin with, which is what techniques are for.

"The air opens a door and I'm already through."

She was a courier under contract, cornered at the end of an alley with nothing behind her, and the wall she was facing turned out to have a gap she had not seen and could not have fitted through.

She arrives on the far side of a closing gate without appearing to hurry, and guards watching a doorway do not remember her crossing it. Her Between-Step does not read as a blink to anyone watching; she steps through a gap that was not there a moment before, and it closes behind her.

Reaches: slipping through a guarded gate, a crowd, or a door swinging shut (Acrobatics or Stealth) · finding the one way out of a room that has one (Perception).

Does not reach: outrunning anybody over open ground · anything with no gap in it at all · taking someone with her, which needs a technique and a good one.

"The ground decides where I stand."

He was fourteen when a gallery came down on him, and he was under it two days before anyone dug that far. He came up connected to the thing that had been on top of him.

Scree does not slide under him, and a rope bridge stops swaying the moment he steps onto it. When he channels, the floor closes around his boots first, and what he throws comes up out of the ground rather than off his hands.

Reaches: keeping your feet where nobody else could (Athletics) · crossing ice, rubble or a rotten floor (Acrobatics) · judging whether a structure is about to fail (Perception or Craft).

Does not reach: moving fast, moving quietly, or climbing · making the ground do anything to anybody else, which is what techniques are for.

Writing yours

Say what it does to the world, not what element it is. "I control fire" is a Source, not an Expression, and it tells the table nothing.

Write something you could see. Flames lean her way. The bridge stops swaying. If a person standing in the room could not point at what is happening, you have written a mood rather than an Expression, and moods get argued about.

Name one thing it cannot do. This is the rule that does the work. "Fire remembers my name" rules out warming a house, and buying that one limit is what makes the other half-dozen things automatic for the rest of the campaign.

Do not write a technique. If your sentence describes an effect that happens — a leap, a shield, a blast — you have written something that belongs in Appendix D and will have to be paid for. An Expression never does anything on its own. It decides which checks your Aura reaches, and what your techniques look like when you use them.

Put the break in it if you can. The most useful Expressions carry a trace of whatever opened you: the buried boy's ground, the courier's doorways. That is where the fingerprint lives.

This costs nothing and does more work than anything else on the sheet. It colours every technique you will ever use, and it is what the table checks when you claim your Aura applies to something. Chapter 6 shows one Expression run across five tasks.

→ Chapter 6

Step 6 — Assign ability scores

You have seven scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma and Aura. Assign the array 15, 14, 13, 13, 12, 10, 8 across them however you like, then apply your Origin's increases.

Aura can take any number in the array. Most people give it the 15.

→ Chapter 6

Step 7 — Choose proficiencies

• Skills: two from your Background, plus your Archetype's starting allowance.
• Saves: two, chosen freely.
• Weapons and armour: by Archetype.

Step 8 — Take your Foundations

Things you can do that you cannot remember learning. They cost nothing, they are always on, and they do not fail — and trained work at Mastery will still out-reach them.

Every practitioner ends up with exactly three, no more and no fewer, but they do not all arrive at once. At Awakening you have one: your Body form. The Mind form wakes at Intent and the Soul form at Mastery. All three were settled before you had any say in it.

Which set you carry depends on how you awakened: a House placed them, or they surfaced on their own, shaped by your Source. If a House placed them, your House and your archetype name your three and there is nothing to pick.

→ Appendix C

Then take the techniques you were actually taught:

• Aura Sense and Windcut, the two at-will Universal techniques. Everyone picks these up.
• One Awakening-band technique from your Source.

Everything else in the libraries is found in play. Techniques are taught, and teaching requires somebody willing.

→ Chapter 9

Step 9 — Beliefs, gear, and the numbers

Write a second Belief — something personal, and in your own words.

Take your starting kit from your Background. Then calculate:

A finished example

Sohra · Saltmarch · Spook · Air · Registry Runner · trained awakening Expression: "The air opens a door and I'm already through."

DEX 17 (+3) · CON 14 (+2) · INT 13 (+1) · CHA 13 (+1) · WIS 10 · STR 8 (−1) · Aura 13 (+1)

HP 22 · Bloodied 11 · Critical 5 · AC 14 · Aura Points 11 · Aura DC 11 · Threshold +2 · Ward 0 · Bonds 2 · Speed 30 ft

Proficient: Stealth, Acrobatics, Perception, Deception (Spook) · Investigation, Persuasion (Registry Runner) · navigator's tools, two languages · Saves DEX, INT

Foundation — Saltmarch opening steps, the Spook trio, which is what she turned out to be: Mirage (Body, and the only one she has yet). Sent Ahead wakes at Intent, The Desert Lies at Mastery.

Techniques: Between-Step (Air, 2 AP, blink 30 ft) · Aura Sense · Windcut

Beliefs: ① A courier's word is the only true coin. ② I owe nothing to anyone who has not earned it.

Kit: courier leathers, two Heartwood knives, navigator's tools, a sealed case she is not supposed to open.

Note what she cannot do yet. She has no Saltmarch technique — the House library is open to her, but somebody has to actually teach her, and that happens at a table. What she has instead is one thing nobody can take off her, and two more already in her that have not surfaced yet.

Everyone in the Heartlands belongs somewhere, or pointedly does not.

An Origin is not a species. Everyone here is a person. What differs is where you were raised, what that place did to you, and, the part that will matter for the rest of your life, whose techniques you are allowed to learn.

Three kinds: a Major House, a Minor House, or Wanderer.

What an Origin gives you

Library access is the real currency. Techniques are taught rather than bought. A Major House opens its entire library to you, including material it will not teach outsiders at any price. A Wanderer learns a little of everything and the secrets of nothing.

And if you awakened under a House, it placed your Foundations before your connection had finished opening — three innate forms that are not on any library list and were never yours to choose. Each House aims at three archetypes and has a trio for all six. Being one of the three is not required, and missing is not a failure. See Appendix C.

The Major Houses

Vaulin — the Turtle-Groves

Provide.

Mobile forests ride the backs of gargantuan turtles, drifting west on a schedule only the tenders understand. Vaulin grows things and feeds people, with a patience other Houses find either admirable or maddening.

They speak of Aura as roots reaching toward water. Growth is natural and cannot be hurried. A tender who forces a student's awakening has failed twice.

"May your roots find water."

Sablemire — the Lowlands

Inform.

Bayou and river delta, with mist standing on the water most mornings. Sablemire trades in knowing things first. Their operatives are trained to silence before they are trained to power, on the reasoning that anyone who cannot keep still cannot be trusted with the rest of it.

They carry no romanticism about Aura. It is a tool, and tools get maintained.

"Walk silent. Arrive unseen. Leave no trace."

Ironvale — the Chiming Snow

Protect.

A crystalline tundra in the north where the snow rings faintly as it falls, and where the seal runs thin enough that things come through. Ironvale holds the frontier, and its training is hard and public and unembarrassed about being both.

They describe Aura as fire in the chest and stone in the spine. You are expected to be there when it is bad, and if you cannot, you should not have come.

"Train hard. Burn bright."

Saltmarch — the Shimmering Expanse

Connect.

A desert where reality has worn thin, and the mirages show places that exist elsewhere, existed once, or might yet. Saltmarch carries messages across it. They have built an entire culture on the single rule that what a courier carries is true.

They are playful with almost everything and rigid about that one thing.

"The desert lies. We deliver truth."

Hollowglass — the Whispering Deep

Remember.

Caverns of memory-stone beneath the Still Ring Basin, entered through a hundred scattered doors. Hollowglass keeps what must be kept and guards what must be guarded, and takes considerable care over which is which.

They understand Aura as frequency. Everything resonates, and the difficulty lies in learning to listen without becoming what you hear.

"Remember what you have read. Tell no one."

Minor Houses

The Boundary Lands are full of smaller families: river-clans, forge-lines, hedge-lineages, a family of three villages who have taught the same footwork for two hundred years. They are lesser powers, which is not at all the same as lesser people.

Increases: +1 to two different scores.

Choose two traits from the list below, and one skill or tool proficiency:

Source lean: free.

Library: the Learnable techniques of one tradition you name at creation, plus Universal. No Exclusives.

House skills: the named tradition's three.

Foundations: a Minor House places, and it places what it was taught to place. Take the named tradition's set for your archetype.

Wanderer

No House. Some were cast out, some walked, some never had one to leave. A Wanderer's techniques are a patchwork of whatever they could persuade someone to show them, and it shows. The results are inelegant and improvised, and occasionally capable of things a trained practitioner would call impossible, because nobody ever taught the Wanderer otherwise.

Increases: +1 to three different scores.

Traits:

Proficiency: any two skills.

Source lean: free.

Library: Universal and Wanderer, plus anything you can persuade someone to teach you.

Foundations: nobody placed yours. Take the wild set for your Source — Source-shaped, never mutating, and each one levies something you did not agree to. A Wanderer who was genuinely trained by somebody names a tradition and takes its set for their archetype, like anyone else who was placed.

A Wanderer trades roots for reach. Whether that is a good trade depends on who you ask and how old they are.

On choosing

Major Houses run deepest. You get the secret material and the obligations attached to it. Minor Houses are narrower and freer. Wanderers have the widest ceiling and the least support.

None of the three is the strong choice. They fail in different ways.

Your Origin and Source decide what you can learn. Your archetype decides how you operate.

An archetype is not a class. It hands you nothing on a schedule and forbids you nothing. It is a price list and a direction: what comes easily to you, what comes expensively, and which way your power points.

The Wheel

`` WARHAND / \ BREACHER WARCASTER / \ SPOOK ——————————— CHANNELER \ / SPELLKNIFE ``

The three on the edges sit between two corners, which is a useful way to remember where they are rather than a description of what they do. A Breacher is not a Warhand and a Spook averaged together; a Breacher is a specialist in getting through things built to stop people, which neither corner does at all.

The Three Lanes

Everything you can learn belongs to one of three lanes.

Your archetype prices each lane Core or Foreign. Core costs standard. Foreign costs double.

A Warhand can learn to throw fire. It costs double. Nothing on the wheel is closed to anyone, which is how two Warhands end up with very little in common.

What each archetype gives you

Build multiplies your hit points.

Starting skills are proficiencies you choose freely at creation, and the spread is priced against the Gap Ladder rather than handed out by generosity.

Raw skills run on your tier whether or not you trained them. Trained skills do nothing for you unless you are proficient. So the cost of being good at your own job is not the same across the wheel. Martial work lives in Athletics, which is Raw — a Warhand is carried by tier alone and needs to buy very little. Channelling work lives in Attunement and Lore, both Trained, where tier carries you nowhere; a Channeler pays full price for competence in the thing they are for. Covert splits down the middle, and Warcaster sits at three because half of what it does is Raw already.

Fewer starting skills means the ladder is already working for you.

Your archetype and your Foundations

If a House trained you, it placed your Foundations before it knew what you would become — and it placed a set for every archetype it might have been placing for. Your House and your archetype together name your three. There is nothing to pick.

Three of the six are what that House aims at. The other three are mutations, and a mutation is not a weakened version of anything: it is a whole trio, built for that path, balanced like everything else in the book. A House reaching for an archetype it does not train produces something that fits you rather than something that fits its doctrine. Missing the aim is common, it costs you nothing, and several of the mutations are the best forms in the appendix.

If nobody placed anything, your Source shaped them instead. That is a different set entirely and it is keyed to your Source rather than to your path. See Appendix C.

Bloodied Abilities

At half hit points or below, your archetype's Bloodied ability switches on. It stays on until you are healed above half.

Every archetype becomes more dangerous at half health. Fights here escalate toward their end rather than winding down toward it.

Path Abilities

Each archetype has its own Path: four abilities, one at each tier, available to nobody else and not for sale at any price.

One arrives at the start of each tier. You do not choose it, you do not pay for it, and you keep it for good. Alongside them sits the Bloodied ability above, which is on from the first tier and switches itself on when the fight turns.

Your Foundations are built to ride these. Every trio in Appendix C was written against the Path of the archetype it belongs to — creating the situations it is good at, or handing it another way to be fed. None of them changes a Path ability's numbers.

Warhand · you take it and give it back

Struck Iron · Awakening No action · Self · always The first time each round you take damage, bank 1 charge, to a maximum of your Threshold. Spend any number as part of any weapon attack — melee, ranged or unarmed: +1d6 each.

Return In Kind · Intent No action · Engaged · when a creature damages you Spend any number of banked charges. It takes 1d6 each.

Struck Iron and Return In Kind draw on the same charges, so retaliating costs you the swing.

Nothing Wasted · Mastery Passive · Self · always You bank a charge from every instance of damage, not only the first, and your charge maximum doubles.

The Anvil · Presence Passive · Self · always When you release charges into an attack, the extra damage applies to every creature Engaged with you.

Spook · you are never where the blow lands

Off By A Hand · Awakening Passive · Self · always The first attack that hits you each round deals half damage. It landed somewhere you were not entirely.

Elsewhere Already · Intent Reaction · Self · when an attack against you hits Move up to half your speed without provoking, and the attack misses.

Not Where You Left Me · Mastery No action · Self · once per creature per round When a creature misses you, it cannot target you again until the start of its next turn, and you may move up to half your speed without provoking.

Not There At All · Presence Passive · Self · always Creatures below your tier cannot target you unless you have attacked them this scene.

Channeler · overt power, early

Overcharge · Awakening No action · Self · costs Aura Points When you use a damaging technique you may pour extra Aura Points into it, up to your Threshold. Each one adds 1d6. Your pool is the only other limit, and at Awakening spending it is most of your fight.

Flood · Intent No action · Self · once per turn A technique with an area covers twice that area; a technique that names a number of targets affects that many again. No extra cost, and it uses the technique's own action.

Nothing In The Way · Mastery Passive · Self · always Your techniques ignore cover, need only line of sight, and gain one band of range.

Open Wide · Presence Self · once per scene Use a technique without paying its cost, and it affects every legal target in range rather than its normal targets. Uses the technique's own action.

Breacher · the wild path

Frenzy · Awakening No action · Self · once per turn per creature An attack deals +2d6 against any creature that has already taken damage this scene. You do not have to have dealt it.

Straight Through · Intent Passive · Self · always You ignore Engagement entirely. Leaving contact never provokes, occupied space does not stop your movement, and the first creature whose space you pass through each turn is knocked prone.

Breakthrough · Mastery No action · Self · when you drop a creature Immediately move up to half your speed and make another attack. Each use has to be paid for with a kill.

Nothing Holds · Presence Passive · Self · always Wards, seals and barriers below your tier break on contact. Once per scene, a barrier of any tier shatters.

