Part Two: The Rules
Chapter Thirteen: Who Are You, Really?
Part Two: The Rules
"The surface world gave you a name, a tax bracket, and a story about how safe you are. The Codex asks a different question: who are you going to be when that lie erodes?"
A Persona is not a costume. It is an identity that has to hold when the room is real. In the Chronomist Archive, great Personas are named. Their deeds enter the permanent record.
To forge your Persona, you must answer five questions. The mechanics come later. The answers to these questions will dictate the shape of your survival.
1. What Do You Know?
Every citizen of Sundered Earth knows a fragment of the truth. What you know is the first question. It determines the starting place of your story.
The Sentinels categorize this awareness into five rungs:
| Rung | Name | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| I | Unaware | The Great Lie holds. Monsters are myth. The stories are just stories. |
| II | Unsettled | Something crossed your path. You cannot name it. You cannot unsee it. |
| III | Engaged | You know the Kin walk the earth. You can name the factions. You understand the rules of the Accord and you are on a path to uncover the full truth. |
| IV | Committed | You have looked past the politics. You know about the Ancient Terrors. You understand that the factions are fighting over who gets to rule a house that is on fire. |
| V | Vigilant | All the layers are revealed to you. You see the Grand Cycle, the Dream Prison, and the shape of the coming Sundering. This rung is occupied almost exclusively by ancient Fae, deep-Gloom elders, and the highest echelon of the Sentinel Order. |
Most Personas begin their journey somewhere between Unsettled and Engaged. A human who watched a coworker shimmer briefly out of the Prime frequency band has crossed into Unsettled. A Kin surfacing from the Gloom for the first time is Engaged by default.
Movement across these rungs is the true arc of a campaign. Moving from Unsettled to Engaged changes what a Persona believes. Moving from Engaged to Committed changes what they are willing to die for. Moving from Committed to Vigilant tends to change the Persona entirely.
2. Where Do You Stand?
The factions of Sundered Earth are ideologies with bodies, organized convictions that draw in the people who share them.
A Hobgoblin raised to the warrior code will feel the gravitational pull of the Unbroken whether they ever take a blood-oath or not. A human who walks into a Sanctuary and realizes the sheer scale of the danger will instinctively drift toward the Concord or the Sentinels. An exiled Fae who believes the modern world is a rotting tragedy is already halfway into the Ascendants before they even realize it.
Where do you stand?
You are not required to formally join a faction to play, but you should know which way you lean. It will shape who you trust, who you trade with, and who you refuse to leave at your back.
Your answer can shift. Many Personas begin with one fierce conviction and end their campaign believing something else entirely. Some end with no allegiance at all, having watched every faction fail them, choosing to stand alone in the dark.
The Reemergence is deafening. Indifference cannot survive inside it. A Persona must care about something, even if that something is burning the rest of it down.
3. Who Are Your People?
The Species of Sundered Earth are not statistical bonuses. They inherit a genetic heritage.
A Goblin's hands remember six thousand years of precision work in candlelight. A Hobgoblin's posture is rigidly braced by siege warfare without end. An Ogre's voice naturally resonates at frequencies that human ears barely hear. A Beast Kin carries Veridian's wildness in their bones, the raw instinct of the natural systems beneath civilization's veneer. A Dwarf's intellect is coldly calibrated to a degree that most mortals find off-putting. A Giant carries the First Age in their body, the engineering of the Dwarves given breath and will. A Fae's body is tuned to a frequency Prime Reality does not provide. And a Human's terrifying adaptability is the direct inheritance of a dead Dragon.
Choose the people whose blood you carry. It is the oldest fact about you. (See Chapter Fourteen.)
4. Where Have You Been?
If Species is what you were born as, Origin is what the world did to you after you took your first breath.
A Goblin raised in the grinding, claustrophobic deep-Gloom of Kael-Morath is a fundamentally different creature than a Goblin born in a surface Sanctuary to parents who never held the Deep Line. An Ogre who served in a Vanguard trench against demon incursions will look at the world differently than an Ogre who spent their life maintaining the quiet, humming Ley networks beneath a peaceful city-state. A human who grew up in a family that secretly passed down the Old Ways is a different human than one who stumbled into the Accord by accident at age forty.
Origin is geography, trauma, and formation. It dictates the first language you spoke, the first violent death you witnessed, and the first skill you were forced to learn. It is the soil your Persona grew in, and like all soil, it dictates the shape of the roots.
