Part Two: The Rules
Chapter Fourteen: Species
Part Two: The Rules
Y our species is your culture, biology, and history pressing on the small space behind your eyes. Each of the species available to you carries that pressure differently. The Goblin who keeps a Gloom city-state running has little in common with the True Fae who watches Prime Reality from a private salon in the Aetherium. Pick well. The Persona you build will spend the rest of their life answering for the people they came from.
Nine species are available at character creation. Two more (Vampire and Cambion) are gated behind story arc unlocks; their entries appear in Appendix A.
Goblin
The operational nervous system of Kin civilization.
For six thousand years, Goblins kept the city-states fed, repaired, connected, and informed while the larger species held the front lines. They are fast, perceptive, endlessly curious, and the most underestimated people on Earth. A Goblin clerk in Kael-Morath knows the trade weight of every fungal strain in the Gloom, the names of every supply-runner on her route, and the exact hour her cousin's shift ends three sub-tunnels down. She knows because knowing is the work, and the work is what holds the Kin together.
They are also the memory-keepers of the Kin peoples. Each clan carries an unbroken oral tradition older than any written record, held by designated rememberers whose recall stays exact across centuries. A Goblin family carries its history in the voice, and every generation speaks it into the next set of ears.
Six thousand years underground did not soften them. It concentrated them.
A Goblin enters a room and casually reads it. By the time anyone else has decided who matters, the Goblin already has a map of the exits, a count of the weapons, a sense of who is lying, and the beginnings of a plan. That is their gift.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Mind +1, Body +1 | Sense +2, Grace +1 | 25 ft. |
Size: Small. Goblins occupy half the floor space of a human and are easy to lose in a crowd. This is not always a disadvantage.
Lineage Notes
Upper Gloom. Raised in the corridors closest to the surface. Speaks at least two surface languages by ear. Knows how to pass a crowded LA sidewalk without being registered, how to read a phone, how to talk to a bartender. First in the family to hold surface currency and surface debts. Starts the game already knowing one practical fact about modern humans that most Kin do not.
Deep Gloom. Raised in the candlelit halls of the deep cities. Fluent in the oldest Gloom dialects. Has never seen sunlight before the Reemergence. Starts the game knowing the name and lineage of at least one Kin elder that most surface Personas have never heard of, and carrying a piece of craft-work made by their own hand.
Frontline. Raised within Ashvault near the Deep Line. Learned what demonic disharmonics sound like before learning to count. Served as eyes and ears for a Hobgoblin cohort and as runners for the Ogre elders. Starts the game with a combat sense other Goblins do not share, and the name of at least one Hobgoblin they owe.
Profession Affinities
Goblins gravitate toward Professions that reward perception, agility, and information-handling. The most common pairings:
Scout. The canonical pairing. Goblin senses, Goblin patience, Goblin invisibility in a crowd. The Awakened world has more Goblin Scouts than any other lineage.
Opportunist. The Goblin instinct for reading a room translates directly into the Opportunist's edge.
Bounty Hunter. Sense and Grace are the Bounty Hunter's primary skills. A Goblin starts ahead.
Assassin. Small, fast, and patient. The Gloom produced more Assassins of Goblin lineage than any other people.
Witch. The old Goblin oral traditions and witchcraft share common ground. A Mind-leaning Goblin can build a formidable Witch.
A Goblin Knight is rare because the build favors larger frames, but the Goblin who chose that path chose it for a reason worth asking about.
The clan’s memory-holder is one hundred and six years old. I sat with her for an evening while she shelled spore-pods for the night meal, and I asked her, as a professional courtesy between archivists, how much she carries.
She recited the water-debt of the Varn clan to the Oskett clan: incurred six hundred and eleven years ago, four generations of repayment, the exact measure outstanding. She recited the names of the nine families who held the east stair during the flood of the Third Deep Century, and the names of the two who did not. She never stopped shelling. Her hands and her memory are the same instrument: precise, continuous, unhurried.
I asked what happens when she dies. She pointed her chin at a girl across the room, eight years old at most, who was mouthing the recitations along with her. Half the ledger is already moved, she said. We do not wait for death down here. Death is not reliable.
I have spent my life among archives of stone and paper. This is the other kind. It walks, it shells spore-pods, and it has never once been burned.
