Background

Every hero’s story begins somewhere. A character’s Background describes the place they were born, the conditions they grew up in, and how that affects what they are capable of today.

It is also the one part of your character that nobody chose. With that in mind, we recommend you roll a random Background from the Background Options rather than pick one. Very few heroes end their journey on the path they started it — those born to money may end up vagabonds and scoundrels, those raised in the wilds may become kings — so a Background you didn’t plan adds narrative depth, and is rarely one you’ll regret. However, the choice is ultimately yours.

What does a Background provide?

Every Background changes the following things about your character:

Your Attribute scores move by ±5 or ±10, with up to five increasing and up to three decreasing. No Background is entirely beneficial.
Free Skills from various Experience Trees, which go on your Skills List. A Background grants one peer group and two other skills, each chosen from a short list.
A peer group is the people who know what you are on sight, and among whom your Favor counts for more than the number on your sheet. It is an ordinary Skill, so you can buy further ones with XP later. ⟨What a peer group is worth is undecided; +10 is the working figure.⟩

Background Options

Roll d100. The bands are uneven on purpose as Zsenai is not evenly populated.

Each entry also names the peoples most likely to have raised you there. That is a recommendation rather than a restriction, as anyone can come from anywhere, and a character who doesn’t match their birthplace usually has a story attached to why.

Roll	Background	Type
01–12	The Uncounted Undercrofts	Urban	The level below the one every city admits to, and the people it doesn’t count
13–24	The Horse Meadows	Rural	Flood pasture where the horses are raised, and where you learned to ride
25–34	The Moving Tentgrounds	Rural, Wilds	A camp that is somewhere else by the end of the month
35–44	The Frontier Garrisons	Urban	A walled fort town, and a gate that shuts at a fixed hour
45–53	The Tidal Margins	Rural, Urban	Any coast, worked the same way: nets, harpoons, and one breath at a time
54–62	The Empty Grasslands	Wilds	Weeks on foot across open country, with a sling and no company
63–70	The Ferry Towns	Urban, Rural	A ferry town on a river that floods to its own schedule
71–78	The Imperial Caravanserai	Urban, Rural, Wilds	A walled inn to keep travelers safe from weather and bandits
79–84	The Scree Slopes	Rural, Wilds	Loose upland stone. Hard country, and nothing to charm with
85–89	The Valley-span Villages	Rural	Terraced hamlets on rope bridges, snowed shut a third of the year
90–93	The Aristocratic Colonnades	Urban	A wealthy quarter’s shaded walks. Raised to be looked at
94–96	The Taxing Slagworks	Rural	Mines and furnaces for six metals, worked by whoever bid lowest
97–98	The Spirit-bound Pyregrounds	Rural	A binder dies, the ground starts to sicken, and your family is sent for
99	The Luminescent Canals	Rural, Urban	The lake that lights from underneath, and the city built in its basin
00	The Waxlight Halls	Urban, Rural	Paper, wax and halls, on the one slope Elyste has never managed to squeeze

The Ancestral Orchards

You were born to an Elysian house that owns trees older than its name. Olives an ancestor planted five generations back, still bearing and still called by his name; grafted stock in a dozen varieties, because your family has kept grafters for two hundred years; pomegranate and quince under irrigation. You learned to read a graft, a frost, and a wind coming off the hills before anyone taught you.

Acres of roses are grown for scent, and a citron tree yields nothing edible: land doing no work is the one luxury that cannot be faked. You were put on a horse young and given a bow younger, and spent your days out on that ground, because hunting is what your family does with a morning. People were paid to keep you fed and well, and you have been ill perhaps twice. Everyone there knew your face before you could speak, because their grandparents knew your grandparents’.

The children you ran with were the tenants’, whose families have worked those trees for four generations, owe a share of everything they make, and cannot leave. You will inherit what they owe along with the orchard. Nothing there ever had to be argued for: you said what you wanted and it happened, so you have never changed anyone’s mind and would not know how to begin. Nothing has ever refused you either.

