Found: Everywhere: Frontier towns, outlying farms and ranches, mining camps, the roads between, and the Capitol
Trades: Farmers, ranchers, miners, sheriffs, hunters, scavengers, Guild drivers, Capitol clerks and scholars
Reputation: Stubborn and still here. Most of what the Frontier is, humans built or refused to give up

Household roll. Tenants, general. The bulk of every holding. Short-lived, quick to breed, and suited to the land. Counted at tithe.

Amended. They led the rebellion, took the Capitol, and are most of the Frontier. The mortal account follows.

Humans are most of the Frontier. They’re the farmers who plant in spring knowing something may come out of the dark before harvest, the ranchers who count the herd every morning, and the sheriffs keeping order in towns with more graves than doors. The average human doesn’t hunt monsters or go into ruins. The average human scrapes by, bars the door at dusk, and fights every season against a land that was never rebuilt with them in mind.

Their history is heavy. Mortal kingdoms, human ones among them, fought the war that ruined the world. Humans labored longest under the Nobility through the golden era. And it was humans, more than anyone, who rose up when the Nobility declined, took the Capitol, and drove the lords out or killed them. Every human child grows up with both halves of that story. Most towns only tell the second half out loud.

There are two kinds of human life in Masada, and they rarely understand each other. Frontier humans live in the scattered towns and measure a good year by who’s still alive at the end of it. Capitol humans live inside a vast golden era city they barely understand, on top of ancient innards nobody has finished exploring, never with quite enough of anything. Each thinks the other has it easier. Neither is right.

Full entry

Playing a human

Humans are the Frontier’s majority, which makes them its judges. They decide who gets let in, who gets hired, who gets blamed, and who gets called a monster. A human character can carry that power well or badly, and the Frontier will test which. A few ways in:

You were a sheriff’s deputy in a town that sent for a hunter who never came. You went looking for one yourself, and found you were good at the work.
You grew up in the Capitol and fell out of favor for reasons you’d rather not discuss. Now you’re on the Frontier with an education and no idea how to survive.
Your older sibling went into the ruin on the edge of town and walked back out a week after the funeral. You left home rather than decide how you felt about that.
Your family has kept a stake over the door for six generations. Last winter you finally used it, and now you can’t go back to farming.

Humans are the most ordinary people anywhere, and that’s their strength. Nobody expects much from a human hunter, which leaves plenty of room to surprise them.

The Brennock’s Ford record

The Dawn Church at Brennock’s Ford has kept a record book since the town was chartered: births, burials, weather, and whatever the priest on duty thought worth writing down. A Capitol clerk once asked the priest what Frontier people are like. He handed her the book. These are the entries she copied out.

The year of the charter. Forty-one families come to settle where the old road crosses the Brennock, most of them from the Western farms. Jonah Wren says his great-grandfather marched on the Capitol with the rebels. So does everyone else’s. A half-dwarf crew raises the palisade by midsummer, and we feed them along the inside of the new wall, as is proper.

Autumn, the same year. Rang the dusk bell for the first time. Nobody asked why the channel past the east gate has to run, or why the Wrens hung a stake over their door before they’d hung the door. It’s what people do.

Year two. The Guild’s transport party came through in spring with thirty guards, salt, iron, and lamp oil. The halflings came in autumn with everything the Guild won’t carry and all the news the Guild won’t tell. We count the days between the two, and we count the silver after the halflings leave.

Year three. Buried Tom Harlan, 38. Kicked by a horse, and the leg set wrong, because the nearest trained healer was three weeks’ ride away. Buried Mercy Stroud, 44, of fever. Mercy looked sixty. Out here everyone does, by forty.

Year five. Hired Plumb’s crew back to deepen the well. The half-dwarves sleep in the jail on nights they can’t reach their camp. Nobody here thinks of them as anything but neighbors, and everybody here underpays them.

Year nine. The Defense Force came up the old road with a Capitol agent and a wagon under canvas. They didn’t stop. Sheriff Cole’s father said they never do for a town of two hundred with a problem in the orchard. That summer something took three sheep a week. Maelis sent word by spell to Sable Crossing, and a hunter rode in eleven days later. She charged forty gold and earned all of it.