Hobgoblin
The shield. Honor in a body honed for war.
Hobgoblins are the most tactically sophisticated martial culture on Earth, shaped by six thousand years of holding the line against the abyss. Honor governs everything: how you strike, how you speak, how you mourn, how you die. Most Hobgoblins cannot imagine another way to live.
At the center of the code is the protector instinct. A Hobgoblin exists in service to what they stand in front of, and one who lets a ward take a blow they could have absorbed has broken something that does not repair. The first name a Hobgoblin child memorizes, after their mother’s, is the name of the clan they will spend their life shielding.
Hobgoblin justice is swift, transparent, and blind to rank; sieges that outlasted empires taught them exactly what uneven rules cost an army.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Body +1, Spirit +1 | Might +2, Will +1 | 30 ft. |
Size: Medium. Hobgoblins are built like trench-bred infantry. Broader and heavier than humans of comparable height, with the bearing of a person who has been disciplined since childhood.
Lineage Notes
Cinder Cohort. Raised in the cohorts that hold the deep Nether boundary directly. Trained in formation combat and disharmonic recognition before they could read. Starts the game with a recognized honor-name from a deep-Gloom war-band and a single oath they swore before leaving the line that they have not yet had to keep.
Shieldbearer. Raised inside a Goblin clan they were sworn to protect. The first word they remember after their mother's name was the name of a Goblin elder. Starts the game with an unbreakable bond to a Goblin Persona or NPC of the Conductor's choosing, and the certain knowledge that this person's safety will at some point cost the Hobgoblin everything.
Surfaced. Among the first Hobgoblins to ascend into Prime. Has spent enough time in modern cities to read crowds, signal layouts, and surveillance patterns. Starts the game already understanding the basics of how to move a Kin family across a surface-world block without drawing attention.
Profession Affinities
Hobgoblins gravitate toward Professions that reward discipline, defense, and structured violence. The most common pairings:
Knight. The canonical fit. The Knight's code architecture maps onto Hobgoblin honor-tradition almost without translation.
Siege Master. The in-world origin of this Profession is Hobgoblin defensive doctrine. Six thousand years of holding lines.
Contender. Hobgoblins who train for personal combat rather than line warfare often find themselves here. Disciplined brawlers.
Bounty Hunter. Uncommon, but a Hobgoblin who has chosen to hunt rather than guard becomes terrifying in a different way. The same patience aimed at a single target.
Witch. Rare. Some Hobgoblin lineages carry old battlefield magic passed down by the survivors of catastrophic engagements. Honor-bound witchcraft.
A Hobgoblin can take any Profession. A Hobgoblin who chooses Opportunist or Assassin owes someone the explanation.
The Ninth Cohort lost four soldiers holding the western approach. On the third night of the funeral I was permitted to sit at the edge of the hall.
The harmony has six parts. Only five singers stand. The sixth part belongs to the dead, and the living take turns carrying it so that it is never silent. A soldier steps into that line, sings the dead soldier’s part for an hour with tears running into their collar, then steps back into their own line as if returning from a watch.
On the fourth night I understood what I was hearing. The song is not about the fallen. It is the fallen, held in the mouths of the people they died beside, until the whole cohort has carried them once.
I asked the war-leader when the song would end. She looked at me the way you look at a child whose question holds no crime, only ignorance. It does not end, she said. It is handed.
Ogre
The voice and spiritual backbone of the Greenskins.
Ogres are the strongest natural conduits of Ley energy among any bipedal species on the planet. They have carried the gift since the Age of Myth, and it precedes the body in every encounter. The body is imposing. An adult Ogre commands a room the way a slow tide commands a coastline. The muscle is a vessel for something older and considerably more interesting.
Ogre culture evolved toward communion. With the earth. With the old systems. With the slow rhythms beneath whatever civilization is currently built on top of them. They thought in geological time before the exile and they think in geological time now. When an Ogre elder speaks, the room stops to listen, because whatever follows is worth hearing.
The Ogre Shamans are the spine of inter-Gloom communication. They keep the Ley relay network alive, and they have done so without interruption for sixty centuries. The Shaman's Net is the only continuous magic in the underspace, and the Net is the reason the Kin can still call themselves a single people at all.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Body +1, Spirit +1 | Will +2, Sense +1 | 35 ft. |
Size: Large. Ogres typically stand seven to nine feet tall and weigh two to three times what a human of the same height would. Doorways were not always built for them. Most learn early how to compress.