Peoples: Elysian

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Ranged · +5 Strength · +5 Vitality · +5 Aura · +5 Perception · −5 Charisma · −5 Will

Resource Modifiers: −20 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Gentry · Peer Tenantry · Peer Servantry · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Grafting · Hunting · Riding · Rents and Dues · Weather Sense · Etiquette⟩

The Aristocratic Colonnades

You were born to walk the shaded colonnades of an Elysian city’s wealthiest streets. A colonnade is where the people who matter are seen — relaxing in the cool of the day, at the correct hour, in front of the correct people. You were brought out among them young and taught all of it: letters, lineage, who is owed what by whom, how to hold your face still, and how to enter a room so that it turns and talk it round once it has.

The same fifty families walk those streets, and you knew all of them before you could name them. Half the household that raised you was hired — the woman who dressed you, the man who drilled your letters, the girl a year older who was never quite a friend — and you learned early that servants see everything and say nothing, which is a kind of power you were on the wrong side of.

What nobody ever asked of you was anything at all. You were carried where the ground was rough and fed until you were the right shape rather than a useful one, and never once made to lift, to carry, or to go without. The road will explain your body to you inside a week.

Peoples: Elysian, Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Charisma · +5 Aura · +5 Will · +5 Intelligence · −5 Strength · −5 Vitality

Resource Modifiers: −15 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Gentry · Peer Servantry · Peer Scholar⟩
Select two of: ⟨Etiquette · Read a Room · Letters · Lineage⟩

The Empty Grasslands

You were born into the sea of rose-gold grasses, your community travelling its unmapped expanse by foot. You carried what you needed on your back for weeks at a time, learned how to spot a figure on the horizon, and to go flat when danger approached. If all else failed, your sling was your solution.

You were not always alone out there. A crossing takes you over another family’s ground, and there are rules for that — where to stop, what to say first, what you owe for the water. Twice a year you would come over a rise onto an Elystean patrol working the border, and both sides would decide, again, not to make anything of it. You know how to be met, and how to be the one who decides whether a meeting happens at all.

The plains did not teach you how to be among others, however. Weeks of your own company do something to a person, and you came back from each crossing a little further out of the habit — not unkind, just run out of the small talk everyone else keeps in reserve. You never let people get too close, in either sense. It’s just too dangerous.

Peoples: Rhioan, Yrri

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Ranged · +5 Strength · +5 Dexterity · +5 Perception · −5 Charisma · −5 Melee

Resource Modifiers: −15 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Herder · Peer Nomad · Peer Soldier⟩
Select two of: ⟨Stillness · Fieldcraft · Herding · Sling Mastery · Wayfinding · Going Without⟩

The Ferry Towns

You were born at a river crossing, where Rhioan ferries move goods across the riverlands. You were on the ropes as soon as you could hold one, poling, hauling and loading until it became second hand. The river seasons ruled your childhood, each year dreading the flood that would silt the banks and shallow the water. Then the crossing had to be built again, wherever the thalweg — the deep line a loaded boat needs — had moved to.

Half of what happens at a landing is an argument. Whose cargo goes on this trip, what the ferry is owed, who broke what. Arguments on a bank get settled at arm’s length; there is nowhere to walk away to. At the end of the boards sits an Elystean clerk with a ledger, taking his cut of everything that crosses. He has always been there. His father was there.

Nobody taught you your letters, because the clerk does the writing. You haul, he records, which is how a river works — and the same reason you have never refused anything. The water sets the schedule, the ledger sets the price, and eighty years of both is why a ferry town has no word for saying no. You will find that other people expect you to have one.

Peoples: Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Strength · +5 Melee · −5 Will · −5 Intelligence

Resource Modifiers: +0 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Riverman · Peer Merchant · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Ferrying · Swimming · Knots · River Law⟩

The Forgiven Generation

You were born to a conquered house and taken from it at nine — old enough to remember the road, young enough that nobody asked you anything. The Empire calls the policy Forgiven, and what you are forgiven is a war you did not fight. Your family kept its lands on your conduct and keeps them still, so you have been the guarantee of other people’s safety your whole life.

A hundred of you a year, raised together, and the others in that room are the only family you can name. Everything came as policy: letters, law, a blade from the second winter, drill until your body stopped arguing, and a voice that expects to be obeyed, practiced on your own year. There was never a day you could afford to be bad at it, because a house you barely remember depended on it.

