World Powers and Influence

Fate's Edge Player's Guide — Chapter 13

Of Patrons, Runes, and Invokers

"You wish to walk the road of power? Then listen well. The world is old, and older still are the voices beneath it. We call them Patrons, though they were never sworn to us. They are the tides that move unseen, the keepers of forgotten bargains, the sleepers beneath the stone and the stars. To call upon them is to dip a hand into a river that has carved mountains."

The Nature of Patrons

Patrons are not gods, though some worship them as such. They are not beings with agency and desire, though some possess a kind of will. They are resonances—frequencies in the fabric of reality that respond when struck.

A Patron's Rites are not spells. They are techniques of attunement. A Rite of the Traveler does not ask the road to open; it teaches you how to walk so that the road opens naturally. A Rite of the Ninth does not beg for forbidden knowledge; it opens your mind so that the knowledge flows.

To entreat a Patron is to risk being changed. Their Rites are gifts and snares both—a thread that binds, a frequency that lingers.

Choosing a Patron

Not every Patron walks in every story. The following pages present a curated selection of powers. You are not expected to read them all before creating a character.

For a first character or a campaign that is just finding its feet, we recommend these eight Patrons. They are mechanically straightforward, thematically flexible, and welcome in almost any game:

• Oath of Flame & Light — vows, radiance, and righteous smiting. A classic paladin or cleric.
• The Traveler — roads, wayfinding, and safe passage. Low risk, high utility.
• Inaea (Angel of the Spider) — mercy, connection, and the threads that bind families and communities.
• The Witness — truth, memory, and uncomfortable revelations. Perfect for investigators or notaries.
• Carrion King — decay, renewal, and the wisdom of endings. Good for those who like cycles of death and rebirth.
• Ikasha (She Who Sleeps) — shadow, secrets, and latent potential. Ideal for rogues, spies, and those who walk unseen.
• Grimmir (The Wild Speaker) — seasons, sacrifice, and the old pact between field and forest. For druids, rangers, and those who respect the wild.
• Palinode (Queen of Encores) — performance, rapture, and the unfinished song. Perfect for bards, dancers, and anyone who lives for the encore.

If one of these speaks to you, stop here. Read its entry. Make your character. The other Patrons (in the Appendix) will still be waiting when you are ready for a second campaign.

Important: Your Game Master has the final say on which Patrons exist in their world. Some Patrons are tied to specific cultures or story arcs; others may be dormant, forgotten, or simply not part of the campaign. Always clear your Patron choice with your GM before you write it on your sheet.

Now, if you are determined to explore the full menagerie—or if your GM has already pointed you toward a particular power—read on. The road is long, and the old voices are patient.

Note: The individual write-ups for the eight recommended Patrons (Carrion King, Grimmir, Ikasha, Inaea, Oath of Flame & Light, Palinode, The Traveler, and The Witness) are presented as standalone Patron entries elsewhere in the Player's Guide.

Patron Gifts and Thematic Skills (Curated Selection)

The +1 bonus applies only when the fiction aligns with the Patron's domain. The Patron's Gift (Imbuement) costs +1 Obligation when invoked (or +1 additional if Pushed).

Patron Fear Influence Table (Curated)

The following table summarizes how the curated patrons modify fear effects.

Witchcraft, Cults, and Religions

The Patrons do not demand worship. They do not build temples, compose scripture, or care which name you speak when you pray. They notice only one thing: Influence (sometimes called Weight). A vow kept, a promise honored, a threshold crossed with witness—these are what move the old powers. Yet mortals are not content to be noticed. We want to be answered. We build cathedrals to flames we do not understand. We whisper confessions into bells that cannot answer. We gather in secret circles to sing the name of a Patron we have never seen, hoping that if we sing loudly enough, someone will listen.

This section describes the human (and near-human) faces of power in the Amaranthine: the religions that shape daily life, the cults that form around specific Patrons or living conduits, and the quiet, patient craft of witchcraft—the art of working at thresholds, tying knots, and reminding the world of promises it has forgotten.

Religions are syncretic traditions—the Everflame, the Temple of Light, the Covenant of Mykkiel—that venerate a single divine principle while drawing power from multiple Patrons. They are the faith of the faithful: public, legal, and often entangled with the state. To join a religion is to join a Terrestrial Patron: you gain access to certain Rites and bear Influence with the hierarchy, not directly with the Patrons. The religion mediates the weight of the covenant.

Cults are concentrations of purpose: fellowships that form around a specific Patron, a specific interpretation, or a specific living voice—a Cantor whose song has drawn the desperate, an Invoker whose bargains have begun to outrun them. Cults are the faith of the desperate: private, dangerous, and always watched.

Witchcraft is not a faith at all. It is a method: the art of listening to Echo, steadying the Veil, and leaning into Flow. Witches work at thresholds—doorways, wakes, crossroads, bedsides—and their power is indistinguishable from skilled attention. Witchcraft is the craft of the cunning: patient, subtle, and older than any temple.

Whether you kneel in a basilica, whisper in a root cellar, or simply tie a red thread around a gatepost, the same law applies: the world remembers. And everything you do carries weight.

Religions of the Amaranthine

The great religions of the known world are not rivals to the Patrons; they are the masks the Patrons wear when mortals need a single face to pray to. Each is a syncretic tradition that venerates one divine principle—the Flame, the Light, the Covenant, the Twin Fires, the Road—while drawing power from several Patrons at once. Patrons care less about correct theology than about whom a promise binds, who is protected by it, and who bears its cost. A priest who invokes the Inquisitor Prime and a paladin who calls on the Oath of Flame & Light may believe they serve the same god. They are not wrong—but neither prayer relieves either of them of deciding what they owe the person standing in front of them.