Warcaster · aura as a martial art

Carried Edge · Awakening Once per turn · resistance is Passive Your Source rides you as well as your weapon. Your first attack each turn with any weapon, including unarmed, deals +1d6 of your Source, and you have resistance to your own Source's damage type.

Evoke · Intent No action · Engaged · once per turn When you hit with a weapon attack, use a single-target Awakening-band technique against that target as part of the same attack, paying its cost.

Perfect Form · Mastery Passive · Self · once per turn Your first weapon attack each turn automatically hits any creature below your tier.

The Whole Art · Presence Passive · Self · always The technique you carry on a weapon attack may be any band you know, and it counts as your own tier for Refusal, whatever band it actually is. Nothing below Presence can pay it off.

Hazewright · you fight the room, not the person

Sleight · Awakening No action · Near · once per round A creature that can see you has disadvantage on an attack against a target of your choice within Near.

Second Guess · Intent Extends Sleight Sleight now reaches to Far, you may use it twice each round, and either use may instead grant an ally advantage on a roll.

Wrong Target · Mastery Reaction · Near · when an attack hits you or an ally within Near Redirect it onto another creature within Near, using the same roll.

You Were Never Fighting Me · Presence Passive · Self · plus once per round Creatures below your tier have disadvantage on every roll that targets you. Once per round, when one of them targets you, it must save against your Aura DC or use that same roll against a creature of your choice within its own reach or range instead.

Backgrounds

Where you were before this, what it left you with, and how you broke open.

Each Background gives two skill proficiencies, a tool or language, a feature, and a starting kit. It also seeds your first Belief.

Caravan Outrider

Survival, Animal Handling · navigator's tools Read the Route — You can tell how recently a road was travelled, by how many, and whether they were in a hurry.

Registry Runner

Investigation, Persuasion · one language Papers in Order — Your documentation is good enough that officials rarely look twice, and you know which ones will.

Border Smuggler

Sleight of Hand, Deception · thieves' tools Hidden Ways — You know a way around any checkpoint, toll, or watched gate. It is longer, and sometimes wet.

House Initiate

Two of your Origin's three House skills (listed in Chapter 3) · one tool Sworn — Any holding of your House will feed you, house you for a night, and carry a message for you. They will also report that you came. Requires a House. Wanderers cannot take this.

Thin-Place Pilgrim

Attunement, Lore · one language Feel the Seam — You know when you are standing somewhere the world is thin, and roughly how thin.

Grove-Tender

Nature, Medicine · herbalism kit Green Hands — Given a day and reasonable ground, you can produce food or medicine enough for a small group.

Deep Archivist

Lore, Insight · calligrapher's tools Catalogued — You know whether a thing you are looking at is recorded somewhere, and roughly where to look.

Frontier Ward-Watch

Athletics, Perception · one gaming set Held a Post — Soldiers, wardens and guards treat you as one of their own without being asked.

Market Hand

Persuasion, Craft · one artisan's tools Known Face — In any market town, someone will vouch for you, extend credit, or tell you what has been going on.

Wild Awakening

Choose any two skills · none No One Taught Me — You can attempt any Trained task untrained, at disadvantage. Most people simply cannot.

The Awakening

The most important line in your Background is how your glimmers opened, and there are two ways it happens.

Trained. A House brought you to it, controlled and supervised and usually at a rite — and it placed your Foundations in you beforehand, while the connection was still opening. You know what happened to you and what it is called. You also owe someone for it.

Wild. Something broke you open: a fire, a fall, a death, a moment where you needed something you did not have and got it anyway. Nobody placed anything. Your Foundations surfaced on their own, already fitted, shaped by your Source, each one carrying a cost you were not asked about. Nobody explained any of it, and you may have spent years assuming you were lucky.

This is the one line on your sheet that decides which Foundations you carry. Neither is better. A placed set is Source-blind, costs you nothing, and is built for the path you turned out to take, whether or not your House aimed at it. A wild set is larger, keyed to your Source instead of your path, never changes, and takes something permanently. Trained practitioners start inside a knowledge economy and inside its obligations; wild ones start outside both.

→ Appendix C

Write one line. "During her binding-rite, the air split and she stepped through a thin place for the first time." "He held a breach on the Chiming Snow for six minutes and does not remember four of them."

Beliefs

A Belief is a short sentence you wrote, in your own words, about what your character holds to be true.

You start with two: one seeded by your Background, one entirely yours. A new one emerges each time you break through.

"A courier's word is the only true coin." "I do not leave before the job does." "Warmth is worth more than power." "I owe nothing to anyone who has not earned it."

What they do

When you act on a Belief under weight, you earn Tempering. Once per session per Belief.

Under weight means it cost you something. You refused the bribe when you needed the money. You stood when leaving was obviously correct. You told the truth to someone who was going to use it against you.

Acting on a Belief when doing so is free and convenient is characterisation. That is worth doing and it earns nothing.

Writing good ones

Make them specific, and make them capable of costing you. "I am brave" will never cost you anything, where "I do not leave people behind, even the ones I dislike" will cost you constantly.

You may rewrite a Belief when it stops being true. That is what happens to people rather than a way of cheating. Say so at the table, say why, and write the new one.

The Roll

d20 + ability modifier + Threshold (if proficient), against a Difficulty Number. Meet it or beat it.

A natural 20 on an attack is a critical hit — roll the damage dice twice. A natural 1 on an attack misses.

On checks and saves, natural 20s and 1s are not automatic. Your tier already decides what is beneath you.

Advantage and disadvantage work as you expect. Roll two d20s, take the higher or the lower. They do not stack, and one of each cancels out.

The Seven Scores

Six abilities, from 1 to 20. Modifier is (score − 10) ÷ 2, rounded down.

And then there is Aura.

Aura is a seventh score and it works differently. It is not an ability — you never roll an Aura check and you never make an Aura saving throw. What it does:

• Sets your Aura DC — 8 + Threshold + Aura modifier — which is what enemies roll against when your techniques force a save.
• Adds to your Aura Point pool.
• Substitutes for another ability when you channel into a task (see below).

Aura never substitutes into a weapon attack roll. Weapons always use Strength or Dexterity, at every tier, without exception.

Techniques that require an attack roll are a separate thing and they use Aura directly — see Chapter 8.

Threshold

Threshold is your tier. It replaces the proficiency bonus and does the same job.

Add it to anything you are proficient in: skills, saves, weapon attacks, tools, and your Aura DC.

Threshold cannot be bought. It is the one number on your sheet that only a breakthrough moves — which is why a breakthrough shifts everything at once.

Expertise doubles your Threshold on a single skill.

Skills

Eighteen. Proficiency in each is bought individually — there are no class lists.

Two are worth explaining:

Attunement — reading Aura. Identifying a Source, recognising a technique and its band, judging a practitioner's tier, sensing a thin place. In a fight, Attunement is what tells you whether the thing coming at you is something you can refuse.

Lore — the histories, the Houses, the legends, the shrines. Everything the Lorekeepers keep.

There is no Religion skill. There are no gods. The Four are cosmology, and they live under Lore.

Raw and Trained

Every skill is one or the other. This matters for the Gap Ladder below.

The test, when it comes up: would failing here look like weakness, or like ignorance? Weakness is Raw. Ignorance is Trained.

Saving Throws

One per ability. Same maths as skills — d20 + ability + Threshold if proficient.

Proficiency is bought individually, like skills, but capped by tier:

You will never be proficient in all six.

Difficulty and Tier

Every obstacle has a Difficulty Number, and its DN tells you its tier.

The Gap Ladder

Subtract the task's tier from yours. Count Mundane 0, Awakening 1, Intent 2, Mastery 3, Presence 4.

On Raw tasks the ladder always applies. On Trained tasks it applies only if you are proficient — otherwise you roll flat, at any tier.

A Mastery duellist kicks down an ordinary door without rolling: gap +3, beneath notice, done mid-sentence. That same duellist rolls to pick its lock, because nobody ever taught them locks.

Manner

Automatic success gives you the outcome, not the manner.

The door opens. Whether it opens quietly is a separate roll. If you need something done cleanly, precisely, or unseen, that is its own question — and often its own, higher, tier.

Overreach

You may attempt something one band beyond your reach. It costs Aura Burn (see Chapter 8) and you roll at disadvantage.

Overreaching is also how you grow. See Chapter 7.

Channelling Into a Task

When you use your Aura on something, say how — then substitute your Aura modifier for the ability the task would normally use.

The reach is set by your Expression (see Chapter 2), and the table's only question is whether the Expression you wrote plausibly touches this task. Not whether Fire could. Whether yours could.

Take a practitioner whose Expression is "Fire remembers my name." Flames near her lean her way, lamps brighten as she passes, and fire that reaches her goes around instead of through.

A practitioner whose Expression is "the fire in me does not go out" would get a completely different column against those same five rows, with nothing on the intimidation line and everything on the endurance ones.

This costs no Aura Points. It costs something else: channelling is visible. People can see it, and in most of the Heartlands a visible practitioner is a rare and reportable thing.

At Presence, that stops being a choice. You radiate whether you intend to or not.

Contests

When two creatures oppose each other directly, both roll. Higher total wins. Ties go to whoever is defending.

The Gap Ladder does not apply to contests. Tier still shows up — in Threshold, in what you can do about incoming techniques, and in the plain fact that the higher tier is better at things. But a person is never automatic.

The world yields to your power on a published scale. People do not.

You have no level. There is no experience track that turns into a package of features.

You have two currencies, and they do entirely different jobs.

Tempering buys breadth. Density buys kind.

Tempering

3 Tempering per session, awarded to everyone equally.

Plus 1 for each Belief you acted on under weight, up to 2 per session.

Plus whatever you earn in downtime, and whatever a mentor, manual or elixir gives you along the way.

What it buys

Foreign-lane purchases cost double. Which lane a purchase belongs to is listed in Chapter 4; when it is unclear, the table decides and writes it down.

Techniques are found, not bought

No amount of Tempering conjures a technique. You learn techniques from a teacher, a text, a rite, or by inventing one. That happens in the fiction, at a table, with someone who has something you want.

Tempering pays for integration — the work of making a technique yours after you have been shown it. Find the scroll cache and you have twenty techniques you cannot yet use. You will absorb them at the speed everything else moves.

Crystallising

Tempering does not have to stay in you.

You can put it into a stone, and another practitioner can take it out. This is how tuition gets paid, how a House supplies its own, and how a practitioner buys anything that coin will not reach.

You lose on the way out. Whoever absorbs it loses again on the way in. A quarter each way, untrained. Put 100 in and 75 reaches the stone; take that out and 56 reaches the practitioner. Roughly half survives a round trip, which is the number worth remembering.

Both losses shrink with practice.

At rank III you lose a tenth each way, and four fifths of a round trip survives. The rank belongs to the practitioner, not the stone, so it improves your filling and your drawing.

A stone is keyed to the Source that filled it. A practitioner joined to that same Source draws at the rates above. Anyone else loses a further quarter on the way in, and no rank reduces that part — it is not a matter of skill. This is why a House supplies its own first, and why a Fire stone in a Water practitioner's hand is worth trading rather than drinking.

How well a stone keeps is a separate matter from how much survived going in. That one is solved knowledge, and the Houses have solved it differently.

Density cannot be crystallised. Not at a loss, not at any rank, not by anyone, not ever. It was earned standing in front of something larger than you and it does not leave.

At the table

Nobody in the Heartlands counts units. A teacher will not quote you a figure; they will ask for three weeks and a good stone of your own fire, and specify that they do not want a thin one. An assessor does not weigh anything. They handle it, and they tell you what they think, and their opinion is worth what their reputation is worth.

The numbers on this page belong to you and the table. They are not something your character can see.

Density

Density fills only when you channel Aura against something at or above your own tier.

Once per encounter.

You cannot grind this. A hundred bandits beneath your tier are worth nothing at all, because the only thing that fills the track is facing what outclasses you.

Density's only job is to gate the breakthrough. It buys nothing else, and it cannot be spent.

→ Chapter 4

This is not a combat track. A researcher straining at a Mastery-tier problem, a courier forcing a crossing beyond their reach, a negotiator holding a room they have no business holding — all of it counts, if you channelled and if it was above you.

Density can also arrive as an object: seam-residue, source-plane matter, a relic still carrying its maker's pressure. These are never for sale, and handling one is never comfortable. That is rather the point.

The Rite

Density alone will not carry you across. A breakthrough needs three things.

The Rite is performed in downtime and consumes the entire downtime period. You do not fit a breakthrough around errands.

Each requirement points at a different kind of play. Density comes from risk, the Catalyst from exploration, the Crucible from travel or from persuading someone. You cannot reach a breakthrough by doing only one kind of thing.

What a Breakthrough Gives You

Six things at once, and a new verb.

1 · Threshold +1. Every proficient number on your sheet moves.

2 · Every task drops a rung. What was Testing is now Routine. What was Routine is Trivial. Whole categories of problem stop being problems.

3 · A new technique band opens. Effects the tier below could not buy at any price.

4 · Your archetype's next Path ability arrives, free, at the start of the new tier. See Chapter 4.

5 · A Foundation wakes. Your Mind form at Intent, your Soul form at Mastery. It was already in you; the connection restructuring is what brings it up. Nothing is chosen and nothing is paid. See Appendix C.

6 · Hit points and Aura Points step hard.

Multiply base HP by your archetype's build, add your Constitution modifier, add any Vigour you have bought.

And a verb

Each of these is something you could not do before in any form or at any price, which is what separates one tier from the next.

The Reverberation

Every breakthrough costs you something, and it is never a number.

Choose one, or let the table choose:

None of these takes anything back. You keep every point of what you just earned. What you have acquired is a complication, and complications are what the next few sessions are made of.

At Presence, the Reverberation is not optional. Radiation becomes permanent. You will never again walk into a room without everyone in it knowing something walked in.

Aura Points

One pool. It pays for everything.

Aura Points = tier base + (your Aura modifier × tier number).

Short rest: recover a third of your maximum. Long rest: all of it.

Technique Costs

Every technique belongs to a band.

Notice that your pool and your costs grow together. You do not get more actions per fight as you rise — you get five or six meaningful ones at every tier. What changes is what those actions are.

You cannot use a technique above your tier. Not for extra cost, not at a penalty, not at all. The only exception is Overreach.

Attacking with a Technique

Some techniques force a save against your Aura DC. Others have to hit.

Technique attack = d20 + Threshold + your Aura modifier.

That is your Aura DC minus 8, so the two move together and there is only one number to remember. Weapon attacks never use Aura — see Chapter 6.

Foundations

Your three innate forms sit outside all of the above.

No cost, no band, no action economy of their own. They are not spent and cannot be run out of. At 0 Aura Points they still work.

They operate at your tier. Which means they can be Refused by anyone above you, they move up the Gap Ladder every time you break through, and they never need buying.

