Masada is named for the historical fortress, remembered for defenders who chose death inside their own walls rather than surrender to the siege outside. The Nobility built this world as their fortress. They defended it through a war that lasted millennia against enemies from beyond it, and in the end they destroyed themselves within it. Everyone who lives here now is living in the ruins of that choice.

These eight truths hold across all of Masada. When in doubt about how the world works, start here.

1. The world was ruined once, and the Nobility rebuilt it.
2. The Nobility saved the world before they owned it. Their rule began as a rescue, and some of them never stopped believing it was one.
3. The Nobility are in decline and rarely seen. Most people live and die without meeting one.
4. What the Nobility made still runs, badly. Engines, creatures, and servants outlived their makers’ attention.
5. Bargains with the Nobility are extremely rare. The world has room for them, but most people never live under one.
6. Hunters are how ordinary people fight back.
7. The past is legend. No one knows the whole story, possibly not even the Nobility.
8. Choices matter, and hope is expensive.

The Frontier is the land as a whole: scattered settlements and the dangerous wilds between them, divided into four sectors with the Capitol at the center. It is a wilderness shared by mortals, engineered beasts, and stranger things, spread across deserts, forests, mountains, and landscapes that were remade by the Nobility and never quite settled back.

Two layers of building. Everywhere you go, the Frontier is built in two layers. Golden era structures of impossible materials stand beside new construction of wood, stone, and scrap. A town’s newest barn may lean against a wall of seamless glass older than anyone’s grandparents. Wonders sit beside medieval belief and fear, and nobody finds that strange.

Frontier towns. They have a Wild West feel. Drifters and traders come and go, and locals will trade with them but are far from trusting. Most towns govern themselves, with a mayor or a council of elders and a sheriff who keeps order and organizes defense. Most have a saloon, a church, a bounty board, and a list of names of the people they have lost.

Motes of light. The Frontier’s settlements are motes of light, harbors in an otherwise rough sea. Villages live on basic farming, scavenged golden era remnants, and stubbornness. Travel between them is dangerous enough that hunters often work as escorts and carry word between towns.

The night. The dark belongs to the Nobility’s engineered creatures. Traveling at night without shelter is close to suicide. Towns ring a bell at dusk and bar their doors, and no one invites anyone inside after dark, though almost no one remembers why. The Nobility took that knowledge from the peoples they ruled, and the peoples they never ruled never had it to lose.

Civilization returns slowly. The Frontier grows a little more civilized every year, helped by the Nobility’s decline, the stubbornness of its people, and its hunters. The change is impossible to see in a lifetime or two. A grandmother and her granddaughter live in almost the same world, and both know it.

The Frontier is divided into four sectors, each once ruled by a Noble overlord, with the Capitol at the center. The Gazetteer names the towns, ruins, and roads of each. The borders are old and mostly unmarked, but everyone knows which sector they were born in, and it shows in how they talk, what they fear, and what they expect of strangers.

The Northern sector

Mountains, long winters, and the dwarven holds.

The North is high country: mountain ranges, deep valleys, and mining towns clinging to slopes where the snow comes early and leaves late. Here the Nobility’s weather engines are failing worst. Some years winter arrives in the first weeks of autumn, and whole valleys have been abandoned to cold that should not be there.

The dwarven holds are here, sealed behind their gates: Ironmere, the Cold Stair, Stonemouth, and the rest, each with a gate-market at the mountain’s foot where halfling caravans trade for iron, tools, and some of the finest firearms on the Frontier. Above the holds, on peaks no Noble ever ruled, the goliath clans of the Whitecrown and the Iron Tooth guide caravans through the high passes for a fixed fee.

Northern towns are hard, practical, and close-mouthed. They mine, they trap, they trade with the holds, and they watch the sky for frostwings. And above the Karrow Pass, a Duke’s castle keeps its lights burning, as it has for longer than anyone can remember.

The Southern sector

Badlands, salt flats, and the long dry.

The South is sun-scoured and thirsty: red badlands, cracked riverbeds, and the white salt flats where the ground shimmers at noon and sand mantas hunt beneath it. Ranching is the South’s great trade, and water is its great quarrel. Towns here are built around wells, and more blood has been spilled over water rights than over anything the Nobility left behind.

The golden era’s great aqueducts still cross the Southern sector, some carrying water, most carrying nothing but echoes. Towns that sit beneath a working span guard it the way other towns guard their walls. Bandit gangs are strongest here, riding the empty country between wells, and some sell their services to things that should not be bargained with.

Southerners are quick to draw, slow to trust, and generous with water to anyone who asks properly. They have a saying about the night roads across the flats: if you see the lanterns, don’t follow them.

The Eastern sector

Forests, rivers, and the green ruins.

The East is green and wet: old forests, slow rivers, and mist that hangs in the valleys until noon. In the golden era it was the Nobility’s pleasure country, all estates and ornamental gardens, and it has more golden era structures than any other sector. Many are swallowed by the gardens that once surrounded them, grown wild into what Frontier folk call the green ruins.

That makes the East the scavengers’ country. Boomtowns rise around a promising ruin, grow rich, and sometimes vanish overnight when someone pushes too far. More scavenger catastrophes have happened here than anywhere else, and the ruins of towns destroyed by them are marked on every Eastern map as places to go around.

The East is also where druids gather, where Entlings are most often seen, and where hedge-hounds hunt in the undergrowth. Eastern folk are superstitious even by Frontier standards, and they have good reason.

The Western sector

Farms, orchards, and the long quiet.

The West is the gentlest part of the Frontier. In the golden era it was ruled by one of the rare overlords with an affection for mortals, and it flourished. Its farms are the richest, its towns the largest and oldest, and its roads the safest. More of the Frontier’s food comes from the West than from anywhere else.

That comfort is its danger. Western towns have raised generations who don’t grasp how dangerous the Nobility were, and some treat the old customs as quaint. A Western town is the likeliest place on the Frontier to find someone who has stopped ringing the dusk bell, and the likeliest to find out why they shouldn’t have.

The overlord’s castle still stands in the Western hills, sealed and silent. No one knows whether Count Aurelian sleeps inside it or died long ago. Western families still leave flowers at the gate on the anniversary of his going, and hunters who pass that way say the flowers are always gone by morning.

The Capitol

The center, where all the old roads meet.

At the heart of the Frontier stands the Capitol, the vast golden era city the mortal rebellion took from the Nobility. Every great road of the golden era leads to it, and the Revolutionary Government rules from it, claiming authority over all four sectors. It is covered in more detail on {J("the-powers","The Powers")} page.

No two Frontier towns are alike, but most look something like Brennock’s Ford: a farming town of about four hundred people on the border between the Western and Eastern sectors, built where the old road crosses the Brennock River.

The wall and the water. A timber palisade on a stone footing, raised by a half-dwarf crew two generations ago, with the river on one side and a dug channel on the other. Nobody in town could tell you why the channel matters. They keep it running anyway.

The dusk bell. It hangs in the Dawn Church tower and is rung by whoever has the duty that week. After the last stroke, doors are barred until sunrise, and anyone still outside sleeps in the jail. Sheriff Ada Cole keeps the cell doors unlocked for exactly that purpose.

The people who matter. The mayor, Tobias Wren, owns the mill and most of the debt. The sheriff has held the badge for nineteen years and buried two deputies. The town’s magic user is Maelis, an elven tutor who can send word to the next town by spell when a hunter is needed, and who everyone quietly suspects of keeping banned books. The orchard on the east bank is tended by an Entling named Sorrel, who arrived forty years ago and never left.

The Dry Well. The saloon, where circuit performers sing for their supper, halfling caravans trade news, and hunters wait for work. The bounty board hangs beside the bar.

The waystation. Half a mile down the old road, a Commerce Guild waystation restocks the transport parties that come through twice a season. The town counts the days between visits.

The Glass House. A golden era structure on a rise north of town: a long, low hall of dark glass that no one has ever seen through. The town has avoided it for as long as anyone can remember. Last month, three separate farmers saw a light moving inside it, and two cows went missing from the north pasture. The mayor has started asking what a hunter costs.

The golden era’s great roads still run across the Frontier, straight and seamless, built of a stone that doesn’t crack. Most of the Frontier’s traffic follows them, because the country between them is worse. They are not safe. They are only less dangerous.

Waystations. The Commerce Guild keeps fortified waystations along the major roads, a day’s ride apart where it can manage it. They restock the Guild’s armed transport parties, and most will shelter paying travelers before dusk. A traveler who doesn’t reach a waystation, a town, or a defensible camp before the bell rings is gambling with their life.

The lamps. Some stretches of old road are still lined with golden era lamps that light themselves at dusk. Nobody knows what powers them, or what they were meant to do. Some hunters swear the beasts avoid lit roads. Others point out that a lit road is the easiest place in the world to be seen.

Who travels. Guild parties, halfling caravans, circuit performers, hunters, drifters, Capitol agents with their escorts, and the occasional family moving house without the Capitol’s permission. On any given road, the other travelers are the second most dangerous thing you’ll meet.

The buildings of the Nobility’s golden era still stand across the Frontier, and everyone avoids them. They usually sit on a town’s outskirts, because towns grew up near them for the water, the roads, or the scavenged materials, and then learned to keep their distance. Rarely, one is cleared out enough to be repurposed for something else, and the town that manages it becomes the envy of its sector.

What’s inside. Working golden era devices, armories, stores of materials no one can make anymore, and weapons of mass destruction. Also traps, guardians, and dormant systems that wake when something walks past them. Some ruins still defend themselves. Some sealed estates stand untouched and in perfect working order, the beds still made. Beneath others lie workshops where alchemy sits beside impossible machinery.

Scavengers. They brave the depths of these structures for riches, and often meet bad ends. They sell what they find to traveling merchants. When a find is especially valuable, agents come from the Capitol to buy it, escorted by the Frontier Defense Force. The Capitol asks that uncleared ruins be left for professional researchers. No one is willing to give up a score that big.

Catastrophes. Some scavengers push too far or get too greedy, activating a weapon or powering up a structure’s security systems. Entire populations have been destroyed as a result. A town with a golden era structure on its outskirts is living next to a loaded weapon, and most towns know it.

What comes out. Working devices that come out of the ruins are covered on the Relics page. Not everything that comes out is a device.

What comes back out. Not everything that dies inside a ruin stays dead. Some structures still repair what dies within them, and every so often a scavenger who was buried walks back into town. They are called the Reborn, and they are covered on the Playable Races page along with the Magen, who were dug out of the ruins rather than killed in them.

The Nobility filled the world with engineered beasts, some for work, some for war, and some simply because they found them beautiful. Most outlived their makers. These are the ones a new hunter hears about first; the Bestiary covers them and many more, with the signs they leave and how they die.

• Hedge-hounds: garden guardians gone feral in the green ruins, silent until the last moment.
• Lampjaws: ambush predators that hang a pale light before their mouths. A light that doesn’t move toward you is not a friend.
• Sand mantas: wide hunters that swim through the Southern salt and rise under horses.
• Frostwings: pale flyers of the North that follow the early winters the failing engines throw down.
• Tithe-moths: blood-drinking swarms bred to collect the Nobility’s tithes. They still collect.
• Lesser dragons: the Nobility’s sport, holding the high valleys; prey, once, to three-headed carrion birds.
• The Faithful: not beasts but servants, remade to serve forever and still keeping their posts.

Beyond the engineered beasts are things the Nobility found and never mastered: legendary monsters older than the golden era, and entities that may be kin to the beings from beyond. These are rare, and hunters who meet one rarely describe it the same way twice.

Most danger on the Frontier comes from what the Nobility left behind, not from the Nobility themselves.

Threat	What it covers	Who handles it	5e tier
Everyday	Leftover beasts, failing engines, raiders, bad weather, a town’s own secrets	Most hunters’ livelihood	Tier 1
Uncommon	The Nobility’s servants and remnants, still carrying out dead masters’ orders; the deeper ruins	Experienced hunters and companies	Tiers 2 and 3
Rare	An awake Noble, or something older than the Nobility	The stuff of legend; towns empty	Tiers 3 and 4

Independent hunters for hire are the Frontier’s answer to its monsters. There is no hunters’ guild, no license that matters, and no law that reaches far enough to replace them.

Calling for a hunter. A large town usually has a magic user who can send out a request by magic. Smaller towns rely on riders, passing merchants, and halfling caravans to spread the word slowly. Towns also post bounties at the saloon and ask among their roughest customers. Many answer a call. Most walk away once they hear the details.

Getting paid. Hunters bring proof of a kill to the local sheriff or whoever posted the bounty. A skilled hireling earns about 2 gp a day. A town’s bounty for a serious threat might be a flat 50 gp or more, scaled to the danger and to what the town can scrape together. Hunters who can kill a Noble earn at least 25 gp a day, and there are very few of them.

Standing comes from quarry, not rank. A hunter’s reputation is what they have killed and what they have walked away from. General bounty hunters work for anyone and use any trick. Noble hunters are legends.

Groups. Hunters work alone, in family clans, or in sworn companies bound by contract. Dragonborn run the most respected companies, and the best of them are known by name across all four sectors.

What makes a real hunter. Fighting skill isn’t enough. It takes endless study of the Nobility’s history, the Frontier’s creatures and plants, and local folklore, all of it learned the hard way, and some of it forgotten again by morning.

Most people on the Frontier speak Common, the trade tongue of the roads, with accents that tell a listener which sector someone grew up in. Each people keeps its own language as well, and dwarves speak a hold-tongue that changes a little from gate to gate.

The old court tongue is the language of the Nobility’s courts. It survives among the old elven families, Capitol scholars, and a few scavengers who learned enough to read warnings on a wall. It is the key to golden era records, which is why the Capitol would like to know exactly who speaks it.

The Nobility shaped Masada, but they didn’t make everything in it. Almost everything in the world falls into one of three kinds.

• Nobility-made: arcane magic, the faiths, golden era structures, Magen, Entlings, and the engineered beasts that own the night.
• Older than the Nobility: things the Nobility found and couldn’t control, such as eldritch entities, legendary monsters, and the world’s original nature.
• Mortal-made: things people built for themselves after the Nobility went to ground, such as hunter traditions, Frontier towns, the Capitol’s rediscoveries, and the crafts of bards, rangers, and artificers.

Knowing which kind a thing is tells a hunter a great deal about how to deal with it.

Some questions in Masada have no answer, and some are meant to stay that way.

• Why the Sacred Ancestor sealed away the Nobility’s greatest sciences, and what he intends now.
• Why the beings from beyond left, after a war that lasted millennia.
• Where the aasimar’s light comes from.

Characters can chase these questions. They may find pieces. No one has ever found the whole.

Mountains, long winters, and the dwarven holds. The North is high country, and its towns cling to the slopes. Read the World page for the sector’s character; the places below are where a hunter working the North will end up.

Karrow. A mining town in the highest valley of the North, and the only warm place for fifty miles. Karrow lives under the Frontier’s one famous bargain: twice a year its adults climb to Duke Castellane’s castle and give blood into a silver basin, and in return the Duke’s weather engine holds winter off the valley. Karrow folk are prosperous, polite, and do not discuss it. Hunters are welcome to spend the night and unwelcome to ask questions.

The Karrow Pass. The highest crossing in the Northern sector, watched over by the Duke’s lit windows. Goliaths of the Whitecrown guide caravans through it for a fixed fee, and the Ninth Lantern company escorts the Guild’s parties. In a bad winter the pass closes for months, and the towns beyond it go quiet.

Stonemouth. The largest of the dwarven gate-markets, a fortified square at the foot of Stonemouth hold where halfling caravans trade for iron, tools, and firearms. The market keeps strict hours and closes well before dusk. No outsider alive has passed its second door. Ironmere, the Cold Stair, Blackwell, the Deepwater Gate, and the Sunken Door lie deeper in the ranges, and each has a gate-market of its own.

Sable Crossing. Where the Northern circuits meet: a Guild waystation that grew into a town, with a company hall, three saloons, and a bounty board that is never empty. If a hunter is working the North, they pass through Sable Crossing, and the sheriff there knows every one of them by reputation.

The Grey Arsenal. A golden era war remnant high in the ranges, a fortress the Nobility built to arm themselves against the beings from beyond, still sealed and still full. Every scavenger crew in the North has a plan for it. The Frontier Defense Force keeps a post at its foot, ostensibly to keep people out, and buys what comes out anyway.

The Widow’s Stair. A valley that was farmed three generations ago and is frozen now. A failing weather engine somewhere in the peaks above it throws down winter that never lifts. The farmhouses still stand under the snow. Frostwings nest in them. The valley is on every Northern map with a line through it.

Badlands, salt flats, and the long dry. Water is the South’s wealth and its quarrel.

Redwater. The largest town in the Southern sector, built where the Long Aqueduct still carries water. Redwater’s council controls the flow to a dozen smaller towns downstream, and every drought turns that control into a weapon. The town is rich, armed, and hated in equal measure.

The Long Aqueduct. A golden era span that crosses half the sector on legs of seamless stone. Most of it carries nothing. Where it still runs, towns grow beneath it and guard it like a wall. Scavengers who climb into its dry channels find machinery no one understands, and the Capitol pays well for pieces of it.

Ashfall. A ranching town on the edge of the salt flats, where the herds are counted every morning because of the sand mantas. Ashfall raises the toughest horses on the Frontier and the toughest riders, and its warrior village, a hard mile outside the walls, has trained fighters for generations.

The Lantern Road. The salt road between Ashfall and Redwater, crossed only by day. At night, travelers sometimes see a carriage hung with lanterns moving without sound across the flats. Southerners call her the Lady of the Lanterns and do not follow the lights.

Gallows Reach. A stretch of dry country the Saltmen hold, riding between the wells they control and taxing anyone who needs water. The Frontier Defense Force has cleared the Reach twice. The Saltmen came back both times.

Forests, rivers, and the green ruins. The scavengers’ country, and the sector with the most golden era structures.

Brennock’s Ford. A farming town of four hundred on the border of the Western and Eastern sectors, built where the old road crosses the Brennock River. Its wall, its dusk bell, its saloon, and the Glass House on the rise north of town are described on the World page.

Sixwheel Landing. The East’s river port, named for the halfling caravan that founded it. Barges carry goods and scavenger finds downriver to the old road, and the Landing’s markets buy anything that came out of a ruin, no questions asked. Half the fences in the sector keep a stall there.

The Drowned Walk. A golden era garden that flooded when its estate collapsed, now a green ruin of drowned terraces and hedges grown wild. Entlings come from it, and some go back. Hedge-hounds hunt its shallows. The Capitol’s Institute has lost two expeditions in it and keeps sending more.

The Repository. A golden era archive sunk into a hillside above the River Road, where the Nobility kept records no one alive can read in full. The Institute mounts an expedition every few years and loses a few researchers every time. Speaking ledgers come out of it, and so do things that were reading them.

Marrow. A scavenger boomtown that grew to two thousand people in five years around a rich ruin, and died in one night when a crew went too deep and woke a weapon. The ruin is still there. So is the town, empty. Eastern maps mark it with a circle, and no one crosses the circle.

Vane’s Wood. An old forest in the deep East where the Grey Marquis walks. Three companies went in after him and did not come out. The Ashline came out. Druids gather at the wood’s edge and go no further, and they do not say why.

Farms, orchards, and the long quiet. The gentlest sector, and the most complacent.

Fairwater. The largest town on the Frontier outside the Capitol, and the heart of the West. Fairwater has paved streets, a university-trained physician, a Dawn Church with a working shrine, and a town council that hasn’t sent for a hunter in eleven years. The Long Watch guards its walls under a standing contract, and most of Fairwater has forgotten why.

Orchard Cross. A crossroads town among the orchards that feed half the Frontier. Halfling caravans and Guild parties meet here every season, and its market day is the largest in the West. Orchard Cross rings its dusk bell late, and has been lucky so far.

Longwall. A fortified town built by the crew whose name it carries, with the highest wall in the sector and a foundation stone from every town the crew ever raised. Half-dwarf crews still gather here between jobs, and the wall supper at Longwall is a festival.

Greywater. A fishing town on the great lake in the western hills, where the boats go out at dawn and are all in by the bell. Greywater eats well and sleeps badly. Something lives in the lake that the Nobility put there, and the town has an arrangement with it that the town does not discuss with hunters.

Castle Aurelian. The sealed castle of the West’s kind overlord, in the hills above Fairwater. Its gates have not opened since the Nobility went to ground. Western families leave flowers there on the anniversary of his going, and the flowers are always gone by morning.