Religion in the Amaranthine is not a moral shorthand. It is the largest thing mortals have ever built together, and it is built out of mortals. The same parish that shelters a widow through a hard winter will inform on her son. The same order that founded the only free clinic in a city will take a child away from a mother for singing the wrong hymn over a cradle. Play the faiths as people play them: with real comfort, real courage, real cruelty, and a great deal of posturing.

Orders Are the Masks

An Order is not a department of a religion. It is the shape a specific Patron takes inside that religion—the office through which that presence is approached, named, and made respectable. This is why the same Order appears in faiths that despise each other, and why it does not hold the same rank in each.

The consequences of this are the whole social texture of religion in play:

• The same power, different manners. An Everflame knight and a Covenant hospitaller both draw on the Oath of Flame & Light. Both are correct. Each finds the other's use of it faintly obscene—one has made a war-saint of a healer, the other has made a nurse of a war-saint—and they will say so, at length, to anyone but each other.
• Rank is the argument. Where an Order sits in the hierarchy is a claim about what the faith is for. The Everflame's Mercy houses are supervised because mercy is a subordinate aspect of fire; the Temple's are beloved because mercy is what light is; the Covenant has no mercy Order at all, which its rivals never stop mentioning and its own hospitallers quietly resent.
• Schism runs along the seams. Faiths do not usually split over gods. They split over which Order gets the money, the pulpit, and the right to speak first. Every schism in this section began as a budget dispute or a seating order and became a theology afterward.
• Posturing is characterization. An adherent wears their Order the way a soldier wears a regiment. A Chain-Lantern will find a way to mention the chain. A Keeper of the Pure Flame will correct your pronunciation of a Name. Let them. It is free flavor and it tells a player exactly who they are talking to.

The Everflame (Ecktoria)

The Everflame is the state religion of the Ecktorian Empire, and the distinction matters: it is not merely the faith most Ecktorians hold, it is an organ of the state. Its basilicas are courthouses. Its magistrates are ordained. Its perpetual fires are maintained at public expense and their extinction in a city is a constitutional event. The Everflame teaches that the world was kindled by a single fire that divided into three aspects—the Gleaming (justice), the Searing (purification), and the Warming (mercy)—and that the flame does not judge. The flame witnesses. The judge is the empire.

The Three Orders:

• Oath of Flame & Light (Orthodox) — Clergy and knightly orders; the public face. Rites of vow, radiance, and smiting.
• Inquisitor Prime (Prosecutorial) — The Flame-Wardens. Iron masks, blessed coal, and jurisdiction that does not stop at a border. Rites of judgment and purification.
• Oath of Mercy and Grace (Hospitalier) — Healers and confessors, and the only Order in the faith that is formally supervised by another. They are required to report the heretics they treat. Most do. The ones who do not are the reason the Order is supervised.

How one is saved: not by a verdict but by a sequence. The Everflame's central claim is that purification is a known procedure — the Refinement — with published stages, in a fixed order, which any soul can be brought through. Confession, restitution, the vigil, the Warming, the Searing, the reading of the name back to the penitent. Perform the stages correctly and completely and you are clean; this is not opinion, and it is not up to the priest.

This is the most genuinely democratic doctrine in the Amaranthine. It does not matter who your parents were or what you can pay. The stages are the stages. Beggars have been carried through the Refinement in full, publicly, by an empire that despised them, because the procedure does not have a clause for despising people. Everflame parishes will feed and shelter a stranger indefinitely while they are in the middle of it, and Ecktorians of every class have been genuinely moved by this for four hundred years, and they are right to be.

It is also the cruellest, for the same reason. A stage performed imperfectly must be repeated from the beginning. Whether it was performed imperfectly is determined by the Censorate. A Refinement can therefore be extended, without malice and without any rule being broken, until the penitent dies in it — and because the stages are the stages, the family may pay to have the remainder completed on the dead person's behalf, which is not a scam, exactly, and is nonetheless most of the income of several dioceses. The most feared words in Ecktoria are not a sentence of death. They are “we will begin again.”

Beauty: the Refinement itself; the perpetual fires that any freezing person may sit at by right; four centuries of parish records that have reunited more families than any army; the Warming, which is simply a rite of being fed and sat with by strangers until you can speak.

Ugliness: the Censorate, which decides what counts as a completed stage and has never once been audited by anyone outside itself; the Unspoken Ninth Citation, a redacted procedural clause permitting execution without confession, never read aloud; censure, which strikes a name from the parish register so that the person's family may not pray for them — a punishment aimed entirely at the survivors.

Internal schism: the Ember Prefects hold that a fire kept in a basilica is a fire being hoarded, and carry candles into the streets to run the Refinement for anyone, free, without the Censorate. They are correct about the doctrine and unbearable about it, and about a third of them are extortionists with a candle.

Where: the Ecktorian core and its borderlands; a minority presence in Kahfagia and among Vilikari communities; called the Imperial Fire in Thepyrgos and meant unkindly.

The Temple of Light (Viterra and Thepyrgos)

The Temple began as a reform movement inside the Everflame and broke from it over a single question: whether a soul needs an institution in order to be met. The Temple's answer is no. Light is not administered. It falls on you. Every member of the Temple has — is expected to have, is examined on having — a personal relationship with the light, unmediated by any priest, and the whole apparatus of the faith exists to put people in the way of that and then get out of it.

The practical expressions of this are startling to an Everflame visitor. The Codex of Illumination is in the vernacular and cheap, and Temple presses have been running for a century to keep it cheap; households own one; children are taught to read on it, which is why literacy in rural Viterra runs ahead of the imperial cities. A Temple priest is a schoolteacher with a stipend. There is no confession to a priest, because there is nobody in between to confess to — there is the morning candle, and you and the light, and the plain and terrible business of being honest by yourself. Congregations call their own ministers and can dismiss them, and do.