Iron switches them off along with everything else — see Aura Shutdown, and Investiture in Chapter 10.

→ Appendix C

Sustained

Available from Intent.

A technique either has a duration or it has an upkeep. Never both.

Most techniques fire and finish. You pay the cost, the effect happens, and either it resolves instantly or it runs its stated span and stops — a minute, an hour, until dawn. Once it is paid for, it is not your problem.

A few are written the other way. Their duration line reads Sustained, and they have no span of their own at all.

Anyone can use one. You pay the entry cost, the effect happens, and it holds until the start of your next turn. Then it stops. One round, paid for once — a perfectly good technique, and this is how every Sustained technique behaves at Awakening.

With the Sustain verb, it does not have to stop. At the start of each of your turns you may pay upkeep — half the entry cost, rounded up — and it keeps running. Stop paying and it ends that instant. There is no concentration save; if you can pay, it holds.

• One at a time, until you buy more Sustain slots.
• Upkeep is paid before you do anything else on your turn.

What Intent buys is not the technique. It is the duration.

That is the whole trade, and it is why a wall means something different at Intent than it did the tier before. At Awakening, Rise is a stone shield that exists for one round. At Intent it is a wall that stands for as long as you are willing to bleed the pool to keep it standing.

A few rare things grant Sustain before Intent: a foundation, a House teaching, occasionally a relic. They are worth exactly what they cost.

Refusal

Available from Mastery.

When a technique of a lower tier than yours targets you, you may simply refuse it. No roll. It does not happen.

Against a technique at or above your tier, there is no Refusal. You roll like anyone else.

Refusal comes out of the same pool you attack with. A practitioner who spends a fight refusing has spent the fight doing nothing else, and everyone watching can see it.

Against a crowd of the newly awakened this makes you very nearly untouchable and leaves you drained afterward. Against one good duellist a rung below you, you cannot afford to refuse everything — you have to decide which of their techniques actually matters.

Overreach and Aura Burn

You may push a technique one band above its tier, or attempt a task one band beyond your reach.

The cost is not Aura Points. It is your own blood.

Aura Burn = (your tier number)d10 damage. Escalating within a scene:

Roughly a fifth of your health, the first time, at any tier. The second is a gamble. The third is close to suicide.

Burn does not heal on a short rest. Only a long one.

There is no limit on Overreaching. You may do it as often as you dare, and the ladder from Bloodied to Critical to Guttering is the only thing stopping you.

Pushing a technique to your target's own tier means they cannot Refuse it. That is usually why you do it.

Ward

Every practitioner leaks. From the first tier, a little of what you are connected to bleeds into the air around you, animals notice and rooms feel different.

Ward is what happens when you train that leak into a shell.

It is not automatic. A practitioner who never learned to condense their emanation gets nothing defensive from it — they simply glow.

Ward applies to each instance of damage, and can never reduce damage below 1. Forty arrows are still forty arrows.

A single hit at or above your own tier lands in full regardless. Ward turns aside the small and the many. It does not turn aside the committed.

Iron ignores Ward entirely.

Radiation

Arrives at Presence, and does not leave.

At Presence you cannot stop leaking. Your Aura is ambient, constant, and legible to anyone with the training to read it.

• You cannot hide that you are a practitioner. Attempts to conceal it fail.
• Anyone with Attunement knows your Source and roughly your tier on sight.
• The Registry maintains a list of everyone at your tier. You are on it.
• The Deepening always knows where you are.

Every technique you have that depended on not being noticed now needs a different plan.

This is the cost of the top of the ladder, and it cannot be refused or bought off.

When you run out

At 0 Aura Points you are not injured. You simply cannot channel. Your weapons still work, your skills still work, your Ward still holds, and your Foundations are exactly as they were.

You are, for the moment, what most people are.

Techniques are learned from people, texts, rites and hard invention. You cannot buy one. Once you have been shown one, you spend Tempering to integrate it.

The library itself is Appendix D. This chapter is how it works.

Five libraries. Trained is open to anybody with a body, practitioner or not. Universal is open to every practitioner. Your Source and your House are yours. The Wanderer library belongs to those who had neither.

Techniques marked ⟨Exclusive⟩ are taught only by the House that owns them, and no amount of money or goodwill changes that. Every House technique is Exclusive. What opens that door is a person with a name who decides you are worth teaching, which is what Standing is for.

Reading an entry

Name · band · cost Activation · Range · Duration · Limit

Band sets what it can be Refused by and what it costs. Activation is Free, Bonus, Action or Reaction. Range uses the bands from Chapter 12 — Self, Engaged, Near, Far, Distant. Limit is stated where it applies.

Duration is either a span — instant, a minute, an hour, until a stated end — or it is Sustained. Never both.

A Sustained technique has no span. Used by anyone, it holds for one round. Used by someone with the Sustain verb, it holds for as long as they pay upkeep. See Chapter 8.

Where a technique forces a save it is against your Aura DC. Where it requires an attack roll it is d20 + Threshold + Aura modifier. Where it scales it scales on Threshold.

The same four-field line runs through Appendix C and every stat block in this book.

Where this chapter sits

This is the taught layer, and you will start with almost none of it.

Beneath it sits the layer nobody studied: your Foundations, placed in you before you awakened or surfaced at the moment you did. They are innate, they were never on any list, and Appendix C covers what they do. Everything in this chapter is an addition. The foundations are the thing being added to.

→ Appendix C

A new practitioner walks in with Aura Sense, Windcut, and one Awakening technique from their Source. That is all. Everything else in Appendix D is something to go and find, which is why Standing, Study downtime and House membership matter as much as they do.

And Appendix D is not the limit either. Teachers, places and people who invented something once hold forms written down nowhere. Those are not bigger versions of what is printed. They are stranger.

Trained and channelled

A technique that represents a trained body is at-will and costs no Aura Points. Anyone can learn it: a practitioner, a swordmaster who never awakened, a knight whose iron plate has severed their connection entirely. That is the line iron already sits on, and it is why skilled mundane fighters are real here.

A technique that channels power costs Aura Points by band.

Trained techniques carry a stated integration price instead of the band price. A band says what a technique costs to use. It says nothing about how long it takes to learn.

Where the library is

→ Appendix D

Inventing your own

At each Rite, you do not learn a technique. You make one.

Pitch it to the table. Three rules bind it:

It cannot exceed the band you are entering. A new Intent technique does Intent things.

Budget. Power spent on riders buys down its other numbers. Two riders maximum. A wall that also shoves and also lasts a minute is three things; pick two, or make the third smaller.

It gets a full entry. Band, cost, activation, range, duration, and a limit if it needs one — written out like everything above before it is used at the table. A technique that has not been stated is not a technique; it is an argument waiting to happen.

Then name it and write it down. Nobody else has that technique unless you choose to teach them.

There are no +1 weapons. Gear in the Heartlands matters for what it does, never for what it adds.

Two Materials

Almost everything anyone fights with is made of one of two things, and the difference is not quality.

Heartwood

Resin-forged timber, worked until it holds an edge like steel. Lighter than metal, resists cold, does not rust. Every farm tool, every guard's spear, every House blade.

Heartwood carries Aura. Every technique that rides a weapon, every on-hit rider, every channelled strike needs something that conducts.

This, rather than scarcity alone, is why the Dominion arms itself in wood.

Iron

Rarer than gold. Prized past all sense. Kept in vaults, handed down, granted rather than sold.

Iron blocks Aura. It does not conduct, it does not carry, and it will not let anything through.

Which makes it the only thing that reliably stops a practitioner, and a very poor weapon for one to hold.

Armour

Armour Class is armour plus Dexterity. Assume Heartwood and hide unless told otherwise — resin-plate over boiled leather, which is what a world with no cheap metal armours itself in.

Where 5e would reach for steel, the Heartlands reaches for shed grove-turtle scute, resin-hardened board, and bronze where somebody could afford it. Iron armour exists and is a different thing entirely: see Investiture below.

⚠ PLACEHOLDER PRICES. Costs are in marks and are first-pass. Weight is listed for when carrying capacity arrives; nothing uses it yet.

Strength. Where a Strength score is listed, falling short of it costs you 10 feet of speed.

Getting into it. Light armour takes a minute on and a minute off. Medium takes five on, one off. Heavy takes ten on and five off. A shield is one action either way.

What they are. Quilted is layered cloth and batting. Boiled Hide is leather stiffened in oil. Ridge-Sewn sets close rows of heartwood studs into flexible leather. Beastcoat is furs and pelts, standard on the Chiming Snow and worn without embarrassment anywhere cold. Ringcoat is bronze rings between layers of cloth. Shellplate is overlapping scute shed by grove turtles, cut and cured — the best medium armour in the Dominion for the money, and Vaulin sells it to everyone. Cuirass is a single fitted resin-plate chest piece. The Harnesses are shaped heartwood board, strapped and buckled, in increasing coverage.

Weapons

Every weapon here is Heartwood unless stated otherwise, which means every one of them conducts. A technique that rides a weapon rides these. An iron version of any of them exists, does the same damage, and turns off everything you are.

Properties

Ammunition. You need it to shoot. Drawing it is part of the attack. After a fight, a minute of searching recovers half of what you spent.

Finesse. Use Strength or Dexterity, your choice, for both attack and damage.

Heavy. Too large to be used well by anything Small or smaller, which attacks with disadvantage.

Light. Small enough to fight with one in each hand.

Loading. One shot per action, bonus action or reaction, however many attacks you have.

Reach. Adds 5 feet, for attacks and for opportunity attacks alike.

Thrown. Throw it as a ranged attack, using the same modifier you would in melee.

Two-handed. Requires both hands to attack with, not to carry.

Versatile. Usable in one hand or two. The bracketed die is the two-handed damage.

Special. A Lance has disadvantage against anything within 5 feet and needs two hands unless you are mounted. A Net restrains a Large or smaller creature until freed; a DC 10 Strength check or 5 slashing damage to the net ends it, and you make only one attack when you throw one.

Where they come from

Nothing here is exclusive to anybody, but reputations attach. Ironvale makes the harnesses and the heavy poles and considers a warhammer an honest tool. Sablemire invented the Gig for fish and kept using it for other things, and the Blowpipe is theirs. The Duelling Blade is a Warcaster's weapon and a Saltmarch affectation. Vaulin cures the shellplate. Hollowglass buys whatever is quietest.

Improvised

Anything you can pick up deals 1d4. If it resembles a real weapon closely enough, the table may let your proficiency carry. Thrown, it has a range of 20/60.

Iron Rules

These are identical wherever iron appears — your blade, an enemy's, a monster's hide.

1 · Iron ignores Ward. All of it. Rank IV is rank 0 against iron.

2 · Iron Shutdown. When an iron weapon hits you, your Aura is suppressed until the end of your next turn. No techniques, no Foundations, no Aura Points spent, no Refusal, no Ward, no Sustain, no Gap Ladder. For one round you are an ordinary person with a weapon.

3 · Iron cannot be channelled. No technique rides an iron weapon. No on-hit rider, no channelled strike, nothing. If you fight with iron you fight with iron alone.

4 · Iron harms the Deepened. Deepened creatures resist non-iron physical damage. Iron, and Aura techniques, do not care.

Rule 3 is the one that matters, because arming yourself in iron disarms your own power. Iron is a specialist answer to practitioners and to the Deepened, and a liability against everything else.

What this looks like in a fight

A squad of ordinary soldiers with one iron blade between them is a genuine threat to someone who could level a building. They hit you once with it, your entire defensive structure switches off for a round, and eleven other people take their turn.

This works in both directions.

Investiture — wearing iron

Iron worn insulates you from other people's Aura, and severs your own by the same measure.

A knight in full iron plate cannot be bound, held, blinded, charmed or turned by any technique in this book. They have purchased that by having no Aura whatsoever.

This is a state, not a build. Anyone can do it, any day, and undo it by taking the armour off.

Signature Items

Remarkable gear does not have a bonus. It has Traits — named, specific things it does.

Never dulls, never rusts, never needs a whetstone. Hums when a practitioner within sixty feet draws on their Source. Once per scene, repeats the last strike it made — same angle, same force, unbidden. Cold does not touch the hand that holds it.

Item tiers

Every signature item carries a tier: Mundane, Awakening, Intent, Mastery or Presence.

An item's tier is the tier of the effects it produces. A Mastery relic makes Mastery-band things happen — which means, among other consequences, that nobody at or below Mastery can Refuse them.

Using an item above your own tier triggers Aura Burn, on the same escalating scale as Overreach. Every time.

You can absolutely carry a blade that is too much for you. People have. It is one of the better ways to die, and one of the better stories.

Bonding

Only bonded items give you their Traits. Carrying one is not enough — an unbonded relic is a well-made object.

Aura is connection. Bonding is the work of extending yours to include something.

Bonding takes a downtime action. Breaking a bond is instant and slightly unpleasant.

Money

Coin buys food, lodging, passage, Heartwood, tools, armour, information, and training.

Coin does not buy iron, and it does not buy Density. Those are found, earned, inherited or taken.

Wealth can make you broader. It has never once made anyone larger.

Time and Distance

The Dominion is six to eight hundred miles across. Seat to seat is two to three weeks on the road. Each region is large enough to spend a year in without exhausting it.

Travel is measured in legs, not days. A leg is a scene: one stretch of road with one thing in it. A three-week journey is five or six legs, not twenty-one entries in a ledger.

Each leg has one Feature and one decision. The pass is snowed under; go around or go over. A courier wants company as far as the ford. The bridge is out and the water is high.

Nobody tracks rations. Someone in the party can obviously feed everyone, or they could not have set out.

(A party Supply pool and a shared carrying capacity are designed and will replace that line. Both are party-level and spend per leg, never per-character and never per-day. Until they arrive, food and hauling only matter where a specific rule says they do.)

Rest

Short rest — an hour. Recover a third of your Aura Points and a quarter of your hit points.

Long rest — a night. Recover all Aura Points and all hit points, except damage taken from Aura Burn, which needs a full night and does not come back on a short one.

Resting in bad ground

Where the Deepening has pooled — scarred country, old ruins, ground that lost a war — resting feeds it. Your GM will tell you the place is wrong. Sleeping there anyway is a decision, not a mistake.

Rest is always available. It is not always free.

Company

Social scenes work like everything else. A difficulty, a tier, the Gap Ladder.

Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation and Insight are Raw skills — they run on your tier whether or not you trained them. A Mastery practitioner talking down an Intent-tier magistrate is at gap +1: automatic, if unhurried and unopposed.

And Manner still applies. You may talk your way past the guard automatically. Whether you do it without being remembered is a different question.

Channelling at people

You can substitute your Aura for Charisma. You are no longer arguing — you are being what you are, in a small room, at someone.

