Ulmist Inquisition

The Inquisition is divided into three distinct branches, each pursuing a different aspect of their grim calling:

• The Minders: Watchers of thought, memory, and dreams. They specialize in identifying psychic corruption, possession, and compulsions. They are feared interrogators and dream-walkers, trained to recognize hidden madness and manipulative influence. Minders often use psionic or hypnotic techniques to probe for secrets or suppress dangerous knowledge.
• The Fleshbound: Hunters and enforcers. These are the visible agents of the Inquisition—armored inquisitors, executioners, and slayers of the unnatural. They are trained to identify creatures that masquerade as mortals—changelings, vampires, shapechangers—and destroy them without mercy. To the Fleshbound, appearance is not proof of innocence, and hesitation is a sin.
• The Veilbreakers: The most secretive branch, dedicated to rooting out forbidden knowledge, alien influence, and heretical magic. They seek and silence those who would tamper with the fabric of reality—cultists, warlocks, and scholars whose curiosity crosses lines better left unexamined. Veilbreakers are archivists and arsonists in equal measure: they collect dangerous lore only to destroy it.

The Ulmist Inquisition is both respected and loathed. Survivors of their interventions speak of interrogations that break the will, rituals performed in utter silence, and judgments rendered with no chance for appeal.

Cultists and corrupted nobles fear the Inquisition—but so too do innocents who have simply learned too much or asked the wrong question. In the minds of the Ulmists, curiosity is not innocence, and protection sometimes requires sacrifice.

The Ulmist Inquisition is not bound by law, nation, or creed. They serve a higher truth: that corruption begins in the unseen—in minds, books, shadows, and whispers. They believe reality is a fragile illusion, easily breached by those who seek forbidden truths or bargain with things beyond comprehension.

Their creed can be summarized as: “Silence the lie before it speaks. Burn the truth before it spreads.”

While they may sometimes ally with other organizations to confront shared threats, the Ulmists are deeply distrusted, even among other protectors of the innocent. To them, even a hero who dabbles too far in the arcane may one day need to be stopped.

Ulmist inquisitors often work alone or in pairs, traveling under assumed names and hidden symbols. Their presence is usually known only by the trail of confiscated books, broken cults, and burned homes they leave behind.

In some domains, they have embedded themselves into ruling institutions, acting as advisors or secret police. In others, they are outlaws and stalkers in the night, vanishing before dawn.

They never claim power openly. Their justice is swift, unrecorded, and irreversible.

The Inquisition’s roots lie in Malitain, a distant, brooding city lost in the Mists—a place plagued by cults, unspeakable doctrines, and the slow rot of sanity. It was there that the Ulmists first took form: philosophers turned zealots, scholars driven to extremism by exposure to mind-shattering truths. They watched their city buckle under the weight of hidden heresies and vowed never to let such corruption spread unchecked again.

When the Mists claimed Malitain, fragments of its people and doctrine scattered across the Domains of Dread. The Ulmist Inquisition survived as a fractured but persistent force, pursuing its mission across domains, always cloaked in suspicion and veiled purpose.