The Three Orders:

• Oath of Flame & Light (Orthodox) — Parish teachers, wandering preachers, and the Dawn-Knights who escort them. Light is a lens refracted into Gold (justice), Silver (truth), and White (mercy).
• Inquisitor Prime (Prosecutorial) — The Chain-Lanterns, who carry their lanterns on chains as a standing reminder that power must be restrained, and who have never once let the reminder stop them.
• Oath of Mercy and Grace (Hospitalier) — Hospices, orphanages, free clinics; the best-loved institution in Viterra and, by a wide margin, the best-run.

Beauty: a faith that trusts ordinary people with its own scripture and has never taken it back; free schools; free clinics; a hundred small congregations that have quietly sheltered exactly the people the Everflame struck from its registers.

Ugliness: when everyone reads for themselves, everyone is a potential heretic, and discipline falls to the congregation — which is to say, to your neighbours, who know what your marriage is like. Temple shunning is administered by people who have eaten at your table, and it is far more intimate and far more effective than any inquisitor. The Temple also fissions constantly: three chapels in one market town, none speaking, all correct. And the Chain-Lanterns' rehabilitation of arcane-talented children — taking them from their mothers into schools that are genuinely kind, genuinely well-fed, and from which the child comes home a stranger who thanks you for it — is the single most disturbing thing any faith in the Amaranthine does, precisely because nobody involved is being cruel.

Internal schism: the Plain Meeting hold that ministers, buildings, and hymns are all mediation and must go; they sit in silence in barns until someone is moved to speak. The Temple has never suppressed them and finds them insufferable, chiefly because they are the Temple's own argument taken one step further, and everyone knows it.

Where: dominant in Viterra; the popular faith of Thepyrgos beneath a Covenant-leaning ruling class; growing among the Linn; missions as far as the Mistlands.

The Covenant of Mykkiel

Every other faith in the Amaranthine begins with a message. The Covenant begins with a ruling.

The Covenant does not hold that a messenger came down with words to be recited. It holds that a woman of the Sidhi diaspora, dispossessed and without recourse, brought a grievance — and that Mykkiel, the Arbiter, heard the case and found for her. The founding document of the faith is not a revelation. It is a judgment, with a plaintiff, a respondent, findings, and a remedy. The first Covenanter was not a prophet. She was a litigant, and she won, and the faith has never entirely recovered from the confidence of that.

This is why the Covenant has no messenger-angel and is proud of it, and why the accusation stung so badly when the Everflame first made it. To a Covenanter, a faith founded on a recitation asks you to believe a speaker; a faith founded on a verdict asks you to read the reasoning and check it. Covenant children are taught the founding judgment the way Temple children are taught letters: as a text you are expected to argue with.

The Three Orders:

• Mykkiel (Orthodox) — Judges, notaries, and law-scholars, who settle disputes and draft the binding oaths. Their courts are the faith's cathedrals; there is no other kind of temple.
• Inquisitor Prime (Prosecutorial) — The Accuser, who investigates broken oaths and brings the suit. Iron scales, the Canons of Obligation, and a formal duty to argue the case against the faith's own officers when the case is good.
• Oath of Flame & Light (Hospitalier) — The healer's path, and the only Order the Covenant borrowed from its rivals. Healing is given under terms: the patient swears to something. Covenant hospitallers argue endlessly about how small the terms may honourably be, and the best of them have gotten it down to a promise to eat.

Beauty: the Covenant will hear anyone. Its courts take the case of a servant against a house, a wife against a husband, a tenant against a landlord, and they take it seriously, for free, and their judgments have been enforced against people who were confident they could not be. In three regions the Covenant is the only body that will write down what a poor person says and treat the writing as binding.

Ugliness: a faith founded on a winning verdict believes it has already prevailed, and treats every disagreement as an appeal it expects to dismiss. Its judgments bind the losing side absolutely and forever, including the losers' descendants, who were not present. Its formal position is that the unbound are not wicked but unheard — which sounds gentle until you notice it means the whole world outside is a docket, and the Covenant is working through it.

Internal schism: the Recusants hold that a judge who founds a faith cannot then preside over it, and that Mykkiel is obliged to recuse himself from all matters touching the Covenant. Nobody can find the flaw in the argument. Nobody with a position will say so out loud. Recusant congregations keep an empty seat on the bench and are considered either the most rigorous Covenanters alive or a nest of sophists, depending on who is asked.

Where: strongest in Galanina and among the Fhara ruling class; secret cells in Ashaan; ascendant among the Thepyrgan nobility; formally heretical in Ecktoria, where its courts nonetheless quietly arbitrate half the commercial disputes on the docks.

The Twin Flames (the Pereshi Faith)

In the Pereshi highlands the fire is doubled. The universe is a contest between the Pure Flame — truth, order, growth — and the Consuming Flame — deceit, decay, appetite. Both are sacred; only one is to be fed. There is no single god, but a host of radiant spirits, and no salvation to be granted by anyone: every person carries a spark, and the spark grows or dims by what you do this week. Nothing is deferred to a court or a procedure. It is a daily faith, and it is exhausting, and its adherents are among the most stubbornly decent people in the world.

The Orders:

• Keepers of the Pure Flame — Priests, healers, archivists; tend the eternal lamps, copy the texts, recite the Twenty-One Names of Radiance. They invoke the Oath of Flame & Light and the Witness.
• Watchers Against the Maw — Hunters of the undead, the possessed, and the corrupted; they burn what the Consuming Flame has touched. They invoke the Pale Shepherd and the Inquisitor Prime, and they are the reason the faith is tolerated in Ecktoria and distrusted in Viterra.
• The Oil-Bearers (lay) — Not clergy at all: householders who keep a lamp and are entitled to speak in assembly for as long as their own oil lasts. It is the closest thing the Amaranthine has to a franchise, and the rich buy very large lamps.