Year eleven. A squad of the Ashline passed through on contract to the North, all dragonborn, and the whole town turned out to watch them drill in the square at dawn. Old Wren said he’d trust them with his life. The sheriff said she’d trust them with her cattle, which from her is more.

Year fourteen. A clerk arrived from the Capitol with a trunk of books and a letter of assignment. Soft hands, careful accent, and she jumped at the dusk bell. Everyone knew what she was the moment she stepped off the Guild wagon. She’s been here six years now and teaches the children their letters. The farmers still read her hands before her face, and they still call her Capitol. She says the city was never as comfortable as we think, and we say the Frontier is worse than she thinks, and neither of us is going to win that argument.

Year sixteen. A shifter took work on the Barrow ranch for a season, hired for his nose and watched for his teeth. He smelled the thing in the north barn before any of us heard it and went in first. After that, people were polite to him, and nobody asked him to supper.

Year seventeen. An Entling came up the river and asked, very formally, whether the east-bank orchard wanted tending. The council said no. It tended the orchard without permission, and the next year’s crop was the best in memory. Her name is Sorrel. She’s a local now, though nobody ever voted on it.

Year twenty. Nate Barrow went into the Glass House for scrap and didn’t come out. We held the funeral. A week later he walked back in through the east gate, whole, with a seam down one cheek and nothing to say about where he’d been. His mother let him in. Half the town hasn’t forgiven her for it. The other half would have done the same, and knows it.

Year twenty-one. A traveler stayed one night at the Dry Well, and when the dogs started barking at her, the lamps in the common room got brighter. By morning the whole town was talking, half of it grateful and half of it afraid of what an aasimar might draw. She left before noon. The dogs settled.

Proclamation Day, year twenty-two. The council stood a round at the Dry Well, and the names of our dead were read before noon, all ninety-one of them. In the Capitol they’ll have parades and extra rations. Out here it’s a glass and a list. The Strouds didn’t come. The Strouds never come, and nobody asks them why.

Year twenty-three. Talk at the Dry Well that the new peddler is a changeling. Nobody can prove it and everybody believes it. The peddler has stopped coming, and nobody can decide whether that proves anything either.

Year twenty-five. By order of the council, posted on the inside of the gate:

The bell. The dusk bell rings from the church tower at a quarter to sunset. After the last stroke the gate is barred, and every door with it. The church rings again at sunrise. Nobody goes out before the second bell.
Invitations. No one is to be invited inside after dark. Not a neighbor, not a child’s friend, not a voice you know. Travelers who arrive late sleep in the barn, the church, or the jail. The jail is unlocked.
The stake. Every household keeps a sharpened stake of ash or oak over the door. Take it down only if the house is empty for good.
The channel. The channel past the east gate is to be cleared every spring and kept running. Anyone who dams it for a mill wheel answers to the council.

Underneath, someone carved WHY THE CHANNEL? Underneath that, in a different hand: Because your grandmother said so.

Year thirty. Buried Hester Wren, 71, in her sleep, which is rare enough here to write down. She kept a stake over her door her whole life and never used it. Her grandson took it down, as is proper when a house empties, and then he carried it across the street and hung it over his own.

The clerk read the book through twice. Then she asked the priest what humans are, out here. He said: “Stubborn. Still here.” He had her write that down too.

Names

Frontier names are plain and practical. Family names usually come from a trade, a landmark, or an ancestor’s nickname, and they stick to a town for generations. Capitol humans add their district or ward when they want to sound formal, which is more often than Frontier folk would like.

Given names	Ada, Amos, Caleb, Clara, Eli, Hester, Jonah, Mercy, Nell, Ruth, Silas, Wade
Family names	Barrow, Cross, Fenn, Harlan, Mills, Stroud, Tanner, Whitlow
In practice	“Nell Whitlow” on the Frontier; “Clara Stroud of the Ninth Ward” in the Capitol