What they took out was every sign of where you came from — accent, name, the way you held your hands — corrected until nothing about you reads as Haleni or Rhioan, and nothing reads as Elysian either. They taught you what is worth looking at, and you stopped seeing the rest. A Rhioan ward’s parents were taken the same way, and theirs before them. A Haleni still has relatives who remember refusing. You will be posted somewhere neither has heard of.

Peoples: Haleni, Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Will · +5 Melee · +5 Charisma · +5 Strength · −5 Aura · −5 Perception

Resource Modifiers: −15 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Forgiven · Peer Soldier · Peer Gentry · Peer Provincial Administration⟩
Select two of: ⟨Letters · Drill · Command · Provincial Accounts · Etiquette · Riding⟩

The Frontier Garrisons

You were born inside the walls of an Elysian fort town, where everything happens at the hour it is supposed to: reveille, drill, the watch changing, the gate closing — whether or not you are inside it. You were handed a spear about when you were handed chores, and stood your first night watch long before you knew what you were watching for. Most of soldiering, it turns out, is staying awake in the dark and not moving. The rest of it is carrying.

A fort town is still a town. Outside the gate was a market that existed because of the wall; inside were Haleni auxiliaries, a Rhioan farrier, a clerk from the provincial office who wrote down everything anybody did, and forty children who all knew the same songs. On market days there were Yrri in the yard. You grew up among three peoples and never once left the ground the fort stands on.

What a garrison never teaches is how to step out of line. You hold, you do not duck — the one who moves is the one who opens the wall. Nobody taught you letters either, since orders came down and were carried out. And nobody ever looked at you and saw anything but a place in a line, least of all you.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni, Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Melee · +5 Strength · +5 Will · −5 Aura · −5 Intelligence · −5 Dexterity

Resource Modifiers: −5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Soldier · Peer Provincial Administration · Peer Highlander · Peer Nomad⟩
Select two of: ⟨Watchkeeping · Spear · Field Repair · Drill⟩

The Horse Meadows

You were born on Rhioan flood pasture, green three seasons and underwater the fourth. The horses are why anyone lives there, and you were up on one before you could be trusted to walk. What the meadow teaches is the pole and the reins: four animals pulling harder than you weigh, in front of a car with no springs, over ground that was riverbed in spring. There are no stirrups; you stay on because you have learned to.

Everything the meadow makes goes somewhere else. The army takes the best teams and pays badly because it can, the yards in Bryn take the next and pay properly, the carters take the rest. You grew up among all three sets of buyers. Rhioan horse-work is the one thing the Empire cannot do without and cannot do itself, and everybody in the yard knows it.

You made the weapon; nobody ever handed you one. Whether you ride in the car with a spear was never going to be your business. And there is the thing your grandmother describes and you have never seen: horses with a river in them. There were more when she was a girl, fewer when her mother was, and every year the water is quieter. You were raised where something used to be reachable and is not.

Peoples: Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Dexterity · +5 Strength · +5 Vitality · −5 Melee · −5 Aura

Resource Modifiers: −10 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Horseman · Peer Herder · Peer Soldier⟩
Select two of: ⟨Riding · Horse-Sense · Droving · Message-Carrying⟩

The Imperial Caravanserai

You were born at the side of one of the Empire’s great roads. A caravanserai is a walled inn built to take an entire caravan behind its gates for a night, safe from weather and bandits, and yours was never empty. The world arrived in pieces and you assembled it — four tongues badly, every road and what it costs to walk, which goods come from where and what they are worth when they arrive, and news from a thousand miles off months before the nearest city heard any of it.

Hospitality was the rule, so you also learned to keep a room full of strangers from turning ugly — where to seat a Haleni trader who will not sit near an Elystean officer, when a joke is about to stop being one, how to be the person nobody remembers arguing with. Everyone who came through wanted something and most of them got it, and you were the one who worked out which.