Beauty: an ethic with no intercessor and no purchase price; the eternal lamps, which any traveller may light a wick from; the Towers of Silence, where the dead are given to the elements and the birds so that no ground is made unclean and no family is beggared by a funeral.

Ugliness: a doctrine of feeding and starving makes purity a daily performance, and performance makes informers. Highland villages keep score of one another's sparks. The Watchers burn corpses on suspicion and have burned houses with them. And a faith that says the spark dims by your own acts has no comfort at all for the person to whom something terrible was simply done.

Internal schism: the Ash-Readers hold that the Consuming Flame must also be fed — sparingly, deliberately, on a schedule — because a hunger starved entirely will feed itself elsewhere. The Watchers consider this the single most dangerous idea in the highlands. The Ash-Readers point out that the villages that keep the old ash-rites have fewer hauntings, and the Watchers do not have an answer for that, which is why the argument is conducted at such volume.

Where: the majority faith of the Pereshi highlands and of Pereshi communities in Zakov, Kahfagia, and the Dolmis ports.

Flames Carried Abroad: Two Syncretisms

Fire travels well and arrives changed. Where the Everflame's witness-fire met a local practice with its own claim on the dead or the doorway, the result was not a heresy so much as a marriage — and the great faiths have never agreed which parent to blame.

The Salt-Fire (Zakov and the eastern Dolmis).

Everflame doctrine crossed salt water and came ashore married to the tide-cults and the Pale Shepherd. The Salt-Fire keeps the Refinement, and has quietly rewritten its last stage: the Searing is performed with brine, not flame, because on this coast the sea is what purifies and fire is what a ship most fears. Its priests are called Namers, and its whole soteriology is one sentence — you are saved if your name is said aloud after you die. The Namers therefore keep the coast's roll of the drowned, and read it, all of it, once a year, for as long as it takes, which in a bad year is three days.

Beauty: nobody on that coast is buried unnamed, no matter how poor, how foreign, or how badly they died; the Namers take no fee and have refused one publicly enough times that offering is now an insult.

Ugliness: a faith whose sacrament is a list runs on informers, because the list must be complete. The Namers know who sailed with whom, who owed whom, and who did not come back, and the Syndicates have found this useful for a century. Being left off the roll is the coast's severest punishment and is entirely at a Namer's discretion.

The Little Flame (the ports, the Way of Silk, everywhere).

The poor people's fire: a candle in a window, a lamp at a door, and no clergy whatsoever. It is what happened when the Everflame's public rites met a hundred household hearth-cults in a hundred harbours and lost the argument about who owns a flame. Its only doctrine is that a lit window is a promise of one night's shelter and that the promise is owed to anyone. Its only rite is lighting one.

Beauty: it costs nothing, excludes no one, and has fed and hidden every kind of person the great faiths struck off their books. In a strange city, a lit window in an upper storey is the most reliable sanctuary in the Amaranthine.

Ugliness: no clergy means no restraint. A Little Flame congregation is whoever is holding candles in that street tonight, and it can become a mob between one hour and the next; every port has a year it does not discuss. And because anyone may preach, any loud voice can be a prophet for a season, and the seasons end badly about as often as not.

The Still Road (the Eastern Realms)

East of the Amaranthine the argument changes entirely. The Still Road does not ask who judges you, or whether the light has met you, or which fire you have fed. It asks what you are holding, and whether you could put it down.

Its founding teaching is that suffering is grip — the clenched hand, the drawn blade, the promise squeezed until it bleeds — and that the way out is not a verdict, a procedure, or a rescue, but practice: attention, restraint, and the long unlearning of the reflex to seize. It has no creator-god and does not miss one. Its Patrons are approached as aspects of practice rather than as powers to be bargained with, which the western faiths find either admirably clean or deeply suspicious depending on how much they have riding on bargains.

The Orders:

• The Unbroken Way — The disciplinary and martial Order, and the one outsiders always meet first. Monks of the Still Point mediate feuds, guard roads, and are famous for winning fights they do not start by declining to have them. The blade that is not drawn cannot be broken.
• The Silver Quiet (Lunara) — Contemplatives and night-keepers; the long sit, the unlit hall, the practice of watching a thought arrive without going with it.
• The Traveler — Mendicants who own a bowl and walk. They take alms and give teaching, and their circuits are the reason the Road has spread further than any army has marched.
• The Pale Shepherd — Funerary Order; sits with the dying, walks the dead out, and is welcome in villages that will not let a monk past the gate.
• The Riven Path (heterodox) — Those who hold that a chain is not untied but broken, and that quietism is a comfortable posture for people who have never been owned. Formally not an Order. Present in every monastery.

It changes as you go east.

The Road is not one thing, and the differences are not corruptions — each branch believes itself the plain reading.

The Himadri foothills (the source):

Austere and world-renouncing. Monasteries own nothing, which means in practice that they are owned by whoever feeds them, and the great houses that feed them have opinions. Beautiful: the discipline is real and it works. Ugly: a tradition that renounces property has no defence against a patron who owns the granary.

Ayokha (the Monsoon Throne):

Absorbed into the God-King's court and made magnificent. Merit is public: water tanks, shade trees, hospitals, roads, all endowed for the good of the endower's practice, all genuinely built, all with the donor's name on them. Beautiful: the tanks hold water in the dry season and everyone drinks. Ugly: when merit is something you can be seen to make, the people who cannot afford to be seen making it are quietly understood to have less.

Sihai (the Central Kingdom):

Examined, licensed, registered. Ordination is by examination; monasteries hold imperial charters; the Censorate keeps the rolls, and the Road has fused comfortably with ancestor veneration and the Mandate. Beautiful: the examinations are genuinely open and have raised farmers' sons to abbot. Ugly: a licensed renunciate is a state employee, and the charter can be pulled.