Lineage Notes
Shaman-Trained. Raised inside a temple lineage with formal Ley-attunement training. Even those who did not become Shamans carry the imprint of that education. A faint sensitivity to Ley currents, a habit of pausing before speaking. Starts the game with passive awareness of nearby Ley flow strength and the name of the Shaman who taught them to listen.
Builder Caste. Raised in the lineages that maintain the First Age Dwarven infrastructure of the Gloom. Trained in stonework, geothermal management, and the slow patient mathematics of underground engineering. Starts the game with a working knowledge of any structure built before the Reemergence and hands strong enough to bend a hand-rail without thinking about it.
War-Bred. From the siege-lineages that emerged during the darkest centuries of Demon pressure. Larger than typical Ogres, faster, capable of violence on a scale that surprises even Hobgoblin combatants. Starts the game at the high end of Large in narrative terms and a name from the war-band they served alongside.
Profession Affinities
Ogres gravitate toward Professions that reward presence, patience, and the long view. The most common pairings:
Wondermancer. The canonical pairing. Ogre Ley-affinity is the foundation of more than half of all known Wondermancers.
Witch. Old Ogre lineages carry witch traditions tied to the Ley current itself. Magic that operates in geological time.
Monk. The contemplative martial professions suit the Ogre tempo. An Ogre Monk does not move quickly. They move at the right time.
Knight. Uncommon but powerful. An Ogre Knight is not a fast knight, but they are a knight who can stand in a doorway for three days.
Siege Master. Natural defensive temperament. Ogres who choose this path tend to fortify positions that hold for longer than the wars themselves.
Ogre Assassins exist. The Conductor should be cautious approving one. Their patience is unsettling.
Giant
Made by hands that loved them. Abandoned in the upper dark.
Giants are the eldest living legacy of First Age craft. The Dwarves made them. Vast, deliberate, conscious, possessed of a will and a wonder no engineer had set out to design, and the two peoples built the foundations the world still rests on. When the Dwarves descended into the Nether to begin their long vigil, the Giants could not follow. They are of the earth and the open sky. A sealed tunnel would have killed them slowly.
So, the Giants have lived in limbo. They settled in the upper chambers of the Gloom and the wild outreaches of human civilization, guarding the threshold between the deep and the surface. They speak rarely. They keep to themselves. They have been carrying a grief older than most species have been alive, and their patience for surface drama is therefore short.
A Giant is a person you do not lie to twice.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Body +2 | Might +2, Will +1 | 35 ft. |
Size: Large. Playable Giants stand eight to twelve feet tall. Larger Giants exist; they are not playable. The world is not fully built for a Persona this size, and that is part of the point.
Dimensional Note. A Giant suffers no dissonance penalty on the surface or in the Upper Gloom. In the Middle Gloom and below, a Giant suffers the standard Dissonance Penalty. After a full rest in the deep without resurfacing, the penalty doubles. (See Chapter Twenty for full Dissonance rules.)
Lineage Notes
Threshold-Born. Raised in the upper Gloom, guarding the boundary between the deep and the surface. Has stood watches measured in years. Starts the game with deep familiarity with the upper Gloom geography and a memory of at least one Demon incursion they personally turned back.
Wild Ranges. Raised in the surface outreaches. Far peaks, deep forests, places humans rarely tread. Has developed a working relationship with whatever Beast Kin or wild creatures share the territory. Starts the game with a name in at least one wilderness that is not a human name and a working understanding of how to remain unseen at scale.
Stoneworker. Raised in the lineages still practicing original First Age stone-craft. Has hands that remember Dwarven techniques no surface architect has ever observed. Starts the game with the ability to identify any First Age structure on sight and a piece of work made by their own hands that they consider unfinished.
Profession Affinities
Giants gravitate toward Professions that reward presence, persistence, and the willingness to stand still for a long time. The most common pairings:
Knight. The canonical fit. Giants take to the Knight's code naturally and are extraordinarily difficult to move from a position they have decided to hold.
Siege Master. The body and the temperament are exactly right. A Giant Siege Master fortifying a position is, in most cases, the position itself.