It nearly always works.

Everyone sees it. Practitioners are rare, licensed and counted, and the person you just did that to will tell someone. In most of the Heartlands, a visible practitioner in a market town is news by evening.

At Presence you no longer get to decide. Walking in is channelling.

Standing

You accumulate Standing with the factions you deal with — each House, the Registry, a town, a person who matters. It is not a number you roll; it is a state the table tracks.

Standing opens doors that money does not: House libraries, mentors willing to teach, access to a Crucible, iron, quiet passage, someone answering a question honestly.

Standing cannot be rested away. Losing it is easy and recovering it takes an act — restitution, a public deed, a debt paid in front of witnesses. This is the currency the whole knowledge economy runs on. Techniques are taught, and teaching requires somebody willing.

Exploration

Exploration is where you find the things that cannot be bought: Catalysts, Crucibles, techniques, iron, and signature items.

A breakthrough needs a Catalyst and a Crucible, and both of them are out in the world. A party that never leaves the city can train forever and never cross a tier.

Physical exploration runs on Raw skills — Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, Stealth — so a martial character crosses hard country on tier alone. Understanding what you have crossed runs on Trained ones: Survival, Nature, Attunement. Finding the thin place is one job. Knowing what the seam means is another.

Downtime

Between adventures, each character takes three Downtime Actions.

Three actions against eight uses, every time. What you need will be decided by what happened to you last adventure — you are Marked because you went down, short on Standing because of how you got what you wanted, carrying Burn because of what you touched.

Downtime is where the campaign's consequences get paid.

Fights are played on a grid, in five-foot squares, and they are still set-pieces: what makes one fight different from the next is the positions and the things in the room to use.

Space

Movement is counted in feet on the grid. Your speed is 30 feet unless something says otherwise, and you may split it before and after your action.

Range is still spoken in four bands, measured from whoever is acting. Techniques and stat blocks use them.

Leaving Engaged provokes an attack unless you Disengage.

Your Turn

One action, one bonus action, one reaction, and your movement. As you would expect.

Initiative is d20 + Dexterity, rolled once, and the order holds.

Features

Every fight has three to five Features. A collapsing gantry. A frozen river. Lantern chains. A bell-post. A herd of something nervous.

Each is a thing you can use — and a thing that can be used on you.

Features are what makes a fight this fight rather than a set of numbers in a void. When your GM describes the room, they are giving you your options. Use them.

Hurt

All three states are read straight off current hit points, so everyone at the table can see where a fight stands without stopping to ask.

Guttering

At 0 hit points you do not fall unconscious.

You are upright, conscious, and finished. You keep acting, badly:

• Your speed is halved and you take one action per turn — no bonus action, no reaction.
• You cannot use techniques above the Awakening band.
• You make a death saving throw at the start of each of your turns. Three failures and you die.
• Any damage you take while Guttering costs you an automatic failure.
• Stabilising ends the saves. You stay Guttering until someone treats you properly.

Surviving a Guttering leaves a Mark — a wound, a debt, a scar, something that does not go away with a night's sleep. Clear it in downtime.

Death is possible here and stays rare. What happens far more often is that somebody ends up on one knee in the sand, still holding the sword, deciding what to do with the last thing they have.

Reading a Stat Block

`` NAME Tier · CR ───────────────────────────────────────────────── AC 15 HP 68 (Bloodied 34 · Critical 17) WARD 4 Speed 30 ft ───────────────────────────────────────────────── STR +2 DEX +4 CON +3 INT +1 WIS +2 CHA +0 AURA +3 Save DC 15 Threshold +4 Saves: DEX, WIS ───────────────────────────────────────────────── IRON: one blade (Shutdown on hit) FOUNDATIONS: Anvil-Stand · Where It Lands · Burn Bright ───────────────────────────────────────────────── ACTIONS Heartwood glaive. +8, Engaged, 2d8+4 ⟨Intent⟩ Shuttering. 4 AP, Near, DC 15 ``

Four lines matter more than they look:

Tier tells you whether you can Refuse what it throws, and where it sits on the Gap Ladder.

Ward is often 0. Most things do not have it. It is never assumed.

Iron on the top line means this fight is different. Whoever carries it can switch a practitioner off.

Foundations are free, always on, and cost the creature nothing to keep using. They are not in the action list because they are not actions. A practitioner at Mastery or above has three; at Intent, two; at Awakening, one. Anything that is not a practitioner has none.

⟨Band⟩ on a technique is what you check before deciding whether to spend a Refusal.

The Deepening

Some places carry it, and where they do, your GM has a pool of points to spend making things worse.

You will see it as escalation: the enemy that acts twice, the interruption, the bridge that chooses now to give way, the second thing that was always there. And occasionally the worst one — a technique that arrives at a higher band than it should, because the Deepening pushed it, and suddenly you cannot Refuse it after all.

The pool grows when you take Aura Burn, when someone rolls a natural 1, when you linger in wounded ground, and when you sleep somewhere you were told not to.

In a bright settlement the pool is zero and stays zero. Your GM has nothing to spend. That is not GM courtesy; it is how the rule is written.

Glimmer Burn

The Deepening's worst act is not damage. It burns the connection.

Glimmer Burn accumulates on its own track, carries between sessions, and does not heal on any rest. Only cleansing removes it: time in healthy ground, Heartwood ritual, or another practitioner's careful work.

If the track ever fills, the result is Severance: you lose a tier, permanently. At Awakening, you become mundane, forever.

This is the only permanent loss in the game. It will be visible for a long time before it is close, and it is always avoidable by choosing differently. Practitioners fear the Deepening more than they fear dying, and this is why.

Standard conditions — blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened, grappled, incapacitated, invisible, paralysed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, stunned, unconscious — work as you expect.

These are the ones this game adds.

Bloodied

At half hit points or below. Your archetype's Bloodied ability is active. Ends when healed above half.

Critical

At a quarter hit points or below. You have one Defiance available this scene: negate an effect that would reduce you to 0. Ends when healed above a quarter.

Guttering

At 0 hit points. Conscious and still acting.

• Speed halved. One action per turn — no bonus action, no reaction.
• No techniques above the Awakening band.
• Death saving throw at the start of each of your turns. Three failures, you die.
• Damage taken costs an automatic failure.
• Stabilising ends the saves but not the condition.

Surviving leaves a Mark.

Aura Shutdown

Caused by being hit with iron. Lasts until the end of your next turn.

No techniques and no Foundations. No Aura Points spent. No Refusal, no Ward, no Sustain. The Gap Ladder does not apply to you. Sustained techniques end immediately.

Your weapons and skills work normally. Nothing else does.

Aura Burn

Damage taken from Overreaching, or from using an item above your tier.

It is ordinary damage in every respect except one: it does not heal on a short rest.

Radiation

Permanent from Presence.

You cannot conceal that you are a practitioner. Attunement reveals your Source and tier on sight. The Registry knows. The Deepening knows.

Only one technique in the Heartlands suppresses it, and Sablemire teaches it to very few people.

Isolation Burden

A consequence of Radiation, not a separate condition.

Mundane people who spend days in close proximity to a Presence practitioner sicken — poor sleep, strange dreams, a wearing-down nobody can name. Lower-tier practitioners feel drained.

This is why the powerful live apart, and why they are rarely in the room as long as they would like to be.

Glimmer Burn

Accumulates on its own track. Carried between sessions. Does not heal on any rest.

Removed only by cleansing: time in healthy ground, Heartwood ritual, or another practitioner's work.

Severance

The Glimmer Burn track filled.

You lose a tier permanently. Threshold, band access, verbs, pool — all of it drops one rung. At Awakening, your glimmers close entirely and you become mundane.

There is no known way to reverse this. The Four's seal prevents new connections forming where old ones were torn.

Sundered

A weapon, shield or item is broken and gives no benefit at all until it is repaired.

Effects that Sunder say so. Otherwise a called attack against a held object hits AC 15, and Sunders it on damage equal to or above a quarter of the wielder's hit point maximum.

Repair takes an hour with the right tools, or a downtime action without them.

A Sundered Heartwood weapon no longer conducts — no technique rides it, no on-hit rider applies. A Sundered iron weapon still blocks Aura, because that was never about the edge.

Marked

A lasting injury, debt or scar from surviving a Guttering. Details are written when it happens.

Cleared with a Mend downtime action, or by whatever the fiction requires.

Invested

Wearing iron. Your Aura Points are reduced by 25%, 50%, or to zero, by how much you wear. In full plate you are immune to Aura control effects and have no Aura at all — no techniques, and no Foundations.

Ends when you take the armour off.

The Source Planes

Six conditions sit outside the world, and a practitioner's glimmers reach through to hold one of them.

You cannot walk to them and nothing lives there. Calling them planes is a convenience of language that Hollowglass has been objecting to for four hundred years.

Darkness carries no moral weight. It is the condition before a thing has been decided, and the Hollowglass archivists who work in it are among the gentlest people in the Dominion.

A practitioner draws from exactly one. Which one is revealed rather than chosen. The shape of an awakening carries two seeds, who you are and what broke you open.

The Four Who Held the World

Four people, once.

Bran, the Still Man. Stillness, will, the refusal to move. Violence hesitated around him.

Ward, the Storm Given Form. Decisive force, fury, passion. The air leaned toward him when he spoke.

Tessa, the Weaver of What Remains. Connection, and the healing of fractures. She bound souls back from breaking.

Eiran, the Winter That Remembered. Cold, preservation, patience through grief. He eased death gently.

When the Deepening surged at the tear in the world, they crossed the final boundary together. Their four frequencies merged into a single chord, and that chord became the Still Ring, a permanent structure holding the balance between Aura and the Deepening.

They did not ascend to rule from thrones. They became the seal.

They remain here, embedded in the structure of reality. Not gone, not dead, but no longer separate beings. They cannot return and they cannot be contacted. They are the seal, and the Dominion is built around it.

The Still Ring

A vast frozen circle at the centre of the Dominion, where the Four performed their final act. Pilgrims walk roads toward it. The Ringbound Throne sits at its edge and takes its name from it.

The Ring is imperfect. Where the Four's own doubts found expression, the seal runs thin, and the Deepening seeps through in those places.

Those are the seams. Most of them are mapped. Most of them are watched.

The Deepening

Corruption that pooled in wounded places before the seal.

It opposes Aura in the most literal sense available: where Aura joins, the Deepening separates. It gathers in broken land, in severed connection, in betrayed trust. It does not appear to want anything, which is among the more unsettling things about it.

Its worst act is Severance, tearing the glimmers free so the connection is gone and cannot be remade. A severed practitioner is not injured. They are mundane, permanently, in a way nothing in the world has ever undone.

This is rare, it is localised, and most people live and die without seeing it.

It is also why nobody sleeps in scarred ground, why some doors stay shut, and why every House, however much they disagree about everything else, teaches its students the same thing about the seams.

Do not go in.

Every practitioner can do three things they cannot remember learning.

They are not small, and they are not the largest thing you will ever do either. Studied work at Mastery goes further. What a foundation has instead is that it is always present, costs nothing, and has never once failed to arrive — not when you were exhausted, not when you were frightened, not on the worst night of your life. Ask a new practitioner to show you their best work and they will show you one of the three, every time, without appearing to choose it.

House techniques are additions. The foundations are the thing being added to.

Each House has its own name for them. Vaulin says first roots. Sablemire says groundwork. Ironvale says first forms, Saltmarch opening steps, Hollowglass the founding chord.

Always three

There are always three, and never two or four. Every House counts three. A fourth is not withheld. There is no fourth.

That is the whole of what the Houses agree on, and it is worth knowing that they agree on nothing else about them — not what they are, not where they come from, not what to call them.

A word about Body, Mind and Soul

You will see the three sorted under those headings throughout this book, and it is a useful way to hold them. It is also a description rather than a law.

The labels come from the Unnamed Scholar, who noticed the pattern across five Houses, wrote it up as a structure, and then corrected himself in print once he had seen enough exceptions. No House places to a slot. No practitioner has ever been told they were owed one of each. The sorting is a reader's convenience that turned out to be roughly true most of the time, which is the most dangerous kind of true.

What it does tell you is the useful part: you are never simply strong. You are strong in one direction, aware in another, anchored in a third, and the three do not have to agree with each other.

How they work

No cost. A foundation is never paid for in Aura Points. It has no band.

No steps. You do not reach for one. A House technique is performed — there is a drawing, a shaping, an order of operations you learned from somebody. A foundation is nearer to breathing than to lifting. Most are always on, or answer a circumstance without being called.

They operate at your tier. A foundation is always current. It sits on the Gap Ladder where you sit, it can be Refused by anyone above you, and it grows every time you break through without ever being bought.

Iron switches them off. Aura Shutdown suppresses your foundations exactly as it suppresses everything else. So does full Investiture. They are innate; they are not separate.

They cannot be taught, traded, bought, or chosen later. No Tempering integrates one. They are the shape your aperture took while it was opening, and that has already happened.

You carry three, and you do not carry all three at once. Your Body form wakes at Awakening, your Mind form at Intent, your Soul form at Mastery. All three were placed or surfaced before you woke; the connection restructures at each breakthrough and each layer settles in turn. A new practitioner has one, and it is already the most reliable thing they own.

Reading an entry

Every form below carries the same four-field line, and it means the same thing everywhere in this book.

Name · slot · tier it arrives at Activation · Range · Duration · Limit

Activation — Passive (no action, always running) · Free (no action, but you choose when) · Bonus · Action · Reaction (with its trigger stated).

Range — the bands from Chapter 12, written here the way they are spoken: Self, Engaged with you, near you, far from you, distant from you. Where a form moves a creature it is written in speed instead, in feet.

Duration — how long it holds. Instant, a span, until a stated end, or always.

Limit — omitted where there is none.

Where a form forces a save it is against your Aura DC. Where it scales it scales on Threshold, because that is the number your tier moves.

Which three you carry

Set by how you awakened, from Chapter 5 — not by your Origin.

Trained. A House placed them before your connection finished opening. Your House and your archetype name your three. Find your House below, then your archetype under it. There is nothing to choose.

Wild. Nothing was placed. Your three surfaced on their own at the moment you broke open, keyed to your Source rather than to anything you would go on to become.

The difference is not power. It is where the three came from, and what they cost.

A wild set is larger than a placed one, form for form, and that is the trade. Nobody chose it for you, so nothing about it was chosen to help.

Minor House characters take the set of the tradition they learned from. Wanderers are almost always wild; a Wanderer who was genuinely trained by somebody names a tradition and takes its set for their archetype like anyone else.

Aim, and missing it

A House does not decide what a child becomes. It watches, takes a measure, and places three things it has reason to think will take — and then finds out.