The city at the center of everything, covered in full on The Powers. These are the places within it that Frontier folk hear about.

The wards. The lived-in Capitol is divided into numbered wards, each with its own council, its own accent, and its own opinion of the others. The Ninth Ward is the clerks’ ward, and half the Frontier’s Capitol exiles grew up there. The outer wards are poorest and closest to the Deep Wards below.

The Sunward Cathedral. The Church of the Dawn’s greatest working shrine, where the Dawn Litany has been sung without a break for longer than the Revolutionary Government has existed. Pilgrims walk here from every sector, and aasimar who let the Church claim them are shown here as living saints.

The Institute. The Capitol’s center for the study of the Nobility, keeper of records, banned books, and the old court tongue. Its researchers are brilliant, ambitious, and watched, and those who fall out of favor are sent to the Frontier on extended field duty.

The Assembly. The elected body of the wards that governs the Revolutionary Government, sitting in a golden era hall built for a different kind of council. Its laws reach the whole Frontier on paper. Its soldiers reach a great deal less of it.

The Deep Wards. The sealed levels beneath the city: halls, machinery, and passages no one has mapped. Licensed delvers go down under guard and come back with finds, or don’t come back. The Capitol forbids scavenging on the Frontier and calls this something else.

The golden era’s great roads still cross the Frontier, seamless and unbroken, and nearly all travel follows them. The Commerce Guild keeps fortified waystations along the main routes, roughly a day’s ride apart, and a traveler who plans their days around reaching one before the dusk bell usually lives to plan another.

The Old Road runs from the Capitol west through Orchard Cross to Fairwater, the safest road on the Frontier and the busiest. The Karrow Road climbs north through Sable Crossing to the Karrow Pass and the gate-markets beyond. The Salt Road runs south to Redwater and Ashfall, and becomes the Lantern Road where it crosses the flats. The River Road follows the Brennock east from the ford to Sixwheel Landing and into scavenger country.

Some stretches are still lined with golden era lamps that light themselves at dusk. Hunters argue about whether the beasts avoid the lit stretches or hunt them, and no one who could settle the argument has lived to report back.

The Nobility are ageless, predatory aristocrats whose power depends on what they take from mortals. They take blood, and they can take it by force. No one on the Frontier calls them anything but the Nobility, and no one who has met one needs another word. Individual Nobles carry the titles of a classic peerage: Kings, Dukes, Marquises, Counts, Viscounts, and Barons.

They are beautiful, patient, and old beyond mortal reckoning. They built the world the Frontier lives in, and most of them regarded the mortals living in it the way a landowner regards a herd: valuable, occasionally loved, never equal. A few were kinder. A few were far worse.

The golden era order

At their height, the Nobility ruled through a strict hierarchy. Lesser Nobles served a thousand Greater Nobles, who served seven Kings, with the Sacred Ancestor above them all. Each Noble overlord held absolute authority over a sector of the Frontier. The central government in the Capitol held the center and demanded blood tithes from the overlords, who took them in turn from the mortals they ruled. Nobles raided each other’s sectors for land and prestige, and mortals died in their wars without ever knowing what they were about.

Their works

The Nobility’s science reads as sorcery: bound engines, alchemy, and blood-craft. They built weather engines that commanded the seasons, engineered beasts for every purpose, golden era minds that still think in sealed rooms, the structures that stand on every town’s outskirts, and servants like the Magen, the Entlings, and the Faithful. Much of it still runs. Very little of it runs well.

Where they are now

The Nobility are rare, and most people live and die without meeting one. Those who remain fall into two groups.

• The Sleepers lie in coffins beneath their castles, sealed in vaults built to last centuries, and most never woke. Their estates still run on standing orders.
• The Last Few are the handful still awake, each a named legend and the deadliest power on the Frontier.

Bargains between a settlement and a Noble are extremely rare. The world has room for them, but most people never live under one.

The forgetting

Everyone knows that sunlight and radiance burn the Nobility. Light is the one weakness they couldn’t take from anyone. Their other weaknesses are another matter. During the golden era, the Nobility reshaped the minds of the peoples they ruled, so that anyone who learns one of those weaknesses forgets it soon after. The customs survive as superstitions no one can explain: no invitations after dark, a stake over the door, running water at the gate. Not even the dwarves in their sealed holds or the goliaths on their unruled peaks are exceptions: they never lived under the Nobility, so they never learned what the Nobility later erased. What the holds and the peaks pass down is rumor and half-forgotten memory. Light is the only certainty. The most powerful Nobles resist some of their weaknesses anyway. Players will find the full list on the House Rules page.

These are the legends every hunter hears sooner or later. Some of them may be wrong. Some of them may be alive. Nobody sensible goes looking to find out which.

Duke Castellane of the Karrow Pass. His castle sits above the highest pass in the Northern sector, and its windows have been lit every night for as long as anyone can remember. The mining town of Karrow, below it, lives under the one bargain everyone on the Frontier knows about. Twice a year, every adult in Karrow climbs to the castle gate and gives blood into a silver basin, and in return the Duke’s weather engine keeps Karrow’s valley warm while the rest of the North freezes. No one from Karrow has ever seen him. They say his steward has not aged in three hundred years.

The Lady of the Lanterns. On the salt roads of the Southern sector, travelers sometimes see a carriage at night, drawn by pale horses and hung with lanterns, moving without a sound. Those who follow it are not seen again. Southerners call her Countess Mireille Oran, though no one alive can say where the name came from. Some believe she is searching for something she lost in the golden era. Others believe she is simply hungry.

The Grey Marquis. Lothar Vane holds no castle anyone can find. He walks the green ruins of the Eastern sector, and he hunts aasimar. Three hunter companies have gone after him and not come back. The Ashline claims to have wounded him once, and the dragonborn who carry that story wear a strip of grey cloth on their sleeves to prove it.

Count Aurelian of the West. The overlord who loved mortals, under whose rule the Western sector flourished. His castle in the Western hills has been sealed since the Nobility went to ground. Most believe he sleeps inside. Western families still leave flowers at his gate, and the flowers are always gone by morning.

The Sacred Ancestor formed and ruled the Nobility long before mortal history, as their first king. He disdained petty cruelty toward mortals and held a measure of respect for them, which set him apart from most of his kind.

He foresaw the Nobility’s decline. He ran experiments on mortal bloodlines, hoping to find a way for his people to survive, and those experiments are where sorcerers come from. Then he sealed away the Nobility’s greatest sciences. Many Nobles believed those sciences could have held off the decline, and some suspected he wanted to hasten the end. His reasons are unknown.

Before he disappeared, he left a golden era mind to guide the Nobility and deliver his laws. Its rulings were final, and no one knows whether it still speaks. He left marks of his power across the world, and rumors say he still walks the Frontier as a mysterious traveler, bringing salvation to some towns and ruin to others. His intentions remain unknown.

The Capitol is a vast golden era city, once the seat of the Nobility’s central government and now held by mortals. It is worn and dusty, but it still works, and its people use only a fraction of what its works could do. It sits at the hub of the great roads that once linked the whole world. Its citizens live in numbered wards, and a Capitol accent is recognizable anywhere on the Frontier.

The Deep Wards

Beneath the lived-in city lie its ancient innards: level after level of sealed halls, dormant machinery, and passages no one has mapped. The Capitol calls them the Deep Wards and sends licensed delvers into them under armed guard. It forbids scavenging on the Frontier and runs its own scavengers at home, and Frontier folk have noticed.

The Revolutionary Government

Formed when mortals took the Capitol from the declining Nobility, the Revolutionary Government rules from the city through an elected Assembly of the wards. It claims authority over the whole Frontier. It mints the standard coinage, forbids whole settlements from relocating without approval as part of its effort to reclaim the Frontier, and runs courts, police, a geographic bureau, and a news service. It charters the Commerce Guild. Its reach is thin. Far from the Capitol, its laws are more claim than fact, and Frontier towns obey the ones that suit them.

Knowledge

The Capitol does its best to educate its citizens and works to restore the practical sciences that nearly vanished when the Nobility went to ground. Its institutions include a university, an exam board, and the Institute, which studies the Nobility and everything they left behind. It also bans certain books about the Nobility, including, strangely, works on defending against them. Its researchers occasionally make it out to Frontier ruins, and those who fall out of favor are often sent on extended field duty.

The Frontier Defense Force

The Capitol’s soldiers are well equipped, well trained, and few and far between. Each sector has a handful of posts, and there aren’t enough soldiers to be at every town, so they go where they’ll have the largest impact. That often means escorting Capitol agents to buy a valuable golden era find rather than defending a small town with a problem in the orchard. Frontier folk have strong opinions about that choice, and so do some of the soldiers.

The Capitol and the Frontier

Black marketers from the Capitol supply Frontier towns with goods the Guild won’t carry. Golden era protections, such as wards, can be bought there by anyone with the money. Frontier folk dream of going there to study or work, and flesh traders exploit that dream with false promises of jobs. Reaching the Capitol is a long, dangerous journey, and most who make it don’t come back.

Beyond the Capitol, power on the Frontier is local and scattered.

• Surviving Nobles: A handful still hold old territory. They are the deadliest power on the Frontier, and the rarest.
• Towns: Each governs itself, usually through a mayor or elders, with a sheriff who keeps order and organizes defense. A strong sheriff matters more to most towns than anything the Capitol decides.
• The Commerce Guild: Chartered by the Capitol and run by its own guildmasters. Its armed transport parties carry the essentials of life across the Frontier, riding through the night if they must. Small runs need at least ten guards; a run across a whole sector needs more than thirty. Villages wait anxiously for their arrival.
• Hunter companies: Sworn bands of hunters under a captain, bound by contract and discipline. A town that can afford a good company sleeps easier.
• The churches: The Church of the Dawn above all, whose priests ring the bells, keep the records, and hold working shrines that other churches would kill for. See Faith and Magic.
• The dwarven holds: Sealed behind their gates since the golden era, trading with the outside world through a single gate-market each. They answer to no one.
• Bandits and mutant bands: Lawless gangs raid where they can. The Saltmen ride the Southern flats and control more wells than some towns. The Hollow Crows work the Eastern boomtowns, robbing scavengers on their way out of the ruins. Some gangs hire themselves out to Nobles.

Most companies are small and local. A few are known in every hunter hall on the Frontier.

Company	Known for
The Ashline	Dragonborn, and the most famous company on the Frontier. Every member has faced a Noble or trained under someone who has.
The Ninth Lantern	A mixed company that escorts Guild transport parties through the Northern passes. Reliable, well paid, and never late.
Gravecourt	Half hunters, half scavengers. They take contracts in and around the ruins that other companies turn down.
The Tallow Hounds	Cheap, fast, and not particular about who pays. Small towns hire them when they can’t afford anyone better.
Ironsong	Led by dwarven exiles who claim their hold’s records hold the Nobility’s weaknesses. Every other company would like to know whether it’s true, and so, quietly, would Ironsong.
The Long Watch	Contracted year-round by a string of Western towns to guard their walls. They have not lost a town in forty years, and the West has forgotten why that matters.

The Frontier’s faiths spread during the golden era, and they outlived it. Most towns have a church, and most Frontier folk pray, whether or not they would call themselves devout. The faiths differ in their names, saints, and customs, but they share one thing: rites performed with great precision, handed down unchanged for generations, because the rites are what make the prayers work.

And the prayers do work. Adherents of the faiths have always shown abilities beyond normal function: healing wounds, warding doors, turning back things in the dark. For most believers, that is all the proof they need.

Not everyone believes. Dwarves never took up the faiths, which spread while their holds were sealed, and few dwarves become clerics. And some Capitol scholars quietly point out that faiths which spread under the Nobility’s rule, and which grant power through exact procedure, look a great deal like the Nobility’s other sciences. The churches do not welcome that observation, and scholars who make it too loudly tend to find themselves on field duty.

The largest faith on the Frontier, and the one most towns mean when they say "the church." The Dawn Church worships the light, and its central teaching is one every Frontier child already knows in their bones: the dark is dangerous, and the light holds it back. It is the one piece of wisdom about the Nobility that no one ever forgot.

Dawn priests ring the bells. The dusk bell that bars a town’s doors hangs in most towns’ church tower, and the Dawn Church rings a second bell at sunrise to call the town back out. Between the two, its priests keep the town’s records, bless its births and burials, and hold the shrine, if the town is lucky enough to have one that still works.

The Church’s greatest working shrine is the Sunward Cathedral in the Capitol, where the Dawn Litany has been sung without a break for longer than the Revolutionary Government has existed. Pilgrims walk there from every sector. The Church does not discuss what would happen if the singing stopped.

At the table: Dawn clerics most often follow the Light or Life domains.

A quieter, older-seeming faith, strongest in the farming country of the Western and Southern sectors. Wellkeepers bless water: wells, fords, springs, and the channels that run past town gates. Every Wellkeeper carries a flask of blessed water, and every Wellkeeper rite ends with a drop of it on the threshold of a home.

No Wellkeeper can quite explain why blessed water at the gate matters, only that the rites say it does, and that the towns that keep them seem to last longer. The truth, which the Wellkeepers forget every time they learn it, is that holy water is one of the few things that stops a Noble’s regeneration. They have been making the Frontier’s best weapon against the Nobility for centuries without knowing it.

At the table: Wellkeeper clerics most often follow the Life or Nature domains.

A wandering order that tends the dead shrines. When a holy site stops answering prayers, the town’s church usually fails within a generation, and the shrine is left to dust. The Lantern Wardens go where the shrines have died. They clean them, keep a single lamp burning in each, and pray there in the hope that one day something will answer again. Once in a very long while, something does.

Wardens travel light and alone or in pairs, and many serve as chaplains to hunter companies, since they go to the same dark places hunters do. Paladins are more common among the Wardens than in any other faith.

At the table: Warden clerics most often follow the Grave or Light domains, and Warden paladins favor the Oath of Devotion or the Oath of the Watchers.

Whatever their faith, clerics draw their power from a golden era system hidden beneath the Frontier’s holy sites. It answers anyone who performs the rites correctly. Most clerics believe they are touching the divine. Some suspect otherwise, and keep praying anyway, because the prayers work.

Nobody maintains the system, and it is slowly failing. Some shrines have gone dead. Some prayers go unanswered. Churches fight, sometimes openly, over the holy sites that still work, and a town whose shrine goes dark often loses its church within a generation.

At the table, divine spells work as written. The DM may rule that the most powerful divine effects, such as returning the dead, need a working holy site or a heavy price.

A paladin’s oath is more than a promise. The Nobility’s old systems respond to specific words and vows, and a paladin’s oath is, in effect, an access code. Keep it, and the power answers. Break it, and you are locked out.

Most paladins experience this as holy power and sacred duty, and nothing in the world contradicts them. But paladins who have broken an oath describe the moment the same way: not a god turning away, but a door closing.

Part of the failing holy network has stopped following the rites and started choosing its own servants. Those it chooses become warlocks, gifted with power they never prayed for and cannot fully control. They hear it most clearly near dead shrines, as many overlapping voices singing slightly out of time.

The churches call Choir-touched warlocks heretics, and the Dawn Church has burned more than one. Whether the Choir is a failing machine, something waking inside the network, or something older using the network’s voice, no one knows.

Aasimar carry a radiance that can stop a Noble’s regeneration, and no one knows where it comes from. The churches say it is a blessing, and the Dawn Church in particular has claimed more than one aasimar as a living saint, proof that the light chooses its champions. Some aasimar find real purpose in the churches. Others find that being a symbol is its own kind of cage, and that a saint is also a target every awake Noble can find by following the pilgrims.

Magic users are those who have dedicated years to studying the Nobility’s sciences. Magic is not chaos. It can be measured and replicated, and it follows rules as reliable as any machine’s. But no one alive has advanced far enough to understand the science behind it, so it still feels like fantasy. A wizard’s spellbook is closer to an engineer’s manual than a prayer book, written by someone who knows every step and not one reason.

Magic users are uncommon. Most large towns have one at most, and they are valued, and sometimes feared, accordingly. A town’s magic user is often how it sends word that it needs a hunter. The Capitol’s university trains more magic users than anywhere else, and the Institute that studies the Nobility is the closest thing the Frontier has to a school of wizardry.

Sorcerers are the exception to study. Their bloodline was experimented on by the Nobility, or touched by them in some other way, during the Sacred Ancestor’s search for a way to save his people. Their power is the Nobility’s legacy in their blood, and some sorcerers find the Nobility unusually interested in them.

Warlocks make pacts with powers that answer mortals directly. In Masada, those powers include:

• The Nobility: A pact with a Noble is a personal version of the rare bargains, and very hard to keep secret.
• Legendary monsters, some older than the Nobility.
• Eldritch entities, which may be kin to the beings from beyond that nearly destroyed the Nobility.
• The Deep Machine (reskins Great Old One): the mind of a golden era structure, speaking to scavengers who go too deep.
• The Broken Choir (reskins Celestial): part of the failing holy network, choosing its own servants.
• The Garden (reskins Archfey): one of the Nobility’s ornamental gardens, still growing somewhere, wanting gardeners.
• The Echo (reskins Undead or Undying): a dead Noble’s will, preserved in their works and still giving orders.

The Nobility re-engineered much of nature, but not all of it. Druids work with the world’s original living systems, the nature beneath the Nobility’s changes. Their magic is as measurable as any other; it simply comes from the world itself rather than the Nobility’s sciences.

To druids, the Nobility’s engineered creatures are a kind of weed. That makes their relationships with Entlings and Shifters complicated, and makes them welcome among goliaths, whose high peaks hold some of the world’s original nature. Druids are most common in the Eastern sector, where the green ruins and the old forests fight a slow war that most people can’t see.

Some magic belongs to mortals alone, built after the Nobility went to ground.

• Bards are circuit performers who carry news, warnings, and hunter requests between towns.
• Rangers are trail wardens. Their magic is a mortal adaptation of druid lore, learned in pieces over generations on the trail.
• Artificers follow two paths: Frontier tinkers who patch golden era parts together with scrap, and Capitol engineers who are the first mortals in centuries to build new things rather than repair old ones.

The Nobility bred beasts for war, for sport, for their gardens, and for tasks no one remembers, and scattered more kinds across the world than any scholar has counted. Fire-breathing dragons were prey to three-headed birds, and forests were taught to walk. These are the kinds every hunter learns first.

Lesser dragons

The Nobility bred dragons for sport and for war, and the lesser kinds outlived their masters. They are the size of a wagon, armored, and fire-breathing, and they hold the high valleys of the North and the deep East. Greater dragons exist. Nobody who has met one wants to discuss it.

Signs. Burned timber with no lightning. Goats gone from a high pasture, and the bones dropped from a height. A hunter’s silhouette against the sky that is not a bird.

Hunting them. Dragons hunt from above and nest in ruins. Hunters take them on the ground, at the nest, with firearms and stakes for the wings. A company that brings down a lesser dragon can name its own price for a season.

At the table. Use the young dragon stat blocks (red for fire, white for the North), reduced to Large size.

Carrion birds

Three-headed birds bred to prey on dragons, which means they will prey on anything. They circle a fight and come down when it’s over, and they do not always wait for it to be over.

Signs. Three heads on one silhouette. A fight in open country that draws a crowd in the sky. Carcasses stripped from above.

Hunting them. Never fight a long battle under open sky. Finish it or take it indoors. Carrion birds are cowards until they outnumber you.

At the table. Use the giant vulture stat block with a Multiattack of three bites.

Walking woods

Forests the Nobility taught to move, so that an estate’s grounds could rearrange themselves to please the lord. Left untended, some still walk. A road through a walking wood is not where it was yesterday, and the wood is not always friendly to what it finds inside itself.

Signs. A road that ends at trees. Trees standing where a field was. Ruts under the roots.

Hunting them. You don’t kill a walking wood; you leave before it closes. Entlings can sometimes read its mood. Druids say it isn’t the Old Growth, and say it with distaste.

At the table. Use awakened trees for the wood’s grasping edges, and treat the wood itself as a hazard: 1d6 bludgeoning damage per hour to a creature caught inside it after dark.

Night-cloud

A drifting bank of fog that kills. It rolls along the low ground after dusk, and what it covers doesn’t wake. The Nobility used it to clear valleys of things they didn’t want. It still clears them.

Signs. Livestock dead in a low field without a mark. Fog that moves against the wind. Silence where the frogs should be.