Contender. Physical professions suit the frame. A Giant Contender is a fight that ends quickly or not at all.
Wondermancer. Uncommon. Some Giants carry stone-bound craft traditions that translate directly into Artificer-style Wondermancy. The work is slow and exact.
Witch. Rare but real. Giants who carry deep-time witch lineages tend toward earth and stone magic.
Giants do not take Opportunist or Assassin. The body does not allow it, and the temperament rejects the work.
The delegation from Kreet passes through the threshold chambers once a year on its way to the Sierra elevator. The Giants assemble to receive it. This year I was permitted to stand at the wall.
Sixteen Dwarves in Attunement Suits, none of them a third the height of the smallest Giant present. They stopped in the center of the hall. The lead Dwarf inclined its head once. The eldest Giant inclined hers in turn. Then the delegation walked on, and the Giants returned to their work.
Four seconds. I timed it. I had come prepared to document a ceremony, and I remember feeling cheated, the way you feel when a door closes just as you arrive.
Afterward I asked the eldest Giant, with the bluntness my people are forgiven for, why no one had spoken. She considered me for a long moment. Little archivist, she said, what is there to say that was not said at the parting? We said everything then. Now we only confirm it is still true.
I have recorded treaties that took nine years to negotiate and were broken inside two. This one is renewed annually in four seconds and has held since before my species learned to write. I no longer feel cheated. I feel underdressed.
Beast Kin
Veridian's wild children.
Beast Kin are descended from the same Dragon as the Greenskins. Where the Greenskins inherited Veridian's communal instincts, the Beast Kin inherited her wildness. Her territorial ferocity. Her connection to the raw, untamed systems of the natural world that move beneath civilization's veneer. They are minotaurs, centaurs, lycans, ratfolk, raptor-eyed scouts, serpent-scaled clans, and dozens of other peoples whose forms reflect specific predators or prey fused with a Secondborn soul.
The diversity is staggering, and any generalization about Beast Kin culture is suspect. A minotaur Labyrinth-Keeper who has spent forty years mapping a single cavern shares almost nothing in cultural terms with a lycan pack running the upper tunnels. What they share is origin. Culture is theirs alone.
What is consistent across every Beast Kin lineage is a sharpened relationship with the body, the territory, and the kill. The world is animal first. Civilization sits on top of that fact and pretends otherwise.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Body +1, Spirit +1 | Sense +2, Might +1 | 30 ft. |
Size: Medium. Beast Kin frames vary considerably across subtypes; for mechanical purposes, all Beast Kin operate at Medium scale. Larger or smaller subtypes are flavor.
Subtype. Choose the animal lineage your Persona presents as: lycan, minotaur, centaur, ratfolk, raptor-eyed, serpent-scaled, ursine, vulpine, corvid, or any other beast-form your Conductor approves. Subtype is narrative; it does not modify rules. Future expansions may change this.
Lineage Notes
City Pack. Raised in or near a Greenskin city-state and integrated into Kin civilization. Functions as scouts, hunters, or perimeter defense for a shared urban structure. Starts the game with established trust within at least one Greenskin community and a working understanding of underground politics.
Range-Born. Raised in the wild reaches between city-states, where Beast Kin govern themselves by pack law, herd consensus, or territorial negotiation. Starts the game with intimate knowledge of a specific stretch of wilderness and the absolute conviction that civilization is a deal you can walk away from.
Solitary. Raised alone, or close to it. Either by choice, by tragedy, or by the temperament of a particular subtype that does not naturally pack. Starts the game without obligation to any larger structure and with the kind of self-reliance that makes other people quietly nervous.
Profession Affinities
Beast Kin gravitate toward Professions that reward physicality, sense, and instinct. The most common pairings:
Scout. The canonical pairing. Beast Kin senses are unmatched, and a great many Scouts in the Awakened world come from this lineage.
Bounty Hunter. The predator chassis maps directly. Some of the most successful Bounty Hunters on the surface are Beast Kin.
Contender. Physical professions are well-suited.
Monk. A Beast Kin Monk is a predator with discipline grafted on top of instinct. The lycan and feline subtypes produce many of the most refined Monks in the Awakened world.
Assassin. Uncommon but devastating, especially among lycan and serpent-scaled subtypes.