Each House aims at three archetypes:

Every House has a trio for every archetype, and the three it does not aim at are its mutations. You will find all six under each House below, marked.

What a mutation actually is

A mutation is what a House produces when it reaches for a path it does not train. It is a whole trio, not a variant of one, and it is built and balanced like everything else in this appendix.

It is not narrower. It does not trade scope for power, and it does not take something away to pay for something else. Sablemire has never trained a Warhand and its Warhand trio is still a Sablemire answer to standing and taking it — quieter, and about what the ledger says afterwards.

Missing your House's aim costs you nothing. Several of the best forms in this appendix are mutations, and the practitioners who carry them tend to be the ones other Houses come to look at.

What the appendix does not show you is the years. A House places a template aimed at what it expects; when the child turns out otherwise, the aperture spends a long time reshaping itself around the person it actually got. Practitioners who have lived through it describe it as failing — most spend a stretch convinced they were handed something they were not good enough to hold, and a few leave over it. What is written above is where that process ends, which is where your character starts. If you want the inside of it, the Scholar's enquiry is the place to look.

The Placed Sets

Thirty trios. Find your House, then your archetype.

Ironvale · first forms

Aims at Warhand, Breacher, Warcaster. The other three trios are mutations, and they are not lesser.

Warhand

Anvil-Stand · Body · Awakening Bonus · Self · until the start of your next turn Set yourself. Until the start of your next turn:

• you have resistance to all damage
• your speed is 0 — you cannot move, step, shift or be carried, by your own choice or anyone else's

Where It Lands · Mind · Intent Free · near you · instant · once per round At the start of each round, name one ally near you.

• The first attack made against them this round is made against you instead, provided you could reach them by moving half your speed.
• You move that far as it happens, and it is not your movement — it does not come out of your speed on your turn.

Burn Bright · Soul · Mastery Free · Engaged · until you end it Switch it on or off as a Free action on your turn. While it burns:

• allies Engaged with you take half damage from any creature that is also Engaged with you
• the half they do not take, you do

Spook · mutation

Off The Anvil · Body · Awakening Reaction, when an attack hits you · Self · instant When an attack hits you, let it shove you instead of wounding you.

• You take no damage from it.
• You are moved up to 15 feet, in a direction of the attacker's choosing.

Braced · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always You always know where the next one is coming from.

• You cannot be surprised.
• A creature attacking you from hiding or while unseen gains no advantage for it.

Burn Out · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · until the start of your next turn · once per scene The first time you drop below half your hit points:

• you immediately move up to your full speed without provoking
• nothing can target you until the start of your next turn

Channeler · mutation

Bellows · Body · Awakening Free · Self · instant You can burn yourself instead. When you Overcharge, pay any part of the extra Aura Points with hit points, one for one.

Only the extra. Never the technique's own cost.

Line Of Fire · Mind · Intent Free · the technique's own range · instant · once per turn When you use a technique that deals damage to a single creature, it also strikes every creature standing between you and that target, on the same roll or the same save.

It does not distinguish, and you may not leave anyone out of it.

Forge Wind · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Everything you channel leaves the ground marked. Any space your techniques pass through or land in is scorched for the rest of the scene.

• It is difficult terrain for everyone but you.
• Any creature that ends its turn in it takes your Source's damage die.

Breacher

First Blood · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always The first creature you hit each scene does not stop bleeding. It takes your weapon's damage die again at the start of each of its turns, until it is healed or it drops.

Fault-Sight · Mind · Intent Action · near you · until that attack is made · once per creature or structure per scene You see where a thing gives. Name the fault in one creature or structure you can see near you.

• The next attack made against it ignores Ward, resistance and cover.
• It counts whether you make that attack or an ally you have told does.

Still Coming · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · while you are Bloodied While you are Bloodied:

• your speed cannot be reduced
• difficult terrain costs you nothing
• at the start of each of your turns you automatically escape the grappled and restrained conditions

Warcaster

Chambered Heat · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Your Source lives in the metal. Choose one weapon at each long rest, or your own hands.

• It deals your Source's damage type instead of its own.
• It counts as at-tier for whatever it has to overcome — wards, resistances and barriers below your tier do not stop it.

The Tempered Blow · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always What you put into a weapon arrives. Your Source's damage on a weapon attack cannot be resisted, halved, Warded or reduced by anything below your tier. It lands whole or not at all.

Forge-Bound · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always The weapon and the connection are the same object now.

• It cannot be disarmed, Sundered or left behind, and returns to your hand as a Free action from anywhere you can see it.
• You may throw it at any creature you can see, at any distance. This is a weapon attack made in place of a melee attack, not in addition to one, and it carries everything your weapon attacks carry.

It is back in your hand before the throw has finished.

Hazewright · mutation

Plain Threat · Body · Awakening Free · near you · until the end of its next turn · once per round Tell one creature near you exactly what you are about to do to it. It saves against your Aura DC, and on a failure, on its next turn it can do nothing but attack you or move away from you.

The Blunt Truth · Mind · Intent Free · near you · until the end of its next turn · once per round Name aloud what one creature near you is doing wrong. It saves against your Aura DC; on a failure it has disadvantage on every roll it makes until the end of its next turn.

The One Lie · Soul · Mastery Action · near you · until the end of your next turn · once per scene Nobody expects a word out of this House to be false, and that is the whole of why it works. Say something about this fight that is not true — that the line has broken, that their second is dead, that you have been going easy. Every hostile creature that can hear you saves against your Aura DC. On a failure, until the end of your next turn it believes you:

• disadvantage on every roll it makes
• it cannot willingly move closer to you

Sablemire · groundwork

Aims at Spook, Breacher, Hazewright. The other three trios are mutations, and they are not lesser.

Warhand · mutation

Nothing Shows · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Nothing you take shows.

• You never appear Bloodied, Critical or Guttering to anyone but your own party, and no effect that selects its target by their wounds can select you.
• No creature can tell you are a practitioner at all until you channel.
• The first attack made against you each round by a creature that has not yet hurt you has disadvantage. It is still working out what you are.

The Cost Of It · Mind · Intent Passive · Engaged · once per round When a creature damages you:

• you learn exactly what it spent to do it and what it has left
• every later use of that same attack or technique against you, for the rest of the scene, deals half damage

The Long Account · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always You keep the ledger and nothing is written off. Any creature that has damaged you this scene cannot regain hit points and cannot be healed by anything below your tier, until it drops or the scene ends.

Spook

Draw No Air · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always You make no sound, leave no track and carry no scent.

• You may Hide at any time that no creature is Engaged with you — no cover, no concealment and no darkness required, in plain sight and full daylight.
• Moving at full speed does not break it.
• While you are hidden, an attack against you misses on anything but a natural 20.

Read the Line · Mind · Intent Free · instant · once per fight When initiative is rolled:

• you act first, before anyone, whatever you rolled
• name one enemy as you go, and its first attack this fight misses

Nobody's Name · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Nothing that has seen you keeps you.

• Any creature that loses sight of you loses you entirely — it cannot target you, cannot follow you, and cannot say where you went, until you attack or speak.
• Nobody can describe you afterwards. Any creature trying to identify or recognise you from memory automatically fails, unless it has spent a full day in your company.

Channeler · mutation

No Hand On It · Body · Awakening Free · the technique's own range · always Your techniques do not come from you. When you use one, choose any point you can see within its range and it originates there instead.

• Cover, line of sight and any shape it throws are reckoned from that point, not from where you stand.
• It never reaches further than its normal range measured from you. This changes where a thing comes from, not how far it goes.

Delayed · Mind · Intent Free · the technique's own range · until it triggers or the scene ends · one at a time Any technique you use may be set rather than fired. Name its trigger in one sentence — someone crosses this doorway, someone lifts this lid, the room goes quiet.

• It waits indefinitely, costs nothing further, and resolves when the trigger comes.
• You may hold one set technique at a time.

Someone Else's Work · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Everything you channel appears to have come from another creature you can see.

• Witnesses, Attunement checks and memory-stone all record them as its source, and they cannot talk anyone out of it.
• Nothing can be Refused, Warded or reacted to by a creature that does not know where it actually came from.

So nothing of yours is ever Refused until somebody works out it was you.

Breacher

Thin Passage · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Any gap that admits your head admits all of you.

• You pass at full speed, without squeezing and without setting down what you carry, and rubble, wreckage and broken ground cost you no movement.
• An attack you make from hidden does not give you away until after it has resolved. If it drops the creature, you were never there at all.

The Watch Pattern · Mind · Intent Action · near you · until the scene ends · once per scene Observe any routine for one minute — a patrol, a shift, a household, a ritual.

• You hold its rhythm exactly, including the parts its keepers have never noticed they do, and you know the length of every gap in it.
• For the rest of the scene, the first attack you make against each creature is a critical hit if that creature has not yet acted.

Leave No Trace · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Your passage does not register.

• Wards do not wake, alarms do not sound, memory-stone takes no impression, and any detection effect below your tier fails to record you.
• Nothing you break sounds like breaking. A door, a wall, a seal or a barrier you go through makes no noise at all, and nothing beyond it learns you are coming.

Warcaster · mutation

The Long Shot · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Distance is not a factor.

• Any ranged weapon in your hands has no effective maximum range short of what you can see.
• You take no penalty for distance, wind, poor light, or a target that is moving.

Cover still works against you exactly as it works against anyone.

One Shot · Mind · Intent Free · sight · once per scene Declare it when initiative is rolled. One ranged weapon attack against any creature you can see.

• It resolves at the start of your first turn.
• It may carry an Evoke, as though it were made on your turn.
• The target may take no Reaction and no Refusal against it.

The Carried Shot · Soul · Mastery Free · once per turn Anything you could do to a creature standing in front of you, you can do to one you can see. A technique you know may be delivered by a ranged weapon attack.

• The shot carries it, the technique's range becomes the shot's, and it takes effect wherever the shot lands.
• You still pay the technique's cost, and one shot carries one technique.

Hazewright

Off True · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always You are never quite where you appear to be. Everyone watching sees you standing about five feet from where you actually are, and which side changes without pattern or warning.

• Attacks against you have disadvantage until that attacker has landed one.
• Water, mirrors, memory-stone and anything else that records a room record the false one.

Look Away · Mind · Intent Bonus · near you · once per round Something happens in the room that did not happen — a door swinging open behind them, a shape crossing a doorway, a lamp dying on the wrong side. Up to Threshold hostile creatures near you save against your Aura DC. On a failure a creature is turned around until the end of its next turn:

• every attack it makes has disadvantage
• it can no longer tell your people from its own, and attacks whatever is nearest to it, ally or enemy

The Wrong Room · Soul · Mastery Action · near you · 1 minute · once per scene Rebuild the place in their heads. Every hostile creature that can see it saves against your Aura DC, and on a failure the room stops being where its contents are — walls arrive early, doors are gone from where doors stood, and their own people are somewhere nobody is standing.

For as long as it holds, that creature is lost:

• every attack it makes has disadvantage
• it cannot Dash or Disengage
• any movement it makes ends the moment it meets something it was not expecting — a wall, a body, a drop, the floor

Damage is the one thing you cannot move. A creature that takes any may save again at the end of its turn.

Vaulin · first roots

Aims at Warhand, Channeler, Warcaster. The other three trios are mutations, and they are not lesser.

Warhand

Deep-Rooted · Body · Awakening Free · Self · until you willingly move Put roots down where you stand. The ground within five feet of you becomes living growth, whatever it was — flagstone, deck timber, ice, sand, a road. While you stay in it:

• you regain Threshold hit points at the end of each of your turns, to a maximum of half your hit point maximum in a scene
• nothing below your tier can move you

The Grove Knows · Mind · Intent Passive · far from you · always Everything growing near you reports what it touches. Wherever there is any living growth at all — grass, moss, a windowbox, a ship's timbers, the roots you put down yourself:

• you know the number, direction and weight of everything moving through it, through walls and in the dark
• nothing that came to you through growing things can surprise you, or anyone you warned
• the first attack made against you each round in such a place has disadvantage

Something that crossed bare stone to reach you arrives like it would for anyone.

Given Back · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always What is done to you goes into the root, and the root holds it. While you stand on living growth:

• half of all damage you take goes into the ground instead of into you, and the ground keeps it
• that patch withers, visibly, and it is still holding what it took
• any hostile creature that ends its turn on withered ground takes the damage it is holding, up to twice your Threshold, and the ground is that much clearer afterwards

Withered ground heals the way ground heals, over seasons, unless something walks on it first. Off living growth you take all of it, as anyone does.

Spook · mutation

Something In The Trees · Body · Awakening Passive · near you · always There is something in the trees and nobody can say what. While you are hidden, every hostile creature near you that cannot see you:

• has disadvantage on attack rolls
• cannot move any closer to where you are
• may save against your Aura DC at the end of each of its turns, and on a success is immune to this form for the rest of the scene

A creature that shakes it off has decided there is nothing out there, and it will not be talked out of that a second time. It does not matter that none of them has worked out you are actually there.

Take The Shape · Mind · Intent Bonus · Self · until you end it Become a beast of the groves — anything from a wren to a big cat to something long and low with too many joints.

• Your hit points, Threshold, Aura and Foundations are unchanged.
• Your size, speed, movement modes and senses become the animal's.
• You cannot channel or speak while you wear it.
• Anything that had you loses you the moment you change.

Coming back is a Bonus action.

Out Of The Trees · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · while you wear a shape Shifting costs what it always cost. What changes is what comes out of the trees. Whatever you take now is not an animal, and everything in the room understands that before it understands anything else about it.

While you wear a shape:

• You may channel and speak in it, which you could not do at Intent.
• Your natural weapons count as at-tier and deal your Source's damage type as well as their own.
• Any creature below your tier that can see you must save against your Aura DC or be frightened of you for as long as it can, and it saves again only once it cannot.
• Changing shape ends the grappled and restrained conditions, and any effect below your tier that named you as its target.

Channeler

Open Channel · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always The ground holds it, not you.

• You have the Sustain verb from Awakening, a full tier before anybody else.
• While you stand on any living growth — soil, grass, root, growing wood — what you Sustain costs no upkeep at all.

Step off it and upkeep resumes at half the entry cost, as it does for everybody.

Reading the Season · Mind · Intent Action · Engaged · instant Touch a creature or a place and know the whole of it:

• its current and maximum hit points, or structural equal
• every condition and ongoing effect on it
• the most recent harm done to it, and whether that harm is still working
• what it will die of if nothing changes

Until the end of your next turn, your techniques against it cannot be Refused or Warded. You know it too well for that.

Give Freely · Soul · Mastery Action · near you · instant Give any number of creatures near you any amount of your current hit points, your Aura Points, or both, divided however you choose.