Nihori (the storm isles):

Stripped to nothing. No scripture, one teacher, one student, one question; awakening is sudden or it is not awakening. The Unbroken Way here is a sword school that has not drawn in three generations and is the most feared institution on the islands. Beautiful: nothing stands between a student and the practice. Ugly: nothing stands between a student and a teacher, either, and there is no appeal from a bad one.

The eastern boundary (among the Aelaerem):

The mendicants join the work-parties. A Traveler-Order monk who walks a week of the boundary rota is fed and housed all season and asked no questions about doctrine, which suits both parties exactly. The hedge-keepers consider the Road sensible people who understand about chores.

Internal schism: the mainland holds that the texts are the practice's memory and cannot be discarded; Nihori holds that a memorized practice is a held object like any other. Both sides are polite about this in public and neither has visited the other in forty years.

Religious Conflict and Cooperation

The great faiths do not wage open holy war. Their priests argue theology, their inquisitors watch each other, their missionaries compete for the same ports — and then a Covenant judge consults an Everflame archivist about a parish register, and a Temple physician staffs a Covenant hospice, and a Still Road mendicant is fed at a Little Flame window without either party asking what the other believes. The Patrons are indifferent to mortal sectarianism and accept weight from all of it.

What the western faiths share is a conviction that witness is binding — that the divine is whatever will not let you pretend it did not happen. The Still Road does not share it, and this is the deepest fault line in the world: to a Covenanter, a wrong unwitnessed is a wrong unremedied; to a monk of the Still Point, a wrong you will not put down is a wrong you have chosen to keep carrying. Neither has ever convinced the other, and the argument is at least four hundred years old, and it is still the best one anybody has.

Other Traditions and Cults

Beyond the great syncretic faiths, the Amaranthine harbors a host of local traditions, mystery cults, and folk practices. Most are tolerated (or ignored) by the great faiths, though some are actively suppressed.

The Gray Pilgrims (The Traveler)

A wandering order of Lethai-ar who maintain the old way-cords. They wear gray cloaks woven from mist and speak only in riddles. Their creed: "The road does not end. It only turns." They accept no payment, only a lock of hair for their way-cords. Found in the Valewood, the Linn coast, and the Aelerian passes.

The Daughters of the Cord (The Bitter Root)

A secretive, all-female cult that believes all obligations are threads that can be cut. The highest form of mercy is to sever a promise without asking. They run hospices and soup kitchens, ask no payment, but write every name into a book whose ink never dries. Found in Silkstrand, Zakov, and the poorer wards of Ecktoria.

The Cog-Cults (The Clockwork Monad)

Underground fraternities of gear-smiths and logicians who believe the universe is a machine that can be perfected. They meet in abandoned watermills, reciting the Canons of Proportion and performing "optimisation rites." Their symbol is a gear with nine teeth (the ninth is hidden). Found in Thepyrgos, Aeler, and the industrial wards of Silkstrand.

The Salt Sworn (The Pale Shepherd)

A syncretic cult of the eastern Dolmis coast. They believe the Pale Shepherd guides not only the dead but the tide. They build cairns of salt stone and leave only the names of the lost, carved into driftwood. Once a year, they chant the names aloud, believing each strengthens the threshold. Found in the salt marshes of Zakov, the coast of Theona, and the Aberderrin headlands.

The Bear Cults of Ubral

In the high glens of Ubral, the Bear Cults believe the Savage Heart (the Red Maw) is not a demon but a teacher. Initiates wear cured bear-skins and carve runes into their ribs. They believe that by becoming the predator, they can protect their clans. Found only in Ubral.

The Ember Prefects (Heretical Everflame)

The street schism described above: candle-carriers who will run a Refinement for anyone, free, in an alley, without the Censorate’s leave. Their symbol is a candle burning from both ends. To a parish priest they are a nuisance; to the Flame-Wardens a standing warrant; to the people in the alley they are frequently the only clergy who came. Found across Ecktoria, with cells in Vhasia and Thepyrgos.

The Veneration of the Hearth (Aelaerem Folk Tradition)

Not a religion in the institutional sense, but a pervasive set of practices among the halflings. Every Aelaerem home has a red door, a cup-mark stone, and watch-geese. The Hearth is the accumulated memory of every kindness shown in that home. Offerings are simple: bread on the doorstep, milk in the garden, a red thread on a knife handle. Found only in Aelaerem (Amedell) and among halfling communities in the Dolmis ports.

Cults of the Amaranthine

Where religions build temples, cults gather in shadow. A cult is not a failed religion—it is a concentration of purpose. Where the Everflame concerns itself with all of Ecktoria, a cult of the Inquisitor Prime concerns itself only with your heresy. Where the Temple of Light builds hospitals for all, a cult of the Oath of Mercy and Grace builds a single room where promises are forgiven—and remembered.

Cults form around a specific Patron, a specific interpretation of that Patron, or a specific living conduit: a Cantor whose voice has drawn the desperate, an Invoker whose bargains have begun to outrun them, or a Runekeeper who has stopped reading the Codex and started writing their own chapters.

The Cantor's Congregation

A Cantor does not choose to lead a cult. A Cantor sings, and the broken listen. The desperate gather. The hungry, the hunted, the hollow—they find the Cantor's song before they find the Cantor. By the time the Cantor realizes they have a congregation, the congregation has already named them Speaker, Shepherd, or Storm-Heart.

A Cantor-led cult is charismatic, volatile, and deeply personal. The Cantor's voice is the cult's scripture; their mood is its liturgy. When the Cantor falters, the cult may fragment, turn inward, or seek a new voice. When the Cantor ascends (or descends), the cult ascends with them—into significance, into terror, or into the annals of inquisitors.

