Heroes of the Heartland

Cultures of the Heartland

Most citizens of the imperial interior come from cosmopolitan or grasslands cultures. The noble families of the capital maintain a number of long-held Arcane Lineages. Half-elves are more common in the east, where the Old Wilds rise on the horizon, but much of the area was lost to Lion's Fall. Those born too close to that arcane wasteland may develop as Blood Inheritors of this new corruption.

Imperial Backgrounds

Life in the Capital serves as a beacon and a model to the rest of the Dream, or so the Lohrian insist. Their personal wayholding, the hilly slope at the center of a great lake splits the lanes of the great southward river road and serves as the heart of the imperial highway system - a hard-earned marvel of marble roads cutting to nearly every major hub on the continent, with guard posts at every horizon. This network facilitates travel, communication, trade, and the rapid flow of the empire’s professional soldiers. This network, built on relationships, ledgers, and communication, has shaped the lifestyles of its citizens.

Advocate/Magistrate

Either in the Capital itself, or in the countless wayholdings and territories under the Empire’s influence, it is up to you to uphold the public justice. Those who represent aggrieved or accused parties are known as advocates, and must meet certain standardized test requirements to be recognized by imperial courts. An advocate can be hired by parties or provided for free, but the quality of an appointed advocate relates directly to the wealth and good intentions of local governors. From civil conflicts to dire crimes, you speak for your charge to ensure a balanced and thoughtful review of all sides - at least, in theory.

These advocates present their arguments to a local judge or to an imperial magistrate - a wandering judge appointed by the Empress herself to decide these cases. While there are no technical requirements for a magistrate, the head of the Empire must be swayed by the testimonials of a trusted advisor and rarely appoints a magistrate without at least a brief personal interview. Folk tales about a wise elder being spooked into a heart attack by the sudden, spectacular appearance of an Empress or Emperor in a flash of magic abound, and especially in recent generations, have been entirely accurate.

Together, these advocates and magistrates seek public justice. In ideal circumstances, this is a negotiation to benefit all parties. At its worst? It becomes a dire, often petty, war over others’ lives.

Skill Proficiencies: Choose two from History, Insight, Intimidation, Investigation, and Persuasion
Languages: One of your choice
Tool Proficiencies: Calligrapher’s tools.
Equipment: A set of calligrapher’s tools (one of your choice), a set of fine clothes for public appearance, a set of traveler’s clothes, a book of regional case precedents, perfume, soap, a steel mirror, and a purse containing 10gp.

Legal Focus

No advocate can learn every facet of every law in the volumes on the imperial record or other systems. Choose a focus for your legal studies and arguments or roll on the table below.

Feature: The Public Justice and the Public Benefit

While an advocate has the right to demand recompense for aggrieved parties and ensure the basic rights of the accused, a magistrate can make demands of individuals, businesses, and local leaders if a solution to a legal problem can be proved to all advocates’ satisfaction to be ‘of the public benefit’. Denying either of these rights and obligations would make an enemy of the Empress herself as high magistrate.

In addition, while pursuing a case, advocates and magistrates may receive food and lodging appropriate to a comfortable lifestyle for themselves and anyone actively contributing to the case’s swift resolution, paid for by local governors. All of these benefits are ultimately weighed against the quality of the case’s resolution for all parties.

Suggested Characteristics

Advocates and magistrates live by their words and decisions, for better or worse. The temperament and biases that drives these arguments can have a profound impact on the lives they touch. The conflict between what the law allows and what advocate and magistrates pursues is a constant challenge.

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Benefactor

You have earned the largesse of a wealthy noble or merchant, on the promise of a gift or wonder that will bring them prestige, victory, or some other form of success that gold and soldiers cannot buy. This duty can be known or private, singular or over time, but patronage is a legal relationship with protections both for you and for your patron. So long as your promise to provide remains in good faith, your patron is duty-bound to provide for your personal and material needs. However, should you refuse, withhold, or keep this masterpiece of your own creation? You cross both a powerful enemy and the law.

Consider the nature and origin of your relationship as you develop the story of your benefice. Beyond the skill or craft that you provide, how did this gift become revealed to your patron? Were you the protege of a renowned crafter, or perhaps their child with a legacy of high expectations. Are you a concubine or mistress to someone powerful, expecting to provide them comfort or spy for secrets? Some benefactors are, in fact, the illegitimate children of powerful figures, whose silent service is their duty. How will your relationship end, and on what terms, if the choice is yours? Theirs? Another’s?