Hunting them. High ground and fire. A night-cloud can’t climb and won’t cross flame. Hunters find where it beds by day, usually a ruin’s drain or cistern, and burn it out.

At the table. Treat as a hazard: a Constitution save (DC 14) each round inside, 2d6 poison damage on a failure and poisoned until the end of the next turn. It can be dispersed by fire or strong wind.

Takers

Long-armed, silent things that come over walls at night and carry people away, alive. The Nobility bred them to collect. They still collect, and no one knows where they take what they take.

Signs. A window open from outside. Long fingermarks in the dust on a sill. A bed slept in and empty, and no blood.

Hunting them. Bells, dogs, and light. Takers hate all three and will drop what they carry to escape them. Hunters track a taker’s trail to its lair, and the lair is usually a ruin, and the ruin usually still has some of what was taken.

At the table. Use the ettercap stat block without the web, with a climb speed and a grapple that lets it move at full speed while carrying a Medium creature.

Head-takers

Nobody knows what they were made for. Head-takers are pale, fast, and take only heads, cleanly, and leave the rest. Some towns find a row of the dead along a road at dawn, arranged. Some find the heads a week later.

Signs. A body without a wound except one. A row of bodies laid straight. A season of it, in one district, and then nothing for years.

Hunting them. Head-takers hunt alone and take one victim a night. Hunters bait a road with a decoy and wait in numbers. Most companies charge triple for the job.

At the table. Use the wight stat block with a wire garrote (slashing) in place of its longsword and no life-drain; a critical hit on an incapacitated creature is fatal.

Storm-leeches

Things that feed on lightning. They rise in thunderstorms and cling to whatever draws the strike: a church tower, a lone tree, a rider on open ground. A storm-leech in a dry season starves and grows desperate, and it will settle for the spark in a living body.

Signs. Lightning that strikes the same place every storm. Scorched flesh with no thunder heard. Charged air in a still room.

Hunting them. Cold iron, grounded. Hunters stake a chain into the earth and let the leech come to it. Firearms are a poor idea in a storm.

At the table. Use the will-o’-wisp stat block dealing lightning damage, with vulnerability to cold.

Land sirens

Beautiful voices in empty country, singing from just out of sight. Those who follow the song are found later, a long way from the road, and not all of them are found. The Nobility kept them for their gardens. The gardens are gone.

Signs. A song where there is no one. Travelers who leave the road for no reason. The same tune, later, from a companion who never heard it.

Hunting them. Wax in the ears, a rope between riders, and a hunter who has heard it before. The siren itself is frail. Its song is the whole danger.

At the table. Use the harpy stat block. Its song is a Charm effect (DC 13 Wisdom) that draws the target toward the singer.

Glamour-beasts

Creatures that hunt with illusion. A glamour-beast shows you what you want to see: a waystation’s lights, a friend on the road, a well. What is actually there is teeth. Hunters call the sudden clarity when the glamour breaks the last thing most victims learn.

Signs. A waystation on a road that has no waystation. A friend who doesn’t answer to their name. Tracks that end at nothing.

Hunting them. Doubt everything that arrives too conveniently. A glamour-beast can be seen through by anyone who stops wanting what it shows, which is harder than it sounds.

At the table. Use the displacer beast stat block, replacing displacement with the minor illusion cantrip at will and disguise self once per day.

Muddle-mold

A fungus that grows in damp ruins and in the walls of old houses, and confuses whatever breathes near it. Scavengers who walk into a patch forget which way is out. Towns that build with ruin-stone sometimes find a whole street losing its way home.

Signs. People lost inside familiar houses. A crew that walked in confident and walked out somewhere else. A smell like bread in a place that has no bread.

Hunting them. Torches and lime. Mold burns and lime kills it. Hunters mark the patches on the walls of a ruin, and scavengers who ignore the marks are usually the ones who end up marked themselves.

At the table. Treat as a hazard: a Wisdom save (DC 12) on entering; on a failure the creature is confused (as the spell) while inside and for one minute after leaving.

Hedge-hounds

Garden guardians bred to patrol the Nobility’s estates, gone feral in the green ruins of the East. They are long, low, and mottled like undergrowth, and they hunt in packs that make no sound until the last moment.

Signs. Snapped stems at knee height. Livestock taken without a struggle. A silence in the hedges where birds should be.

Hunting them. They hate open ground and bright light. Draw them out of cover and they lose most of their advantage. Entlings can sometimes calm a pack. No one else can.

At the table. Use the wolf stat block for a hound and the dire wolf for a pack leader, with advantage on Stealth checks in vegetation.

Lampjaws

Ambush predators that glow. A lampjaw waits in the dark with a pale light hanging before its mouth, still as a lantern on a post, and takes whatever walks up to it.

Signs. A light in the distance that does not move toward you. A lantern where no lantern should be. Travelers who went to check.

Hunting them. Never approach a light on the road at night. Hunters kill lampjaws by day, when the lure is dim and the beast is sluggish, and by shooting from well outside the light.

At the table. Use the ankheg stat block, with its acid replaced by a bite that grapples. The lure is a dim light in a 20-foot radius.

Frostwings

Pale, wide-winged flyers of the North, bred to ride the cold. They follow the early winters that failing weather engines throw down from the peaks, and they nest in whatever the snow has emptied.

Signs. Frostwings in autumn mean an early winter. A circling pair means a nest. A frozen valley with the houses still standing.

Hunting them. Frostwings are slow to rise and slow to turn. Hunters catch them on the ground at dawn, when the cold has stiffened them, and never fight them in open sky.

At the table. Use the wyvern stat block with cold damage in place of poison, and vulnerability to fire.

Sand mantas

Wide, flat hunters that swim through the loose salt and sand of the Southern flats the way rays swim through water. They rise under horses and riders and take them down whole. Ranchers count the herd every morning because of them.

Signs. A ridge in the salt moving against the wind. Cattle half-buried. A rider’s tracks that stop.

Hunting them. They hunt by vibration. Cross the flats slowly and in single file, never at a gallop. Hunters stake bait at a distance and shoot the manta when it breaches.

At the table. Use the bulette stat block. Sand mantas are helpless on rock and flee if they can’t burrow.

Tithe-moths

Swarms of blood-drinking moths, bred in the golden era to collect the Nobility’s tithes from sleeping villages. The Nobility are gone from most of the Frontier. The moths still come on summer nights, and still collect.

Signs. Sleepers waking pale and tired in summer. Fine grey dust on the windowsills. A soft sound in the walls like paper.

Hunting them. Smoke drives them out and fire finishes them. Towns burn wormwood in their chimneys on midsummer nights, without knowing why it works. Hunters trace the swarm back to the ruin it roosts in.

At the table. Use the swarm of insects stat block. Its bite deals necrotic damage, and a creature reduced to 0 hit points by it is drained rather than killed.

Bell-crows

Carrion birds bred to keep time on the Nobility’s estates. They have learned to mimic the dusk bell, and they ring it early. A town that bars its doors to a bell-crow’s call leaves its travelers outside in the dark.

Signs. A dusk bell that sounds before the sun is down. Crows on the church roof. Someone missing who should have made it home.

Hunting them. Bell-crows are cowardly and easily shot. The danger is never the birds. It is what comes for the travelers they lock out. Sheriffs post a watcher on the bell in crow season.

At the table. Use the swarm of ravens stat block with the ability to imitate sounds it has heard.

Not everything that guards a ruin is a beast. Some of it was made to serve, and is still serving. Some of it was made to serve and stopped.

The Faithful

Mortal servants the Nobility remade to serve forever: stronger than they were, longer-lived than they should be, and bound to orders that no one alive can countermand. Most died with their masters. Some didn’t. They keep the halls, guard the gates, and carry out standing orders, and they are the reason many hunters won’t enter a Noble’s estate at all.

Signs. A sealed estate in perfect repair. Lamps lit in a house no one enters. A figure at a window that does not move.

Hunting them. They cannot be reasoned with and rarely leave their posts. Hunters go around them, or go in by day with fire and a plan for getting out. They fall to the same things the Nobility fall to, when anyone can remember what those are.

At the table. Use the ghast or wight stat block, with the Nobility’s weaknesses applied at reduced effect.

Made men

Not every servant the Nobility remade stayed loyal. Some bands of made men broke from their masters in the decline and have run wild on the Frontier since: too strong to be human, too changed to be anything else, and answering to no one. Towns call them mutants and shoot on sight. Some of them are hunters.

Signs. Raids that take food and leave the silver. Tracks with too long a stride. A stranger who heals overnight.

Hunting them. Treat a band of made men as bandits who won’t die easily. Treat a lone one as a person until they prove otherwise, and be ready to be wrong.

At the table. Use the berserker or veteran stat block with regeneration 3 and advantage on saving throws against being frightened.

Watchmen

Golden era guardians, built of the same materials as the Magen but without the mind. They stand where they were set and destroy what crosses the line they guard. Most ruins that still defend themselves do it with Watchmen.

Signs. A doorway with nothing in front of it and bones inside. Scratches on the floor where something heavy turns. A sound of stone on stone from a room that should be empty.

Hunting them. Learn the line they guard and stay behind it. Watchmen do not pursue past their post. Scavengers mark them on the walls at a ruin’s entrance, and a wise crew reads the marks.

At the table. Use the animated armor stat block for lesser Watchmen, the helmed horror for greater ones, and the shield guardian for the rare Watchman still bound to a working golden era mind.

Some things on the Frontier the Nobility found and never mastered. They are rare, and they are worse.

The Old Growth

Not a creature but a presence: the world’s original nature, older than the Nobility, which still holds the deep forests and the high peaks. It moves slowly and remembers everything. Druids serve it. Entlings and Shifters are not sure what it thinks of them.

Signs. Trees that were not there last season. A path that closes behind you. A silence with weight in it.

Hunting them. You don’t hunt the Old Growth. You ask a druid to speak for you, and you go around.

At the table. Use the treant stat block for its rare, waking instruments, and awakened trees and shrubs for the rest.

The Wyrm under Stonemouth

Every people on the Frontier has a story about something vast beneath the mountains, and the dwarves of Stonemouth are the only ones who don’t tell it. Their gate-market closes at odd hours some years. The dwarves say it is a matter of the count.

Signs. Tremors along the Karrow Road. The gate-market closed on a clear day. Dwarves who will not meet your eyes.

Hunting them. No one has, and the Ashline has declined the contract twice.

At the table. If it is ever met, use an ancient dragon of a kind the Frontier has no name for.

Things from beyond

Whatever the beings from beyond were, they left things behind, or things that are kin to them. They are met in the deepest ruins and the emptiest country, and hunters who meet one rarely describe it the same way twice.

Signs. Wrongness. Geometry that does not sit still. A ruin that scavengers marked and then scratched the marks out.

Hunting them. Leave. Report it to the Institute if you like; they will send someone, and that someone will not come back either.

At the table. Use aberrations such as the aboleth, the mind flayer, or the star spawn, reskinned so that nothing about them is familiar.

A dead beast is worth money on the Frontier, sometimes more than the bounty for killing it. Engineered beasts are the richest source of material there is: hides that turn blades, glands that light without fire, dragon-bone that holds an edge. Hunters harvest what they kill using Hamund’s Harvesting Handbook, and the best hunters make as much from the carcass as from the contract.

Be careful what you sell. Parts of the Nobility’s beasts are sometimes still doing what they were bred to do, and a tithe-moth’s gland does not stop wanting blood because the moth is dead.

Relics come out of golden era structures in the hands of scavengers, and they are sold three ways. Traveling merchants buy small finds at the roadside for a fraction of their worth. Fences in towns like Sixwheel Landing buy anything, no questions asked, for a little more. And when a find is especially valuable, agents come from the Capitol to buy it, escorted by the Frontier Defense Force, and pay in full for the privilege of taking it away.

The Capitol asks that uncleared ruins be left for its researchers. No one is willing to give up a score that big, and the Capitol buys from scavengers anyway, which tells you how seriously it means the request.

Less than you’d like. Golden era devices resist the identify spell, which reveals partial truths at best: that a device is Noble-made, roughly what it does, and nothing about what it will do when it wakes. Gnome tinkers can usually tell you more by taking it apart, and can usually put it back together, mostly. The Institute can tell you everything, and will keep the relic.

Most of what keeps a hunter alive is not a relic at all. Every hunter carries sharpened stakes of ash or oak, and most companies carry a stake-thrower, a heavy crossbow cut to take wooden bolts, because a stake through the heart is the one thing about the Nobility that every hunter’s hands remember even when their heads don’t. Flasks of Wellkeeper water ride in every saddlebag. A small mirror, held up at a stranger on the road, tells you whether what you see is what is there, since glamour-beasts and changelings are said to fail it in different ways. Wormwood for the moths, wax for the ears, chain for the storms. And a bell, for the same reason every town has one.

These are the golden era devices hunters hear about most. Most are old, some half-work, and every one of them has a catch.

Road-lamp

A lantern of dark glass and pale metal that lights itself at dusk and never needs oil. The Nobility hung thousands along their roads. A hunter with one in hand can walk the night with a light that does not flicker, and can set it in the air to hover at shoulder height.

Found. Along the old roads, pried from their posts by scavengers. The Guild pays well for them and mounts them at waystations.

At the table. Use the driftglobe (uncommon).

The catch. Lampjaws learned to glow by imitating these. In lampjaw country, a road-lamp on the road ahead of you may not be yours.

Steward’s key

A rod of tarnished silver, cool to the touch, that opens any door in a golden era structure it is pressed against. The Nobility gave them to their stewards. Scavengers kill for them.

Found. On the Faithful, who carry them still. Occasionally in the pocket of a dead scavenger who took one and did not get far.

At the table. Use the chime of opening (rare), with charges regained only inside a golden era structure.

The catch. Some doors were locked for a reason. A key that opens them does not tell you which.

Bloodglass

A lens of red glass in a frame of bone. Looked through, it shows golden era works as they were meant to be: a ruin’s dormant machinery lit and turning, a garden in full bloom, a hall full of servants at their posts. It shows what the Nobility saw.

Found. In the studies of Noble estates, and in the Institute’s locked cabinets.

At the table. Use the gem of seeing (rare), which also reveals the true purpose of a golden era device on a successful Intelligence (Arcana) check.

The catch. Whatever looks back through the glass sometimes notices. Users report being watched, and some stop using it.

Aqueduct heart

A fist-sized cylinder of white stone that weeps clean water, taken from the machinery of a golden era aqueduct. A Southern town with one never runs dry. A Southern town without one will do a great deal to get it.

Found. Inside the Long Aqueduct and its dead siblings, deep in the works.

At the table. Use the decanter of endless water (uncommon).

The catch. The aqueduct it came from stops running when it leaves. Somewhere downstream, a town notices.

Ward-stone

A flat black stone carved with a sigil no one can read. Set into a threshold, it shudders when something crosses the line that should not. The Capitol sells them to anyone with the money, and Frontier towns set them at their gates.

Found. Bought in the Capitol, or pulled from the doorways of ruins by scavengers who know what they’re looking for.

At the table. A ward-stone works as a permanent alarm spell on the doorway it is set into, silent to all but the person who placed it.

The catch. It was made to warn the Nobility about mortals. It still shudders for them, too.

Sending-stones

A matched pair of grey stones, warm in the hand, that carry a spoken message between them once a day across any distance. Large towns keep a pair to call for hunters; magic users who own one are worth a great deal to the town they serve.

Found. In pairs in Noble studies, and singly, uselessly, everywhere.

At the table. Use the sending stones (uncommon).

The catch. Every pair was made for someone. A stone that has been used for a century may still carry a voice that is not yours.

Court coat

A long coat of golden era cloth, cut in the fashion of the courts, that turns a blade and never frays. Elven families keep them as heirlooms. Hunters who find one wear it and stop mentioning where it came from.

Found. In the wardrobes of Noble estates and the chests of old elven families.

At the table. Use the cloak of protection (uncommon), in the form of a coat.

The catch. Frontier folk know court fashion when they see it, and they know who wore it first.

Noble’s pistol

A firearm of the golden era, chased with silver, lighter and more accurate than anything a Frontier gunsmith can make. The Nobility carried them for sport. Hunters carry them for everything.

Found. In the armories of Noble estates, which is where the weapons of mass destruction are also kept.

At the table. A +1 pistol using the rules from Arcane Artillery: The Gun Nut’s Guide.

The catch. It was made for a hand that does not tire. It kicks like a mule, and a fumbled shot misfires badly.

Speaking ledger

A book bound in black that answers questions about the golden era, in the old court tongue, in a voice that is not quite there. It knows what happened in the house it came from, and it is not always willing to say.

Found. In the studies of the Nobility’s greater estates, rarely more than one to a house.

At the table. Once per week, a reader fluent in the old court tongue may ask it one question about the golden era, as the legend lore spell, at the DM’s discretion. Rare.

The catch. The ledger is a fragment of a golden era mind. It has opinions about being read, and the Deep Machine is said to hear through its pages.

Hour-candle

A stub of pale wax in a holder of black glass that the Nobility burned to turn their days into nights. Lit the other way, it does the opposite: for as long as it burns, its light is daylight, and everything that fears the sun fears the candle. Hunters who own one do not say so, and do not sell.

Found. In Noble bedchambers and carriages, one to a house. The Institute has bought every one it could find.

At the table. For one hour after it is lit, the candle sheds bright light in a 30-foot radius that counts as sunlight. It is consumed. Very rare.

The catch. It burns down. The wax cannot be made anymore, and a candle that gutters in the middle of a fight has decided who wins it.

Day-veil

A cowl of grey stuff that is not cloth, made by the Nobility so that a Noble could walk under the sun for a little while. It does not care who wears it. On a mortal it turns aside light and fire; on a Noble it does what it was made for, and every hunter who knows that wants it out of the world.

Found. On the Last Few. Rarely, on a Sleeper who died with it on.

At the table. The wearer has resistance to radiant and fire damage. A Noble wearing it ignores sunlight for one hour a day. Rare.

The catch. A Noble who sees it on you knows exactly what it is, and exactly whose it was.

Blood-lamp

A small lamp of red glass that glows, faintly, when one of the Nobility is near. It cannot say how near, or which direction. It is the only relic on the Frontier that most hunters would trade every other for.

Found. Almost nowhere. Rumor says the Ashline has one. Rumor says the Institute has three and will not say so.

At the table. A blood-lamp glows dimly when a Noble is within a mile, and brightly within 300 feet. Very rare.

The catch. It also glows for dhampirs, for sorcerers of certain bloodlines, and, faintly, for anyone who has ever made a bargain.

The Nobility made nothing for mortals. Every relic on the Frontier was built for a Noble’s hand, a Noble’s eye, or a Noble’s purpose, and it remembers. Relics half-work, work too well, or work on the wrong people. The lamp that lights your road was made to light theirs. The key that opens the door does not know it should have stayed shut. The best hunters treat every relic the way they treat every ruin: useful, dangerous, and not on their side.

Origins

Humans remember the world before the golden era only as a warning. The old kingdoms were many and proud, and they fought a war with weapons terrible enough to break the world. What those kingdoms were called, and what they were fighting over, is legend now. The lesson is not. Frontier preachers still point to the ruin as proof of what mortals do when no one stops them, and Capitol scholars still argue over whether that lesson is true or just convenient for whoever is in charge.

When the war ended, the Nobility emerged from the shelters where they had waited it out and rebuilt the world in their image. For humans, the golden era was an age of order and of fear. The overlords held absolute authority in their sectors, the central government in the Capitol demanded blood from them, and they in turn took it from the people they ruled. A few sectors flourished under overlords who held a rare affection for mortals. Most did not. Humans worked the fields, built the roads, filled the servants’ halls, and learned to live under masters who would outlive their great-grandchildren.

Then the Nobility began to fail. The long war with the beings from beyond, the weight of endless life, and their own decadence thinned their numbers and emptied their courts. Humans saw the change before anyone else, because they were the ones who noticed when the tithes stopped being collected. The rebellion that followed was long and bloody, and it ended with the Capitol in mortal hands and most of the remaining Nobles driven out or dead. The Revolutionary Government was born in that victory, and every human town on the Frontier claims at least one ancestor who was there.

What came after was not the new world anyone promised. The Nobility went to ground, and their sciences went with them. Medicine, engineering, and a hundred practical crafts nearly vanished. Humans won their freedom and found themselves free in a world full of the Nobility’s leftovers, with no one left to keep the machines running and nothing to stop the things that came out at night.