Witch. Beast Kin who carry old wild-magic traditions tied to specific animal totems often manifest as Witches of unusual tone.
A Beast Kin can take any Profession. A Beast Kin Knight is rare, and the ones that exist tend to be exceptional.
Dwarf
The supreme logicians of reality. The rarest people on Earth.
The Dwarves are two peoples with the same name. The seventeen million who descended into the deep bedrock with the Dragons six thousand years ago, and the few who never went under. Both share the original Dwarven genius. Minds that process reality the way a mathematician processes an equation, calculating their way toward understanding. What distinguishes them now is which dimension has been recalibrating their bodies.
A Dwarf in your company will almost always be from one of the two lineages, and the difference is visible immediately. The deep-bred Dwarves cannot survive Prime Reality unprotected. Their Attunement Suits hum at a barely audible low frequency, and their obsidian visors hide eyes built for total darkness. The Surface Dwarves vibrate just below the human register and will be in the room for ten minutes before you realize you have been listening to them speak.
Both are diminutive. Both are precise. Both maintain a quiet arithmetic that other species miss.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Mind +2 | Logic +2, Knowledge +1 | 25 ft. |
Size: Small. Dwarves stand four to four-and-a-half feet tall on average. The literal etymology fits.
Dimensional Note. Bastion-Born and Sierra Trade Dwarves suffer Doubled Dissonance in Prime Reality outside of a Sanctuary, negated entirely while sealed inside their Attunement Suits. Wanderers suffer no penalty; their lineage never left the surface. (See Chapter Twenty for full Dissonance rules.)
Lineage Notes
Bastion-Born. Descended from the seventeen million who built the Bastions and have kept the watch over the slumbering Dragons for six thousand years. Body recalibrated to the deep. Wears an Attunement Suit at all times in Prime Reality. Starts the game with a working knowledge of Bastion engineering, a genuine relationship to one of the five Dragons (whether they have ever seen the slumber-chamber or not), and an Attunement Suit they did not personally design but understand intimately.
Wanderer. From the small remnant who never descended. Surveyors of the surface highlands, mappers of mineral veins. Operates in Prime Reality without the Suit because their biology never adapted away from it. Starts the game with two highland regions deeply mapped in their head and the kind of difficult-to-notice presence that has kept their lineage alive for six millennia.
Sierra Trade. From the small population that handles the formal annual exchange between Bastion and surface. Comfortable with both Dwarven and human protocol. Starts the game with established human contacts in mountain communities, working command of trade language, and the rare ability to translate Dwarven mathematics into something a human delegation can understand without being insulted.
Profession Affinities
Dwarves gravitate toward Professions that reward calculation, precision, and the long arithmetic. The most common pairings:
Wondermancer. The canonical fit. Dwarven engineering is the foundational discipline of arcane construction, and Bastion-Born Wondermancers are among the most respected in the Awakened world.
Alchemist. Dwarven mineral expertise translates directly into transmutation work.
Bounty Hunter. Surface Dwarves who hunt are uncommon but extraordinary. The frequency advantage that makes them difficult to notice extends to their tracking.
Witch. Rare. A handful of Dwarven witch traditions exist, mostly tied to deep-stone divination.
Siege Master. Bastion-Born who choose this path bring the engineering education to bear on fortification work that is functionally impossible to break.
A Dwarven Knight is exceedingly rare. A Dwarven Swashbuckler is a story.
Escort summary, autumn Meet, fourteenth year I have drawn this posting. The Meet ran forty-one minutes, which is long. Most years it runs thirty-five.
The extra six minutes were my fault. Their translator noted, in the flat tone the Suits give everything, that this would be my final year on the detail before rotation. I confirmed it. The delegation conferred for six minutes, an eternity by their standards. Then the translator set a small object on the trade table, apart from the manifest, and said: not for exchange. For the record of service.
It is a sphere of black alloy that is always slightly warm and weighs more than it should. Our Artificers tell me it is a maintenance gauge, worn smooth, roughly three thousand years old, and that a Dwarf would sooner part with a limb than with a working tool.
Forty-one minutes a year for fourteen years. Nine and a half hours, total, in their company. I have colleagues I have spent nine hundred hours beside who know me less well.
True Fae
The original citizens of Earth. Topped out and bored.