Skill Proficiencies: History, Insight
Tool Proficiencies: Two of your choice from artisan’s tools, musical instruments, gaming sets, or vehicles
Equipment: A set of artisan’s tools (one of your choice), a set of fine clothes for public appearance, a set of common clothes for your private work, a token of your patron’s favorite (usually a ring or other jewelry), and a purse containing 20 gp.

Patronage

Your life revolves around your patron, for better or worse, and the kind of patron you work for will determine how you approach the work you need to do. The quality of that relationship will impact you much more than it will affect them, so you have a vested interest in keeping your patron happy.

Feature: Duty-Bound

The focus of your recent life has been upon the thoughtful service of your patron, towards an ultimate goal. Whether this is the creation of a magic item, a work of art, a contract of marriage, the legitimacy of your birth, or some more esoteric goal, you know the next steps in your duty or at least the nearest threads to pull and people to question to fulfill it. Your patron is a powerful figure with broad social connections, which they are also duty-bound to provide... So long as you keep up your end of the duty.

Suggested Characteristics

Benefactors are as varied as the goods or services they provide, so the focus must fall on what you bring to the life of your patron. Consider how you’ll align or conflict with the patron you have in mind with all things, as any of your choices might come back to bite you or them in the end.

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Bureaucrat

The empire of Galastaire was won with spears, bound in marble, and made fertile by sweat and blood, but it breathes and lives on countless reams of paper. The central authority of the Lohrian nobles, the military, the merchants - all of it relies on clear records, precise figures, and accurate forecasts for future plans. From dawn to dusk, you sort the sheets and turn garbled reports into actionable information. To you, the world not only can, but must be reduced to its most elemental terms. In this way? The wilderness and fancies of the Dream can be tamed, tilled, and made to provide its bounty to the people.

The fundamental curse of your work is that few people can understand it without doing it. To the less engaged, your work can be byzantine, arbitrary, or even absurd. Perhaps worst of all? People often find it boring. While the guildhalls and palaces across the Empire are full of figure-scratchers with bent necks and spines, those lucky (or unlucky) enough must go out and find those figures. Scribes, surveyors, tax collectors, and assessors keep the Dream aware of its wealth, its dangers, its opportunities, and more. No one will be sent to fend off a growing menace of gnolls if no one does a sensible count of them. And that’s what it means to be you - you understand that someone has to be accountable. Probably you.

Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Investigation
Languages: One of your choice
Tool Proficiencies: Calligrapher’s tools
Equipment: A bottle of ink, several candles, a quill, an abacus or similar counting tool, a blank book for tracking figures, a set of traveler’s clothes, and a coin pouch containing 15 gp

Bureaucratic Specialty

You aren’t just an interchangeable cog in the world of paper and figures. There are particular papers, documents, rules, and ledgers that speak your language and you theirs. While you can certainly make out the work of other fields, you’ll always be more comfortable in your native territory, as all other fields are full of liars, incompetents, fiends, and obstructionists of the highest order. Unlike yourself, of course.

Feature: Tally-taker

You have received training or have a natural knack for quickly sorting numbers. You can make precise number counts of most objects or creatures you can see, based on a smaller section-count followed by a count of the sections. Barring intentional deception, you can create a clear and accurate reporting of the areas and events that you witness, or build a clear one from conflicting accounts. You also have intimate knowledge of who’s responsible for certain information - within your homeland, you know the legal, financial, and guild authorities and their territory. Outside of it, you know the signs to look for and likely have an idea of any familiar resources like an embassy or trade group who does business in both areas.

Suggested Characteristics

Bureaucrats are tireless advocates of the importance of their own work. This isn’t just a matter of pride, but a side effect of understanding what the pieces of paper they work with represent. To them, it isn’t a stack of paper, but the weight of lives in their hands - or at the very least, the weight of your afternoon.

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Griot

It’s not just your job, but in your nature or your very blood to know things. Before this age of paper and pampered minds, your tradition has crafted the songs, stories, poetry, and histories that have lasted for ages against the constant tide of the Dream’s fickle passing. Knowledge put to the dead flesh is dead, and while it can be revived by an awakened mind? Too few minds are taught or can be bothered to awaken in these days, or so many elder griots fear. And so, they train their charges harder than ever.

While many griots are also bards or troubadours skilled in magic and defense, just as many rely on the strength of their communities and safe travel through the empire for their livelihood. It isn’t the power to defeat others that matters, after all - it is the power to remember and to be remembered, to maintain a living legacy with a spirit that can touch hearts and guide souls along the path of wisdom and fullness. You take bare information and you bring it to life. The great treasure of your work is a proper context. Whether you wander from town to town or advise kings and warriors by blood tradition, you shape history through how you speak it to others. In turn, you must understand how it may shape others.