Your Origin is yours to build. Talk it through with your Conductor. The instincts your Origin forged will find their way onto your Persona Sheet through the mechanical choices you make in the chapters ahead. (See Chapter Fifteen.)
5. What Do You Do?
When the Sanctuary doors are breached, when the negotiation fails, when the night asks for a toll in blood, what do you actually do?
Are you the iron shield standing between the innocent and the dark? Are you the spell-weaver whose magic is pulled bleeding from your own spirit rather than a textbook? Are you the alchemist who violently forces magic and science into a synthesis that shouldn't work, but does? Are you the operative who reads the room, identified the threat, and moved into position three turns ago?
Your Profession is your role in the world. Every Profession in this Codex carries a specific shape of story within it. A Knight is a promise the world keeps testing. A Witch is a conversation the world is terrified to have. An Alchemist is a wager against the laws of physics.
A Persona is not locked to a single Profession. As you grow, you may take on others, with the trainings that come with them. The Codex does not fix its people into one role. It rewards those who discover what else they are.
A woman came to the heavy oak doors tonight who did not know what she was looking for. She had been dreaming, she said. The exact same dream every night for three weeks. A colossal tree she could not identify. A low, thrumming song she could not stop hearing.
She followed the hum in her teeth to a building she had never heard of, in a district she rarely visits. She knocked, and I opened the door.
I asked her what she knew. She said she didn't know anything. I asked her what she thought she knew. She immediately started crying.
I have been an archivist for ninety-six years. I have cataloged catastrophic incursion patterns, documented the collapse of ancient alliances, and recorded the folding of dimensional frequencies I previously thought impossible. Tonight, I cataloged a woman in her thirties who had just realized the world was infinitely larger and darker than she had been allowed to believe.
Every person who becomes part of this history begins exactly this way. A question they could not put down. A dream they could not shake. A door they knocked on without knowing why.
Her name, for the record, was Marta. She is Unsettled. By year's end, I expect she will be Engaged. What she becomes after that is entirely her choice. She did not know she was choosing a war when she knocked on the door. They never do.
The Persona Sheet
Every Persona in Sundered Earth possesses a page in the Codex. It is called the Persona Sheet.
The Persona Sheet is a physical record you maintain yourself, erasing and revising as the Persona bleeds and grows. In the Sundered Codex companion app, the Persona Sheet lives as a dynamic, encrypted document that updates in real-time, enforces the mathematics of Persona creation, and seamlessly connects your local tabletop to the massive, living world the Codex is actively becoming.
The Persona Sheet is the living record of a soul that has awakened. Call it a biography in progress. Fill it in with care. Begin with the name at the top.
Building Your Persona
The five questions above are the soul of your Persona. What follows is the math that turns that soul into a Persona Sheet. Four steps, worked in this order.
1. Select Your Species
Every Trait and every Skill on a fresh Persona Sheet starts at 1. Choose your Species from Chapter Fourteen and apply its Trait Modifiers and Skill Modifiers first; they are the foundation everything else is built on.
2. Select Your Origin
Choose one Origin from Chapter Fifteen and apply its Skill bonus. Origin bonuses stack on top of Species bonuses. Nothing about this step touches your Traits.
3. Select Your Profession
Choose a Profession from Chapter Sixteen. Its first Training is free and comes with it. Every other Training on your grid, every die upgrade, every additional Profession, is bought with Story Points in the step below.
4. Spend Your Story Points
Every new Persona begins play with 100 Story Points. Spend them across Traits, Skills, Trainings, and, if your Profession casts, spells, using the costs in Chapter Seventeen: a Trait raise costs its target level × 3 SP, a Skill raise costs its target level × 2 SP, an additional Training costs 4 SP, and every die, Training or spell, starts at d4 and climbs one step at a time from there. Equipment does not draw from this pool. A weapon, a suit of armor, or a piece of Wonder Gear brings its own fixed Augment die, determined by what it is, not by what you spend. The Wondermancer's Trainings are the one exception, letting a Persona enhance a piece of gear's die by one step through Profession, not through this pool.
A finished example: a Hobgoblin who takes the Ironworker Origin and trains as a Knight starts with a Might Skill Score of 6 before a single Story Point is spent, the sum of a Species-boosted Body Trait, a Species Skill Modifier, and an Origin bonus that all happen to point the same direction. Where the other 100 SP goes from there is the player's decision entirely.