True Fae remember the world when it was whole. They were partners to the Dragons in the First Age, conductors of nature, long-lived and luminous. When the First Sundering dropped Prime Reality's frequency into a register hostile to Fae biology, Veridian gave everything she had to weave the Aetherium for them, and they have lived there ever since.
The Aetherium saved them. It also froze them. A civilization with nothing left to strive for turned its genius inward, to status and gossip and the elaborate performance of importance, and it now observes mortal affairs from above with the serene certainty that it understands Prime Reality better than anyone forced to live there.
The True Fae you meet in Prime Reality are almost always exiles, serving sentences in a dimension that physically hurts. Some claim they came voluntarily. Ask instead what they were sentenced for; the answer is always better.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Mind +1, Spirit +1 | Knowledge +2, Will +1 | 30 ft. |
Size: Medium. True Fae are generally human-presenting in size. Slender and elegant by aesthetic preference, not biological necessity.
Dimensional Note. True Fae suffer the standard Dissonance Penalty in Prime Reality outside of a Sanctuary. The penalty is the central reason most True Fae on Earth are political refugees of one kind or another, and a major reason they cluster in Sanctuaries.
Lineage Notes
Exiled Court. Sent to Prime Reality by an Aetherial sentence. For political crimes, social transgressions, or the wrong kind of art. Starts the game with detailed knowledge of Aetherial court politics, at least one enemy back home who is delighted by their suffering, and the ongoing arithmetic of a sentence the Persona can only end by demonstrating something specific to a court that may or may not still be paying attention.
Self-Banished. Left the Aetherium voluntarily, by some definition of voluntarily. Either out of genuine curiosity, philosophical objection to the Court, or a personal grief the Aetherium could not accommodate. Starts the game with a private reason for being here that they will not casually disclose and the reluctant respect of at least one peer back home.
Hidden Generation. A True Fae who has been in Prime Reality long enough to forget the Aetherium's rhythms. Has lived among humans for decades or longer, often masquerading as wealthy mortals. Starts the game with a constructed surface identity, real estate, and an unsettling familiarity with modern human culture.
Profession Affinities
True Fae gravitate toward Professions that reward arcane refinement, presence, and the performance of authority. The most common pairings:
Wondermancer. The canonical fit. Aetherial training in arcane construction maps directly into Wondermancer practice.
Witch. Old Fae lineages carry witchcraft of devastating elegance.
Alchemist. Refined arts, refined materials, refined ego. Common.
Opportunist. Uncommon but deadly. A True Fae who chooses to operate by leverage rather than spell is operating with millennia of social practice.
Knight. Rare and stylized. A True Fae Knight is a deliberate political statement.
True Fae do not take Bounty Hunter, Contender, or Siege Master. The body does not bend that way without considerable narrative justification.
You will want to know if I am suffering. Set your heart at ease: constantly. The light here is thin, the air argues with my blood, and the cuisine is an apology at best. Everything you promised me about this dimension is true.
Here is what you did not promise me.
Yesterday I watched a human woman sing to her child. She was exhausted, tuneless by any standard the Court would recognize, and she will be dead in fifty years, and the child in ninety, and she sang anyway. Badly. Fearlessly. The way we sang when singing still cost us something.
We finished our great song an age ago, and we have been rehearsing it ever since. These creatures are mid-verse. They do not know how their song ends and they sing regardless. I find I cannot look away.
Do not show this letter to anyone. Do not write back. I am not ready to learn which of those instructions you obeyed.
Fae Blood
Half-mortal, half-Aetherial. Native enough to walk Prime, foreign enough to feel it.
Fae Blood are the descendants of Fae-mortal liaisons. Sometimes the direct offspring of a True Fae and a human, sometimes the great-great-grandchild carrying a much older inheritance forward. They are mortal by lifespan and Aetherial by trace. Most pass for human until they don't. Until the wrong angle of light reveals an inhuman cast to the eyes, or a hand passes through a barrier it should not have, or a voice in a quiet room hits a register no human throat can reach.
Where the True Fae are visitors here, the Fae Blood are residents. Prime Reality is their home dimension; the Aetherial inheritance is the second voice in their head. Some embrace the inheritance and seek out their high-born kin. Others run from it for their entire lives. Most negotiate.
