Heroes of the Bones

Cultures of the Bones

Hill, forest, mountain, and nomadic peoples are the most common cultures within the Bones. Dwarven-cut cities, monasteries, and enclaves mark the mountain peaks and passes. Nomadic herders follow great beasts along the weaving canyons and lichen-rich coves of the middle region. Hill folk maintain villages and holdfasts, keeping a wary eye on the hungry expansion of Galastaire and Elvenkind.

A few small patches of the dragon-ruled Treasured (see the Steppes for details) maintain a near-constant state of war, as lineages of white and silver dragons vie for mastery of the skies above the Bones. The last silver Winter Queen has recently fallen, leaving an avaricious white to claim tribute from many mortals and monsters alike for her ‘court’ - a grim museum gallery of frozen trophies, with their past owners still holding or wearing them in the translucent walls. As the clutches feud eternal, so too do their servants.

Ascetic. You were raised in an isolated monastery, largely separate from the outside world. Your life was made up of chores, meditation, education, and training to hone your sense of self or your surroundings.

Ascetic Exercises. You may choose the Martial Arts fighting style or the Unarmored Defense feature, allowing for Wisdom to replace Dexterity or Constitution when determining your Armor Class. If neither suit your character, you may select an appropriate boon instead including a paragon’s bonus feats.

Braggart-Born. You are a child born to a renowned hero, at least allegedly. The streets of Ven Draria are full of children with ‘heroic parentage’, and twice as many orphans with a favorite legend as a bloodline. You may love or hate the tales of wild abandon and peerless skill, but you know that legends never stay.

Cold Souled. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed or frightened by anything you’ve experienced at least once from the same source. You also roll with advantage on Intelligence checks to see through illusions while in the presence of a creature you know is capable of creating them, if they aren’t already an ally.

Hearth-Handed. Born or gifted to the protectors of Highrock, you’ve grown under the restful whispers of the dreaming stone. More than once, it has guided you, and no matter how far you wander? It always will.

Portentous Dreamer. Hints of fate are revealed to you in symbolic dreams. After completing a long rest, roll a d20. As your reaction, you can replace any attack roll, saving throw, or ability check made by you or a creature that you can see with this portentous roll's result. This roll is lost upon the completion of your next long rest. When you reach 3rd level, you may expend this roll to cast comprehend languages on yourself. When you reach 5th level, you may expend this roll to cast augury. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for these spells.

Luck and destiny have a conflicting relationship. You may not use both a portent and luck during the same period before completing a long rest. Using a single luck point or a halfling’s Lucky feature prevents the use of a nightly portent, and vice versa. Portents interact normally with divination magic or features.

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Adepts

Innovation lies at the heart of the Bones. While the Empire and other agricultural monarchies tend to view the northern nations as backwards, the ideas and tools used to sustain large populations in harsh environments require brilliant minds and constant new development. While they have a few enclaves and limited methods of cultivation, the leaders of the Bones make wonders out of hard-won resources. From daring scouts and raiders to breathtaking storytellers, these bright hearts, brilliant minds, and determined souls push their companions and peoples ever forward, turning struggle into songs.

Exceptional Boons

Oathbinder

Your word is a sacred trust and the weight of your will or reputation hold others to the same standard. When you make or broker an agreement among intelligent creatures, you may spend up to your character level in focus points. You imbue the oath into a number of creatures equal to the focus points you spend. So long as the agreement is maintained by all parties, each of them gains adept inspiration which may be spent on tasks that work towards the oath’s terms. Spells like detect magic sense a mild enchantment effect.

Dispelling or otherwise removing the oath informs all participants on the same plane. If the oath is broken by a participant’s own choices or ignorant actions, you and all participants on the same plane immediately know who broke the oath. If you or another participant challenges the oathbreaker, the accuser may expend their adept inspiration as a bonus action - you may expend 1 focus point instead. The oathbreaker becomes frightened of all participants and is restrained until the end of the accuser’s next turn.