Skill Proficiencies: History, Performance
Languages: Two of your choice, or one language and proficiency with a musical instrument
Equipment: A set of comfortable robes and a set of fine clothes, a steel mirror, perfume, a waterskin, a week’s rations and 1sp worth of soap, in a sack containing 15 gp

Lore Focus

Griots (and modern librarians) tend to have a focus to their studies. Trying to know everything is an excellent way to know a great number of things, if poorly. Only by mastering one field could one hope to begin the proper study of another, and most are content with a single focus for their professional lives.

Feature: Memory of Ages

You may not know the particulars of one dungeon, creature, or spell, but you likely know a song or story that can shed light on the deeper meaning behind a mystery. You can read the intent in the colors chosen by a warrior, or the origin of codenames used by a group of mercenaries. You have a legend for every situation, and rarely is one less than relevant if it comes to you. Work with your DM to shape the lore and oral histories that reflect back on the themes, mood, and challenges you’re likely to face. Details remain the province of ability checks or research, but the heart of a thing is never fully hidden from you.

Suggested Characteristics

Regardless of their methods and traditions, griots and librarians share a common passion for knowledge. This passion can lead them down many roads, figuratively and literally, and how one approaches the idea of knowledge and how best to preserve or present it can change a great deal in how one pursues it.

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Messenger

The Galasteri Empire has achieved something that has never been done before in the Dream - it has connected it. Countless kingdoms have risen and fallen, but most remained a mystery to all but their immediate neighbors. Now, rumors and legends fly across the imperial highway instead of meandering down the wild rivers. Each resting post and toll station along the roads lays in spyglass-sight with another, allowing for a network of semaphore messages to flow with near-immediacy at a fraction of a spell’s cost and rarity. The Dream has never been smaller than it is now, and the network can only grow.

Your work is to expand the signal towers, mirror poles, and odder tricks to expand the common voice of Galastaire. Much of this network is under threat, as Elvenkind has severed communication in response to Savrias’ war. Many nations and peoples fear that being connected makes them easy targets for the rapid surge of imperial soldiers or whatever nightmares make claim the roads for their own ends. You must go forth to share messages, expand the network and its defenders, and keep the Dream bound together. Should the Dream return to disconnection, it may not just end the Empire. The Empire may be forgotten.

Skill Proficiencies: Choose two from Animal Handling, Perception, Persuasion, and Survival
Languages: One of your choice or the message cantrip
Tool Proficiencies: Choose one from cartographer’s tools, navigator’s tools, or a vehicle
Equipment: One set of either cartographer’s or navigator’s tools, traveler’s clothes, a hooded lantern, a map case with 10 sheets of parchment, ink and an ink pen, and a coin purse containing 10gp

Feature: Ciphers and Signals

You can convey and interpret information with another messenger or outpost along the imperial roads via hand gestures, semaphore flags, whistles, or even coded taps and pulses. If you possess a secret language like Druidic or Thieves’ Cant, you can also use those tricks with another versed in those languages, so long as they can see or hear you. The messages must be brief and simple, and take up to 1 minute per 25 words at a rough estimate. You may be able to pick up on or create a distress cipher to those in the know, but if the signal ciphers are compromised, you won’t be the only one left vulnerable.

Suggested Characteristics

Messengers vary greatly, from letter-carriers to semaphore technicians to range-riding adventurers who set up remote stations and survive long enough enough to get them established and properly defended. At their heart, however, lies a common connection to communication and how that shapes their lives.

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Servant

Galastaire is a massive city of remarkable wealth. Outside of the muddy, warren-infested seawall of the docks, every available inch of the island is covered in ever-expanding boarding houses, tenements, inns, and markets. On the summit, the Palace Quarter holds more mansions and manors than the rest of the Dream combined. You’d think that servants would be plentiful and poorly regarded. You’d be very wrong. The few wealthy souls who don’t learn this lesson find themselves on a blacklist. Peers notice. And talk.

Thanks to Galastaire’s wealth and common standards of education, an elite class of caretakers, tutors, stewards, and managers have arisen. With a careful eye and a handful of cantrips, they can manage ten times the area of even experienced attendants. With that skill comes a demand for respect, not just for the ‘master servants’, but for their peers across all social classes. Managing intimate teams, a fine staff will remain with a palace or leave as a troupe rather than tolerate mistreatment, underpayment, or tone. In return, you have an honor as keen as any warrior - careful, efficient, timely, and ever flawless at the appointed hour. Always. Hell itself treads lightly when a servant goes out on a worthy master’s business.