GM Seed: A Cantor of the Pale Shepherd has begun singing funerals for the not-yet-dead. Villagers pay to have their names sung into the Shepherd's flock before they die. The local Temple priest calls it a mercy. The dead call it theft.

The Invoker's Covenant

An Invoker does not seek followers. An Invoker solves problems. But when an Invoker has solved enough problems for enough people, those people begin to wait. They wait outside the Invoker's door. They leave offerings. They whisper the Invoker's name alongside the Patron's. A covenant forms—not of worship, but of dependence.

An Invoker-led cult is pragmatic, secretive, and increasingly brittle. The Invoker did not ask for loyalty and does not know how to maintain it. Rituals are improvised. Doctrine is whatever worked last time. The cult endures only as long as the Invoker's bargains keep paying out. When they stop, the knives come out.

Invokers themselves are usually wary of cults—cults attract attention, and attention attracts the Inquisitor Prime. But a desperate Invoker may tolerate a covenant, even cultivate it, telling themselves it is just a network, just a favor economy, just a few people who owe them. It never stays just.

GM Seed: An Invoker of the Clockwork Monad has accidentally created a cult of gear-makers who believe the Monad speaks through her calculations. They have begun "optimizing" the village—replanting fields in perfect grids, scheduling marriages by algorithm. The Invoker cannot stop them without admitting she is not a prophet.

The Runekeeper's Schism

A Runekeeper leads a cult only when they have broken faith—with their Codex, with their Order, or with the Patron's orthodox interpretation. Runekeeper cults are doctrinal, obsessive, and dangerous in proportion to their literacy. They keep records. They write commentaries. They argue about commas in Rites that should never have been written down at all.

Most Runekeeper cults are small: a master, a few apprentices, a locked scriptorium. But some grow, especially when the Runekeeper claims to have found a lost Rite—a fragment of a Patron's power that the orthodox Orders have suppressed. These cults are heresies in the truest sense: not a different faith, but a different reading of the same faith. The orthodox hate them most of all.

A Runekeeper's attitude toward cults varies by Patron:

• Oath of Flame & Light: Cults are weeds in the garden—to be pulled, burned, or redirected.
• Ikasha: A cult may be a useful shadow, but the Runekeeper will never stand at its center.
• The Witness: Constitutionally incapable of leading a cult; they would be forced to reveal their own manipulations.

GM Seed: A Runekeeper of the Carrion-King has found a Rite that allows followers to "compost" their own memories into physical tokens. The cult now trades these tokens—childhoods, first loves, old griefs—on a black market. The Runekeeper insists this is what the King intended. The King has not disagreed.

Cults as Factions

Mechanically, a cult functions as an Asset (see the Followers and Assets chapter) with a severe narrative bias. A cult is never neutral. A cult will:

• Provide Aid: Followers can act as Cap 2–5 followers, but only in service of the cult's purpose.
• Generate Influence: Leading a cult ticks Influence with the relevant Patron +1 per session—the Patron notices when you gather followers in their name.
• Attract Attention: Any cult of 10+ members begins a Cult Investigation [6] timer. When it fills, someone comes looking: an Inquisitor Prime agent, a rival cult, or the Patron themselves.
• Demand Upkeep: A cult requires either Efficient Upkeep (XP, representing bribes, shelter, and lies) or Intensive Upkeep (a scene per session where the leader performs a miracle, preaches, or solves a follower's problem).

Examples of Cults

The Unforgotten Ledger (Varnek Karn)

Funeral notaries who speak with the dead. Meet in crypts. Outsiders bring a name and leave with a task.

• Leader: A Death-Speaker (Cantor or Runekeeper).
• Hazard: The dead begin to answer—politely, then demandingly.

The Gilded Jest (Mab)

A conspiracy of wits who believe every exchange is a performance. Meet in theaters and back rooms.

• Leader: A Masked Jester (Cantor or Invoker).
• Hazard: Contracts become binding fae bargains; breaking one draws Mab's amused attention.

The Iron Chorus (Inquisitor Prime)

Militant witch-hunters who believe purity is survival. Meet in fortified chapter houses.

• Leader: A Censor-Prime (Runekeeper or Cantor).
• Hazard: The Chorus begins to see heresy everywhere—including in you.

The Compost-Circle (Carrion-King)

Gardeners and gravediggers who believe nothing is wasted. Meet in compost heaps and burial mounds.

• Leader: A Rot-Warden (Invoker or Hedge-Witch).
• Hazard: The Circle's transformations begin to accelerate—composting becomes contagion.

Joining or Founding a Cult

• Founding: Requires a Patron's Favor (a Talent, a critical success on a Rite, or a GM-defined story beat). The new cult begins as a Minor Asset (4 XP) with 1–3 followers.
• Joining: Grants access to the cult's Asset benefits (followers, safe houses, information) but ticks Influence +1 to the cult's Patron. Leaving a cult is a narrative scene, not a mechanical cost—but the Patron may remember.
• Reluctant Leadership: A character who becomes the focus of a cult without seeking it gains the Cult Leader tag. This is a Condition: once per session, the GM may compel the character to act in the cult's interest (preach, protect, perform a Rite) or mark 1 Fatigue from the weight of expectation.

Witchcraft

The Amaranthine prays to the Everflame, the Temple, and the Covenant. But when prayers fail, when the child will not be born, when the roads turn against the traveler, the people do not call for a priest. They call for a witch.

A witch is not a heretic—not necessarily. A witch is a threshold worker: one who listens to what has been (Echo), steadies what is (the Veil), and leans into what wishes to be (Flow). Witchcraft is not brute force; it is fit—finding where the world already wants to move and giving it a gentle, precise nudge. Hearth craft, mill craft, and road craft are simply slow, patient forms of the same art practiced by ordinary hands. The most powerful magic is often indistinguishable from skilled attention.