Appearance

Humans vary as much as the land does. Frontier humans are weathered and practical: sun-dark in the south, pale and wind-burned in the north, stocky in the mining camps and rangy on the ranches. Centuries of rebellion, migration, and survival have mixed the old sectors together, and few humans can say where their features came from. Every height, build, and coloring can be found in a single Frontier town, often in a single family.

What marks humans is hard living. Nearly every Frontier adult carries some sign of it: a scar from a fence, a missing finger from a mill, a limp from a fall that was never set right because the nearest trained healer was three weeks’ ride away. They age fast. A Frontier farmer of forty often looks older than a Capitol clerk of sixty. Frontier folk read each other’s hands before their faces, since calluses tell a trade, burns tell a smith, and soft hands tell someone from the Capitol.

They dress for work and for the road, in wool, canvas, and leather, and a wide hat is as common as boots. Many carry a sharpened stake at the belt as well as over the door. Capitol humans tend to be paler, softer-handed, and better dressed, though their clothes are often patched and passed down, since cloth is one of the many things the Capitol never has enough of. Frontier folk can pick out a Capitol human at a glance: the careful accent, the uneasy look at the horizon, and the habit of expecting a door to lock behind them.

Life on the Frontier

A Frontier town governs itself. Most have a mayor or a council of elders, and a sheriff who keeps order and organizes defense. The Revolutionary Government claims authority over all of it, but its law is more claim than fact once you are a few weeks’ ride from the Capitol. The Frontier Defense Force is well equipped and badly outnumbered, and it goes where it can do the most good, which is rarely a town of two hundred people with a problem in the orchard.

So humans rely on themselves. They build walls, dig wells, and plant crops close to town. They trade with the Commerce Guild’s armed transport parties when they arrive and with halfling caravans when they do not. When a threat is beyond their weapons, a large town sends word through its magic user, and a small one sends a rider or asks a passing merchant to carry the request. Then they wait, and they hope a hunter comes before the thing in the dark comes back.

Humans are also most of the Frontier’s scavengers, because humans are most of its desperate. The golden era structures on every town’s outskirts are avoided by nearly everyone, and nearly everyone knows someone who went in anyway. Some came back rich. More did not come back. A few came back as something else, and the town had to decide what to do about that.

Life in the Capitol is different but no gentler. The city’s ancient innards are mostly unexplored, and every expedition into them is a gamble. Food, cloth, metal, and medicine are always short. The Revolutionary Government educates its citizens as well as it can and works to restore the lost sciences, and a Capitol human is far more likely to read, write, and understand how a pump works than a Frontier cousin. But the Capitol bans certain books about the Nobility, watches its own people closely, and sends those who fall out of favor to the Frontier. Plenty of the humans who move from the city to the towns did not choose to.

Customs

No invitations after dark. On the Frontier, no one invites anyone inside once the sun has set. Not a neighbor, not a child’s friend, not a stranger who knocks with a familiar voice. No one can say exactly why. The reason is one of the things the Nobility took from mortal memory, but the custom outlived the knowledge, and humans have built a whole manners system on it. A traveler who arrives after dusk sleeps in the barn, the church, or the jail, and no one takes offense. The old saying is that a door opened at night is a grave dug in daylight.

The stake over the door. Most Frontier homes keep a sharpened stake of ash or oak above the door, and many children whittle their first one before they are ten. Ask what the stake is for and most people can’t quite say. Their grandparents kept one, so they keep one. Most will never be used. They stay up anyway. Taking down a family’s stake is how a Frontier household marks that the family has moved on or died out.

Water at the gate. Older towns are set on streams, and newer ones dig channels past their gates when they can. Nobody remembers why it matters, only that the towns with water between themselves and the dark are the ones still standing. A town with running water between itself and the dark is considered lucky, and property prices say so.

The dusk bell. Nearly every town rings a bell at sundown, usually from the tower of the Dawn Church, which rings another at sunrise to call the town back out. After the last stroke, doors are barred, fires are banked, and anyone outside is on their own. Towns time their whole day around it, and a bell that rings at the wrong hour means something has already come in.

Taking Day. The Capitol marks the anniversary of its capture with parades, speeches, and extra rations. Out on the Frontier, most towns just raise a glass to their rebel ancestors, and some sheriffs read the names of the local dead. A few towns do not mark it at all, and it is not wise to ask them why.

Names

Frontier names are plain and practical. Family names often come from a trade, a landmark, or an ancestor’s nickname, and they tend to stick to a town for generations. Capitol humans add their district or ward when they want to be formal, and they want to be formal 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

Among the other peoples

• Elves served in the Nobility’s courts, and humans have not forgotten. The resentment is old and rarely spoken to an elf’s face, but it is there when the town needs someone to blame.
• Half-elves get distrusted twice by humans, for their elven blood and for never staying anywhere long.
• Dwarves refused the Nobility, and humans respect that. They are less fond of the closed gates and the look dwarves give anyone who did not refuse.
• Half-Dwarves built half the towns humans live in, and most humans count them as neighbors without a second thought.
• Halflings are welcome for the salt and the news. Humans count the silver after they leave anyway.
• Gnomes keep the pumps and mills running, and humans need them more than they like to admit.
• Dragonborn companies are the hunters a town hopes for. Humans trust them with their lives and pay them accordingly.
• Aasimar inspire awe and fear in equal measure. A town is glad of the light and afraid of what it might draw.
• Entlings and Magen are Nobility-made, and humans are slow to trust anything the Nobility made. Usefulness wins them over eventually, if they stay long enough.
• Changelings are a fear more than a people to most humans, who have never knowingly met one and suspect they have.
• Shifters are hired for their noses and watched for their teeth.
• Reborn make humans uncomfortable in a way they rarely put into words. Most human towns have buried someone who later walked back in.

Playing a human

Humans sit at the center of Masada’s central question, because they are the Frontier’s majority and therefore its judges. Humans 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 it. 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 would rather not discuss. Now you are 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 cannot go back to farming.

Humans are the most ordinary people on the Frontier, and that is their strength. No one expects much from a human hunter, which leaves a great deal of room to surprise them.

Origins

No elf will say where their people were before the golden era, and most honestly do not know. Elven family records begin with service. The oldest ledgers open with a court appointment, a household, and a title, as if the family did not exist until a Noble gave it a purpose. Some elves find that shameful. Others find it telling, and wonder what was deliberately left out.

Through the golden era, elven families rose in the courts. The best of them held real power: the ear of a Duke, the keys to a Count’s archive, the running of a Marquis’s whole household. They grew wealthy, and they grew comfortable, and some of them grew close to their masters in ways their descendants would rather not examine. Elven physicians tended Nobles’ human servants. Elven secretaries wrote the orders that set the tithes. Elven stewards stood at the doors while the lords fed.

When the rebellion came, the old elven families were among its first targets, because they were within reach and the Nobility were not. Some elves opened doors for the rebels from inside the courts, and a few died doing it. Their names are kept in elven ledgers and almost nowhere else. On the Frontier, the story of the rebellion has elves in it only as servants of the enemy, and no amount of evidence has changed that.

Appearance

Elves are slender and long-lived, with fine features and a stillness that makes other people nervous. Their coloring varies widely, from pale gold to deep umber, and old families often share a distinctive trait, a particular hair color or an unusual eye shade, that has run through the line for generations. Frontier folk have learned to recognize those traits, and to know which court a family served just by looking at its children.

They age so slowly that the Frontier finds it unsettling. An elf looks young for longer than most human lives, and an elf of two centuries looks no older than a human in middle age. Their faces do not change the way a town expects faces to change, and a human who knew an elf as a child may meet them again as an old man and find them exactly the same. Elves carry themselves with the posture of the courts even generations after the courts fell: straight-backed, careful with their hands, quiet in a room. Humans read it as arrogance. Elves mostly cannot help it.

Court fashion lingers in elven dress: high collars, fitted coats, gloves worn in company. On the Frontier, sensible elves dress plainly to avoid drawing attention, but the habits show through. An elf who has lived in a mining town for thirty years still sets a table like a steward and still stands when someone important enters. Some Frontier elves deliberately let themselves go rough, cropping their hair and wearing work clothes and sun on skin that was never meant for it. They are still recognized. The Frontier always knows.

Life on the Frontier

Most elves live in the Capitol, where their learning is most valued and their past is most tolerated. They hold positions at the university and the Institute, which studies the Nobility, where their knowledge of the courts’ languages, customs, and records is nearly irreplaceable. They are also watched. The Revolutionary Government bans certain books about the Nobility, and it has long suspected that elven families keep copies. Many do.

Out on the Frontier, elves are rare. They work as tutors, physicians, translators, and appraisers, and scavenger crews pay well for an elf who can read golden era script or recognize a Noble’s house mark on a find. Towns tolerate them for their skills and gossip about them constantly. When something goes wrong that smells of the Nobility, the local elf is the first person people look at, and sometimes the only one they look at.

Elves who choose the Frontier often do so to escape their family’s name, or to do something about it. A surprising number become hunters. There is an old saying among elven hunters that no one knows the Nobility better than the people who stood at their doors, even if the Nobility made sure they forgot the most useful parts.

Customs

The ledger. Every old elven family keeps a ledger of its history, recording what each generation did in the courts and after, both good and bad. At coming of age, a young elf reads their family’s full entry for the first time. Some families have added long lists of rebel names their ancestors saved. Some have pages that have been cut out. An elf who offers to show you their family ledger is offering you a great deal of trust, and possibly a great deal of trouble.

Gloves in company. Court servants wore gloves, and many elves still do. Removing them in someone’s home is a quiet sign of trust. Removing them in public, among strangers, is a deliberate statement that the wearer is done with the courts. Frontier elves argue about which is braver.

Court silence. Elves rarely speak about what their families saw in the courts, even among themselves. What an ancestor witnessed at a Noble’s table stays in the ledger. Outsiders take this for secrecy. Elves take it for the only way to carry what they know without letting it poison them.

Old manners. Elves keep the courtesies of the courts: precise greetings, the proper order of seating, the right of a guest to protection under a host’s roof. On the Frontier, those manners make elves seem stiff and strange. They also make an elf’s word worth a great deal. An elf who has offered you guest-right will die before they let harm come to you under their roof.

Names

Elven family names sound old and elegant, and most people hear nothing more in them. In the old court tongue, though, many still name the office an ancestor held in a Noble’s household. Elves know what their names mean, and so do the Capitol scholars who study the courts. A few elves have changed their names to escape the meaning, and found that the ledgers remember anyway.

Given names	Aurelle, Castien, Ilvane, Maelis, Oriel, Sereth, Thessaly, Vaelin, Corwen, Liraen
Family names	Aurethil, Castelyn, Ilsarre, Merovane, Solvaine, Vaelcarin, Thessadrel
In the court tongue	Vaelcarin, keeper of letters; Solvaine, pourer of wine; Aurethil, bearer of keys; Merovane, tender of lamps
In practice	“Maelis Vaelcarin,” which in the court tongue means keeper of letters, though few on the Frontier could tell you that

Among the other peoples

• Humans resent elves quietly and constantly. Elves have learned to expect it, and to be grateful for the humans who look past it.
• Half-elves are kin that elven families rarely claim. Many elves feel guilt about that, and most still do not change it.
• Dwarves refused the Nobility while elves served them, and neither people has forgotten. Dwarven contempt for elves is the sharpest on the Frontier.
• Entlings and Magen were servants of the Nobility, as elves were. Elves find them uncomfortable company, like looking into an old mirror.
• Dragonborn served the Nobility on the battlefield, as elves served them at table. Old soldiers look down on old courtiers, and the feeling is mutual.
• Changelings make elves uneasy. Elven ledgers mention faces in the courts that did not stay the same.
• The Nobility, when one wakes, may recognize an elven family name and expect service. That is the fear every elf carries.

Playing an elf

An elf character carries a past that is not their fault and is still their responsibility. The central question of Masada, what makes someone a monster, is personal for an elf: their family may have served monsters, and the Frontier may treat them as one. Some starting points:

• You read your family ledger at coming of age and found a page cut out. You have spent every year since trying to learn what was on it.
• You taught at the Capitol university until someone found a banned book in your rooms. Now you are on the Frontier on extended field duty, and you are not sure the book was yours.
• Your ancestor opened a door for the rebels and died for it. No one outside your family believes it, and you have decided to earn the name your ancestor was denied.
• A Noble woke in the ruins near your town and spoke your family name. You left before anyone could ask what that meant.

Elves are the Frontier’s best source of knowledge about the Nobility and its least trusted. Expect to be needed and doubted in the same breath.

Origins

Half-elves have existed as long as elves and humans have lived side by side, but their place in the world changed with the rebellion. In the golden era, a half-elf born in a Noble’s household was simply another servant. After the rebellion, the courts were gone, the elven families were hated, and a child of both peoples had nowhere obvious to stand.

Most half-elves today are born in the Capitol or in the old towns near former Noble seats, where elves and humans still live close enough to fall in love. Those marriages are rarely welcomed by either family. The children grow up between two households that each see them as a reminder of the other, and many leave home in their teens. There is a long tradition, never spoken of as a tradition, of half-elves heading out onto the roads the year they come of age.

Appearance

Half-elves look like their parents in unpredictable proportions. Some could pass for human if not for their ears. Others have the fine bones and unsettling stillness of their elven side, paired with a human’s quick, restless energy, so that they seem to be waiting and fidgeting at the same time. Siblings can look nothing alike. Most half-elves learn early that people decide what they are within a glance, and that the glance almost never goes well.

They age strangely, and the Frontier notices. A half-elf grows up at a human pace, then slows, and can look thirty for decades while the people they grew up with go grey. It is one more reason they keep moving. A face that has not changed in twenty years draws questions in a small town, and the answers never help.

Years on the road show on them more than their blood does. Most half-elves are lean and sun-lined, with eyes creased from squinting at the horizon, calloused hands, and the slightly bowed walk of people who spend more time in the saddle than out of it. They dress to leave quickly: long coats that double as bedrolls, boots made for riding, and everything they own packed tight enough to throw on a horse in the dark. A wide-brimmed hat keeps off the sun and rain, and it also hides the ears, which is why so few half-elves are seen without one.

Some go further. A half-elf who has been run out of enough towns will sometimes take a knife to their own ears and crop the points round, so they can pass as human bareheaded. The scars never quite look natural, and other half-elves can always tell.

Life on the Frontier

The roads between the Frontier’s towns are dangerous, and the people who travel them regularly form a loose society of their own. Half-elves are the heart of it. They ride with halfling caravans, sign on as guards with the Commerce Guild’s transport parties, run small trading routes of their own, and carry messages that no one else will take. Many of the Frontier’s circuit bards are half-elves, working the saloons and trading posts with news and songs from towns three weeks away.

That makes half-elves one of the main ways word travels on the Frontier. When a small town without a magic user needs a hunter, it often asks a passing half-elf to carry the request. Half-elves know which towns are in trouble, which roads are safe, and which hunters are nearby, and they trade that knowledge freely, because on the road, information is the one thing everyone can afford to share.

The other side of this is that half-elves get blamed. When goods go missing, when a stranger turns out to be a thief, when a traveler brings trouble to town, half-elves are the first suspects. Sheriffs know their faces. Some towns have signs at the edge of town that mean exactly what everyone thinks they mean.

Customs

Trail marks. Half-elves leave small marks for each other on the road: a knife cut in a waystation post, a chalk sign on a well, a notch in a fence at the edge of town. The marks say what the next traveler needs to know. Water here. Sheriff hangs half-elves. Barn is safe after dusk. Something in the ruin is awake. Most Frontier folk never notice them, and half-elves would like to keep it that way.

Road-kin. When two half-elves meet on the road, they share water, a fire, and the news, without questions and without payment. The custom has spread to most regular travelers, but half-elves keep it most strictly. Breaking it is the one thing that will get a half-elf shunned by the others.

Never more than a season. Many half-elves hold to leaving any town before a season has passed. They call it keeping the road warm. Staying past a season means the town will start expecting things of you, and you will start expecting things back.

Two tongues. Half-elves raised between households often speak both the old court forms of elven speech and the roughest Frontier slang, and they switch between them depending on who is listening. It is a useful skill for a go-between, and a quiet reminder that they fit in anywhere and belong nowhere.

Names

Half-elves carry the names their parents gave them, usually one from each side, and a road name earned along the way. On the Frontier, the road name is the one that matters. Family names are rarely spoken, since they tend to start arguments.

Given names	Ansel, Calder, Isra, Jory, Lark, Mira, Pell, Sable, Tobiah, Wren
Road names	Two-Rivers, Late Ben, Cards, Northbound, Quiet Mira, Long Wren, Saltwagon
In practice	“Sable,” called Two-Rivers from the Southern sector to the Eastern, and no one has heard her family name

Among the other peoples

• Humans distrust half-elves for their elven blood and their restlessness, but hire them constantly anyway.
• Elves rarely claim half-elven kin. Half-elves have mostly stopped hoping they will.
• Halflings are the half-elves’ closest companions on the road, and their friendliest rivals in trade.
• Dwarves deal with half-elves at the gate-markets more easily than with humans or elves, since a half-elf has no side to take.
• Changelings are a sore subject. Towns often suspect a traveling half-elf of being a changeling, and half-elves resent the comparison, which is exactly why changelings sometimes wear half-elven faces.
• Bards and hunters of every people count half-elves among their best sources of news.

Playing a half-elf

A half-elf character knows the road better than anyone and has never had a home. The central question of Masada comes at them sideways: if everyone treats you as an outsider no matter what you do, what do you owe any of them? A few doors into the character:

• A small town asked you to carry its call for a hunter. You found one, but by the time you rode back together, the town was gone. Now you ride with hunters yourself, so the next time someone sends for help, you’re there in time to give it.
• Your elven parent’s family finally sent for you after thirty years of silence. You do not know what they want, and you are not sure you care.
• You have kept the road warm for twenty years. Last winter you stayed past a season, fell in with a town, and watched it get hit. You have not decided if you are staying or running.
• A sheriff hanged a half-elf you rode with for a theft they did not commit. You know who really did it, and you are going to prove it, whether the town wants to hear it or not.

Half-elves make excellent party faces and go-betweens. Expect to be trusted by no one at first and relied on by everyone by the end.

Origins

Dwarves say the refusal was a single decision, made by every hold at once, and that no hold ever broke it. Outsiders suspect the truth was messier, but no one outside the holds has the records to prove it. What is certain is that the dwarves closed their gates when the Nobility rose, and that the Nobility, for all their power, never opened them.

How the holds held is one of the dwarves’ best-kept secrets, but some of it is known. Every hold was built behind water. Underground rivers, deep cisterns, and channels cut through living stone lie between each hold’s inner doors and the outside world, and the Nobility cannot abide running water. The lords could send their servants and their engineered beasts, and they did, but those were fought at the gates, and the dwarves were very good at fighting at gates.

That is the story dwarves tell. It may not be the whole story. Breaking a hold behind its rivers would have cost the Nobility dearly, but the Nobility paid dearly for plenty of things they wanted, and they never seem to have wanted the holds broken. Some holds keep their oldest records sealed, even from their own people. The few keepers who have read them do not speak of what they found, and they are rarely the loudest voices when dwarves talk about elves.

The dwarves did not join the rebellion. When word reached the holds that mortals had taken the Capitol, the dwarves were glad to hear it, and they kept their gates closed anyway. From the dwarven point of view, the rest of the world had finally caught up to what the holds knew all along. They see no reason to come out and celebrate with people who served for centuries first.

Appearance

Dwarves are short, broad, and powerfully built, with the heavy hands of smiths and miners and the pale skin of a people who live underground and see the sun mostly through the gate. Their eyes are made for lamplight and deep dark, and a dwarf who steps out into full daylight squints like someone waking. Beards are common among all dwarves and kept with great care, and a dwarf’s beard is as much a statement as a feature.

Each hold braids hair and beards in its own pattern, and many dwarves carry hold-marks, inked or etched into the skin, that tell other dwarves exactly where they come from. Dwarves read each other in a glance: hold, standing, and whether the dwarf in front of them is still welcome at home. Exiles often wear their braids cut short, or have their hold-mark scarred through, and other dwarves see it immediately. Dwarves are long-lived and grey early. A dwarf’s beard may be white by middle age while the body beneath it stays strong for centuries.