A Fae Blood in your company is generally in the middle of a long, private argument with their own ancestry.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Body +1, Spirit +1 | Grace +2, Knowledge +1 | 30 ft. |
Size: Medium. Fae Blood present at human size and human scale, with occasional inhuman markers (eye color, ear shape, the cast of the cheekbones) that vary by lineage.
Dimensional Note. Fae Blood suffer the standard Dissonance Penalty in Prime Reality outside of a Sanctuary. The penalty is real but lighter in lived effect than it is for True Fae, because Fae Blood biology has had generations to adapt. Most learn to function through it.
Lineage Notes
Aetherial-Aware. Knows the inheritance and has chosen, on some level, to engage with it. Has met at least one True Fae relative. Starts the game with a court name they may or may not use, a piece of inherited Fae craft, and the awareness that their existence is regarded by the Aetherial Court as either an opportunity or a problem.
Hidden. Does not know the inheritance, or did not until very recently. Was raised mortal, by mortals, in a household that may or may not have known what was being raised. Starts the game with the uncomfortable late realization that something about themselves was always slightly off and a list of childhood incidents that now read very differently.
Renounced. Knows the inheritance and has explicitly rejected it. Refuses the court name. Refuses the craft. Refuses to acknowledge the relatives. Starts the game with a clean human identity they have been maintaining for years and the steady awareness that Aetherial relatives consider this rejection insulting.
Profession Affinities
Fae Blood gravitate toward Professions that reward charm, intuition, and the leveraging of secrets. The most common pairings:
Witch. The canonical fit. Inherited Fae magic surfaces most often as witchcraft in Fae Blood lineages.
Wondermancer. Common, especially among Aetherial-Aware lineages with access to Aetherial training texts.
Opportunist. Uncommon but extraordinary. A Fae Blood Opportunist with active relatives can leverage a network most operators cannot touch.
Swashbuckler. Grace-leaning lineages produce some of the most stylish Swashbucklers in Prime Reality.
Alchemist. Common, especially in lineages that retained recipes.
Fae Blood can take any Profession. A Fae Blood Bounty Hunter is more common than the True Fae version because the body is mortal enough to absorb the work.
Human
The generalists. Children of Sol-Axion. Capable of anything.
Humans are Secondborn, descended from Sol-Axion the Adamantine Serpent. Where every other Secondborn people inherited a specific gift (Goblin precision, Hobgoblin discipline, Ogre resonance, Giant scale), humans inherited ingenuity. Breadth over depth. They learn faster than any Secondborn species. They adapt to environments, cultures, disciplines, and crises with a speed the longer-lived peoples have never been able to replicate.
In the Age of Myth, this made them indispensable. They were diplomats and soldiers and scholars and laborers and healers, often in the same generation, sometimes in the same individual. When the Great Lie came, humans adapted to it too, because that is what it means to be a species shaped by environment. They forgot.
They can also choose to remember. Quickly. Profoundly. Inside a single generation. That is the part of human nature the Reemergence is testing.
Stat Block
| Trait Modifiers | Skill Modifiers | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Choose any one trait +2 | Choose any one skill +2; choose any one other skill +1 | 30 ft. |
Size: Medium.
Generalist. A Human's bonuses are player-selected at character creation, reflecting the species' defining adaptability. Once chosen, they are locked.
Lineage Notes
Inheritor. Born into a family that has maintained, through whatever means, an unbroken line of awareness. The Awakening is not a shock. The Persona has been preparing for this, perhaps without fully understanding it, their entire life. Starts the game with at least one heirloom of genuine arcane significance, a contact within the Awakened world, and the burden of expectation.
Convert. Born and raised under the Great Lie. The Awakening hit recently, hard, and is not over. Starts the game with the raw, vivid memory of a single Reemergence-era event that broke their assumptions about reality and the conviction that whatever it was, they cannot un-see it.
Sleeper. Born on the surface, lived under the Great Lie, and has reasons to believe the inheritance might run deeper than anyone has told them. Starts the game with a tangle of unexplained childhood experiences, a relative who refuses to discuss something specific, and the gnawing sense that they have been waiting for an answer their whole life.
Profession Affinities
Humans gravitate to every Profession. That is the point. The breadth of the species means there is no canonical pairing; every Profession has had a foundational Human practitioner.