Rumormonger

You are a master of gathering information in populated areas. As long as there’s a loose-lipped location - taverns, inns, brothels, even dreary labor - you know how to find what you’re looking for in any mass of people that you can communicate with. With an hour’s carousing or conversation, you gain knowledge as if you’d cast your choice of augury, locate animals and plants, or locate object. Information that even the snoopiest of neighbors wouldn’t know can’t be gleaned, but hints of suspicious persons or activities may result.

Weather-Belly

You have a jarring sense for the unexpected which those who know you can read on your face or in your stance. You and allies within 30 feet of you that can see you have advantage on initiative when ambushed, saving throws for hidden traps, or checks to mitigate sudden pitfalls or hazards. Threats or dangers you’re aware of do not gain this benefit, though you must know the source and location of the threat to negate this benefit. To gain this benefit, you can’t be blinded, deafened, or incapacitated.

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Paragons

The Bones are an expression of extreme challenges, and those who seek to defend it or dominate it must rise to those challenges in turn. Just as the Winter Queen presides over the mountain range and those in its shadow, the warriors of the Bones must be either noble or fearless. Megafauna and dangerously adapted creatures are just the beginning - bandits, rivals, and warlords are always on the hunt for their own bellies. The undead, once led by a vampire-crafting sorcerer, besieged the old dwarven enclaves and monasteries, and were only stopped when the great dragon herself swept the sorcerer up as her prize.

Whether noble or craven, traditional or rebellious, those who shed blood in the Bones learn to respect their enemies and to know when they stand in strength or reveal weakness. As they fell, so can you.

Ancestral Boons

Emulation or veneration of powerful beasts is a common practice in the Bones, the Old Wilds, and other places where the lean folk and their tools have not quite claimed supremacy. Beast, noble, or both, the Winter Queen stands as a symbol of dominance, rulership, cruelty, and protection - a living goddess of two deadly moods. Warriors of the Bones often seek that same ascendancy, to the extent where a rare few have challenged the Queen herself to grapple for dominance. Those who impress her or her disciples are marked - the cold clings to them, leaving scales of silvery ice or a frosty hide of pallid white.

Direct students of the Queen are almost unheard of in the current age, but a few brave souls each year wander out of the white monsoons with her same inner chill, and the power that comes with it.

Winter Queen's Fangs

You’ve felt the fury of a white monsoon on your bare skin and survived the chill. Once per turn, your unarmed strikes or weapon attacks add your Constitution modifier as cold damage. Creatures who start their turn grappling or grappled by you also take cold damage equal to your Constitution modifier and their walking speed is reduced by 10 until the start of your next turn should they escape.

Additionally, you do not require a free hand to grapple, relying on elbows, legs, leverage, and sheer tenacity.

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Winter Queen's Talons

You treat creatures one size larger than you as if they were the same size for the purposes of grappling and creatures two sizes larger as only one size larger. Neither can escape your grapples without a roll.

Additionally, you have advantage on your checks to grapple creatures of equal or smaller size than you.

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Winter Queen's Mercy

You share the will of the Winter Queen to crush an enemy in your grasp. You gain the following benefits:

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Winter Queen's Hoard

Victory thrills you and brings a grim chill to the flesh of those who witness your might. If you reduce an enemy to 0 hit points on your turn, you may roar as a bonus action. Creatures within 15 feet of you must make a Constitution saving throw against a difficulty equal to 8 + your proficiency modifier + your Constitution modifier. Creatures who fail the save suffer 4d8 cold damage and are restrained for 1 minute, as a frosty rime overtakes them. Restrained creatures may attempt to escape as an action, making a Strength (Athletics) check against the save DC above.

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Winter Queen's Wings

You become as elusive as the frosty mists of the Bones, appearing silently and suddenly regardless of your size. Armor no longer causes you to suffer disadvantage on Stealth checks. Once per turn, you may fade into a spreading mist and immediately attempt to Hide. While in mist form, you gain immunity to bludgeoning, cold, piercing, and slashing damage. You revert to your normal form as soon as you make an attack or grapple attempt.