• They receive all of it, up to their own maximums.
• It arrives whether they are conscious, Guttering, or past the reach of anything else.
• You cannot reduce yourself below 1 hit point. You may reduce yourself to 0 Aura Points.

Breacher · mutation

Root-Split · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Where you put your weight, things open.

• Any structure, wall, door, floor or barrier you strike takes double damage and cannot resist you.
• Difficult terrain made of anything grown, rotten, root-bound or fallen costs you no movement at all.

The Long Push · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always You do not stop being applied. For each consecutive round you spend attacking the same creature or structure, your attacks against it gain +1d6, cumulative, to a maximum of your Threshold in dice. Attack something else and it resets to nothing.

Nothing Stands Long · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Nothing you have started stays standing. Damage you deal carries through into whatever is directly behind your target — the next rank, the wall behind it, the floor under that — in full, and it goes on carrying while there is anything left in the line.

Warcaster

Living Edge · Body · Awakening Free · Self · always Your weapon is grown rather than made — green wood, thorn, living bone — and it is not finished.

• As a Free action it becomes any other weapon you are proficient with, putting out what it needs and drawing back what it does not.
• Its damage die is always the larger of its own and your Source's.
• Cut it apart and it puts out new wood by morning. It cannot be permanently Sundered by anything below your tier.

Seeded · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always What your Source puts into a wound goes on growing there. The first time each round you deal your Source's damage with a weapon attack, that same damage lands again at the start of that creature's next turn.

Slow Anger · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · while a fight continues You do not start well, and you do not stay that way for long.

• First round: nothing.
• Second round: +Threshold to technique damage and to your Aura DC.
• Third round onward: +twice your Threshold, where it stays until the fight ends.
• At the maximum, your weapon attacks and techniques count as at-tier against anything.

And it shows. Bark closes over the backs of your hands, thorn comes through at the joints, and by the end of a long fight nobody in the room mistakes you for a person.

Hazewright · mutation

The Ground Is Ours · Body · Awakening Free · near you · once per round Name a space near you. Growth comes up through it and knows the difference. Until the end of your next turn:

• it is difficult terrain for your enemies and open ground for your allies
• the first attack made against each enemy standing in it has advantage

What The Grove Wants · Mind · Intent Bonus · near you · once per round Name a creature near you. Growth reaches for it. Until the end of its next turn:

• its speed is halved
• it cannot Disengage
• every attack made against it by an ally standing on living growth has advantage

The Grove Between You · Soul · Mastery Action · near you · 1 minute · once per scene A grove comes up through the floor. Everything near you becomes dense living growth:

• your enemies treat it as difficult terrain and cannot see through it
• your allies move through it as open ground
• any hostile creature that ends its turn in it is held fast, unless it saves against your Aura DC

It stays where it grew when the minute ends.

Saltmarch · opening steps

Aims at Spook, Channeler, Hazewright. The other three trios are mutations, and they are not lesser.

Warhand · mutation

Take The Charge · Body · Awakening Free · Self · once per scene Name one creature near you. A shimmer of you settles over them, obviously an image and obviously yours — nobody who looks twice mistakes it for a person.

• It has hit points equal to half your maximum.
• All damage that creature takes comes off the shimmer first. Anything beyond what the shimmer has left carries through to them as normal, and the shimmer is gone.
• Every instance that touches the shimmer banks you a charge of absorbed force, as though you had been struck.

Once spent it does not come back this scene.

The Promise Holds · Mind · Intent Free · near you · once per round The shimmer is yours to move, and it mends.

• Once each round, place it on any other creature near you. It keeps whatever hit points it has left.
• At the start of each of your turns it regains hit points equal to your Threshold, provided it has any left at all.

Wearing You · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always It stopped being a skin and became a second of you.

• A creature carrying the shimmer uses your Ward, your saves and your Threshold, wherever those are better than its own.
• While the shimmer has any hit points left, a blow that would reduce your charge to 0 instead spends whatever is left of it and leaves them standing at 1.

Spook

Mirage · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always You choose where you are seen. Place your image anywhere within 30 feet you can see.

• Everything that would target you targets the image instead — attacks, techniques, area effects — using your AC and your saves, and range and reach are measured to it.
• The image goes the moment an attack hits it, or the moment you attack or channel.
• It comes back at the start of your turn, after any round in which you neither attacked nor were hit.

Sent Ahead · Mind · Intent Free · near you · once per round The image no longer has to be of you. Put one of any creature you have ever seen anywhere within 30 feet — an ally, one of their own, an officer who is not in the building.

• It walks where you point it and speaks in their voice, and it holds until something touches it.
• A creature that spends an attack, a technique or a Reaction on any image of yours has spent it for nothing.

The Desert Lies · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always You have Threshold images and they no longer break when you act.

• An attack that hits one destroys that image and does nothing else.
• Any of them may act as you. You say which one you were in afterwards.
• One image comes back at the start of each of your turns.

When the last one is gone you are as visible as anybody.

Channeler

Thin-Walker · Body · Awakening Bonus · near you · instant Step through a gap that is not open to anybody else.

• Arrive anywhere near you that you can see or have previously stood, bringing one willing creature you are touching.
• In a thin place you do not walk. Your movement each turn is spent as blinks instead of steps, in whatever increments you like, and none of it provokes anything.

The Line Between · Mind · Intent Action · far from you · Sustained Open a line between two points and hold it while you Sustain it.

• Both ends must be within far of you and must stay there. It closes the instant either end leaves that range, so it takes nobody anywhere you could not already walk.
• Anything sent through arrives at the far end at once.
• One creature may pass through each round.

Open Hand · Soul · Mastery Action · Engaged · 1 minute · once per scene Lend the connection itself outward. One willing creature you touch — including the unawakened — channels through you for the duration.

• They use your Aura score, your Aura DC and your Aura Points, and may use any technique you know at or below your tier.
• Everything they spend comes out of your pool, and you cannot channel at all while it holds.
• They appear as you for the duration, to everyone including their own side.

Breacher · mutation

Come A Long Way · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Your first attack each turn deals +1d6 for every 10 feet you moved before making it, to a maximum of twice your Threshold in dice. Dashing counts, falling counts, being thrown counts.

No Shorter Route · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · while Dashing Take the Dash action and name a straight line toward anything you can see. Nothing on it slows you:

• difficult terrain costs nothing
• any barrier below your tier on that line — door, shutter, fence, wall, cart — breaks as you reach it, without stopping you or costing you movement
• creatures on the line are knocked prone as you pass through them

It does nothing on a turn you do not Dash, and nothing off the line you named.

The Whole Desert Behind You · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always When your first attack of a turn hits:

• every creature near the target takes the same momentum dice you added to it
• anything below your tier among them is thrown 15 feet and knocked prone

Warcaster · mutation

Struck From Elsewhere · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Choose where the blow lands. When you make a weapon attack, it may resolve against any creature near you instead of the one you swung at, whatever you were facing and whatever stands between. Cover, position and facing do nothing about it.

The Blow Ahead · Mind · Intent Free · sight · once per turn Swing now and let it arrive later. Hold a weapon attack as you make it.

• It resolves at the start of your next turn, against any creature you can see, at any range.
• It cannot be Reacted to and cannot be Refused — from where the target is standing, it has already happened.

Everywhere At Once · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always One swing, several arrivals. When you hit with a weapon attack, choose up to Threshold creatures you can see. The blow lands on all of them, in full, carrying everything it was carrying — your Source, anything you Evoked, all of it.

Hazewright

Called Out · Body · Awakening Free · near you · once per round Name a thing near you as false and it goes like dropped glass.

• Every illusion, disguise, concealment or figment below your tier on a creature or a space near you shatters, audibly and in front of everybody.
• Whatever was standing behind it is staggered: disadvantage on everything it does until the end of its next turn.

Nothing Held Up · Mind · Intent Passive · near you · always Nothing false holds together where you are standing.

• Illusions below your tier come apart as they enter, and disguises slough off the people wearing them.
• Every creature near you has disadvantage on Stealth checks.
• Concealment gives no benefit against you.

Break The Picture · Soul · Mastery Bonus · near you · once per round Take a creature apart from whatever has been holding it up.

• Every effect on it below your tier ends at once — illusions, disguises, Wards, anything being Sustained on it by anybody, whether it was helping or not.
• Effects at your tier end as well, unless whatever placed them saves against your Aura DC.
• It is knocked prone, and nothing new can be placed on it until the end of its next turn.

Hollowglass · the founding chord

Aims at Spook, Channeler, Breacher. The other three trios are mutations, and they are not lesser.

Warhand · mutation

The Anchor Stone · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always The stone takes the pattern of everything that damages you.

• The first time in a scene you take damage of a given type, the stone records that type.
• From the second instance onward you have resistance to that damage type for the rest of the scene. The stone records types independently and there is no limit on how many it holds.
• Held in hand, it reports what struck you, from what distance, and what it was, for as far back as you have carried it.

It Takes The Print · Mind · Intent Reaction · Self · when an Aura effect would apply a condition to you · Threshold times per scene The condition lands on the stone instead of on you. You are not affected by it at all.

• Aura sources only — a technique, a Foundation, a Path ability, a ward, anything a practitioner or a source plane put on you. Memory stone takes pattern, and there is no pattern in a shove.
• Conditions from mundane causes go straight into you as they do into anybody: knocked prone, grappled, poisoned by a blade, blinded by sand.
• This does not affect the roll. You still fail the save; only the condition is diverted.
• It diverts conditions, not damage and not effects that only deal damage.
• Once used your Threshold in times, the stone is full for the scene and conditions apply to you normally.

The Whole Record · Soul · Mastery Action · Engaged · instant · once per scene Empty the stone into one creature you are Engaged with.

• It takes damage equal to the total damage the stone has taken this scene, to a maximum of your own hit point maximum. This is one instance, of your Source's damage type.
• Every condition diverted by It Takes The Print this scene applies to it at once, each lasting until the end of its next turn.
• The stone empties and begins recording again. It does not break.

Spook

No Impression · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Nothing takes a print of you. Wards do not wake as you pass, memory stone takes no impression, and no ledger, tally or written account of a place you were in has you in it.

No effect that names you as its target has a duration. A mark, a hunter's bond, a curse, a technique somebody is Sustaining on you — it ends at the start of your next turn. Damage and effects that resolve at once still resolve at once; this only strips duration.

Nothing To Go On · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always Breaking line of sight hides you. No check, no cover requirement, no need for silence — the instant a creature cannot see you, you are hidden from it.

• You stay hidden from that creature until it sees you again, or until you attack, channel or speak.
• A creature that has lost you cannot deduce your position, cannot search the space you occupied, and gains nothing from tracking, noise or footprints.
• Creatures that never lost sight of you are unaffected.

Out Of The Count · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always A creature that has not been able to see you since the end of its own last turn loses you from the engagement entirely. While that holds, it:

• cannot target you with anything, or move to Engage you
• cannot name you or report you afterwards, and does not know it was fighting you
• cannot spend actions, techniques or resources searching for you

You come back into the count for every creature the moment you attack, channel or speak, and drop out again once they lose sight of you.

Creatures at or above your tier keep hold of you. They still cannot find you, but they know somebody is missing from the count and can say so.

Channeler

Set It Down · Body · Awakening Action · Engaged · until it fires · one inscription at a time Use a technique against a surface instead of a target and pay its full cost now, including any Aura Points poured into it. It does not resolve. It holds in the material indefinitely — through rests, travel, seasons — until its trigger comes.

• Choose one trigger as you set it: a hostile creature comes within Engaged of the surface; you speak a word you chose (Free action, any distance, and you must know where the inscription is); or the surface is moved, opened or broken.
• It resolves from the inscription, not from you. Range, area and line of sight are measured from that point. Where the technique lets its user choose targets, you made that choice when you set it.
• Firing costs you no action and happens whether or not you are present, conscious or in the same region.
• Finding it: a creature searching that surface deliberately finds it on a check against your Aura DC. Nothing about it shows otherwise.

The Layered Seam · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always Inscriptions layer. You may hold your Threshold in inscriptions at once and any number of them in the same surface, and they do not interfere.

Speaking your word is a Free action and fires any number of them simultaneously, in any order you choose. You no longer need line of sight to an inscription to fire it — only to know where it is.

The Walls Take It · Soul · Mastery Action · near you · 1 minute to set · once per scene Inscribe the place rather than a surface in it. For one minute, every technique you use while standing here is taken into the walls as a second, free inscription. You paid for it once when you used it. The room keeps the copy.

• A copy is an inscription in every respect. It holds indefinitely, resolves from where it was taken, and fires on a trigger.
• Set each copy's trigger when you leave, choosing from the list in Set It Down. Until then the copies are inert.
• Copies do not count against the Threshold limit in The Layered Seam. You may hold your Threshold in copies on top of it.
• A copy can only be made of a technique you paid for in full, and a copy cannot itself be copied.

You do not have to be present when they fire, and they do not expire with the scene. Walk out of a room you have fought in and the room is still armed.

Anyone able to read stone can recover what happened here, in order, for as long as the building stands — including which of the walls are still holding something.

Breacher

Struck Loose · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always The first time each round you deal damage to a creature, both of the following:

• It loses its grip. Anything it is Sustaining ends unless it saves against your Aura DC.
• Something comes loose. Choose one category and the GM gives you a true answer about that creature: its name · what it was ordered to do · what it is guarding or standing in front of · how it got here · who sent it. Below your tier it does not know this happened.

Nothing Shut · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · always Against any creature you have damaged this scene:

• its Ward does not apply to anything you do
• it cannot Refuse anything you do
• it has disadvantage on saves against your techniques

It keeps all three against everyone else. They fail only against you.

Broken Open · Soul · Mastery No action · Engaged · rest of the scene · once per round, when you deal damage The creature saves against your Aura DC. On a failure it is broken open:

• disadvantage on every save
• cannot Refuse, cannot Ward, and cannot maintain anything it is Sustaining
• once each round you may ask it one question. It answers aloud, truthfully, in its own voice, in front of whoever is present. If it does not know, it says so.

Being broken open does not end with the scene. Nothing below your own tier closes it, and it is still open the next day.

Warcaster · mutation

The Note It Breaks On · Body · Awakening Free · Engaged · rest of the scene · once per round Take the note of one creature or object you are Engaged with. You may hold your Threshold in notes at once; taking another past that drops the oldest.

Against anything whose note you hold:

• your Source's damage ignores its resistance and immunity
• if it is an object or structure, your attacks against it deal double damage

Sounded · Mind · Intent Bonus · far from you · instant · once per round Sound every note you are currently holding. Only the specific creatures and objects whose notes you took are affected.