What you never learned was how to take up your own space. You were staff in your own home, watching the important and the wealthy pass you by, and you never insisted on anything for yourself.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni, Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Intelligence · +5 Charisma · −5 Will · −5 Aura

Resource Modifiers: −5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Merchant · Peer Nomad · Peer Provincial Administration⟩
Select two of: ⟨Trade Tongues · Roads and Routes · Haggling · Read a Room⟩

The Isēbu Wildwood

You were born under canopy in the north, where the forest is not a resource but a neighbor. D’ir Szuda walks it — forty feet of him, wearing an Isēbu he took so long ago nobody can say when — and the wild herd moves with him. You learned to read that herd before much else. Which way it is facing is the only answer anyone up there gets.

Everything here is negotiated with something that does not negotiate. You may cut, in the managed way, as much as grows back; take more and the herd turns around, and every village on the slope knows what that means. He is not angry. He is growing, and a house is in the way of a forest. Your shamans spend whole lives on his movements, reading where he has been for what he intends, and they are not guessing.

So you grew up without the assumption that talking works. Nothing you could say was ever going to move him, and the habit follows you out — you watch a person the way you watched the herd and wait to see which way they turn. You have also never had a clear line at anything, because there is always a trunk in the way, and you never once wanted one.

Peoples: Haleni

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Perception · +5 Aura · +5 Intelligence · −5 Charisma · −5 Ranged

Resource Modifiers: −10 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Herd-Runner · Peer Shaman · Peer Highlander⟩
Select two of: ⟨Isēbu-Riding · Herd-Reading · Coppicing · Augury⟩

The Lepidopteran Elite

You were born scarlet, which in Elyste means imperial blood: your place in the family is your place in the birth order, settled before you could speak. Heirs take as many spouses as they like, of any sex, and every child of that blood is placed high; the people they married stay a second class, comfortable and never counted. Rooms have arranged themselves around you your whole life. You have no idea what it is to enter one unnoticed.

The court is masks, soft fabric and very good drink. You learned to read a face through a cage of gold filigree, the only way anyone is read there, and the game underneath — who is owed, who is climbing, whose name is not said this month. People were paid to keep you healthy, others to drill you with a blade, because the family arms its children regardless.

Nobody ever asked you to decide anything. Do as you are told and you will never want for anything: you took the arrangement, because everyone does. You have never lifted anything heavier than a cup. The Emperor keeps a butterfly house and calls himself a winter monarch: the generation that survives the cold, ragged and outliving its season, carrying the line. His son failed him. His grandson was not permitted to try. You are not the winter one.

Peoples: Elysian

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Aura · +5 Charisma · +5 Perception · +5 Vitality · +5 Melee · −5 Will · −5 Strength

Resource Modifiers: −20 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Scarlet-Born · Peer Gentry · Peer Servantry⟩
Select two of: ⟨Precedence · Masked Faces · Favors Owed · Lineage · Etiquette⟩

The Luminescent Canals

You were born in the basin a meteor made, the lake in it and the volcano over both. Asra is built on water — canals to take the rise when the rains come, and lesser ones out to the lake towns — so you knew a boat before a street. You fished in steam and fog, off water hot in one channel and cold in the next, learning to find a shoal by sound. The lake glows from underneath all year, and you have never thought that strange.

The rest was the temples. You were in them before you could follow what was said, and by ten you had the rites, the days they fall on, and the letters they are written in — more schooling than most of Halen gets. A room of people believing the same thing at once does something to a child standing in it, and you were that child a thousand times.

Nobody taught you to fight; the Opal Acropolis has soldiers for that, dark stone gone gold and cream since the Governor took it. You grew up knowing the old canals are full of people who locked the flood gates to sleep dry, that the lake rises every year, and that nothing will be done. Asra teaches one thing: knowing something and changing it are different, and you stopped expecting otherwise.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni, Rhioan, Yrri

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Dexterity · +5 Perception · +5 Aura · +5 Intelligence · −5 Will · −5 Melee

Resource Modifiers: −10 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Fisher · Peer Shaman · Peer Uncounted · Peer Provincial Administration⟩
Select two of: ⟨Small Boats · Nets and Lines · Rites · Flood Sense⟩

The Moving Tentgrounds

You were born in a hollow chosen because nothing could see into it. A Yrri camp sits below the line of the horizon and is somewhere else within the month — struck, carried, and pitched again somewhere just as invisible. You learned early what a good hollow looks like: which dip holds water and which holds wind, how ground reads from a mile off. An outsider could cross that country for a season and never find a camp, but another Yrri family always knows where to look.