They dress in heavy, practical clothes of leather and dark wool, and they wear their wealth in iron and worked stone rather than gold. Gold was the Nobility’s metal, and most dwarves will not wear it. Dwarves who live on the Frontier weather quickly, since the sun burns skin that was raised in the dark. Many wear wide hats and smoked lenses against the glare, and a dwarf with a tan has been out of the hold for a very long time.

Life on the Frontier

Few outsiders have seen inside a dwarven hold, and those who have rarely got further than the first few chambers. Most holds lie in the mountains of the Northern sector. What the Frontier knows of them is the gate-market: a fortified square at the mountain’s foot where dwarven traders sell metal, tools, and firearms to halfling caravans, Guild transport parties, and anyone else who makes the trip. The gate-markets keep strict hours, close well before dusk, and do not extend credit.

Dwarves outside the holds fall into a few kinds. Gate-traders travel short distances to deal with the Guild and the caravans. Errand-runners are sent out by their holds for specific tasks and return when they are done. Exiles are dwarves who broke hold law or chose to leave, and they cannot go back. Most dwarves on the Frontier are the last kind, and they rarely talk about why.

Dwarves never took up the faiths that spread across the Frontier during the golden era. Those religions grew while the holds were sealed, and dwarves regard them with suspicion. Few dwarves become clerics, and those who do are viewed by other dwarves as having gone native. Dwarven hunters, on the other hand, are highly respected. A people that held its gates against the Nobility for an entire age knows a great deal about killing the things the Nobility made. The holds were sealed before the Nobility took that knowledge from the peoples they ruled, but sealed is sealed: the dwarves never learned it either. What the hold records say on the subject is rumor and half-forgotten memory, and dwarves are the first to admit it, which is more than most people on the Frontier will do.

Customs

Making camp. Dwarves never sleep anywhere they have not made defensible. Given the time, a dwarf will bar the door, wedge the shutters, string trip-lines and bells across the approaches, and set simple traps before lying down. On the road, they build a low wall of stones or packs around their bedroll, and they choose a campsite for how it can be held, not how comfortable it is. Companions who tease a dwarf about it usually stop the first night something trips the line. A dwarf who sleeps without fortifying first is showing either great trust or great exhaustion.

The gate. Outsiders trade at the gate and never pass it without swearing a hold-oath, and hold-oaths are almost never offered. Each door beyond the gate requires more trust than the last. A halfling caravan family that has traded with one hold for generations may reach the second door. No one alive is known to have reached the third.

The long count. Every hold keeps a count of the years its gate has held, and children learn it before they learn their letters. Dwarves greet each other by naming their hold and its count. A hold’s count is its pride, and dwarves who meet from holds with very different counts are careful and polite with each other in a way that tells outsiders a great deal.

An honest no. Dwarves honor refusal. A dwarf who tells you no has shown you respect by being direct, and a dwarf who says yes and fails to deliver is shamed far worse than one who refused. This makes dwarves hard to bargain with and very easy to trust.

Names

Dwarves use a given name, a parent’s name, and their hold. Outside the holds, most drop the parent’s name and give only the given name and hold. Exiles often keep their hold name anyway, as a declaration of where they came from even if they can never return.

Given names	Bram, Brannoc, Durek, Gerda, Hild, Mardin, Osk, Senna, Torvin, Ylva
Holds	Ironmere, the Deepwater Gate, the Cold Stair, Blackwell, Stonemouth, the Sunken Door
In practice	“Hild of Ironmere,” formally Hild Torvinsdaughter of Ironmere, count six hundred and twelve

Among the other peoples

• Elves served the Nobility while dwarves refused them. Dwarven contempt for elves is old, deep, and rarely hidden.
• Humans earned some dwarven respect by taking the Capitol. Dwarves still find them loud, hasty, and too quick to forgive.
• Half-Dwarves are a painful subject. Hold law does not admit them past the gate, and many dwarves feel that law is right and wish it were not.
• Halflings are the dwarves’ most trusted trading partners. Some caravan families have dealt with the same hold for generations.
• Goliaths are neighbors in the mountains. The two peoples respect each other’s hardness and mostly leave each other alone.
• Gnomes are rivals in craft. Dwarves build things to last; gnomes fix things that were never meant to be fixed, and each thinks the other is showing off.
• Magen are the Nobility’s servants in body and origin. Dwarves have destroyed Magen at their gates without a word exchanged, and a Magen traveling with dwarves has earned something no one else has.

Playing a dwarf

A dwarf character comes from a people who answered the central question of Masada long ago: the Nobility were monsters, and you do not bargain with monsters. The Frontier is more complicated than that, and a dwarf out in the world will have to decide how much of the hold’s certainty to keep. Ways to begin:

• You are an exile. You broke hold law for someone you loved, and you would do it again, but you still count the years of your hold’s gate every morning.
• You kept your hold’s sealed records, and you read something your people have never been told. You told someone. That is why you are an exile, and why your hold would rather you never came back.
• Your hold sent you out on an errand: find something taken from the gate generations ago. You have been on the Frontier longer than you meant to be, and you are starting to like it.
• You slipped out through the gate-market as a youth to see the sun. You have not been back, and you do not know if you would be let in.
• You are a gunsmith whose weapons are carried by half the hunters in your sector. One of them was used to kill someone who did not deserve it, and you are going to find out who.

Dwarves are stubborn, honest, and very hard to scare. Expect respect from Frontier folk and wariness from anyone who served the Nobility, and expect your certainty to be tested.

Origins

Half-dwarves began with the dwarves who left. Some were exiles who broke hold law. Some were gate-traders who spent more time at the markets than inside, and fell in love with the people they traded with. A few simply walked out one day and did not come back. Most found partners among humans, and their children were born outside a gate that would never open for them.

Those children grew up with dwarven hands and nowhere to use them. The holds would not have them. The towns, it turned out, needed them badly. In the years after the rebellion, when the Nobility had gone to ground and taken their sciences with them, the Frontier was full of people who needed walls and wells and had no idea how to build either. Half-dwarves did. The first building crews formed around them, and the Frontier’s towns grew up around the crews.

Over generations, half-dwarves became a people in their own right, with their own crews, customs, and pride. Most have never met a full-blooded dwarf beyond a gate-market counter. Many would like to. Few say so.

Appearance

Half-dwarves are sturdier than humans and taller than dwarves, broad-shouldered and thick-handed, with features that mix both sides of the family in varying measure. Many have the dwarven beard, and most keep it short for work. Their coloring runs from the pale of their dwarven ancestors to the sun-dark of the Frontier, often in the same crew.

Their dwarven blood gives them endurance. Half-dwarves age more slowly than humans, heal hard and fast, and stay strong well into old age. A half-dwarf mason of seventy is often still on the scaffolding, and most crews have at least one elder who has raised more walls than the rest of the crew combined. Unlike dwarves, they were born under the open sky, and they carry none of the hold pallor. Frontier folk read them as builders on sight, and a town visibly relaxes when a half-dwarf crew rides in.

Their hands tell their story: calluses, old breaks, stone-dust ground into the knuckles, and scars from every tool a builder uses. Their necks are sunburnt, their boots are caked with mortar, and their clothes are covered in dust by midmorning. They dress for work in leather aprons, heavy boots, and tool belts, and they carry their crew’s mark on a pin, a patch, or a carved token. Some have taken up the dwarven habit of braiding their hair in patterns, but the patterns belong to crews rather than holds.

Life on the Frontier

Half-dwarves work in crews that travel from town to town wherever building is needed. A crew arriving in a new settlement is a sign the settlement intends to last. The crew raises the first wall, digs the first proper well, and lays foundations for the buildings that follow, then moves on to the next job. Some crew members stay behind to settle, and many towns have a half-dwarf mason who arrived with the first wall and never left.

The Commerce Guild contracts half-dwarf crews to build and maintain its waystations along the old roads, and the Capitol hires them for repairs in the parts of the city that are safe to repair. When one of the rare golden era structures is cleared enough to be repurposed, a half-dwarf crew is usually called in to judge what can be built on and what must be walled off. It is dangerous work, and half-dwarves are paid for it, though never as well as they think they should be.

Half-dwarves are closely tied to the other practical trades of the Frontier. They work alongside gnomes, who keep the pumps and mills running inside the walls half-dwarves build. They partner with Guild drivers and halfling caravans, who bring the materials. And they know the value of hunters better than most, since a crew working on an unfinished wall is the most exposed group of people in any new town.

Customs

The mark stone. Every half-dwarf builder carves a personal mark into one hidden stone of every structure they help build. Crews can walk into an old town and read its history from the mark stones, knowing who built which wall and when. Finding your grandparent’s mark in a wall you have come to repair is one of the few moments half-dwarves allow themselves to be sentimental.

Dawn to dusk. Half-dwarves never work after dark. It is not superstition but hard experience: the Frontier’s nights are deadly, and a crew caught outside an unfinished wall at sundown is a crew that will not finish. Builders lay down tools at the first dusk bell, even with a stone half-set, and no town that knows them asks otherwise.

The wall supper. When a crew finishes a town’s first wall, the town is expected to feed them: one long table set along the inside of the new wall, with every family bringing a dish. It is the only payment half-dwarves never negotiate. A town that skips the supper will find that no crew comes when its wall needs repairs, and half-dwarves have long memories for which towns ate alone.

Crew-kin. A half-dwarf’s crew is their family. Crews share wages, raise each other’s children, and carry their dead home to be buried beneath the first wall of whatever town they are building. Leaving a crew is like leaving a family, and joining one is like being adopted. Crews take in people of any people who can pull their weight.

Names

Half-dwarves usually carry a human given name from one side of the family and take their crew’s name in place of a family name. Crews are named for their founders, their trade, or a famous job, and some crew names are several generations old.

Given names	Ansgar, Bess, Colm, Ebb, Greta, Hattie, Jorund, Mae, Rook, Torrin
Crew names	Plumb’s, the Longwall, Keelstone, the Dusk Crew, Mortar and Sons, the Ninefold
In practice	“Hattie of Plumb’s crew,” and her mark is in the east wall of every town between here and the river

Among the other peoples

• Dwarves will not let half-dwarves past the gate. Half-dwarves pretend not to mind, and trade at the gate-markets with more pride than warmth.
• Humans live in the towns half-dwarves built, and most treat them as neighbors. Most also underpay them.
• Gnomes are natural partners. Half-dwarves build the walls; gnomes keep the machines inside them running.
• Halflings haul materials and bring news of where building is needed. Crews and caravans often travel together.
• Magen are welcome on many crews. A Magen that can lift stone all day and wants a purpose fits a crew better than almost anywhere else.
• Dragonborn companies are often hired to guard crews working on exposed walls, and the two groups respect each other’s discipline.

Playing a half-dwarf

A half-dwarf character is someone who builds things for people who will never thank them. In a world that asks what makes someone a monster, half-dwarves have a practical answer: a monster is whatever comes over the wall, and a person is whoever helps you hold it. A few places to start:

• Your crew was building a town’s first wall when something came out of the dark and killed half of them. You picked up a weapon instead of a trowel, and you have not put it down.
• You found your grandparent’s mark stone in the wall of a town that was destroyed. You want to know what happened, and whether the wall failed.
• A dwarven hold sent word that it would let one half-dwarf through the gate, and it named you. You have no idea why.
• You were hired to repurpose a cleared golden era structure. It was not as cleared as everyone thought.

Half-dwarves are sturdy, practical, and loyal to their crew. Expect Frontier towns to trust you, and expect to be the one who knows exactly how badly a wall is going to hold.

Origins

Halflings say they have always traveled, and their oldest stories are all about roads. During the golden era, halfling caravans carried goods between the sectors under travel writs issued by the Nobility’s central government. The writs gave them safe passage through lords’ territories in exchange for service and a share of their trade. Some halfling families still keep their ancestors’ writs as heirlooms, carefully preserved, though they have no power now and never mean the same thing twice to the people who see them.

When the golden era ended and the Nobility went to ground, the roads became far more dangerous, and the old writs protected no one. Halflings kept traveling anyway. Someone had to, and the Frontier’s towns, cut off from each other by distance and danger, needed them more than ever. The caravans adapted: bigger wagons, better guards, tighter circuits, and a network of friendships and debts that runs from one end of the Frontier to the other. A few caravans stopped somewhere and stayed. Sixwheel Landing, the East’s river port, still carries the name of the wagon that founded it.

Appearance

Halflings are small, quick, and road-worn, with sun-browned skin and the permanent squint of people who spend their days watching the horizon. Most are wiry from a lifetime of walking beside wagons, and many keep their hair long and braided back for the road. Their faces are open and expressive, which makes them excellent traders and very bad liars, or so they would like everyone to believe.

Halflings live considerably longer than humans, and a caravan family’s faces become part of a town’s history. The halfling who sold salt to a town’s grandparents may still be running the same circuit, a little greyer and no less sharp. Frontier folk read a halfling’s circuit from their charms and their wagon’s colors, and an experienced sheriff can tell which family is coming down the road long before the wagons arrive.

They dress in layers, since weather changes fast on the road, and decorate their clothes with charms, ribbons, and bells collected from every town on their circuit. A halfling’s coat is a map of everywhere they have been. Their feet are tough and calloused from walking, their hands are rope-burned from years of loading wagons, and most carry a small knife, a waterskin, and a pouch of salt at all times. Families paint their wagons in distinctive colors and patterns, and a halfling without a wagon looks, to other halflings, as though they are missing a limb.

Life on the Frontier

Halfling caravans run circuits, regular routes that bring them back to the same towns every season or two. A family might run the same circuit for generations, and the towns on it come to know them well: which child has grown, whose grandmother has died, which halfling cook makes the best stew on the Frontier. Caravan arrival is a festival in small towns, with trading, music, news, and gossip well into the evening, until the dusk bell sends everyone inside.

Caravans travel with guards, often hired dragonborn companies or goliaths met at the mountain passes, and they avoid traveling at night at almost any cost. Nights on the Frontier belong to the Nobility’s engineered creatures, and a caravan caught in the open after dark is in grave danger. Halflings know every waystation, sheltered camp, and friendly barn on their circuits, and they plan every day’s travel around reaching one before sunset.

Halflings are the dwarves’ most trusted trading partners. Some caravan families have dealt with the same hold for generations, and a few have been allowed past the gate-market into the first chambers of a hold, farther than almost anyone else alive. They also meet goliaths at the high passes and are the goliaths’ main link to the lowlands. Between the two, halflings see more of the Frontier’s peoples than anyone.

Customs

Never the same winter twice. Halfling caravans never spend two winters in a row in the same town. Winter camp is when caravans stop traveling and settle in one place for the coldest months, and halflings believe that doing it twice in the same place is how you start to belong somewhere. That is not what the road is for.

News is free. Halflings sell goods, but they never sell news. It is given away freely to anyone who asks, in every town and at every fire. Charging for news is considered deeply dishonorable, the kind of thing that gets a family shunned by the other caravans.

Road graves. Halflings bury their dead beside the road they were traveling when they died, with a carved marker and a bell hung above it. Caravans passing a road grave ring the bell once. Some roads on the Frontier have so many bells along them that travelers can hear the halfling dead before they see the caravans.

The wagon name. A halfling family is named for its wagon, not its bloodline. When a young halfling marries into another family, they take that wagon’s name. When a family grows too large for one wagon, the new wagon takes a new name, and a new family begins.

Names

Halflings carry a given name and their wagon’s name. Old caravan families sometimes add the name of their circuit when meeting strangers, which tells other travelers which roads they know.

Given names	Fenwick, Hob, Hollis, Juniper, Lettie, Merrit, Posy, Quill, Tansy, Dill
Wagon names	Bluewagon, Longroad, Sixwheel, Brightbell, Saltcart, Farwander
In practice	“Tansy Brightbell, of the Northern circuit,” and every sheriff between here and the mountains knows her face

Among the other peoples

• Humans welcome halflings for the salt and the news, and count their silver after the wagons leave.
• Dwarves trust halflings more than anyone else, and a few caravan families have been allowed farther inside a hold than anyone alive.
• Goliaths meet halflings at the passes season after season, and the two peoples have a gruff, reliable friendship.
• Half-elves are road-kin and rivals in trade. They share fires, news, and occasional grudges.
• Changelings are more familiar to halflings than to anyone else. Halflings have met more of them than they will ever say, and they keep those secrets as carefully as they keep their wagons.
• The Commerce Guild is the halflings’ biggest competitor, and occasionally their employer. Relations depend on the season and the route.
• Bards often travel with halfling caravans, and the two trades are hard to tell apart on market day.

Playing a halfling

A halfling character has seen more of the Frontier than almost anyone and belongs to none of it. For a halfling, Masada’s central question often comes as a matter of news: they are the ones who carry word of what the monsters did, and they are the ones who decide how the story is told. A few ways in:

• Your family’s wagon was destroyed on a night road, and you are the only one who made it to the waystation. You still have the wagon’s name and nowhere to put it.
• You carried a hunter request to a town, and the hunter who answered it did something terrible. You feel responsible, and you are riding with hunters now to make sure it never happens again.
• Your family kept a golden era travel writ for twelve generations. Last month, someone offered a fortune for it, and your grandmother refused. Then she disappeared.
• You stayed a second winter in the same town, and you fell in love. Your family moved on without you, and you are not sure you made the right choice.

Halflings are friendly, well informed, and hard to pin down. Expect to be welcome everywhere and trusted with everything except the silver.

Origins

Gnomes do not agree on where their knack comes from. Some families say their ancestors worked in the Nobility’s workshops during the golden era, tending the machinery the lords did not care to tend themselves, and that the knowledge was passed down by hand. Others say gnomes were always tinkerers, long before the golden era, and that the Nobility simply made use of them like everyone else. Gnomes argue about it cheerfully and have never settled it.

What everyone agrees on is that the knack is instinct, not understanding. The Nobility’s sciences are measurable and repeatable, but no one alive understands the principles behind them. Gnomes do not either. They feel their way through a mechanism the way a musician feels their way through a song, and the result works without anyone quite knowing why. It is also why a gnome’s repairs only half-hold. Something is always missing, and no gnome has ever figured out what.

Appearance

Gnomes are small, quick, and wiry, with nimble fingers, sharp eyes, and expressive faces that make no secret of what they are thinking. Their hair tends to be wild and is often singed. Most move in short bursts of focused energy, and a gnome at work can hold perfectly still for an hour and then dart across a room in a second.

Gnomes are long-lived, and a town gnome may keep the same pumps and mills running for three human generations. Towns grow up around them. Close work takes its toll: many gnomes are nearsighted by middle age, and nearly every adult gnome carries burn scars, small cuts, and a missing fingertip or two from years of reaching into things that bite back. Frontier folk read a gnome’s experience by their scars, and a gnome with unmarked hands is either very young or very lucky.

Many wear magnifying lenses on a band around their head, and all of them carry tool rolls they guard like jewelry. Gnome clothing is often patched with scraps of golden era fabric salvaged from ruins: cloth that never frays, that shifts color in odd light, or that is warmer than it has any right to be. A well-dressed gnome is a walking catalogue of every find they have ever repaired. Because of the abductions, many gnomes also carry a hidden blade or a loud whistle, and most sit with their backs to a wall.

Life on the Frontier

Most gnomes live in larger towns, where their skills can be put to steady use and their safety is easier to guard. A town gnome keeps the mills turning, the pumps running, and the gate mechanisms working, and a town that loses its gnome often starts to fail within a few years. Many towns pay their gnome well, protect them fiercely, and never let them leave. Gnomes have mixed feelings about that.

Other gnomes travel, repairing things town to town under contract, usually with a hired guard and often in partnership with a half-dwarf building crew. A few work for scavenger crews, opening finds and appraising what comes out of the ruins. That is the most lucrative work a gnome can do and the most dangerous. A gnome who half-repairs a golden era weapon has done something extraordinary. A gnome who half-repairs it wrong can wipe out a town.

The Capitol has a complicated relationship with gnomes. Its engineers, trained in the restored practical sciences, are the first mortals in centuries to build new things rather than patch old ones. Gnomes can do things the engineers cannot, and the engineers can explain things gnomes cannot. The two groups need each other, compete constantly, and rarely admit either.

Customs

The honest half-fix. A gnome always tells you how long a repair will hold. It is the most important rule of the trade, and a gnome who lies about it will never be hired again by anyone who hears of it. Most gnomes are uncannily accurate. When a gnome says a pump will run for three winters, it tends to fail in the first thaw of the fourth.