The Two Speeds of Witchcraft

The Long Road: Ritual, threshold, price, and consequence. It takes Significant Time (hours, days, a moon phase). This is the domain of Full Rituals: unbinding a curse, hallowing a threshold, or unraveling a wound.

The Short Road: Instinct, residue, and a flicker of attention. It takes Some Time (a few heartbeats, a single action). This is the domain of Quick Workings and Hedge Gifts—magic so subtle it can be mistaken for luck.

Core Principles of Witchcraft

1. The Law of Named Existence: To name is to anchor. A True Name fastens an Echo; forgetting frays it. Words spoken under witness reshape how a place remembers.
2. The Concordant Layers: People, places, and vows exist as chords across Echo / Veil / Flow.
   • Echo: Accumulated memory and intention. What has been.
   • Veil: The current, perceivable state; the boundary between potential and actual.
   • Flow: The direction of change; the will of elements and intent.
3. Threshold Mechanics: All workings begin at edges—doorways, wakes, vows, last breaths, first light, crossroads. Magic is boundary-law: who may pass, what must stay, and what should never meet.
4. Element-Will: Elements are wills, not mere substances. A working argues with a chosen will; Influence is the weight incurred when borrowing from a will larger than yours.
5. The Silent Ninth: The missing step in every scale—absence with teeth. The Ninth is erasure, gaps, omissions, and the power of what is left unsaid. Players never declare the Ninth. The GM may apply a Void tag only as consequence.

Hedge Gifts

A Hedge Gift is not a spell. It is the world tilting slightly in the witch's favor because she has paid attention to the right thresholds. Hedge Gifts require no dice roll; they simply work within their limited scope.

Any character with the Craft of the Hedge talent may learn Hedge Gifts. A witch begins with two Hedge Gifts of her choice. Additional Hedge Gifts cost 2 XP each.

Steady Hand

Once per scene, touch a wounded person (including yourself) and whisper a word of comfort. Remove 1 Fatigue. No roll. You may not use this on the same person twice in a scene.

Knot of Favor

Once per scene, tie a small knot in a cord, thread, or cloth. For the rest of the scene, you and allies within Near gain +1 die to a single type of roll (choose when you tie: stealth, persuasion, defense, or navigation). The knot must remain tied; if undone, the benefit ends.

Warm Hand

Once per scene, touch someone and speak a word of comfort or warning. For the next exchange, that person's next physical action either gains +1 die (comfort) or suffers -1 die (warning). No roll. The effect is subtle and cannot be directly perceived as magic.

Hearth-Sense

Once per scene, ask the GM one yes/no question about a threshold, a boundary, or a promise in the current scene. The GM must answer truthfully.

Salt Line

Once per scene, pour a handful of salt in a continuous line (move action). Any spirit, ghost, or cursed creature attempting to cross must test Spirit+Insight (DV 3) or be stopped for that exchange. The line must be at least Close length; broken if someone steps through or scatters the salt.

The Unlit Candle

Once per session, declare that a light source you can see (lantern, candle, torch) falters or extinguishes. This creates a zone of dim light or darkness in Near range for one exchange.

Counting the Eighth

Once per scene, when you or an ally is about to roll, whisper a number (1–8). If the GM's current Story Beat count is equal to that number modulo 8, the roll gains +2 dice. If not, nothing happens. You cannot use this again until the GM's SB count changes.

Quick Workings

A Quick Working is a single-action roll that relies on the witch's knowledge of thresholds, elements, and will. Its effects are limited, subtle, and always carry the risk of consequence.

Procedure

1. Name the Threshold (door, tide line, wound, vow, breath).
2. Choose a Layer (Echo, Veil, or Flow) and a single Tag (from the magic tags list).
3. Set Position by urgency (Controlled if you have time, Desperate if threatened).
4. Roll Attribute + Skill (typically Wits+Lore, Spirit+Insight, or Presence+Sway).
5. Apply Outcome (see table).

The effect is always minor and scene-limited: a door sticks shut or opens; a candle gutters (brief darkness); a rope knot tightens or loosens; a pursuer's footing slips (1 Fatigue); a whispered name is heard or forgotten.

Full Rituals

A Full Ritual requires Significant Time, a proper threshold, and often a witness. Its effects are lasting or permanent: blessings, curses, bindings, or the hallowing of ground.

General Procedure

1. Identify the Threshold (name the edge, learn its disposition).
2. Choose Your Witness (a person, spirit, or Hollowed who watches).
3. Name Your Will (what change you intend, using Threshold Tags).
4. Set Your Price (memory, name, lock of hair, promise, blood).
5. Make the Exchange (roll, resolve, pay the price on success or partial).

Example Rituals

Unravel the Wound (Heal Harm)

Requires: Significant Time, a threshold (doorway or basin of water), a witness. Restores 1 level of Harm. Price: A lock of hair, a memory of a childhood injury, a tear in a vial. Roll: Spirit + Lore vs. DV (3 for Harm 1, 4 for Harm 2, 5+ for Harm 3 requires a coven). Success: Harm reduced; witch pays the price. Partial: Harm reduced, but witch gains a minor Condition or a Promise Timer [4]. Miss: Wound does not heal; witch gains the Condition she tried to remove.

Hallow Threshold (Permanent Ward)

Requires: Significant Time, a permanent threshold (door, well, bridge, hearthstone), a witness who will maintain the consecration, an offering (bread, salt, coin, spoken promise). The blessing lasts until the threshold is physically broken or the offering removed. Roll: Spirit + Lore vs. DV 4 (home), 5 (village well), or 6 (city gate). Success: Threshold hallowed. Spirits, undead, and cursed creatures crossing must test Spirit+Insight (DV 5) or be turned back. Partial: Blessing holds but has a weakness (the witch names one thing that can bypass it). Miss: Blessing fails; threshold becomes cursed for one season (all who cross feel unease, -1 die to first action).