You never needed to shout for someone to answer, communally raised by your mother, her sisters and your cousins, the men arriving and leaving by season. And no household survives alone. Other Yrri families come in to trade stock, settle who grazes where, hand over news a month old, or marry somebody off. So you learned to sit down with people who are not your kin and want something from you, which is most of what holds the Yrri together at all.

But the hollow that hides you also blinds you. You grew up somewhere with no horizon and no long view, where the world can arrive without warning. You made no decisions independently, used to a dozen opinions creating consensus, and never needing to hold a position on your own.

Peoples: Yrri

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Vitality · +5 Intelligence · +5 Charisma · −5 Will · −5 Perception

Resource Modifiers: −5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Nomad · Peer Horseman · Peer Herder⟩
Select two of: ⟨Concealment · Striking Camp · Weather Sense · Herd-Reading · Hospitality⟩

The Patron-Spirit Households

You were born into a house that has a spirit. Not a shrine and not a trade — an arrangement kept alive six generations, with something that has known your family longer than your family has kept records. Whether an ancestor reached across and it liked what it found, or it picked the house, is a thing such families disagree about. It comes back to whoever is most worth looking at, so you were raised to be looked at.

There were four of you and it would take one. Nobody said so; nobody had to. You learned young what it liked, and got very good at making a case for yourself to something that does not answer in words and has no reason to be fair. Every family’s spirit wants a different thing. Your household has done its one thing for two hundred years and cannot stop.

It was away for eleven years once. Nothing could be settled while it was gone — no marriage, no move, nothing that might make you less interesting when it came back — and you have never been the person who decides. You were raised to be chosen rather than useful, so you have the arms of someone who was never sent to fetch anything. And every question anyone in that family has ever asked has the same answer underneath it.

Peoples: Any — the arrangement is older than the borders, and in Elyste it is a household that owns a door the state would rather issue

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Aura · +5 Charisma · −5 Will · −5 Strength · −5 Intelligence

Resource Modifiers: +0 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Binder · Peer Bound Houses · Peer Shaman · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Summoning · Bargaining · Rites · Reading Signs · Old Names · Lineage⟩

The Provincial Markets

You were born in a market town a long way from Rimahn, to a family that sells something. Everything the Empire moves passes through a place like yours — Haleni silver going south under guard, grain off the estates, cloth from three provinces over — and a market is where news arrives before it is announced. You knew what a thing would cost next week, and which official to be elsewhere from, before the town did.

You were selling before you were tall enough to see over the trestle. Strangers all day, most passing through and never coming back, and you learned the number that makes a man reach for his purse instead of walking to the next stall. Your family owes the firm on the corner; everyone does. They paid the assessment the year the roof went, and your father’s name is a line in a ledger three generations old.

Nobody in that market ever asked where anything came from. Not out of cowardice: asking does not help, and the silver is the same silver. What you learned was to take the deal, because the alternative was no deal, and you have never held out for anything. Your name means something for three streets. Past that you are a person at a stall, and the Empire that made your living could ruin it next season without noticing.

Peoples: Elysian

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Charisma · +5 Perception · −5 Will · −5 Aura

Resource Modifiers: +0 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Merchant · Peer Carter · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Haggling · Weights and Measures · Coin-Sense · Trade Tongues · Hearsay · Letters⟩

The Renamed Shrines

You were born to the people who keep a shrine — either to a family that has kept it six generations, or given to it at four because your family owed money. The Empire paid for the roof. It restored the building, endowed the ground, and supplied the name. The thing inside has a feast day and an official life: a binder who served three emperors and died well. Your grandmother calls it something else, and so do you, quietly, indoors.

The life is not true. Whatever is in there came out of the river long before there was an empire, and it remembers being asked for different things. Your work was the lamps, the water, the cloth, and the vigil on the nights it is kept — all of it under the god’s attention. A shrine child is looked at from both sides: people clock you on the road, and so does what you tend.