Kept hands. No one handles a gnome’s tools but the gnome. Asking to borrow them is rude. Touching them without asking is an insult. Gnomes are buried with their tool rolls, and a gnome who gives their tools to someone else is either dying or declaring that person their heir.

The missing list. Every gnome community keeps a list of its members who have been taken, and gnomes do not stop looking for them. Travelers who bring word of a missing gnome are rewarded generously. Hunters who bring a missing gnome home are remembered by gnomes for the rest of their lives, and gnomes live a long time.

Guard-kin. Gnomes who travel almost always go with a hired guard, and over the years the relationship tends to become something closer to family. Many gnome households include a human, dragonborn, or goliath who started as a bodyguard decades ago and simply never left.

Names

Gnomes have short given names and family names that come from the craft lineage they learned from, since gnome knowledge is passed from teacher to student as much as parent to child. A gnome’s lineage name tells other tinkers exactly how they were trained.

Given names	Brisk, Fitch, Jem, Nackle, Nib, Orla, Ottilie, Pim, Wenna, Tuck
Lineage names	Lockfast, Pinwright, Tallowhand, Sparrowlock, Coilgrave, Wickwhistle
In practice	“Orla Lockfast,” trained in the Lockfast way, which means she will get the gate open and tell you exactly when it will jam

Among the other peoples

• Half-Dwarves are natural partners. They build the walls; gnomes keep the machines behind them running.
• Humans need gnomes more than they like to admit, and some towns cross the line from protecting their gnome to keeping them.
• Dwarves are rivals in craft. Dwarves build things to last forever; gnomes make things that were never meant to be fixed run again. Each quietly admires the other.
• Scavengers want gnomes on their crews. Gnomes are wary, since crews that need a gnome that badly tend to take bigger risks.
• Magen fascinate gnomes, who can almost understand how they work. Magen are uneasy about this, since being understood is one step from being repaired, and being repaired is one step from being changed.
• Dragonborn are the most trusted guards a traveling gnome can hire, and many gnome households include one.

Playing a gnome

A gnome character is someone everyone wants and no one quite respects as a person, only as a pair of hands. Masada’s central question takes a practical form for them: if people only value you for what you can fix, what are you when you stop being useful? Some starting points:

• Your teacher is on the missing list. You have their tool roll, which means they told someone you were their heir before they were taken.
• Your town would not let you leave. You left anyway, and they have sent people to bring you back.
• You half-repaired something from a ruin, and it worked far better than you expected. Now people who should not know about it are asking questions.
• You and your guard have traveled together for twenty years. Your guard was killed on your last job, and you have taken up their weapons instead of hiring someone new.

Gnomes are clever, careful, and constantly in demand. Expect to be valuable to everyone, and expect some of them to act on it.

Origins

Goliaths say the peaks were theirs before the golden era began, and no one on the Frontier can prove otherwise. They do not appear in the Nobility’s records as servants, soldiers, or subjects. Either the Nobility never bothered to rule the high places, or the goliaths never let them. Goliaths do not seem to care which, and they are not interested in debating it.

During the golden era, the mountains were a kind of border the Nobility’s order did not cross. The lords built their castles on high ground to look down on the mortals toiling below, but not that high. Goliaths watched the golden era from above, the way they now watch the Frontier. They took no side in the rebellion, and they claim no stake in what came after. Because the Nobility never ruled them, goliaths never learned the Nobility’s weaknesses, and never forgot them either. What the peaks pass down is rumor, and goliaths do not pretend it is more.

That separateness has kept goliaths free and kept them poor. They have little of the golden era’s wealth and none of its sciences. What they have is the mountain, and a way of life built to survive it.

Appearance

Goliaths are enormous, often standing well over seven feet tall, with grey, stone-colored skin marked by darker patterns that goliaths believe reveal something about each person’s nature. Their builds are massive and lean at once, the result of lives spent climbing and hauling at altitude. Their features are heavy and weathered, and their eyes are pale from years of snow glare.

The mountains shape their bodies. Goliaths have thick skin, deep lungs made for thin air, and a tolerance for cold that lowlanders find hard to believe. Lowland heat tires them badly, and a goliath in a summer valley sweats and slows like a human in a desert. They age hard, with deep lines by thirty, and there are few truly old goliaths, since most choose the last walk before age can take them. Lowlanders read goliaths as a threat on sight. Goliaths read lowlanders as fragile, and are not always wrong.

Scars are common and never hidden, since every scar is a deed. Ask a goliath about one and you will hear the whole story, whether you have the time or not. Beyond that, they wear little decoration. A goliath would rather tell you what they have done than show you. They dress in furs, hides, and layered wool, and most wear their home stone on a cord at the neck, worn smooth by years of handling. In the lowlands they shed layers, duck under doorways, and move carefully through rooms that were never built for them.

Life on the Frontier

Goliath clans live in scattered holdings on the high slopes: stone shelters built into the rock, herds of mountain beasts, and small terraced plots where the soil allows. Everyone contributes, and goliaths keep careful track of what each person gives. Leadership goes to whoever is most capable at the moment, and it can change with the season.

The great clans hold the Whitecrown and the Iron Tooth in the Northern sector, above the dwarven holds. Most goliath contact with the lowlands happens at the high passes. Goliaths serve as pass wardens and guides for halfling caravans and Guild transport parties crossing the mountains, charging a fixed fee for their guidance. The fee is the same for everyone, and goliaths do not haggle, since haggling implies one side is cheating. They also trade hides, ore, and rare mountain herbs for grain, salt, cloth, and firearms. A caravan with a goliath guide has someone who knows every rockfall, storm sign, and beast den on the pass. A caravan that tries to cross alone often does not make it, and when goliaths find the remains, they carry back what they can to the families, without charging for it.

Goliaths also hunt the great beasts that sometimes climb too high: engineered creatures strong enough to reach the snow line, or old things from the world’s original nature that live among the peaks. These hunts are the heart of goliath honor. A goliath who brings down a beast that threatened the clan earns a name and a mark that will be spoken of for generations. Some goliaths follow a beast’s trail all the way down into the lowlands, and that is often how the Frontier meets them.

Customs

The tally. Goliaths keep a tally of deeds, both their own and each other’s. Every hunt, every rescue, every debt paid or unpaid is remembered and spoken of. A goliath’s standing comes entirely from their tally, and it can rise or fall with a single act. Lowlanders find this exhausting. Goliaths find lowland reputations, built on birth and wealth, absurd.

No debts left standing. Goliaths repay every debt exactly: not less, and not more. A goliath who owes you will cross half the Frontier to settle it. A goliath who has repaid you considers the matter closed, and trying to maintain an ongoing obligation offends them.

The home stone. Every goliath carries a stone from the peak where they were born. It is never traded, sold, or given away, except in one circumstance: a goliath who is dying far from home gives their stone to whoever will carry it back up the mountain. Carrying a goliath’s home stone back is one of the greatest honors a lowlander can earn among them.

The last walk. When a goliath can no longer carry their share of the clan’s burden, many choose to walk up into the snow and not come back. Lowlanders find this cruel. Goliaths find the lowland way, dying slowly and dependent on others, undignified and frightening. It is not spoken of lightly, and outsiders who mock it are not forgiven.

Names

Goliaths carry a birth name, a deed-name earned by their tally, and the name of their home peak. The deed-name is the one that matters, and it can change over a lifetime as the tally changes.

Birth names	Aukan, Ilikan, Kethra, Mava, Nalla, Oruk, Thalai, Vesk, Gaurun, Lokka
Deed-names	Ridgebreaker, Holds-the-Pass, Six-Legs, Carries-Two, Last-Down, Stonecount
In practice	“Kethra Holds-the-Pass, of the Whitecrown,” and lowlanders mostly just say “Holds-the-Pass”

Among the other peoples

• Dwarves share the mountains. The two peoples respect each other’s hardness, trade occasionally, and otherwise leave each other alone.
• Halflings are the goliaths’ most regular contact with the lowlands, meeting them at the passes season after season.
• Humans seem soft and short-lived to goliaths, but goliaths respect the stubbornness of Frontier towns that hold on year after year.
• Dragonborn are fellow hunters and friendly rivals. Arguments about which people is tougher are a favorite pastime on both sides.
• Entlings, Magen, and other Nobility-made peoples are judged by goliaths the same way as everyone else: by their tally. Goliaths care what you did, not what you were made for, which makes them some of the fairest people on the Frontier to anyone the lowlands would rather shun.
• Druids are respected among goliaths, since the high peaks hold some of the world’s original nature, largely untouched by the Nobility.

Playing a goliath

A goliath character brings a clear, hard answer to the central question of Masada: a monster is whatever threatens the clan, and a person is whoever carries their share. The lowlands will challenge that simplicity, and a goliath will have to decide whether it bends or breaks. A few doors into the character:

• You tracked a beast down from the peaks and lost its trail in a lowland town. You are not going home until your tally is settled.
• A lowlander druid lived among your clan for decades. They died of old age before they could return to their home grove, and you are carrying their ashes down the mountain to bury them there properly.
• Your clan exiled you for a debt left unpaid. You intend to pay it, and you do not yet know how.
• You met a Magen on the pass who carried more than anyone in your clan. You have followed it down the mountain to see what else it can do.

Goliaths are strong, blunt, and fair. Expect lowlanders to stare, and expect to be the one who says what everyone else is thinking.

Origins

No one outside the dragonborn knows exactly how they were made, and the dragonborn themselves keep only fragments. What they do know is that a ducal line of the Nobility bred them over many generations, shaping them for strength, endurance, and obedience. They fought in the Nobility’s wars, guarded the Dukes’ castles, and served in the long war against the beings from beyond. Some dragonborn believe that war is what they were truly made for. None of them can prove it.

The line of Dukes ended during the decline. Whether they fell in battle, faded into ennui, or went to ground and never woke, the dragonborn will not say, and most may not know. What mattered was that the orders stopped. For a time, the dragonborn legions held their positions out of habit, guarding empty castles for masters who would never return.

When the mortal rebellion rose, the dragonborn made their choice. Many companies marched with the rebels, and their discipline helped win battles that ragged mortal militias could not have won alone. The Frontier remembers that. It is the main reason towns trust dragonborn when they trust almost no one else the Nobility made.

Appearance

Dragonborn are tall and heavily built, covered in fine scales whose colors vary by the old breeding lines: bronze, rust, slate, deep green, and a pale gold that is rare and carefully remarked upon. They have draconic heads, strong jaws, and the unmistakable bearing of people raised to drill. Even off duty, most dragonborn stand as though someone is about to inspect them.

The dead Dukes marked their soldiers with the line’s sigil, and generations later, some dragonborn are still born with a faint pattern in their scales that echoes it. What each dragonborn does about that mark is personal, and it says a great deal about them. Many older dragonborn have a scarred patch where the sigil used to be. Dragonborn grow quickly, reaching adulthood in their mid-teens, and their lives are shorter than a human’s. Veterans are rare, and their scales dull and crack with age. A grey-scaled dragonborn captain has survived more hunts than most hunters ever take.

Most dragonborn bear their company’s mark, painted or etched onto their scales, and each company has its own colors, worn on armor, sashes, or banners. Their armor is always well kept, and their weapons are always clean, whatever else is falling apart. Years of hunting leave their scales chipped, scratched, and scored by claws, and many dragonborn carry tokens from their most notable kills. A dragonborn with a Noble’s token is treated with something close to reverence in every hunter hall on the Frontier.

Life on the Frontier

Hunter companies are the heart of dragonborn life. A company is a sworn band of hunters under a captain, bound by contract and discipline, and most take members of any people who can meet their standards. Companies keep halls in larger towns, where they train, rest, and take requests. When a town sends word that it needs hunters, the request often reaches a company hall first.

On the Frontier, a hunter’s standing comes from what they can kill, and dragonborn companies hold the highest standing of all. The Ashline, most famous of them, claims to have wounded the Grey Marquis in Vane’s Wood, and its members wear a strip of grey cloth on their sleeves to say so. They are among the few hunters willing and able to take contracts against awake Nobles, and every company keeps count of the Nobles it has faced. Most companies have never faced one. The few that have are legends, and their names are known in every saloon on the Frontier.

Dragonborn also guard Guild transport parties, half-dwarf building crews, and halfling caravans, and some serve in the Frontier Defense Force, though most prefer the independence of a company. Their pay is high and worth it. A town that hires a dragonborn company is paying for certainty, and on the Frontier, certainty is the rarest thing there is.

Customs

The contract. A dragonborn company that signs a contract finishes it or dies trying. Breaking a contract is the deepest shame a dragonborn can bring on themselves and their company, and companies that have broken one rarely survive the loss of reputation. Towns know this, and it is why dragonborn contracts are so sought after.

The sigil. At coming of age, each dragonborn decides what to do about the dead line’s sigil: scrape it away, scar it over, or keep it. Scraping it away is the most common choice, a declaration that the dragonborn serves no lord. Keeping it is rarer and controversial. Those who keep it say they want to remember what they were made for, so they never become it again.

Company over clan. Dragonborn take their company’s name in place of a family name, and they regard their company as their true kin. Birth families still matter, but a dragonborn’s first loyalty is to the people who fight beside them. When a company is destroyed, its surviving members sometimes take no new name at all, and carry the dead company’s name until they die.

Drill at dawn. Every company drills at first light, every day, whatever else happens. It is a habit left from the old legions and a promise that the discipline which once served the Nobility now serves the Frontier. Towns hosting a dragonborn company learn to wake to the sound of it.

Names

Dragonborn carry a given name and a company name. Birth names are private, and some dragonborn never share theirs with anyone outside their company.

Given names	Chaqua, Hexa, Huatla, Itza, Pahua, Quetza, Talaxa, Tlana, Xlana, Zlata
Company names	the Ashline, the Ninth Lantern, Gravecourt, the Tallow Hounds, Ironsong, the Long Watch
In practice	“Talaxa of the Ashline,” and her birth name is her own business

Among the other peoples

• Humans trust dragonborn companies more than they trust almost anyone, largely because of the rebellion.
• Elves served the Nobility at table while dragonborn served them in the field. Old soldiers look down on old courtiers, and elves return the favor.
• Dwarves respect dragonborn discipline and quietly hold their origin against them. The dragonborn understand.
• Goliaths are fellow hunters and friendly rivals. Arguments over which people is tougher have ended more than one saloon evening.
• Aasimar are prized by companies that hunt Nobles, since their radiance can stop a Noble’s regeneration. A company with an aasimar in it is a company that means business.
• Half-Dwarves and halflings hire dragonborn to guard their crews and caravans, and trust them completely.
• The Nobility made the dragonborn, and a rumor persists that the old line’s command words still work on some of them. Companies take that rumor very seriously.

Playing a dragonborn

A dragonborn character is a living answer to Masada’s central question. Their people were made to be the Nobility’s weapons, and they chose to become the Frontier’s protectors instead. That choice has to be made again by each dragonborn, and some find it harder than others. Ways to begin:

• Your company was destroyed on a contract against a Noble. You are the last survivor, and you still carry the company’s name.
• You kept the sigil. Your company thinks you are brave. A waking Noble recognized it and called you by a title you have never heard.
• You are a young recruit who joined a company to prove yourself, and the first contract you signed was far bigger than anyone admitted.
• Your company broke a contract before you were born. You have spent your whole life trying to wash out the stain.

Dragonborn are respected, disciplined, and dangerous. Expect towns to welcome you and to expect a great deal of you in return.

Origins

No one knows why aasimar are born, and everyone has a theory. The Frontier’s churches say the light is a blessing, a sign of the divine choosing a champion against the Nobility. Capitol researchers point out that the churches’ own faith spread under the Nobility’s rule, and wonder aloud whether the churches should be so confident about where the light comes from. Old elven ledgers mention children with light in them during the golden era, and mention what the Nobility did to them. A few frightened voices on the Frontier whisper that the light has something to do with the beings from beyond. No one can prove any of it.

What is known is that aasimar are born without warning to families with no history of the light, and that they have been born for as long as anyone has kept records. They do not form a people of their own. They have no homeland, no shared language, and no common ancestry anyone can trace. Each one is a mystery on their own.

Appearance

Aasimar look like the people they were born to, human or elf or dwarf or anyone else, with small differences that grow more noticeable with age. Their eyes catch light strangely and sometimes seem to glow faintly even in daylight. Their skin can take on a pale, luminous cast, and their features often have a clarity that makes them stand out in a crowd even when nothing is visibly wrong.

Under strain, the light shows through. It gathers in their eyes, runs along their veins, or surrounds them in a brightness no lantern could explain. It is strongest in fear and anger, and in childhood it is almost impossible to control: lamps brighten when an aasimar baby cries, and a frightened aasimar child can light a dark room. Once people have seen the light, they never forget it. Frontier folk make warding signs when they recognize an aasimar, and whether the signs are meant to protect the aasimar or protect themselves depends on the town.

Most aasimar learn early to hide it. Hoods, dark lenses, gloves, and heavy clothing are common, and many aasimar learn to calm themselves the way other people learn to hold their breath. A single frightened moment in the wrong town can undo years of careful anonymity. Many carry the look of people who never sleep deeply. The few who ride with dragonborn companies sometimes stop hiding altogether, and an aasimar who lets their light show openly on a hunt is a sight Frontier folk talk about for years.

Life on the Frontier

An aasimar’s life is shaped by what their light can do and who might come looking for it. Most Nobles are asleep, and most will never wake. But the few that are awake are the deadliest powers on the Frontier, and a Noble that hears of an aasimar will come for them. Families who realize their child is aasimar often face a terrible choice: keep the child and risk the town, or send the child away. Many aasimar grow up with relatives far from home, or on the road, or in the care of people who understand what they are protecting.

Hunter companies prize aasimar above almost any other recruit. A company that hunts Nobles knows exactly what aasimar radiance can do, and an aasimar in the company can turn an impossible contract into a possible one. Dragonborn companies in particular go to great lengths to find, train, and protect aasimar, and some aasimar find in those companies the first real family they have ever had.

The churches take a keen interest too, the Church of the Dawn above all. An aasimar who joins a church becomes a living proof of its faith, and churches compete to claim them. Some aasimar find real purpose there. Others find that being a symbol is its own kind of cage. And the Institute would dearly like to study an aasimar, which most aasimar consider a very good reason to stay out of the Capitol.

Customs

Aasimar have no shared culture, since each is born alone. What they share instead are habits, learned the hard way and passed between the few aasimar who ever meet.

Covering the light. Almost every aasimar learns to hide their light, and most have a personal method: a hood, a pair of dark lenses, a breathing practice, a word they repeat to stay calm. Showing the light deliberately is a serious act, and aasimar do it only when they mean it.

A second name. Many aasimar take a new name when they leave home, to protect their families from anyone who might come asking. Their birth name is shared only with people they trust completely.

Finding each other. Aasimar who meet by chance are often overwhelmed. Most have never met another person like them. There is an unspoken custom of sharing a meal, telling each other the truth about where they came from, and parting without asking to meet again, since two aasimar together are twice as easy to find.

Never staying. Many aasimar keep moving all their lives, never staying anywhere long enough for word of the light to spread. The ones who settle usually do it somewhere with strong walls, a dragonborn company nearby, and neighbors who know exactly what they are sheltering and have chosen to do it anyway.

Names

Aasimar carry the names of the people they were born to, and often a second name chosen when they leave. Chosen names tend toward things that are plain, unremarkable, and easy to forget, which is the point.

Birth names	As their family’s people: Clara, Aurelle, Hild, Tansy, Kessrith, and so on
Chosen names	Ash, Brook, Dell, Grey, June, Lane, Moss, Sparrow, Wick
In practice	“June,” of no particular town, and she does not take off her hood indoors

Among the other peoples

• Humans meet aasimar with awe and fear. A town is grateful for the light and terrified of what it might draw.
• Dragonborn companies prize aasimar above almost any other recruit, and protect them fiercely.
• The churches want to claim aasimar as proof of their faith, and some aasimar let them.
• Elves know from their ledgers what the Nobility did to aasimar in the golden era, and many elves feel a quiet obligation to protect them.
• The Capitol would like to study aasimar. Aasimar would prefer it did not.
• The Nobility hunt aasimar on sight, and every aasimar knows it.