Skill Proficiencies: Choose two from Animal Handling, Insight, Investigation, and Perception.
Languages: Choose two from any language or fromthe mending, message, and prestidigitation cantrips.
Equipment: Fine clothes that signify your station, a bell, a book to keep notes and schedules, a 1-ounce vial of ink and an ink pen, a hooded lantern, perfume, soap, a steel mirror, and a purse containing 10gp.

Household Role

Servants have their own roles and specialties, as sure as any army. Choose the role you perform, or roll a e10, taking a role from the chart below.

Feature: Good Help

There’s a peerage of sorts among servants, and your deeds both within and beyond your household will follow you. So long as your ambitions are reasonable, other servants will see to it that you’re granted shelter and that your messages or concerns reach the ears of their masters if they should. If there is a reason why your presence is unwelcome, it will be made known to you without causing a crude scene. Be ready to trade in favors, labor, and the indulgences of the wealthy that you’ve developed a taste for.

Servants heading outside of areas where connections will help may instead take the Retainers feature temporarily, as a hand-picked staff aids them in their master’s care or in serving their interests.

Suggested Characteristics

Servants can be a family of their own, or treated like part of a master’s family, but their lives are strongly tied to nature of the families they work with. Their relative wealth, their idiosyncracies, and the laxity or strictness of their expectations will make a servant’s personality either perfect or doomed from the start.

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Adepts

The mind is the weapon, wealth, and wonder of the empire, as the saying goes. Those who demonstrate cunning, leadership, or guile are often respected even as enemies or criminals. This doesn’t soften the fines, lashes, or executions that follow, but there’s a pragmatic understanding that the difference between a noble thief and a nimble prince is where the powers and fates have aligned them.

Ability with magic is often seen as a special blessing or achievement, and this is no different among those with the will to change the story. From the chosen few to the diamonds in the rough, magic and fate often come as one when they leave their mark upon the next generation of heroes, villains, and rivals.

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Exceptional Boons

Cultured

You’ve honed your bearing, presence, and skills to represent the ideal of a cultured soul - a person worth telling stories about. Whether you live up to the image you’ve cultivated is up to you and fate. You gain the following benefits:

• You learn two cantrips from the following list: light, mage hand, mending, message, prestidigitation, or thaumaturgy
• You can speak, read, and write two additional languages
• You gain proficiency in one set of artisan's tools and one gaming set of your choice

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Diplomatic Immunity

Prerequisite: the noble/knight background, the spy background, the benefactor background, the servant background, or the sponsorship of a major political power such as the empress, a crime boss, or a god

You gain the sanctuary spell, which you may cast with only verbal components. Once used, you regain the ability to do so again once you complete a long rest. However, this use is not expended if you cast this spell in an official capacity. Choose Wisdom or Charisma as your spellcasting ability for this spell.

Paragons

The Galasteri military is composed of elite archers, cavalry, and then a volunteer force of spear-bearers. The bow and spear are the cornerstone of the Galasteri way of war, with their shortened ‘brave spears’ as the signature weapon of an imperial officer or champion. The military ‘rents’ its forces out to tributary wayholdings and annexed nations, placing those funds in turn to improve the military’s equipment and training. Since the war, soldiers’ loyalties tend towards their local commanders before the Throne itself.

Outside of the military, the most renowned warriors of the Galasteri combine their martial prowess with a bond to the ‘sagely’ forces beyond. Arcane knights, idealistic paladins, and others stand as ‘sages of war’, respecting spiritual development as much as or more than victory in petty skirmishes or duels.

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Ancestral Boons

Spear and Shield

You’ve mastered the use of a shield and spear in tandem, guarding yourself while bringing a threat to bear. You gain the following benefits:

• Shields can be treated as an open hand for the versatile property of spears
• While holding a shield, proximity to hostile creatures doesn’t impose disadvantage on thrown ranged attacks
• While holding a spear, enemies provoke opportunity attacks when they first move adjacent to you

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Opening Gambit

You’ve honed and practiced the timing to make the most of thrown weapons to close the gap. This is a standard of Galasteri spear training, as well as knife and axe throwers across the Dream. You gain the following benefits:

• You may add the ability modifier you use with a thrown weapon you’re holding to your initiative
• As a bonus action, you may make a ranged attack with a thrown weapon and move up to your speed in the direction of your throw. You stop if you step into a square adjacent to your target.
• If you pass your discarded weapon or move adjacent to a target of your ranged attacks with a thrown weapon that hasn’t yet moved, you can retrieve your weapon as part of your movement.