Unbind the Anchor (Permanent Spirit Release)

Requires: Significant Time, the spirit's true name or a strong anchor, a threshold (doorway facing east, crossroads, grave), a witness. Steps: (1) Discover the anchor (unfinished business, stolen object, broken vow). (2) Name the Terms (propose resolution). (3) Prepare the threshold (salt, chalk, broken cord). (4) Speak the Unbinding (Spirit + Lore vs. DV 4–5). (5) Pay the Price. Success: Spirit released. Witch gains 1 Boon. Partial: Spirit released but leaves a remnant (echo, cold spot). Witch marks 1 Fatigue and gains a minor Condition. Miss: Spirit refuses, becomes hostile. Start a Promise Timer [4] named "The Spirit's Revenge."

Talents of the Hedge

Craft of the Hedge (4 XP)

Requires: Lore 1+ or Endurance 1+; a witch mark (tattoo, scar, or birthmark). You have learned the small magics of thresholds and edges. You gain: two Hedge Gifts; the ability to perform Quick Workings; and once per session, when you fail a Quick Working roll, you may convert the Miss into a Partial Success by marking 1 Fatigue.

Hedge Gift of the Patron (6 XP)

Requires: Craft of the Hedge, Bond to a Patron. Once per session, when you would use a Hedge Gift, you may instead invoke your Patron's Imbuement. Gain +1 die to all actions tied to your Patron's domain for the scene, but mark +1 Obligation immediately. No action required.

Covens and Traditions

The Bone Coven (Aelerian Influence)

Focus: Ancestral wisdom and the patient power of stone that remembers. Signature Rite: Stone Memory Communion—by pressing hands to ancient stone, the witch witnesses events that occurred near it, going back centuries. Patron Elements: Earth and Fate.

The Mistwalkers (Mistlands Influence)

Focus: Navigation between worlds and manipulation of thresholds. Signature Rite: Wayfinding Through the Veil—by burning specific herbs, the witch creates temporary passages through the Ways Between. Patron Elements: Water and Obishaal (Death/Dreams).

The Stormweavers (Linn/Ykrul Influence)

Focus: Weather magic and storm riding. Signature Rite: Storm Dancing—through ritual movement, the witch calls forth or calms storms. Patron Element: Air, with strong ties to Raéyn or Xhak'Thul.

Threshold Magic and Promise Timers

Many workings create obligations. Represent these with a Promise Timer (typically 4 segments):

• Mark the timer when the promise is ignored, deferred, or disrespected.
• When filled, the price comes due—socially, spiritually, or narratively.
• Examples: sharing grief, tending a grave, protecting a hearth, reconciling rivals.

Household Disposition

Communities and dwellings possess a temperament. When entering a new settlement or threshold site, the GM may choose or roll for its disposition:

Household temperament can change through care, ritual, or story.

The Daughters of the Cord (The Cord)

Among the most feared and misunderstood covens are the Daughters of the Cord—also called the Gray Watchers, Pale Midwens, or simply the Cord. They appear as midwives, hospice nurses, and deathbed witnesses, offering the mercy of warm hands and the comfort of final words. They seem harmless. Mostly.

The Daughters are bound to the High Mother, a threshold entity sustained by accumulated promise and subtle sacrifice. She may be a lich. She may be the current Vessel: a mortal woman elected by the coven, granted godlike power through centuries of accumulated influence. The Daughters smile when asked which is true. The Cord does not distinguish between memory and flesh.

Becoming a Daughter

• Attributes: Spirit 3+, Body 2+
• Skills: Lore (Thresholds) 1+, Deception 1+
• Talents: Disciplined Body (Monk) [3 XP], Gray Thread [4 XP] (see below)

Gray Thread (4 XP)

Requires: Disciplined Body, Spirit 3+. You are bound to the High Mother's Cord. Your flesh accepts tattooed Rites; your blood activates them. You may perform Rites of the High Mother without a Codex or Thiasos. Instead, you receive a Hollowed—a heartless familiar with eyes like spilled milk. It witnesses your magic and counts as the threefold presence required by Hag Law. The Hollowed never speaks.

Cord of Flesh (8 XP)

Requires: Gray Thread, Body 3+. Your body stores memories and promises. When you convert Harm → Fatigue (Monk ability), you may store up to Body rating points of Fatigue as Corded Knots, appearing uninjured (as fresh scars or weeping tattoos). You have until sunset after the next to perform a sacrifice or take 2 Harm.

The Open Palm, Closed Cord (8 XP)

Requires: Gray Thread, Melee 2+. Your unarmed strikes or subtle touch carry Widow's Measure. Instead of dealing Harm, you may mark a Promise Timer [4] on the target—they owe the Cord a truth or grief. If they already owe the coven, you may activate that weight: they suffer Position -1 for the scene, or you gain Effect +1 against them.

The Subtle Sacrifice

The Daughters require domestic sacrifices—acts so small they are dismissed as accidents or cruelty, yet sufficient to feed the Cord.

• The Missing Child: Taken to the House Without Doors. The child is hollowed out into a Heartless familiar. The parents forget they existed (Un-Naming).
• The Unspoken Grief: At a deathbed, the Daughter convinces the dying to forget their greatest love. The memory is trapped in a Name-Bead. The dying smile peacefully, having forgotten why they were sad.

Performing a sacrifice clears 1 segment of Obligation with the High Mother or reduces a Rite's cost by 1 (minimum 1). Each requires Intricate Description and leaves physical evidence.