Each of them within far of you takes your Source's damage equal to twice your Threshold and is deafened until the end of its next turn. Unattended objects among them crack and are no longer structurally sound.

Line of sight is not required and cover, walls and distance within the band do nothing.

Nothing Is Solid · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Your weapon attacks ignore cover of every kind and ignore shields, and you may make them through any barrier below your tier: reach and range are measured straight through it as though it were not there.

A barrier struck through this way fails — the whole span up to 20 feet of it comes down, not just the point of contact. A barrier at or above your tier blocks you normally.

Hazewright · mutation

Nobody Hears The Same · Body · Awakening Passive · near you · always Hostile creatures near you cannot act in concert. No two of them are hearing the same thing.

• They cannot take the Help action
• They cannot grant one another advantage by any means, including flanking, marking and called targets
• Anything requiring two or more of them to act together fails

Each of them fights alone, in a room with everybody else.

Flooded · Mind · Intent Action · near you · Sustained One creature near you is in the noise while you Sustain this.

• Disadvantage on everything
• Cannot Sustain anything of its own, and anything it was Sustaining ends
• The first time each turn it takes an Action, it saves against your Aura DC or loses that Action

A creature at or above your tier can get out. It saves against your Aura DC at the end of each of its turns, and on a success the effect ends and it is immune to this form for the rest of the scene. Below your tier there is no exit — it stays in the noise until you stop holding it.

You are in it as well: your own attack rolls have disadvantage while you hold this.

The Whole Gallery · Soul · Mastery Action · far from you · 1 minute · once per scene Stop aiming it. For the duration, every creature within far of you has:

• disadvantage on attack rolls and on saves
• no Reactions
• no communication or coordination of any kind
• nothing may be Sustained, and anything already being Sustained ends

As you begin, name up to your Threshold in creatures. They are given a single clear tone to hold and are unaffected for the duration.

You cannot be one of them. Your own attack rolls have disadvantage until it ends.

The Wild Sets

Nobody placed these. They surfaced at breakthrough, already fitted, keyed to your Source.

These never mutate. They arrived fitted, and there is nothing to bend toward.

Every one carries a cost that is not optional. A placed form was chosen for a child by somebody weighing what that child would need. A wild form was chosen by nothing at all.

Fire · heat, passion, consumption

Runs Hot · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Nothing degrades you.

• Immune to poison and disease.
• You automatically stabilise while Guttering.
• A short rest restores half your hit points rather than a quarter.
• Fire and heat below your tier do you no harm at all.

Cost: you consume what you are given. Healing from another creature restores half. You also eat four times what anyone else does and count as an extra body against the party's Supply, every leg, so what you are is paid for by everyone rather than only by you.

What It Wants · Mind · Intent Passive · near you · always You perceive what any creature near you is craving this minute — the drink, the door, the reassurance, the fight — and you watch it change.

• Advantage on Persuasion, Deception and Intimidation that offers it or threatens it.
• Once per round, name a creature's craving aloud: it saves against your Aura DC or spends its next turn pursuing it, whatever it meant to do instead.

Cost: you perceive it whether or not you want to, in strangers, in friends, and in people you love, and you cannot switch it off or decline to know.

Nothing Held Back · Soul · Mastery Free · Self · always Fire and heat do you no harm at any tier now, from any source, including your own. Beyond that: declare anything you spend Aura Points on to be full throttle, as you spend them.

• For the rest of the scene it operates one band higher and costs no Aura Burn.
• It costs double Aura Points every time, upkeep included.
• You may declare as many things as you like, and you may not take any of them back.
• This includes Refusal.

Cost: once you have declared anything you may not Disengage or retreat for the rest of the scene. There are no half measures in you: you cannot Dodge, you cannot pull a blow or fire a warning shot, and you have disadvantage on any check that depends on doing something gently, quietly or partially.

You are setting fire to your glimmers to do it, and anyone who knows what they are looking at can see you doing it.

Water · flow, memory, depth

Never Quite Still · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always Nothing holds you.

• Immune to the grappled, restrained and paralysed conditions.
• You automatically escape any non-iron binding — rope, manacle, net, lock — at the start of your turn, without a check and without breaking it.
• Half damage from anything that crushes, pins or pushes.
• You have the Sustain verb from Awakening, a full tier before anybody else.

Cost: you cannot hold on either. You cannot grapple, restrain or pin another creature, you have disadvantage on checks to brace, anchor, catch or carry someone against their weight, and you cannot be caught when you would like to be.

Nothing Fades · Mind · Intent Passive · Self · permanent Everything that has happened to you stays at full clarity.

• You recall any moment of your own life perfectly, and cannot be deceived about anything you witnessed.
• Advantage on Lore and Investigation concerning events you were present for.
• Anything you have watched done once, you can describe well enough to be taught from — a technique, a route, a ritual, a fighting form.
• You are your own teacher. Your memory of a technique you have watched used counts as sufficient to learn from — you need no teacher, no text and no place that knows it. Everything else about learning it is unchanged.
• Studying from your own memory costs two downtime actions rather than one. The recall is exact and it does not correct you.

Cost: including what you would rather it did not. You have disadvantage on saves against being frightened, sickened or grieved, because every previous instance is available to you in full.

Fathomless Depths · Soul · Mastery Passive · near you · always Glimmers do not chafe near you. Yours are built for the long haul rather than the hard pull.

• You move through a space another creature occupies as open ground, and no barrier below your tier is any more solid to you than water is.
• You pay no upkeep. Any Sustained technique you start holds as long as you want it, at no further cost.
• You may hold Sustained techniques equal to your Threshold, rather than one.
• What you Sustain does not end when you do. It holds through unconsciousness, through Aura Shutdown and through Guttering, and stops only when you release it or die.
• The first Overreach each scene by anyone near you costs no Aura Burn, and anyone taking a short rest near you recovers half their Aura Points rather than a third.

Cost: your glimmers never strain, so they never stretch. You cannot Overreach. Not a technique, not a task, not once.

Earth · stability, endurance, patience

Unspent · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always You do not tire.

• Immune to exhaustion from every source.
• Any physical effort continues indefinitely at a steady rate — marching, climbing, hauling, holding a door, rowing against a current.
• You go Threshold days without food or water before it begins to tell on you at all.

Cost: you cannot hurry. You may not take the Dash action, and no effect can increase your speed above its base.

What Will Hold · Mind · Intent Passive · near you · always You know what will take weight and what will not.

• Objects and structures. You know the exact remaining hit points of anything built or grown that you can see, and how much more of a given strain it has in it: two more crossings, one more blow, an hour against this current.
• Nothing gives way under you without warning. A floor, rope, ledge, bridge or seal never fails on you unannounced — you always have a turn's notice, and no trap that works by giving way can catch you.

Cost: you read structures, never people. Disadvantage on Insight and Deception. You judge a person the way you judge a wall, and people are not walls.

Will Not Be Moved · Soul · Mastery Passive · Self · always Nothing changes your mind.

• You automatically succeed on saves against the charmed and frightened conditions, and against any effect that would compel, coerce or alter your intent — at any tier, including from the Deepening.
• It hurts to try. Any creature that targets you with such an effect immediately takes Aura Burn as though it had Overreached, counting toward its own escalation for the scene.

The second attempt costs it double. The third is usually the last. Cost: what will not be moved does not move easily. Raising your Aura score costs double, at every step. And a Belief of yours can only be rewritten at a Rite: your mind changes when the rest of you does, and not before.

Air · movement, freedom, breath

Weightless Enough · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always You are barely there.

• No falling damage from any height.
• You cross surfaces that should not hold you — water, snow crust, rope, thin ice, a bannister, a bad rooftop — at your normal speed.
• Your speed increases by 10 feet.

Cost: you weigh too little to matter. You have disadvantage on Strength checks and saves to hold ground, shove, or resist being moved, and any effect that would push you moves you an additional 15 feet.

Everything At Once · Mind · Intent Passive · far from you · always Your attention does not narrow and it does not drop things.

• Once you have seen a creature move, you know where it is for as long as it stays far from you or nearer — through cover, through darkness, through a crowd, whether or not you can still see it.
• You cannot be surprised, and neither can anyone you have warned.
• You lose it the moment it stops moving. Anything that goes completely still is gone to you until it starts again.

Cost: narrowing is difficult. You have disadvantage on any check requiring sustained attention on one thing — investigating a single object, reading closely, following one set of tracks, hearing one conversation in a room.

The Next Horizon · Soul · Mastery Passive · any distance · always You cannot become lost. Not in any terrain, at any distance, by any weather, by any technique or feature of a place built to turn people around.

• Name anywhere you have heard of and you know its direction and roughly how far, whether or not you have ever been.
• Any journey you lead takes one fewer leg, to a minimum of one.
• The first time you reach somewhere you have never been, you immediately gain the benefit of a short rest.

Cost: nothing you build behind you holds. You may not take the Court downtime action. You are never anywhere long enough for someone to vouch for you.

Light · revelation, clarity, truth

Marked Visible · Body · Awakening Passive · near you · always You are impossible to miss, and so is everything around you.

• Hidden and invisible creatures below your tier are revealed the instant they come near you, and so is anything they are carrying.
• Illusions and disguises near you show their seams to everyone present, not only to you.

Cost: you are the first thing anyone notices, always. You gain no benefit from Stealth, cover or concealment, and you automatically fail checks to hide.

Plain Reading · Mind · Intent Passive · near you · always You see what a thing actually is, beneath its name, its reputation and its presentation.

• Forgeries, counterfeits, mislabelled materials, false relics and items claiming a tier they do not hold are transparent to you, with no check.
• You know any item's true tier, whether it is bonded, and whether it is iron.
• You know a technique by sight — its band, its Source and what it is about to do — the first time you ever see it used.

Cost: you see it about everything, including gifts, including heirlooms, and your face does it before you have decided anything. You cannot Bond with an item whose true tier is Mundane. Nothing ordinary can ever mean anything to you, because you can see exactly what it is.

Cannot Dissemble · Soul · Mastery Passive · near you · always People trust you immediately, and are right to.

• Any creature that has heard you speak treats you as friendly on first impression.
• Advantage on Persuasion, and no creature can find deceit in you with Insight, because there is none there to find.
• Anything you state as fact is believed by any creature below your tier that has no direct evidence against it.

Cost: you cannot lie or mislead. You may stay silent, and frequently should, but you cannot say a false thing: you automatically fail all Deception checks, and a direct question asked in good faith gets a true answer or no answer at all.

Darkness · potential, mystery, rest

Night-Fed · Body · Awakening Passive · Self · always The dark is not an absence to you, it is where you are from.

• You see perfectly in darkness of any kind, including darkness made by a technique above your tier.
• Anything relying on sight alone does not see you at all in dim light or darker.
• A short rest taken in darkness counts as a long rest for you.

Cost: light is what rest is not. You gain no benefit from a short rest taken in bright light, and until you find somewhere dim you have disadvantage on saves against exhaustion.

Nothing Spent Yet · Mind · Intent Passive · near you · always You read what has not been used.

• For any creature near you, you know what it is holding back — a technique it has not spent, an ally it has not called for, an order it has not given, a way out it is keeping.
• You do not learn what any of them are for, only that they are there and waiting.
• When a creature spends something you knew it was holding, you and every ally you warned have advantage on the first roll or save against it.

Cost: you read what is not happening and nothing else. You have disadvantage on Insight against anything a creature is presently doing, presently feeling, or presently saying.

Held In Reserve · Soul · Mastery Free · Self · once per scene You have been keeping something back this whole time and nobody has ever seen the whole of you. Take an entire extra turn, immediately:

• a full action
• a bonus action
• your movement
• your Reaction back, whether you had spent it or not

Cost: you are always holding something back, and everyone who fights beside you comes to know it. You act last in the first round of any fight, whatever you rolled, and you may never take the Ready action.

What broke you open

The break does not change the effect. It changes how the effect presents, and that is what a practitioner who can read the foundations is actually reading. Pick one, or write your own.

Every other layer a practitioner carries can be defeated. House techniques can be studied and mimicked, a signature can be dampened or scattered, and a patient liar can present as any House they like. The foundations are the only layer nobody performs deliberately. They surface under exhaustion, under fright, under the ordinary friction of a day.

Every technique in the book, in one place. The rules for reading, learning and inventing them are in Chapter 9.

Five libraries. Trained is open to anybody with a body. Universal is open to every practitioner. Your Source and your House are yours. The Wanderer library belongs to people who had neither.

This is not everything

These pages are what has been written down and taught widely. They are not the limit of what a practitioner can do.

Teachers hold forms that appear in no book. So do places, and so do people who worked something out once under pressure and never showed anybody. A technique found that way is stranger than what is printed here rather than stronger, and it belongs to whoever gives it to you.

You can make your own at every Rite. See Chapter 9.

Trained

Nothing here is channelled. These are things a body learns to do, and every one of them is available to creatures with no Aura whatsoever: a knight in iron plate, a pit fighter, a swordmaster who never awakened.

They cost nothing to use and they are always on. What they cost is Tempering, and finding somebody willing to show you.

Integration prices are stated on the entry rather than taken from the band. A band prices what a technique costs to use. It says nothing about how hard it is to learn.

Second Strike · at-will · 0 · integration 20

Passive · Self · always When you take the Attack action you make two attacks instead of one. This is two aimed strikes, not two swings.

Open Hand · at-will · 0 · integration 8

Passive · Self · always Your unarmed strikes count as a weapon you are proficient with, and their damage die scales with your tier.

Quick Work · at-will · 0 · integration 14

Passive · Self · always Dash, Disengage and Hide are bonus actions for you.

Turned Aside · at-will · 0 · integration 10

Reaction · Self · when an attack you can see hits you Halve the damage.

Nothing Lands · at-will · 0 · integration 12

Passive · Self · always Where a successful Dexterity save would halve damage, it takes it to none. On a failed Dexterity save you take half.

Catch · at-will · 0 · integration 10

Reaction · Self · when a ranged weapon attack hits you Reduce the damage by 1d10 + your Threshold. If that takes it to 0 you catch the missile, and may throw it back as part of the same reaction.

Light Landing · at-will · 0 · integration 4

Passive · Self · always Halve all falling damage, and always land on your feet.

Unburdened · at-will · 0 · integration 8

Passive · Self · while wearing no armour Your AC is 10 + Dexterity + Constitution.

Universal

Available to every practitioner.

Aura Sense · at-will · 0

Free · Near · instant You know how many practitioners are within Near, roughly where, and which are currently channelling. Spend an action and make an Attunement check against their Aura DC to learn one Source and rough tier.

Windcut · at-will · 0

Action · Near · instant A thin, fast cut of raw drawn power. Technique attack for 1d10 damage of your Source's type. This is what everyone falls back on, and the reason a practitioner is never actually unarmed.