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Sages

The Bones are the cradle of life and its energies for the entire Dream, and the seasonal outflowing of blood, rain, snow, and rivers carries that energy onward where it blossoms in the heartland or takes root in the Old Wilds. Many come from other regions to return the source of these various energies - dragonkind, giantkin, practitioners of ki manipulation, nature shamans, and countless others take pilgrimages from their array of homelands to find common truths in the cold air and the high stones. And of course, wherever there is life? Death follows, and not all deaths are just, satisfying, or kind. Those who seek the voices of their ancestors may find their origins in the Bones. Those looking for corpses or a vampire’s kiss? Find their fate among the rocks, for good or ill. The Bones welcome all forms of strength.

Supernal Source: Fate

There are countless local faiths, and they can vary deeply on their views of the cosmology, purpose, or lessons of the Dream. Some see a unity of divinity in the highest peaks - a living spirit that encompasses and is reflected in all things, perfection faceted down to the portions of that grandness we may witness. Others believe the Dream itself is a sort of torment - a prison, if not of our own making, then made of the collective ignorance and conflicting needs of many. Few people know their own true desires and needs, with countless distractions and dangers to lead the mind astray. Only through discipline, devotion, and meditation can one see the truth of the world and unbind oneself from it, or so they say.

A common thread among these often-overlapping views is a sort of play at life and destiny, a purpose to each life. By unraveling that mystery or overcoming the challenges before us, we may advance or decline in a larger spiritual journey. This view of fate or doom is less about prediction of what will surely happen, and more about recognizing what ought to or should come to pass from what is present and evident. The intent of one’s life is written in the stone and the stars. It is a mortal failing if we fall short of the map laid out for us. Gods, ancestors, and Muses watch us.

By looking for the signs and portents, by reciting the epics and the rightful ways, and by honoring both our elders, our ancestors, and our peers, we follow a path to divinity, the self, or a meeting of both. Sages of fate aid others in finding their path, craft the tools that allow others their storied success, and often have their own grand destiny to face. All power is granted for a challenge yet to come, after all.

Source Feature: Portents of Doom

You have seen and touched the paths free to all who may yet choose and to those who have no choice at all. With a bonus action, you can determine if a creature’s challenge rating is equal to, higher, or lower than your level, or compare it to the level (or challenge) of another creature that you can sense nearby.

Additionally, you can capture a portent from the weave of destiny. As your reaction after a creature rolls an ability check, attack roll, or saving throw, but before the DM declares the roll’s result, you may roll a d20. You may exchange the triggering roll with your roll’s result, saving the stolen result to apply to another roll at a later moment.

Each portent you impart after the first costs an additional focus point, returning to 0 after you complete a short rest. You can’t capture a new portent with your own d20 roll until you complete a long rest. Luck and destiny also have a conflicting relationship. You may not use both a portent and luck during the same period before completing a long rest. Using a single luck point or a halfling’s Lucky feature prevents the use of a nightly portent, and vice versa. Portents interact normally with divination magic or features.

Bonus Spells of the Bones

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Supernal Boons

Few resources are as precious as the life of a loved one or a useful ally in the Bones. Friends are irreplaceable and each fallen comrade is a stain upon one’s reputation. As such, the services of healers both mundane and magical are highly regarded and can demand a significant price. Healers often serve as key advisors among the wandering nations, and hold favored positions in even the most sedentary courts. The energies of the Bones themselves seem to empower healing, either to bring comfort to those who struggle, or to ensure they’ll be ready to get right back into the struggle to survive.

Blood Rush

When you heal or bolster a creature by recovering their hit points, granting them temporary hit points, or ending a harmful condition affecting them, that creature may choose at the start of their next turn in combat to gain advantage on attack rolls until the next turn after this choice. If they choose to fight recklessly, they grant advantage to attack rolls against them until their next turn.

If you’ve applied healing outside of combat, those you heal can draw on this reckless energy on the first round of combat in the next encounter they face. The rush fades after completing a short or long rest.

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Timely Healer

You’re ready in a time of need with healing magic, and have the wisdom to know when to rush and when to wait. if an ally within the range of a healing spell available to you suffers damage or a condition that you can end, you may use your reaction to provide that healing. This healing can come in the form of a spell that recovers hit points, grants temporary hit points, ends a condition, or even a feature that does any of the above. Healing you can perform as a reaction can require no longer than an action to perform.

Once you’ve applied timely healing, you may not do so again until you complete a short or long rest.

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