You have recited words given to you since you could speak, so you never had to find your own and would not know where to start. There were fasts, vigils, and a great deal of cold stone. And you have carried the older name in your mouth your whole life without once letting it out in the wrong room — a thing you are very good at and can never tell anyone.

Peoples: Elysian, Rhioan

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Aura · +5 Will · −5 Charisma · −5 Vitality

Resource Modifiers: +0 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Oblate · Peer Shrine-Keeper · Peer Official · Peer Binder⟩
Select two of: ⟨Rites · Lamps and Vigil · Hagiography · Old Names · Letters · Fasting⟩

The Scree Slopes

You were born in the foothills of the alps, on ground the mountain has been shedding for longer than anyone has lived under it — a hand’s breadth of soil over stone, browse thin enough that goats are the only animal worth keeping, weather that comes over the ridge without asking. You went up after the herd, and learned to find the other thing that grows up there: medicinal herbs, in ones and twos, in folds and shadows it takes a season to learn.

The pass road climbs past you, and everything the north sends south goes up it without stopping. Your neighbors were Haleni and Elysian both, on the same bad ground, equally unable to do anything about the gate at the top. What you had that anyone wanted was a little dried leaf and a goat or two, and you walked it down yourself. You learned to go through a hard thing, because there was never a way around.

You were never fed enough to grow into the work, so you use leverage and patience where another would use their back, and a winter in your childhood left something in you that has not gone. You were one of several children and you are the one still here. Nobody ever came to your family for anything, and nothing you have ever said has moved anyone.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Perception · +5 Will · −5 Vitality · −5 Strength · −5 Charisma

Resource Modifiers: +5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Highlander · Peer Herder · Peer Miner⟩
Select two of: ⟨Endure · Climbing · Judge Ground · Cold Camp · Forage · Herb-Lore⟩

The Spirit-bound Pyregrounds

You were born into the household that gets sent for after the most dangerous deaths. Without your community to collect them and perform the rites, the corpses of spirit-binders lead to blight. You followed them as they fetched pyre wood, placated the afraid, and kept watch through the night. You heard the sacred words said a hundred times but were not yet allowed to speak them.

What you actually learned was the work. Which wood burns hot enough and which only smokes, how long you have before the ground starts to turn, what a binder leaves behind that has to go onto the pyre with them and what can be handed back to the family. The rites are long and there is an order to them, and you knew that order by heart years before anyone would have let you speak a word of it aloud.

Nobody relished your presence. Accepting your visits meant acknowledging a risk in their home, seeing your wagons on the road meant wondering what they were carrying, sending you into the blight meant confronting over the sacrifice they didn’t want to make themselves. Nobody taught you to fight either, because taboo was all the protection you ever needed.

Peoples: Haleni

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Aura · +5 Intelligence · −5 Charisma · −5 Vitality · −5 Melee

Resource Modifiers: +0 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Binder · Peer Shaman · Peer Highlander⟩
Select two of: ⟨Rites · Handling the Dead · Pyre-Building · Reading Blight⟩

The Taxing Slagworks

You were born in the ore country, downwind of the furnaces. Silver and gold come out of that ground, and gems out of some of it, but the Empire counts iron and tin twice — armies are made of one and bronze does not exist without the other. You went down the shaft at six, or into the furnace-yards. Either way you were working before you were grown, in galleries cut narrow because children fit and props cost money.

Nobody grows rich down there and most do not eat well. Every season the right to work a face is let to whichever family will take it cheapest, so the bidding is against your neighbors, and the household that wins is the one that agreed to eat least. What you pulled out went down the road under guard and none of it came back — not as wages, not as roads. You grew up knowing the exact shape of the arrangement and who it fed.

