A character-making interleaf
Belonging is a document before it is a feeling.
Humans are the largest population and hold most states, charters, armies, and route institutions. That is not the same as being the only people in the world, or even the only people in a Crown office.
Rarity measures how much origin work a choice needs. It does not measure worth.
There is no single human society.
A documented orc veteran from Aurevane may have more standing in Kaerys than a stateless human from the Longreach.
Papers, class, region, religion, wartime allegiance, and ancestry all affect how a person is treated, and they affect it differently in different places. The Crown, its successors, and the cities between them do not agree on who belongs.
Culture follows place, route, household, trade, and history more strongly than blood. Every ancestry-plurality enclave is mixed. Every regional culture includes several ancestries. A Crown goblin and a Coldwater goblin may share inherited customs and disagree about almost everything governing their daily lives.
No special permission
Established peoples.
Humans may come from every region and need no special premise. The other peoples below have substantial regional populations and visible diasporas. Choose where you are from; the ancestry itself needs no extraordinary explanation.
- Dwarf
- Old mercantile, mining, engineering, and military communities on several continents.
- Elf
- Long-established regional peoples with smaller urban diasporas; true elders are scarce and consequential.
- Gnome
- A gnome-plurality island league in Harrowmark’s ordinary waters, with precision-craft and artistic diasporas abroad.
- Halfling
- Long-established minorities across human-majority states, ports, farms, and route towns.
- Orc
- Regional peoples and large labour, military, and veteran diasporas living under sharply unequal jurisdictions.
- Goblin
- Port, yard, foundry, salvage, and civic communities, especially visible along the Thread.
- Hobgoblin
- Recognised military and administrative communities without one world-spanning state.
- Shoony
- Old mixed littoral towns on ordinary water, with dock and survey communities in Kaerys and the Scatters.
A community, cohort, or reason for leaving
Known enclaves.
Their existence is ordinary knowledge. Most humans have never met one. Your origin names the community that made your character possible without making that community a monoculture.
- Android
- A new postwar people. The first woke in adult replacement bodies whose intended patrons never arrived; later cohorts are grown without a donor or death. Concentrated near Harrowmark clinics and works, with a politically visible Kaerys population.
- Jotunborn
- Established mixed-scale communities in Vorn and smaller route and industrial diasporas elsewhere.
- Kitsune
- Regional communities with merchant, artistic, and diplomatic diasporas; their forms complicate identity law without defeating it.
- Kobold
- Small volcanic, subterranean, and yard communities with no inherited knowledge of the Crown’s dragons.
- Merfolk
- Populous in a few ordinary-water basins and extraordinarily rare on the surface; travel between basins requires specialised air travel.
- Arboreal
- Old localised forest and civic-grove communities, uncommon in human cities.
- Leshy
- Self-sustaining plant communities and mixed civic gardens, never disposable servants manufactured to order.
- Sprite
- Small woodland and island enclaves; personal flight is short-range, weather-bound, and not a crossing method.
Two repairs, one bench.
The android repairs the automaton’s detached weather closure. The automaton rebinds the android’s long fitted instrument case. Their tools cross the centre of the bench before either object returns to its owner.
Boundary The reciprocal action and distinction between peoples are established. Faces, genders, relationship, occupations, room, tools, case, clothing, repair map, and phenotype are illustrative, not universal anatomy.
Each choice below is a character premise. Build the origin, public identity, and legal status together.
There is no numerical party cap. The whole party must still read as one coherent ensemble, and an exceptional ancestry cannot arrive carrying answers to the Still, the Crown’s dragons, quickening, gods, souls, or the party’s missing span.
- Automaton
- A rare pre-Still soul-vessel. The making art is lost, and most survivors have long dormancies or fragmented personal memory.
- Giant
- A singular logistical fact in any human-built city or vessel; Jotunborn sustain the known mixed-scale communities.
- Awakened animal
- Every awakening has a particular cause. There is no repeatable industry for making a population.
- Angel, devil, or demon
- Embodied people classified through competing theologies. Their existence proves neither a god nor a universal moral order.
- Doppelganger
- A rare person whose forms do not copy memory, handwriting, legal history, or crystal resonance.
- Dragonet
- A small draconic people distinct from the Crown’s dragons, with no inherited knowledge of the imperial refusal.
- Mimic
- A singular shapechanging person; resemblance never reproduces a mechanism, rune, document, or crystal matrix.
- Nymph
- A person bound to, exiled from, or carrying the injury of one particular natural place.
- Slime
- A sapient organism with a specific origin, not a reproducible recipe or comic underclass.
- Swarmblood
- One continuous person in symbiosis with a swarm; division cannot copy or restore that person.
A stranger concept may still be pitched privately. Some options need boundaries around memory, death, or personhood before they can enter this campaign without answering its central questions for everybody else.
The limits apply to everyone
An ancestry choice does not make the map optional.
- 01
The Still is not a drowning hazard.
Amphibiousness, not breathing, changing shape, walking the bottom, undeath, or a constructed body offers no immunity. Nothing known swims, wades, burrows, or walks across it.
- 02
Personal flight is not route-grade flight.
A person may fly locally without carrying stores, navigating the fog, surviving a crossing, and returning. The Rider Age names roughly the first fifty years after riders made crossing repeatable, not the first wings.
- 03
Magic does not make the crossing optional.
No known spell, ritual, gate, or planar route carries an endpoint safely across the Still. Local magic works; crossing remains the fact every route must solve.
- 04
Ancestry is not an archive key.
Long life, draconic appearance, an ancient chassis, or outsider origin grants no protected history. Elders know what they personally witnessed.
- 05
Shape is not identity.
Transformation does not copy memory, handwriting, legal history, magical signature, or crystal resonance.
- 06
Divination is evidence, not a transcript.
Psychometry and similar magic can reveal useful sensory or emotional traces. They do not restore an excised memory, certify an interpretation, prove legal identity, or turn protected history into an omniscient account.
- 07
The missing span applies to every kind of body.
No ancestry makes the opening premise optional or supplies automatic recovery. The same bounded gap applies whether a body is living, constructed, undead, singular, or divided.
Priests receive answers. Outsiders make claims. Traditions disagree about whether any of them deserve the word god.
Faith is regional: civic patrons, household ancestors, local powers, and saints carried between continents by armies and routes. Ragathiel is one of the traveling names, a warrior-saint or power of duty, chivalry, and righteous vengeance. His devotion and PF2E mechanics remain available; his ultimate nature is not settled by the narrator.
Long PF2E-style lifespans remain true. Most people still do not survive for centuries. A few living elders remember pieces of the Rider Age—the first roughly fifty years after repeatable crossing—but their testimony is situated: one shore, one court, one season, one life. A PC old enough to remember it is a campaign-scale provenance choice, not a convenient library card.