Reinforce · Awakening · 2

Bonus · Self · Sustained +2 AC, and advantage on Strength and Constitution saves. Upkeep 1.

The technique every practitioner learns first, and the one that shows them what a breakthrough is. It is a single braced round at Awakening. At Intent it is a posture you can simply hold.

Steady Draw · Awakening · 2

Bonus · Self · until the end of your turn You draw without flaring. Your next technique this turn cannot be seen being channelled, and Attunement checks to identify you as its source have disadvantage. The effect is still perfectly visible. You are not.

Sever · Intent · 4

Action · Near · instant End one ongoing technique effect on yourself or a creature within Near, provided its band is at or below yours.

Widen · Intent · 4

Bonus · Self · until the end of your turn Your next technique this turn affects a second target within Near of the first, at half effect — half damage, half duration, half distance, as applies.

Deep Draw · Mastery · 0

Free, when you use a technique · Self · instant You reach past the pool and take it out of yourself instead. Instead of spending a technique's Aura Points, take that many points of damage. It counts toward your Overreach escalation for the scene, so the second time costs double and the third triple.

This recovers nothing. It converts. A Mastery technique costs 7 the first time, 14 the second, and 21 the third, which is how most people find out where their limit was.

Ward Flare · Mastery · 7

Reaction, when you are hit · Self · until the start of your next turn Your Ward doubles. If you have no Ward this does nothing at all.

Unmake · Presence · 11

Action · Near · instant Every ongoing technique effect within Near ends. Yours, theirs, at any tier, and none of it can be Refused.

Rally · Awakening · 2

Bonus · Self · once per short rest Recover hit points equal to a quarter of your maximum.

Fury · Intent · 4

Bonus · Self · Sustained Melee weapon attacks deal +1d6 and you have resistance to physical damage. You cannot use any other technique while it holds. Upkeep 2.

Shock · Mastery · 7 · integration 18

No action · Engaged · when you hit with an unarmed strike · once per turn The target saves against your Aura DC or is stunned until the end of your next turn.

Integration is stated rather than taken from the band.

Surge · Mastery · 7

Free · Self · once per scene Take one additional action this turn.

The Sources

Each Source has its own library.

Fire · heat, passion, consumption

Emberhold · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · Sustained Your weapon or hands carry heat. Your attacks deal +1d6 fire on a hit. Upkeep 1.

Cinder Wake · Intent · 4 Free, when you move · Self · 1 minute The ground you crossed this turn burns. A creature entering that space or ending its turn there takes 2d6 fire, once per turn.

Scatter Flame · Awakening · 2 Action · Near · instant A spreading cone of fire. 2d6 fire, Dexterity save for half. Anything flammable in the area catches and keeps burning.

Backdraft · Intent · 4 Reaction, when you take fire damage · Self · instant You take none of it. Whatever dealt it takes it instead, in full, with no save.

Kiln · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · instant A 30-foot sphere becomes furnace-hot. 6d6 fire, Constitution save for half. Metal in the area glows and burns whoever holds it for a further 1d6. Iron does not care.

Wildfire · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · Sustained A fire takes hold of everything within Near of a point you choose and spreads out a band at the start of each of your turns, to Far and then Distant. Anything in it takes 3d6 fire, once per turn. Upkeep 3.

You can stop paying. You cannot tell it to stop growing.

The Last Argument · Presence · 11 Action · Distant · instant Everything within Far of a point you can see takes 10d6 fire, Constitution save for half. Structures burn, stores go up, and nothing you do afterwards puts it out before it has finished.

Water · flow, memory, depth

Mend · Awakening · 2 Action · Engaged · instant Restore 2d6 hit points by touch. Does not heal Aura Burn.

Undertow · Intent · 4 Action · Near · instant One creature is pulled one band closer to you, from Far to Near or from Near to Engaged, and its speed is halved until the end of its next turn. Strength save negates.

Current · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · Sustained The world moves around you rather than against you. You ignore difficult terrain, cannot be knocked prone, and leaving Engaged never provokes. Upkeep 1.

Drawn Off · Intent · 4 Action · Engaged · instant Take one condition or ongoing effect off a creature you touch and onto yourself. It ends on you at the start of your next turn, whatever its stated duration was.

The Long Memory · Mastery · 7 Action · Engaged · instant Touch an object or place. You see one significant thing that happened there, in full. You do not choose which, and the GM does.

Pressure · Mastery · 7 Action · Near · Sustained The air in the area carries the weight of deep water. Creatures below your tier move at half speed, cannot Dash, and have disadvantage on Strength saves. Upkeep 3.

Everything Returns · Presence · 11 Action · Near · instant · once per long rest Up to Threshold creatures you choose are returned to the state they were in at the start of this scene: hit points, conditions, ongoing effects. Position, Aura Points and anything spent stay exactly as they are. The dead stay dead.

Earth · stability, endurance, patience

Set Stone · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · Sustained You cannot be moved, knocked prone or forced back against your will by anything at or below your tier. Upkeep 1.

Rise · Intent · 4 Action · Near · Sustained A wall of stone up to Near in length and ten feet high. AC 15, 10 hit points per point of Threshold, blocks line of sight. It sinks the moment you stop paying.

Shape Stone · Awakening · 2 Action · Engaged · instant Worked or natural stone answers your hands. Open a passage, close one, cut a step, seal a crack, or smooth a surface, up to roughly what a person could carry.

Sudden Weight · Intent · 4 Action · Near · instant One creature's own gear turns against it. Strength save or be knocked prone with its speed halved until the end of its next turn.

Shatterfoot · Mastery · 7 Action · Near · instant The ground breaks. 5d6 bludgeoning and knocked prone to every creature on it; Dexterity save for half and no prone. The area becomes difficult terrain.

Bulwark · Mastery · 7 Action · Self · Sustained You and every ally Engaged with you reduce all damage taken by 4, to a minimum of 1. This is not Ward and does not stack with it; take the better of the two. Upkeep 3.

Bedrock · Presence · 11 Action · Far · Sustained An area within Far becomes absolutely stable. Nothing below your tier can move anything in it that does not wish to move, no structure inside it can fail, and the ground cannot be broken. Upkeep 5.

Air · movement, freedom, breath

Between-Step · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Near · instant Blink to a place you can see within Near. You do not provoke.

Gale Hand · Intent · 4 Action · Near · instant Shove one creature anywhere within Near of where it stands, including straight up. Strength save negates. A creature moved into a solid surface takes 2d6 and is knocked prone.

Updraft · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · Sustained The air holds you up. You take no falling damage, and a jump carries you a full band in any direction. Upkeep 1.

Take the Breath · Intent · 4 Action · Near · instant The air leaves one creature. Constitution save or it cannot speak or channel until the end of its next turn.

Stormwall · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · Sustained A screaming wall up to Near in length and twenty feet high. Ranged attacks through it have disadvantage, crossing it costs a creature's entire movement, and no sound carries through.

Cyclone · Mastery · 7 Action · Near · instant Every creature within Near is thrown out to Far and knocked prone, Strength save negates. Those who fail also take 4d6 bludgeoning.

Nowhere Is Far · Presence · 11 Action · Self · instant · once per long rest · requires open sky at both ends You and up to Threshold willing creatures travel to any place you have personally stood under open sky, arriving in the time it takes to draw one breath. Enclosed, buried and roofed places are beyond this, in both directions.

Light · revelation, clarity, truth

Show · Awakening · 2 Action · Near · instant Everything within Near is revealed. Invisibility, illusion and concealment of a band at or below yours end; anything above it is outlined and cannot benefit from being unseen until the end of your next turn.

Brand · Intent · 4 Bonus · Far · Sustained One creature glows. Attacks against it have advantage, it cannot hide or become invisible, and you know its direction at any distance while the brand holds.

Lamp · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · Sustained You shed light to Near that nothing below your tier can dim, and while it holds, nothing inside it can be invisible to you. Upkeep 1.

As It Is · Intent · 4 Action · Near · 1 minute For the duration you see the true form of everything within Near. Disguises, illusions, shapeshifting and false signatures all read as exactly what they are, without a check.

Verdict · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · instant One creature must answer one question truthfully and completely. Wisdom save negates, and either way they know exactly what you tried to do.

Sunlance · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · instant A line of light to Far. 6d8 radiant, Dexterity save for half. It passes through cover, and cover does not protect anyone standing behind it.

Nothing Hidden · Presence · 11 Action · Far · Sustained Within Far of you nothing can be concealed, disguised, invisible, illusory or falsely signed. This includes what people are, which is why it is rarely used twice in the same town. Upkeep 5.

Darkness · potential, mystery, rest

Unlit · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Self · until you attack or channel You are heavily obscured, in any light, and may hide as a Free action while it holds.

Smother · Intent · 4 Action · Near · Sustained One creature is blinded and silenced. It may make a Constitution save at the end of each of its turns to throw it off early; otherwise it holds as long as you pay.

Gloom · Awakening · 2 Bonus · Near · Sustained Light within Near dims to nothing for everyone but you. Creatures relying on sight have disadvantage on attacks and Perception while it holds. Upkeep 1.

Step Into Nothing · Intent · 4 Reaction, when you are targeted · Self · instant · once per round You are not there. The attack or effect misses entirely, and you appear at any point within Near that you can see.

The Quiet · Mastery · 7 Action · Far · Sustained A 30-foot sphere in which no sound carries, no light reaches, and no technique below your tier functions. Creatures inside cannot channel, hear or be heard. Your own techniques are subject to it, including the upkeep on this one.

The Long Sleep · Mastery · 7 Action · Near · instant One creature below your tier must make a Wisdom save or fall unconscious for one minute. Any damage wakes it.

The Long Dark · Presence · 11 Action · Far · Sustained Absolute darkness and absolute silence, out to Far, and everyone for a mile can see the edge of it from outside. A creature below your tier that begins its turn inside must succeed on a save against your Aura DC or take no action at all that turn. Upkeep 5.

The Houses

Every technique in this section is ⟨Exclusive⟩. A House teaches its own, and no amount of money or goodwill changes that. What changes it is a person with a name who decides you are worth teaching, which is what Standing is for.

Ironvale

Internal enhancement. Nothing that draws attention on a frontier where attention is fatal.

Ember Core ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Self · until spent or you long rest Hold a reserve of Aura Points equal to your Aura modifier. You may spend from the reserve at any time, on anyone's turn, ignoring action costs — including to use a technique out of sequence. While it is held your Aura reads one tier lower to anyone attempting to detect you, and you take 1 damage at the start of each of your turns.

Shuttering ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Self · 1 minute Close your own connection. You have no Aura whatsoever — no radiation, no techniques, no Ward, no Foundations, no Gap Ladder. Nothing can detect what is not there. Reopening early is an action and costs 2d10 damage.

Sunder Strike ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Mastery · 7 Action · Engaged · instant Release power through a target rather than at it. Technique attack, 6d8 damage of your Source's type, ignoring armour, AC bonuses from shields, and Ward entirely. It leaves no visible wound, which is why Ironvale is careful who it teaches.

Saltmarch

Movement, and the keeping of what has been promised.

Resonance Navigation ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Awakening · 2 Action · 1 mile · 1 hour You sense every thin place within a mile, know which are safe to approach, and cannot become lost for the duration.

Code Binding ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Engaged · until delivered or you die Bind one message, object or truth to yourself. While you live it cannot be taken, read, altered, copied or compelled from you by any means — no save, no check, at any tier. You may release it to a named recipient, and only to them.

Source-Plane Transit ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Mastery · 7 Action · Self · instant · requires a thin place Step into your Source's plane at a thin place and out at another you have previously visited. You may bring creatures up to your Threshold. Minutes pass inside; roll 1d6 hours for how long passes outside, and the GM may rule it longer.

Hollowglass

Frequency. Everything resonates; the discipline is in not resonating back.

Resonant Cataloguing ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Awakening · 2 Action · Near · until released Commit one room, page or conversation to perfect memory. You may recall it exactly, at will, and you cannot be deceived about its contents. It stays until you deliberately release it.

Frequency Dispersion ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Self · 1 hour Scatter your own signature. Attempts to track, scry, locate or identify you automatically fail for the duration, including by Attunement and by the Registry's methods.

Dead Vault ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Mastery · 7 Action · Engaged · permanent · requires memory-stone Seal one memory, secret or technique into memory-stone. It leaves your mind entirely — you cannot recall it, and no effect of any tier can take it from you, because it is not there. Only you can open it, and only at the stone where you left it.

Vaulin

Growth cannot be hurried. It can be encouraged.

Root-Touch ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Awakening · 2 Action · Engaged · instant · requires living ground Through contact with living ground, know everything that has passed this place in the last day — number, direction, size, and how long ago.

Channelled Healing ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Engaged · instant Restore 4d6 hit points and end one disease or poison. Does not heal Aura Burn or Glimmer Burn.

Grove-Mark ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Mastery · 7 Action · Near · permanent · one at a time Mark a place up to a mile across as under your keeping. You know whenever anything enters or leaves it, from any distance, and living things resting there regain twice the normal hit points from any rest. Marking a new place releases the old.

Sablemire

Silence first. Everything else is downstream of silence.

Acoustic Dampening ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Awakening · 2 Action · Near · 1 minute You and every ally within Near make no sound whatsoever. Stealth checks relying on silence automatically succeed; speech, signals and spoken commands do not work either.

Shadow-Merger ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Intent · 4 Action · Engaged · until you leave Merge with a shadow large enough to hold you. While you remain you cannot be found by any means below your tier, you take no actions but may observe, and leaving is a Bonus action.

Radiation Diffusion ⟨Exclusive⟩ · Mastery · 7 Action · Self · indefinite Suppress your Aura signature entirely without closing your connection — you keep every technique, your Ward, your Foundations and your full pool, and register to detection as mundane. This is the only thing in the Heartlands that answers Radiation, and Sablemire knows exactly what that is worth.

The Wanderer Library

Nobody taught them properly, which occasionally turns out to be an advantage.

Not ⟨Exclusive⟩, and it has no House behind it. These are what people work out for themselves when there was nobody to ask.

Raw Draw · Awakening · 2 Action · Engaged · instant Draw without shaping it into anything. Technique attack, 2d8 damage of your Source's type, and you take 1d4 yourself whether or not you hit.

Borrowed Resonance · Intent · 4 Reaction, within 1 minute of seeing it used · as the original · one use Copy a technique you watched used within the last minute, one band lower than it was used at, for a single use. You must be able to afford that band's cost.

Adaptive Channeling · Mastery · 7 Action · Self · 1 scene · once per long rest Treat any one Source as your own — its lean, its library, its damage type, in place of yours. Afterwards you gain one level of exhaustion that only a long rest clears, and you are visibly unwell for a day.