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Sages

The magical traditions of the Galasteri are varied, but the conflict arising among them is a shared threat. Bards, smiths, leatherworkers, and sorcerers have maintained a longstanding oral tradition, but a new style of magic ‘born of paper, not of the flesh’ has grown popular. New sages keep their lore in forms that can be easily copied and shared - perhaps too easily for that lore to be respected and fully absorbed. The Throne supported transcribing knowledge for posterity and exchange while respecting the traditions of the past, but it was that same grand repository of knowledge that inspired Mansa Savrias to craft the failed working that devastated the Dream and lost the fabled Tower of Art to Lion's Fall.

In the recent era, arcane military magic has risen to superiority, and recognition as a Mage of the Court is awarded by the Empress or Master Heiwa alone. Nobles, promising volunteers, and troublemaking sages often find themselves thrust into the discipline of the arcane mantle, and then into the heart of conflicts.

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Supernal Source: The Three Queens

A common figure of veneration as goddesses, ancestors, or a single tripartite being, the Queens are the bringers of the palm, the grape, sorghum, and millet to the heartland and the peoples of the capital. She fills the belly and warms the throat. In her chaste aspect, her gifts are sown and swallowed wisely as she patronizes landowners and purposeful study. In her bared aspect, her gifts are sown abroad and swallowed deeply as raw fuel for art, love, vengeance, sex, and warfare. And in the dawn? One sows little and swallows not at all. Called The Mother of Regrets, Lady Hangover, or whispered profanities? She sits with grace, bringing reflection, renewal, regret, and a thoughtful silence.

Source Feature: Aspects of the Queen

As three beings in one, you may choose which goddess to venerate before taking a long rest. Once your long rest is completed, your bonus spells change to those of your chosen aspect. Should your long rest be interrupted and you’re unable to get at least 8 hours of sleep, you take on the Queen at Dawn’s spells.

Bonus Spells of the Three Queens

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Supernal Boons

Way of the Imperial Arcanist

One of the benefits and limits of formal magical education is that common curricula emerge. Based on the arcane practices of wayholders, the studies of an imperial arcanist are to demonstrate power, not just for the sake of knowledge. By demonstrating strength, wealth, and prowess, a court mage brings respect to their family, an asset to those sworn to their name, and a threat to any potential rivals.

Arcane Mantle

You can weave a protective mantle out of lingering magical energies. Upon casting, countering, or dispelling a spell of 1st level or higher, you gain temporary hit points equal to twice the spell’s level. This mantle of protection lasts for up to 1 minute or until no temporary hit points remain. While it mantle remains, you roll with advantage on Constitution saving throws. You may expend all of your temporary hit points to cast expeditious retreat, feather fall, jump, or shield without material components.

If you gain temporary hit points while the mantle is active, these hit points apply as part of the mantle.

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Embodied Art

You no longer need an arcane focus – or, in effect, you are the focus. Through tattoos that gleam with your workings, draughts of herbs turned to smoking breaths of internal alchemy, or an inner fire that shines through your eyes? Magic flows through a visible conduit from your body.

You also gain proficiency in one skill of your choice from Deception, Intimidation, Performance, or Persuasion.

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Iron Hand

Arcane authority imbues your flesh with power, turning the art into a weapon. You may cast any spell that requires a ranged spell attack roll as a melee spell attack instead. Once you do so, you may not do so again until you complete a short or long rest.

In addition, you may absorb a wand, rod, or magical staff into your body. The item shines as a spectral shade of its true shape as it is activated. You may use its effects as if you were attuned and wielding the item – including replicating a potential weapon as a spell attack that deals force damage. Use your spellcasting modifier for attack and damage rolls with such a weapon.

If the item becomes non-magical, is destroyed, or otherwise vanishes, it leaves your body. It also leaves on death or if subject to an antimagic field. You may only absorb one object at a time.

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Mastery of Breath

You have now learned how to consume and internalize arcane might thrown against you. As your reaction, you may replicate the effects of a counterspell, regaining 5 hit points per spell slot level of a spell targeting a creature, object, or area within 30 feet of you should you succeed. If this would exceed your maximum hit points, your Arcane Mantle is restored with the rest gained as temporary hit points.

Once you use this feature, you may not do so again until you finish a long rest.

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The Living Art

Your arcane mantle no longer fades after 1 minute. While your mantle is active, you also have a flying speed equal to your walking speed, but must land at the end of your turn.

You may now also embody an artifact, gaining all of its benefits and detriments. You must still attune to it and face the risks of such power, but you roll with advantage on any rolls to resist its influence or saving throws related to its detrimental effects. Rolled detrimental effects are rolled twice, with you taking your preference of the potential outcomes. Artifacts have a habit of freeing themselves in time, regaining their form. Its departure will not harm you, if unprovoked. If wronged, the separation may be harsher.

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