The smoke gets into children. Everyone knows the furnace-raised are slower after, and knows why, and nothing changes. You were furnace-raised. Between the dark below and the glare off a tapped crucible your eyes were finished early, and your lungs have been wrong since you were small. You are out, which most are not, and you left none of the anger behind you.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni, Rhioan — and any people sold into it

Attribute Modifiers: −10 Vitality · −5 Perception · −5 Intelligence

Resource Modifiers: +20 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Miner · Peer Smelter · Peer Uncounted · Peer Aggrieved · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Deep Dark · Ore-Sense · Shoring · Endure · Furnace-Work · Assaying · Gem-Cutting⟩

The Tidal Margins

You were born on the margin — any margin, since every people on this continent has a coast and works it much the same. The margin is neither land nor sea and a different place twice a day, so you learned water the way other children learn a street: which channel is running, what its color means, where the bar has moved since spring, how long before it closes behind you.

What came out of it depended on the coast. Nets and lines in most places; whales off the headlands, taken from small boats with a harpoon and a great deal of nerve; pearls in the warm shallows, which means going down on one breath, again and again, until the light goes wrong. You have a chest built by that, and a tolerance for cold water that alarms anyone who did not grow up in it.

The sea never answered anything you said, and you kept the habit — you read a situation and wait it out. You never did the selling either: a factor at the quay set the price and kept the difference, and nobody asked the diver. And the water took your hands. Cold, salt, wet rope and fish spines have been at them since you were small. They are strong, they are not delicate, and will not be again.

Peoples: Elysian, Haleni, Rhioan, Yrri

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Vitality · +5 Perception · +5 Ranged · −5 Dexterity · −5 Charisma

Resource Modifiers: −5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Fisher · Peer Diver · Peer Whaler · Peer Merchant · Peer Riverman⟩
Select two of: ⟨Small Boats · Weather Sense · Tides and Channels · Trade Tongues · Breath-Hold · Harpoon · Shore-Reading⟩

The Uncounted Undercrofts

You were born under a city — it hardly matters which, because every city has a level below the one people admit to. Vaulted cellars, low ceilings, no daylight, and rent, because uncounted has never meant free of charge. You learned to see everything: whose shoes are on the stair, which of the four ways out is watched tonight, what a man means before he has decided to mean it.

Nobody down there is a criminal by birth or a revolutionary by temperament. They are people getting through the week. You grew up hard against them, in rooms where privacy was a direction you faced, and you learned to talk — to soften a rent-man, to make a stranger want to give you something. Both ways out of an undercroft run on that: you can talk a purse out of a pocket, or a street into standing up.

You were never given a reason to be looked at. Nobody counts the undercroft, so no room has ever been obliged to notice you, and you feel it the moment you enter one that does. You were fed enough to keep going and never enough to build on, and never had a clear line to anything past the end of a street. You got out, one way or the other, and which way may still be an open question.

Peoples: Any — the undercroft is where the city puts everyone it does not count

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Perception · +5 Charisma · −5 Aura · −5 Strength · −5 Ranged

Resource Modifiers: +5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Uncounted · Peer Aggrieved · Peer Servantry · Peer Official⟩
Select two of: ⟨Dark-Sight · Climbing · Sleight · City Ways · Sedition · Fencing · Crowd-Sense⟩

The Valley-span Villages

Haleni country is river valleys cut so deep that the far side of your village is either an hour’s walk or a swinging rope-bridge away. You grew up on the terraces — cutting them, walling them, hauling the soil back up after every wet spring — in a place winter shuts for four months at a stretch. Everyone is a cousin and everyone is within earshot, so when a quarrel turns it turns at arm’s length, on a path too narrow to walk away down.

Nobody goes anywhere. Somebody walks out to the nearest market when a bridge has gone or a person is dying, and comes back with iron and drugs and nothing else, because there is nothing else worth the walk. Elyste holds the passes at the southern and eastern ends. They have never once come up your valley, and they have never needed to.

You can see four hundred paces and have never needed to see further — the world arrives around a bend or not at all — and the people in it were the same forty faces your whole life, so you never learned how to be pleasant to a stranger.

Peoples: Haleni

Attribute Modifiers: +5 Strength · +5 Melee · +5 Vitality · −5 Charisma · −5 Perception

Resource Modifiers: −5 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Highlander · Peer Herder · Peer Merchant⟩
Select two of: ⟨Deep Winter · Rope and Span · Close Quarters · Avalanche Sense⟩

The Waxlight Halls

You were born on the long slope that runs from the volcano down to the sea — no valleys up here, just forest nobody may clear and terraces cut narrow between it. The ground is the best in Halen and the least farmed, because the trees are worth more standing. What the slope makes instead is paper and wax, and you had your hands in pulp and comb before you were ten.