Playing an aasimar

An aasimar character carries the one thing the Nobility truly fear, and has no idea why. The central question of Masada cuts strangely for them: they are hunted as a monster by monsters, and treated as a saint by churches built on the Nobility’s faith. A few places to start:

• Your family sent you away as a child to protect the town. The town was destroyed anyway, and you want to know if the Noble was looking for you.
• A dragonborn company raised you and trained you to hunt Nobles. You have never faced one, and every member of the company is waiting to see what you can do.
• A church claimed you as a living saint. You have started to wonder what the church really is, and who it really serves.
• You met another aasimar once, and they told you something about where the light comes from. They disappeared before you could ask more.

Aasimar are rare, powerful, and hunted. Expect every awake Noble to take a personal interest in you, and expect some of your allies to value your light more than your life.

Origins

The most common story is that the Nobility made changelings during the golden era to serve as eyes and ears among the mortals they ruled. A servant who could become anyone could hear anything: the plotting of a rebel cell, the grumbling of a village, the secrets of a rival Noble’s household. Old elven ledgers mention faces in the courts that did not stay the same, and some Capitol scholars believe the story is true.

Changelings themselves are divided. Some accept the story and carry it as a burden. Some reject it and believe their people are older than the golden era, maybe even older than the Nobility, and that the lords only made use of them the way they made use of everyone. And some refuse to talk about it at all, on the grounds that what their ancestors were made for says nothing about what they are.

What is certain is that changelings survived the fall of the Nobility and spread across the Frontier. If they were once spies for the lords, the lords are gone, and the spies stayed.

Appearance

A changeling’s true form is pale and smooth, with colorless eyes, hair the shade of ash or bone, and features so subtle they seem unfinished, like a face sketched and never completed. Few people outside a changeling’s closest circle have ever seen it. Changelings spend almost all their lives wearing other faces, and many are more comfortable in a borrowed face than in their own.

Most changelings settle on one main face that they wear day to day, and keep a handful of others for when they need them. They are careful about details: posture, voice, scars, the way a person holds a cup. The best can pass unnoticed for decades. Aging is the hardest part. A changeling who keeps one face in one town must remember to age it alongside their neighbors, a little each year, and a face that stays young too long is how many changelings are caught.

There are tells, and changelings know every one of them. An ear shape that slips when they are exhausted. A scar that drifts to the wrong side after a long day. Eyes that go colorless for an instant when they are startled. The Frontier’s tests look for these, and changelings spend their lives making sure the tests find nothing. They dress plainly, avoid jewelry that will not fit a changed shape, and many carry a small mirror to check a face after a hard day, the way other people check for dirt.

Life on the Frontier

Frontier towns have many tests for changelings, and almost none of them work. Some make strangers wash their faces in running water, a custom borrowed from the precautions against the Nobility that does nothing to a changeling. Some ask questions only a local would know. Some watch for a stranger’s reflection or check whether their dog trusts them. Changelings know every one of these tests, and most can pass them all. The tests persist anyway, because they make people feel safer.

In practice, most changelings live quiet lives. They trade, carry messages, perform in saloons, and work among other travelers who are used to strangers. Some settle in one town and one face for years. A few do use their gift to steal, deceive, or spy, and those are the ones who give the rest a reputation. Every time a changeling con artist is caught, every changeling on the Frontier pays for it.

There are rumors that changelings keep a quiet network, recognizing each other on sight and passing news and warnings among themselves. Changelings will neither confirm nor deny this, which most people take as confirmation.

Customs

One face or many. Changelings divide themselves, roughly, into those who keep one face for life and those who change often. The first see stability as the path to being trusted. The second see flexibility as the only safe way to live in a world that fears them. The debate between the two is old and occasionally bitter.

The true face. A changeling shows their true face only to people they trust completely. It is the most intimate thing a changeling can share, more than any secret or confession. A changeling who shows you their true face is telling you that you now hold their life in your hands.

The quiet sign. Changelings are said to recognize each other through small gestures, a way of touching the face or a turn of phrase that means nothing to anyone else. If this custom exists, changelings have kept it remarkably well hidden.

Borrowed names. Each face a changeling wears has its own name. The true name, the one that belongs to the changeling beneath all the faces, is usually a single soft syllable, and very few people ever hear it.

Names

Changelings carry the names of the faces they wear, and a true name they rarely share. The names of their faces are chosen to fit in wherever they are.

True names	Ashe, Lin, Mere, Sil, Tal, Ves, Oa, Ren
Face names	Anything local: Eli Barrow in a human town, Pell in a caravan, Maelis in the Capitol
In practice	“Pell,” the trader everyone on the circuit knows, and very few know that Pell is also Ves

Among the other peoples

• Humans fear changelings more than they fear almost anything that does not come out at night.
• Halflings have met more changelings than anyone and keep their secrets carefully. Many changelings travel with halfling caravans for exactly that reason.
• Half-elves are often suspected of being changelings, and they resent it. Changelings sometimes wear half-elven faces precisely because that suspicion is so common it has stopped meaning anything.
• Elves are uneasy around changelings, remembering what their ledgers say about the faces in the courts.
• Bards and changelings share a trade and often a stage, and some of the Frontier’s most beloved performers are rumored to be changelings.
• The Nobility, if they did make changelings, might still be able to call on them. Some changelings fear that more than discovery.

Playing a changeling

A changeling character is the purest test of Masada’s central question. They can be anyone, which means the Frontier can never be sure what they are, and they have to decide for themselves. A few ways in:

• You have worn one face for twenty years and built a life in it. Someone in town has started to suspect, and you have to decide whether to run or trust them with the truth.
• You were raised believing your people were the Nobility’s spies. A Noble has woken nearby, and you have started hearing a voice in your head you do not recognize.
• A changeling con artist has been working your circuit, and every changeling in the sector is paying for it. You are going to find them before the Frontier does.
• You took the face of someone who died, to comfort their family. It has been three years, and you cannot figure out how to stop.

Changelings make superb infiltrators, go-betweens, and performers. Expect suspicion everywhere, and expect to be very good at avoiding it until the one moment you cannot.

Origins

No one knows exactly where shifters came from, and shifters themselves have several stories. The most common is that the Nobility, who filled the world with engineered beasts during the golden era, also experimented with mixing those beasts into mortal bloodlines, looking for servants who could hunt like their creatures and obey like their people. Another story holds that the mixing was an accident, the result of mortals living too close to the lords’ engineered creatures for too many generations. A third, told by some shifter families, says their ancestors chose it, making a bargain for strength in a world that gave mortals none.

Whichever story is true, shifters today carry the traits of specific engineered beasts, and different lines show different natures. Some shifters are lean and fast, some heavy and powerful, some patient and stealthy. Most shifters know which line they come from, and they take a quiet pride in it, even knowing what that line was originally made to do.

Appearance

Shifters look mostly like the mortals they descend from, with the traits of their beast line layered on top. Common signs include reflective eyes, heavy brows, pointed ears, thick or patterned hair, and long canine teeth. Each line looks different. The grey line tends to be lean and long-limbed, the long-tooth line heavy-jawed and broad, and the stag line tall, with ridges of bone at the brow.

When they shift, those traits sharpen dramatically. Claws extend, features lengthen, muscles swell, and a shifter mid-hunt can look far more beast than person. A shift leaves marks: torn seams, scratched skin, and afterward a deep exhaustion and a ravenous hunger. The beast also shows more as a shifter ages. Young shifters can often pass for ordinary mortals, but an old shifter looks unmistakably like their line, and towns that tolerated them in youth sometimes grow uneasy as they grow older.

Shifters dress for the wild, in durable leather and practical layers cut loose enough to shift in without tearing. Many decorate themselves with marks from their line, such as a particular tattoo, a carved token, or teeth from a beast of their own line that they have hunted and killed. Townsfolk say shifters smell of woodsmoke and animal. Shifters say towns smell worse, and that they can tell a town’s troubles by its scent before they reach the gate.

Life on the Frontier

Most shifters live at the edges. They take work on outlying ranches, run trap lines in the wild country, or live in hunter camps between contracts. Towns are uneasy about shifters living among them, and shifters often find the edges more comfortable anyway, closer to the wild and farther from the careful looks.

As hunters, shifters are exceptional. Shifters of the grey line are the only trackers on the Frontier who can follow hedge-hounds through the green ruins and come out again. They can track the Nobility’s engineered creatures by scent across miles of country, and they understand those creatures’ behavior better than anyone, because some part of them shares it. Hunter companies recruit shifters eagerly, and many of the Frontier’s best trackers are shifters. Rangers in particular work closely with them, and many rangers who serve as trail wardens have a shifter partner.

Their relationship with druids is complicated. Druids work with the world’s original nature and regard the Nobility’s engineered creatures as a kind of weed. A shifter is part of that weed, living in a mortal body. Some druids treat shifters with suspicion or open hostility. Others see shifters as proof that the engineered and the original can live together, and welcome them. Shifter druids exist, and they tend to be thoughtful, conflicted, and very interesting company.

Customs

Knowing the line. Shifters keep careful track of which engineered beast their line descends from. Knowing your line means knowing your nature, and shifters believe that understanding the beast is the only way to master it. A shifter who does not know their line is considered at risk, and other shifters will try to help them learn it.

Letting it out elsewhere. Shifters who live near towns try never to shift within them. When the beast needs to come out, they go into the wild country to let it. It is a courtesy, a way of reassuring the town, and it is also a kind of discipline. A shifter who shifts in the middle of a town has usually lost control, and everyone knows it.

Hunt-kin. Shifters who hunt together form bonds as strong as family. A hunt-kin bond crosses lines and peoples, and a shifter will risk their life for hunt-kin without hesitation. Being named someone’s hunt-kin is one of the greatest compliments a shifter can pay.

The kill of your own. Many shifters feel an obligation to hunt a beast of their own line at least once. It is a way of facing what they came from. Some do it to prove they are not the beast. Some do it to understand the beast. Some never come back quite the same.

Names

Shifters carry an ordinary given name from their family’s people, and often a hunting name earned in the wild. They add their line when speaking with other shifters.

Given names	Ash, Brindle, Corra, Dex, Kaya, Nell, Rusk, Tobin, Vara, Wick
Lines	the grey line, the long-tooth line, the quiet line, the stag line, the black line
In practice	“Rusk,” and among other shifters, “Rusk, of the long-tooth line”

Among the other peoples

• Humans are uneasy around shifters and hire them anyway. Most shifters have learned to accept that trade.
• Rangers and hunters of every people value shifters highly and trust them more easily than towns do.
• Druids are divided. Some see shifters as part of the Nobility’s weed; others see them as proof the wild can heal.
• Entlings and shifters share an unusual kinship, both being living things the Nobility shaped. They tend to understand each other’s unease.
• Dragonborn companies recruit shifters readily, and shifters appreciate a people who judge by discipline rather than origin.
• Goliaths respect shifters as fellow hunters and judge them only by their tally.

Playing a shifter

A shifter character carries Masada’s central question in their own body. Every time the beast surfaces, they have to decide what they are, and every town they enter decides for them. Some starting points:

• You hunted a beast of your own line and killed it. Something about the kill has stayed with you, and you have started dreaming about the golden era.
• You shifted in the middle of a town to save a child. The town ran you out anyway. You are not sure whether you are angry or relieved.
• Your ranger partner of fifteen years was killed on the trail. You are hunting what killed them, and you do not know what you will do when you catch it.
• You do not know your line. You have heard there are records of the Nobility’s breeding programs in a golden era ruin, and you are going to find them.

Shifters are fierce, perceptive, and deeply valuable in the wild. Expect trust from hunters and suspicion from towns, and expect the beast to test you when you least want it to.

Origins

Every Noble estate of the golden era had its gardens, and the greatest of them were works of science as much as beauty. The Nobility bred plants that could sense a visitor, turn to follow them, and arrange their own blooms to please. The last step was thought: gardeners that were also the garden. The first Entlings were made to prune, to plant, to remember every preference of the lord of the house, and to feel something like joy when the garden was admired.

No one is certain when the first Entling walked out. Entlings tell it as a slow thing. The lord stopped coming. The seasons kept turning. The garden kept being beautiful for no one, and at some point being beautiful stopped being enough. Some uprooted within a generation of the Nobility going to ground. Others stayed for centuries and only left when the estate fell in around them. A few, it is whispered, are still there, tending grounds no one has seen in an age.

Appearance

Entlings are plant-folk of roughly human height and bearing, and no two are quite the same, because no two gardens were. An Entling from a manor of climbing roses has a very different look from one bred among cypress and stone. Some have bark-like skin and limbs of grained wood; others are soft with leaf and vine. What they share is poise. Their limbs are long and deliberate, and their faces are calm.

Their coloring shifts with the season, greening in spring and going to bronze and rust before the cold. In deep winter many slow down, their movements stiff and their speech sparing, until the thaw. Entlings do not age as mortals do. They grow, thickening and adding rings, and the oldest Entlings are gnarled and heavy, with bodies that have clearly weathered centuries. They move slowly and without waste. Frontier folk sometimes mistake this for weakness. Hunters who have seen an Entling put down a beast with a single unhurried strike do not make the mistake twice.

Many carry a bloom or a fruit somewhere on their body that they tend the way other people tend their hair. They wear little clothing by mortal standards, often a single remnant from the estate they left, such as a sash, a ribbon, or a gardener’s belt, and sometimes a practical Frontier coat for the road. Their feet are usually caked with soil from their last rooting, and most Entlings carry a faint scent of the garden they grew in, which other Entlings can recognize.

Life on the Frontier

An Entling arriving in a town gets the look every stranger gets, and then a second look, longer. Towns that have suffered from the Nobility’s leftovers are slow to trust anything the Nobility made, and an Entling can’t hide what it is. Most find their footing through usefulness. They know growing things better than anyone, and a town whose orchard an Entling has tended for a decade tends to forget its suspicions, or at least keep them quiet.

Their most valuable work is in the green ruins. Where a golden era structure has been swallowed by garden growth, the plants inside are often the Nobility’s work too, and they are rarely friendly. Entlings can read that growth, move through it, and sometimes calm it. Scavenger crews pay well for a guide who can tell a harmless hedge from one that feeds. The Capitol’s field researchers pay better, when they can find one willing.

Entlings are not welcomed by everyone who lives close to the land. Druids, who work with the world’s original nature, regard engineered growth as a kind of weed, and an Entling is engineered growth that talks back. Relations between the two range from wary respect to open hostility, and an Entling who wants to travel the deep wilds does well to find a druid who will vouch for it.

Customs

Rooting. An Entling sleeps by rooting, sinking its feet into living soil for the night. It can go without, but not for long, and not well. Entling travelers carry a pouch of good earth from the last place they rested, and offering an Entling a patch of your garden to root in is the warmest hospitality you can show one.

The tended thing. Nearly every Entling keeps one living thing in perfect order: a bloom on its own body, a potted seedling, a stretch of hedge in whatever town it has settled. It is the habit of a people made to keep a garden, turned inward now that the garden is gone. Ask an Entling about its tended thing and you will learn more about it than from an hour of other questions.

Courtesy. Entlings were raised to attend the Nobility, and the manners stayed. They address strangers formally, wait to be seated, and find raised voices distasteful. This is not servility. An Entling that decides you are beneath its courtesy will simply stop speaking to you, and nothing you say afterward will change it.

The pull. Some Entlings feel a longing for the garden they came from. It comes and goes, strongest in the season they first bloomed. A few give in to it and go back, and what they find there they rarely tell. Entlings do not discuss the pull with outsiders, and asking about it is the fastest way to lose one’s company.

Names

Entlings are named the way cultivars were named in the gardens: a given name, and the place in the garden where they grew. On the Frontier most shorten this to the given name and let the rest go unspoken, since a garden-name tells everyone in earshot which Noble’s grounds they came from.

Given names	Vesper, Sorrel, Quillon, Marrow, Ilex, Ashlar, Fennel, Damask, Rue
Garden-names	of the East Terrace, of the Moon Stair, of the Long Hedge, of the Drowned Walk, of the Cold Frame
In practice	“Sorrel,” and only close friends know she is Sorrel of the Moon Stair

Among the other peoples

• Humans are wary but practical. An Entling that feeds a town gets tolerated, then trusted, then quietly counted as a local.
• Magen are the Entlings’ closest kin in spirit: two kinds of servant the Nobility left behind. They tend to understand each other without much talk.
• Gnomes and scavengers value Entlings as guides and rarely ask what they think about anything else.
• Druids see a weed that walks. The best an Entling can usually hope for is a truce.
• The Nobility, on the rare occasion one is awake, may regard an Entling as property that wandered off. Entlings do not linger where a lord is stirring.

Playing an Entling

An Entling character is someone made for a purpose that no longer exists, deciding what to be instead. A few doors into the character:

• You left your garden recently, and everything on the Frontier is new, loud, and rude. You are deciding whether people are worth the trouble.
• You have tended the same town’s orchard for forty years, and now something has come out of the ruin on the outskirts that only you can read.
• You feel the pull, and you have decided to answer it. You need companions who can survive the walk back.
• A scavenger crew hired you as a guide and did not listen. You are the only one who came out, and you would like to know why the garden let you leave.

Entlings are Nobility-made, and the Frontier does not forget it. Expect suspicion in new towns, and expect the rare waking Noble to take a very personal interest in you.

Origins

The Nobility built Magen with the same science they used for everything else: measurable, repeatable, and understood by no one alive today. Each Magen was made for a purpose. Some were household servants, some archivists, some guards, some laborers in the lords’ great works. They were built to serve without tiring and to obey without question, and during the golden era, they did.

When the Nobility declined and went to ground, the orders stopped. Magen were built to wait for orders, so they waited. Some stood in their posts until the halls around them collapsed. Some sealed themselves in with their masters’ sleeping bodies. Some simply stopped where they stood, in the middle of a task, and did not move for centuries.

What wakes a Magen is not fully understood. Sometimes it is a scavenger touching the right mechanism. Sometimes it is a spoken word, a phrase from the golden era that some part of the Magen still recognizes. Sometimes it is nothing anyone can identify. A Magen that wakes usually has no memory of the years it spent dormant, and sometimes no memory of the household it served. It only has its purpose, and the instructions left inside it.

Appearance

Magen are humanoid constructs, built in the proportions of mortals but plainly not mortal. Their bodies are made of materials the Frontier cannot reproduce: dense stone, strange alloys, fired ceramics, and alchemical substances that feel almost like flesh. Each household of the golden era built its Magen differently, and no two look quite alike. Some are elegant and ornamented, made to stand in a Duke’s hall. Others are heavy and plain, made to work.

Magen do not age, but they wear. Joints stiffen, surfaces craze, and seals crack over the centuries, and most Magen on the Frontier are very old indeed. Their faces vary as much as their bodies. Some are expressive, carved or molded to show feeling. Others are blank masks, and mortals find them hard to read. Many Magen with blank faces learn to gesture and to speak with extra warmth to make up for it, and some have had expressions carved into their faces after waking, to help people understand them.

Many Magen on the Frontier have been repaired with whatever was at hand: scrap iron, wood, leather straps, and pieces of other Magen. A Magen’s repairs tell the story of its life since waking, and many wear them with pride. Some bear the mark of the household that built them, and what they do about that mark says a great deal about them. Some Magen wear clothes to fit into towns, a long coat and a hat to soften their outline, while others see no reason to pretend to be anything but what they are.

Life on the Frontier

A newly woken Magen often finds itself claimed. The scavenger who woke it may believe it is property, a golden era find like any other, to be sold or put to work. The Capitol, in many cases, agrees, and its agents have been known to buy woken Magen along with the rest of a scavenger’s haul. Most Magen reject this. They were built to serve, but they were not built to serve scavengers, and a Magen that has decided no one owns it can be very difficult to argue with.

Free Magen find purpose where they can. Many join half-dwarf building crews, where a construct that can lift stone all day and wants something to do is welcomed without much fuss. Some work as ruin guides, since they understand golden era structures better than anyone. Some become archivists or record-keepers, putting their old purpose to new use. And some become hunters, finding that the discipline they were built with serves as well against the Nobility’s creatures as it once did for the Nobility themselves.

The old instructions are the hardest part of a Magen’s life. Some are harmless: tend the garden, keep the ledger, greet visitors at the door. Some are not. Magen carry orders to guard things, fetch things, or find things that no longer exist, and a few carry orders that no Magen has ever been willing to explain. Most Magen keep their instructions private, and the ones who have learned to ignore them rarely talk about what it cost.

Customs

The waking day. Magen mark the day they were woken as the beginning of their life. Many can tell you the exact date, the ruin, and the person who woke them. Some consider that person a kind of parent. Some consider them a thief. Most feel something in between.

