Concordant Expeditionary Order
Adventurers are not outlaws, but neither are they ordinary citizens. They exist in sanctioned deviation—an institutional exception carved out by necessity. The Processes maintain the world’s harmony, yet harmony cannot defend itself. When corruption, monsters, or chaos surface, it is motion, unpredictability, and ingenuity—traits anathema to the Processes—that are required to restore balance.
Thus, The Concordant Adventuring Charter was established in 3395, authorizing select individuals—often marked, trained, or “processed apart”—to act in service of maintaining Processual stability. These individuals are licensed to move beyond the boundaries of civility, to cross forbidden lands, and to engage directly with Unbound phenomena.
“The world must breathe, and sometimes the breath is fire.”
Who Becomes an Adventurer
Adventurers are not chosen by lineage or privilege, but by compatibility with contradiction. Some are born with an innate resistance to Process alignment—souls that never quite settled into Aureth’s rhythm. Rather than branding them Unbound, the Concord repurposes them. Others are rigorously trained through sanctioned academies, their bodies and minds tempered to withstand the shifting resonance of the Wounds and other chaotic zones.
To the public, they are necessary deviants: tolerated, admired, and feared. Citizens see them as walking borders between order and collapse—heroes who must remain slightly impure to do their work. The Processkeepers justify their existence as a controlled release valve. Each adventuring company is formally aligned with one of the Nine Processes, giving them an ideological anchor. This structure prevents the perception of adventurers as Unbound—on paper, they are extensions of the Processes themselves, specialized antibodies in the body of the world.
Still, some argue that adventurers tread too close to the Unbound. Many never return the same. The Concord teaches that even sanctioned chaos carries risk—that repeated exposure to the Wounds or other unbound phenomena thins the tether that holds a soul to Processual order.
The lesson told in academies is simple:
“To confront what the Processes cannot contain, to enter where Process cannot reach, and to preserve the balance of the lawful world through necessary irregularity. To fight what is unbound is to hear them whisper. To listen too long is to become what you silence.”
Structure
The High Concordant Council
A joint body of representatives from the main Academies and the Guild. It approves large-scale expeditions, oversees border management, and controls access to forbidden regions, including the Three Wounds.
The Process Liaisons
Assigned to each regional Guild Hall, these Liaisons act as observers, political safeguards, and spiritual advisors. They maintain ritual alignment ceremonies to ensure adventurers remain within acceptable Process resonance.
The Field Guilds
Independent branches scattered across the Process territories. Each Field Guild focuses on specialized training tied to a Process that their specific territory originally brought forth to the concord.
The Expedient Orders
Veteran formations of adventurers who’ve served across multiple territories. Some Orders gain reputations as near-mythical—their members rumored to walk freely in Unbound regions without succumbing. Officially, these stories are discouraged as dangerous superstition.
Culture
The Guild lives under a contradiction it cannot resolve:
It trains people to resist the very order it claims to protect. The Academies insist that the Guild is merely an instrument of the Processes—an adaptive expression of order. The Guild itself, however, whispers a different belief: that the Processes are fragile and blind, and only those who’ve stepped outside them truly understand what holds Aureth together.
“We serve the law by forgetting it when necessary.”
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