Paper and candles are what a school is made of, so the slope grew halls. You were taught letters in rooms lit by wax your neighbors rendered, on sheets your cousins pressed, and taught to argue in them properly, with the other side’s case stated first. Everyone up here knows something and expects to be asked. It is the only place in Halen where you can be somebody for what you know.

Nobody up here can make you do anything, which is the strangest thing about it. Elyste has wanted this forest down and the slope under grain for thirty years, and there is a forty-foot god in the trees who has not agreed. So you were never squeezed. You can hold a position all day. You have also never lifted anything heavier than a press, and nobody ever thought to teach you what to do if somebody swung at you.

Peoples: Haleni

Attribute Modifiers: +10 Intelligence · +5 Dexterity · +5 Will · −5 Strength · −5 Melee

Resource Modifiers: −10 Luck

Skills:

Select one of: ⟨Peer Scholar · Peer Artisan · Peer Merchant⟩
Select two of: ⟨Letters · Papermaking · Hivecraft · Disputation⟩

Optional: Custom Backgrounds

If none of these Backgrounds appeal to you, you can create your own — but at a cost. Custom Backgrounds grant you the same amount of Attribute Modifiers and Resource Modifiers as the Backgrounds above, but you start with one less Skill. A Custom Background describes where your character came from and what it did to them — never what they do for a living or how they fight. Those are your Job and your Archetype, and a Background that answers them first leaves those choices with nothing left to say. Work with your Game Master to create a Custom Background that makes sense for the game you are playing.

Select one to three Attributes to receive a −5 modifier, with no more than one Attribute decreasing by −10. At minimum, you must have −5 on two Attributes or −10 on one Attribute.
Select up to five Attributes to receive a +5 modifier, not including any Attributes modified in Step 1. If you did not decrease an Attribute by −10 in Step 1, you may increase one Attribute twice in this Step, resulting in a +10 modifier.
Calculate your total Attribute increase or decrease and take the inverse of this as your Luck Resource modifier. For example, four +5 modifiers and two −5 modifiers results in a total of +10, meaning your Luck receives a −10 modifier.
Select one Skill and one Peer Skill from any Experience Tree, provided you meet the prerequisites.

Here’s an example of a Custom Background:

Concept. You washed ashore after a terrible storm, and have difficulty remembering your past. With no one to call your own, you were at the mercy of the first kind group of people to take you in.

Step 1. You decrease one Attribute twice: −10 Intelligence, because everything you knew before the storm is gone. A single Attribute decreasing twice meets the minimum for this Step, so you do not need to reduce any others.

Step 2. You increase three Attributes once: +5 Strength for swimming, +5 Vitality for surviving the nights after it, and +5 Charisma for convincing strangers to care for you. You cannot increase any Attribute twice, as you took a −10 modifier in Step 1.

Step 3. You increased your Attributes by +15 overall and decreased them by −10, resulting in a total change of +5. Your Luck modifier is now −5.

Step 4. You take the Skills ⟨Swimming⟩ and ⟨Peer Riverman⟩ to cover how you survived your childhood disaster.

Every Background takes something, and that is a rule about people rather than about numbers. The arithmetic is already even — whatever a Background adds to your Attributes comes back off your Luck, point for point, so a Background of pure gain would be no stronger than any other. It simply wouldn’t be a childhood. Nowhere shapes a person only by what it gave them. Decide what yours took before you decide what it gave, and put the loss where it will be felt: a −5 on an Attribute your character was never going to roll costs you nothing, and a Background that costs nothing isn’t one.

A Background that only takes is a real build. Nothing requires you to raise an Attribute at all — The Taxing Slagworks raises none, and hands back +20 Luck for it. Every point a Background declines to spend on your Attributes returns to you as Luck, the only currency on your side of the table, so a character that somewhere merely cost ends creation holding more of it than anybody else. That isn’t a trap or a wasted roll. It is somebody who came out of a place with nothing left but their own good fortune, and that is a person worth playing.