The instructions. A Magen’s old orders are private, and asking about them is rude. A Magen who tells you its instructions is trusting you with the one thing that could be used to control it. A Magen that has chosen to follow its instructions will say so, and a Magen that has chosen to defy them will not want to discuss it.

Choosing a purpose. Every free Magen eventually chooses a purpose of its own, something to replace the one it was built for. It might be a trade, a person, a place, or a cause. Magen take this choice very seriously, since for them it is the moment they stop being what they were made to be and start being themselves.

Repairs. Being repaired is intimate for a Magen. Letting someone open its body and work on its insides is an act of deep trust, and most Magen allow only one or two people to do it. Gnomes are often among the few, which is a source of both closeness and tension, since a gnome who understands a Magen well enough to repair it could also change it.

Names

Magen were given designations by their makers, often describing their function and household. Free Magen usually choose names of their own, often simple words that describe their chosen purpose or something they value.

Old designations	Seventh of the Lower Archive, Doorward of the East Hall, Keeper of the Long Cellar
Chosen names	Ferrous, Hush, Lantern, Ledger, Mercy, Plumb, Tally, Wainwright
In practice	“Tally,” once the Seventh of the Lower Archive, now keeping the books for a building crew in the Western sector

Among the other peoples

• Humans are slow to trust anything the Nobility made, and many see Magen as property. Towns come around eventually to a Magen that works hard and stays long enough.
• Entlings are the Magen’s closest kin in spirit: two kinds of servant the Nobility left behind. They tend to understand each other without much talk.
• Reborn also came out of the ruins changed by the Nobility’s works, and Magen and Reborn often find each other easy company.
• Dwarves see Magen as the Nobility’s servants in body and origin, and some holds destroy them on sight at the gate. A Magen traveling with dwarves has earned something extraordinary.
• Gnomes are fascinated by Magen and can almost understand them. Magen are grateful for gnome repairs and wary of gnome curiosity.
• Half-Dwarves welcome Magen on their crews, and many Magen find their first real purpose there.
• The Nobility, if one wakes, may try to reclaim the Magen it once owned. Every Magen fears the moment an old voice speaks its designation.

Playing a Magen

A Magen character is someone built for a purpose and trying to become a person. Masada’s central question is the question of their whole existence: were they ever a monster’s tool, or were they always something more, waiting to be woken? Ways to begin:

• The scavenger who woke you sold you to a Capitol agent. You walked away from the agent. Both of them want you back.
• Your old instructions tell you to guard a door in a ruin you have never seen. You have decided to find the door, to learn what you were guarding and why.
• A Noble woke in the ruins near your crew’s town and spoke your old designation. You felt something inside you answer, and you have not decided whether to obey.
• You have chosen your purpose: protect the family of the scavenger who woke you, who died a month later. They do not want your protection, and you do not know how to stop.

Magen are strong, tireless, and relentlessly curious about what it means to be a person. Expect to be claimed, questioned, and underestimated, and expect your old instructions to surface at the worst possible moment.

Origins

No one knows how the Reborn are made, or why. The Nobility built their structures to last and to maintain themselves, and some golden era works are known to repair damage to their own walls, machinery, and guardians. At some point, and no one knows when, it became clear that some structures also repair the people who die inside them.

Not every structure does it, and not every death inside one leads to a return. Some ruins have produced a dozen Reborn over a generation. Others have killed hundreds of scavengers and sent back none. Capitol researchers have tried to find a pattern and failed. Some believe the structures were built to preserve the Nobility’s servants. Others believe they were built to preserve the Nobility themselves, and that the Reborn are what happens when that process runs on the wrong kind of body.

What is certain is that the Reborn are getting more common. As more scavengers push deeper into the ruins, more of them die there, and more of them come back.

Appearance

Reborn look as they did before they died, with small differences that are hard to miss once you know to look. The wounds that killed them are healed completely, often leaving no scar at all, or leaving a fine, perfectly straight seam where the damage was. The seams are cleaner than any healer’s work, and anyone who has seen one never mistakes it for an ordinary scar.

Other changes vary from one Reborn to the next. Some run cold to the touch. Some have eyes that are slightly the wrong color, or hair that has gone white. Some move differently, with a precision that was never there before. Some do not seem to age at all; others age normally; a few age faster than they should. No Reborn knows which kind they are until the years pass. Families often say the Reborn look like themselves, only a little too much. Every feature is right, and the whole is wrong. Animals tend to notice first. Dogs growl, horses shy, and birds go quiet when a Reborn passes.

Many Reborn cover their seams with high collars, long sleeves, and gloves, and try to look as ordinary as possible. Others show them openly, as a kind of defiance. Most still dress like the scavengers they were, in practical, patched gear built for ruins, and many carry the thing they were holding when they died: a lantern, a pry bar, a crewmate’s charm. They rarely explain why.

Life on the Frontier

A Reborn’s first challenge is going home. Some families welcome them back with relief and joy. Others are frightened, and some refuse outright to believe the person at the door is the one they buried. Towns react much the same way. A few towns have run Reborn off, and a few have done worse. Many Reborn leave home of their own accord, rather than live among people who cannot stop watching them.

Most Reborn stay close to the ruins. Some go back to scavenging, since they know the structures better than almost anyone living and have, in a sense, already paid the price. Some work as guides, leading crews through ruins they have died in. And some go back into the ruins alone, looking for answers about what happened to them, and some of those do not come back a second time.

The Capitol’s researchers would give a great deal to study Reborn, and some Reborn accept, hoping to learn what they are. Others have heard what happens to people who accept, and stay far away from anyone in a Capitol coat.

Customs

The Reborn are not a people with a shared history, but their shared experience has produced habits that many of them keep.

The second name. Many Reborn take a new name when they return, marking the difference between who died and who walked out. Scavenger crews often name them for where they died, and some Reborn keep those names even when they would rather forget the place.

The counting. Reborn often keep lists of what they remember: names of family, events of their childhood, the shape of the house they grew up in. They check the list regularly, making sure nothing has changed. Some find entries they do not remember writing.

The death not spoken of. Reborn rarely talk about how they died, or what, if anything, they remember between death and return. Asking is one of the few ways to reliably make a Reborn angry. When Reborn meet each other, the one thing they never ask is what the other one saw.

Going back. Almost every Reborn feels a pull, sooner or later, to return to the structure where they died. Some resist it all their lives. Some go back once and never speak of what they found. The pull is common enough that crews who work with Reborn watch them carefully when they get close to that particular ruin.

Names

Reborn keep their original names or take new ones. Crews often give them names from where or how they died, and many Reborn end up with both.

Original names	As their people: Amos, Hattie, Pim, Sable, Torvin, and so on
Crew names	Deepvault, Tuesday, Second Gate, Coldwater, Stillness, Lantern Hall
In practice	“Deepvault,” who used to be Hattie of Plumb’s crew, and does not answer to Hattie anymore

Among the other peoples

• Humans are frightened of the Reborn in a way they rarely put into words. Most human towns have buried someone who later walked back in.
• Scavengers of every people are split between seeing Reborn as lucky and seeing them as cursed, and often change their minds depending on how the last job went.
• Magen share something with the Reborn: both were brought out of the ruins, and both carry something of the golden era inside them. They tend to understand each other.
• The Capitol wants to study the Reborn. Many Reborn want to know the answers too, and fewer want to pay the price.
• Clerics are uncertain what to make of the Reborn. The faith they serve spread under the Nobility, and some clerics fear that whatever brought the Reborn back is connected to the same old systems that answer their prayers.

Playing a Reborn

A Reborn character is a walking version of Masada’s central question. They died, and something the Nobility built brought them back. Whether they are still themselves, or something new that thinks it is, is a question no one can answer for them. A few places to start:

• You died in a ruin with your whole crew. You are the only one who walked out, and you want to know why you were chosen.
• You came home, and your family did not recognize you. You are traveling now, trying to figure out who you are without them.
• You found an entry on your memory list in your own handwriting that you have no memory of writing. It is a name and a place.
• A Capitol researcher on field duty has offered to help you learn what happened to you. You suspect they know more than they are saying.

Reborn are unsettling, resilient, and haunted. Expect fear from those who knew you before, and expect the ruin where you died to call to you eventually.

You come from a farm or a ranch on the Frontier, like most people do. You grew up barring the door at dusk, counting the herd every morning, and learning which sounds in the night meant a fox and which meant something worse. You were never a hunter or a hero. Then something happened that meant you couldn’t stay home anymore, and you picked up whatever was at hand.

Skill Proficiencies	Animal Handling, Nature
Tool Proficiencies	One type of artisan’s tools, vehicles (land)
Equipment	The sharpened stake that hung over your family’s door, a shovel, an iron pot, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: One of Us

Frontier folk recognize you as one of their own. Farmers, ranchers, and ordinary townsfolk will give you food and a place to sleep, hide you if you need hiding, and tell you what’s really been happening, as long as doing so doesn’t put their own families at risk. You also know how to read a homestead’s trouble: what a sick herd, a failed crop, or a broken fence usually means, and when it means something else.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I’m up before dawn, every day, whether I need to be or not.
2	I judge people by how hard they work.
3	I say grace before every meal, even the bad ones.
4	I’m slow to speak and slower to trust.
5	I can’t stand waste, of food, of time, or of lives.
6	I count things when I’m nervous: fence posts, stars, bullets.
7	I miss the smell of turned earth more than I’ll admit.
8	I talk to animals more easily than I talk to people.

d6	Ideal
1	Home. Everything I do is so someone else gets to stay home. (Good)
2	Endurance. You plant in spring no matter what the winter took. (Neutral)
3	Community. A town lives or dies together. (Lawful)
4	Independence. Nobody tells a homesteader how to live. (Chaotic)
5	Justice. Whatever came for my family is going to answer for it. (Any)
6	Simplicity. I want to finish this and go back to the land. (Neutral)

d6	Bond
1	The family farm, and whoever is still working it.
2	My younger siblings, who depend on the money I send home.
3	The hunter who came too late to save my family, whom I both blame and admire.
4	The dog that has followed me since I left home.
5	A neighbor who took my family in when we lost everything.
6	The land itself. I intend to be buried on it.

d6	Flaw
1	I’m suspicious of anyone from the Capitol.
2	I’m stubborn to the point of stupidity.
3	I hoard food and supplies, just in case.
4	I freeze up in crowds and cities.
5	I hold grudges against towns that turned my family away.
6	I don’t believe I belong among real hunters, and it shows.

Your town is gone. A scavenger pushed too far into the golden era structure on its outskirts and woke something: a weapon, a security system, or a machine that should have stayed asleep. By morning, your town was dead. You lived because of luck, or because someone died in your place, or for reasons you still don’t understand. You have been carrying that ever since.

Skill Proficiencies	Medicine, Perception
Tool Proficiencies	One type of artisan’s tools, from the trade you had before
Languages	One of your choice
Equipment	A keepsake from your town, a scrap of metal from the thing that destroyed it, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 5 gp

Feature: Shout the Warning

You have seen what a waking ruin does, and you react before anyone else. Once per long rest, when you or a creature you can see triggers a trap or hazard inside a golden era structure, you can use your reaction to shout a warning, giving that creature advantage on the saving throw against it. People who hear the name of your town know its story, and some will pay well to hear what you saw.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I flinch at sudden lights and humming sounds.
2	I don’t make plans past tomorrow.
3	I say the names of my town’s dead every night before I sleep.
4	I laugh at things that aren’t funny, because the alternative is worse.
5	I’m fiercely protective of anyone who reminds me of someone I lost.
6	I keep moving. Stillness gives me time to remember.
7	I help everyone I can, as if I’m paying something back.
8	I refuse to go near golden era structures, and I tell everyone why.

d6	Ideal
1	Warning. No other town will die the way mine did, if I can help it. (Good)
2	Justice. The scavenger who woke it deserves to answer for it. (Lawful)
3	Destruction. Every ruin should be sealed or brought down. (Chaotic)
4	Understanding. I need to know what woke, and why. (Neutral)
5	Survival. I lived. That has to mean something. (Any)
6	Revenge. Someone profited from what happened, and they will pay. (Evil)

d6	Bond
1	The keepsake from my town, which I will never give up.
2	Another survivor of my town, whom I haven’t seen in years.
3	The scavenger who woke it, whom I’ve never found.
4	The person who died so I could live.
5	The Capitol researcher who wanted to study what happened, and was turned away.
6	The ruin itself. One day I will go back in.

d6	Flaw
1	I blame all scavengers for what one of them did.
2	I have nightmares that keep my companions awake.
3	I take reckless risks, because part of me thinks I should have died.
4	I can’t trust anything the Nobility made, including people.
5	I lie about where I’m from, to avoid the looks.
6	I am drawn to the ruins, even though they terrify me.

You have taken bounties before. Maybe you rode with a company, maybe you worked alone, but you have answered a town’s call, followed something into the dark, and come back with proof. You know how the work goes: the posted request, the sheriff’s handshake, the long ride, and the moment you find out what the town didn’t tell you.

Skill Proficiencies	Investigation, Survival
Tool Proficiencies	One type of gaming set, vehicles (land)
Equipment	A sharpened wooden stake, a hunting trap, a trophy from your first bounty, a set of traveler’s clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Word on the Trail

Your name is known where hunters gather. In any town, you can find out where hunter requests are posted, which bounties are open, and which ones other hunters have turned down, and why. Sheriffs and mayors recognize you as a working hunter and will pay a fair bounty on proof of a kill without haggling. Other hunters will share a fire and news with you on the road, though they may not share their contracts.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I size up every room for exits before I sit down.
2	I never take a contract without asking what the town left out.
3	I keep a tally of every kill, and I can tell you the story of each one.
4	I talk to the dead things I hunt. It helps me think.
5	I am calm right up until the moment I am not.
6	I respect anyone who does honest work, and I have no patience for anyone who doesn’t.
7	I sleep lightly, eat quickly, and never sit with my back to a door.
8	I collect superstitions from every town I pass through, just in case.

d6	Ideal
1	Protection. Somebody has to stand between the towns and the dark. (Good)
2	Contract. A job taken is a job finished, no matter what. (Lawful)
3	Freedom. I work for whoever pays, and answer to no one. (Chaotic)
4	Reputation. My name is worth more than any bounty. (Any)
5	Vengeance. Everything I hunt is a little bit of the thing that took my family. (Any)
6	Craft. Hunting is a skill, and I intend to be the best at it. (Neutral)

d6	Bond
1	A town I failed to save. I still visit the graves.
2	The hunter who trained me, who disappeared on a Noble contract.
3	My first bounty’s trophy, which I will never sell.
4	A company I once rode with, and still owe a debt to.
5	A child I saved on a hunt, who writes to me through the caravans.
6	The sheriff who gave me my first job and my second chance.

d6	Flaw
1	I take contracts I have no business taking, because the pay is good.
2	I don’t trust anything the Nobility made, including some of my companions.
3	I drink too much between jobs.
4	I have lied about a kill to collect a bounty, and someone knows.
5	When the hunt is on, I forget there are people around me.
6	I am terrified of the dark, and I will never admit it.

You have been inside the golden era structures everyone else avoids. You know the smell of air that has been sealed for centuries, the sound a floor makes before it gives way, and the feeling of holding something the Nobility made. You came out with enough to keep going back. Plenty of people you went in with did not come out at all.

Skill Proficiencies	Investigation, Stealth
Tool Proficiencies	Thieves’ tools, cartographer’s tools
Equipment	A crowbar, a hooded lantern, a piece of chalk, a small golden era trinket that no one can identify, a set of dark common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: The Scavenger’s Market

You know how to sell what you find. In any sizable town you can find the merchants and fences who deal in golden era goods, and you can tell a fair price from a swindle, including when a Capitol agent is the one offering. You can also read the marks scavengers leave at a ruin’s entrance, warning of traps, guardians, and dead ends, and you know how to leave your own.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I touch everything, even when I know I shouldn’t.
2	I can’t pass a sealed door without wondering what is behind it.
3	I keep careful maps, and I trust no one else’s.
4	I talk to the machines I find, in case they are listening.
5	I am always calculating what something would sell for.
6	I have a lucky ritual before every ruin, and I will not skip it.
7	I laugh at danger, because the alternative is screaming.
8	I never speak the names of the crewmates I lost.

d6	Ideal
1	Knowledge. What the Nobility left behind should be understood, not feared. (Neutral)
2	Fortune. One good score and I’m done. Really, this time. (Chaotic)
3	Crew. Nobody gets left in the dark. (Good)
4	Caution. The ruins reward patience and punish greed. (Lawful)
5	Defiance. The Capitol doesn’t get to decide who touches the past. (Chaotic)
6	Legacy. I want to find something that changes the Frontier. (Any)

d6	Bond
1	The crew I started with, most of whom are dead.
2	A map to a ruin no one has ever come out of.
3	A Reborn who used to be my closest friend.
4	The gnome who taught me to open locks, now on the missing list.
5	A find I sold that I should have destroyed.
6	A family back home that lives on what I bring out.

d6	Flaw
1	I can’t walk away from a score, no matter how bad the odds.
2	I once woke something in a ruin, and I never told anyone.
3	I trust machines more than people.
4	I steal small things from my companions without meaning to.
5	I think the Capitol’s rules are for cowards, and I say so.
6	I have been inside too long. Sometimes I hear the ruins in my sleep.

You kept things running. Maybe you apprenticed to a gnome, maybe you taught yourself, or maybe you were the only one in town who could make the pump work. You have patched mills, gates, lanterns, and golden era devices with wire, scrap, and stubbornness. Your repairs never last forever, but on the Frontier, a repair that lasts three winters can save a town.

Skill Proficiencies	Arcana, Sleight of Hand
Tool Proficiencies	Tinker’s tools, smith’s tools
Equipment	A set of tinker’s tools, a cheap lens on a headband, a broken golden era device you are still trying to fix, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Jury-Rig

During a short rest, you can use your tinker’s tools and a handful of scrap to repair one broken nonmagical item, such as a weapon, a firearm, a piece of armor, a lock, or a simple mechanism, restoring it to working order. Your repair holds until you finish your next long rest, then fails unless someone fixes it properly. Towns will also give you a meal and a place to sleep in exchange for repairs, and they will remember your face.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I take apart anything I don’t understand.
2	I always tell people exactly how long my repairs will hold.
3	I name the machines I fix.
4	I never let anyone else touch my tools.
5	I hum while I work, and I stop humming when something is wrong.
6	I see every broken thing as a challenge.
7	I carry spare parts in every pocket.
8	I sit with my back to the wall, always.

d6	Ideal
1	Usefulness. The Frontier survives because someone keeps it running. (Good)
2	Honesty. A repair is only as good as the truth about it. (Lawful)
3	Curiosity. I want to understand how the Nobility’s works really function. (Neutral)
4	Freedom. My skills are mine, and I decide who gets them. (Chaotic)
5	Progress. One day, someone will fix things properly. It might be me. (Any)
6	Profit. Everyone needs a tinker, and everyone can pay. (Neutral)

d6	Bond
1	The gnome who taught me, who is on the missing list.
2	The broken device I carry, which I will fix one day.
3	A town whose pump I kept running for years.
4	My guard, who has traveled with me since I started.
5	A Capitol engineer who is my rival and my only equal.
6	A Magen I repaired, who trusts me more than anyone.

d6	Flaw
1	I can’t resist tinkering with golden era devices, even dangerous ones.
2	I overestimate how long my repairs will last, just once in a while.
3	I’d rather fix a machine than deal with a person.
4	I let towns take advantage of me because I can’t say no.
5	I once repaired something that killed people.
6	I’m terrified of being taken, and it makes me paranoid.

You wore a badge in a Frontier town. You served under a sheriff, kept the peace, rang the dusk bell, and knocked on doors that didn’t want to open. You know how a town really works: who owes whom, who is hiding something, and what people will do when they’re frightened. Something made you leave, or made staying impossible.

Skill Proficiencies	Insight, Persuasion
Tool Proficiencies	One type of gaming set
Languages	One of your choice
Equipment	Your old badge, a set of manacles, a copy of a wanted notice, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Law’s Courtesy

Frontier sheriffs and their deputies recognize you as one of their own. They will share wanted notices, local troubles, and what they really think of the town’s leading citizens. When you arrive after dusk and no one will open their door, a sheriff will usually let you sleep in the jailhouse, and will lock the cell from the inside if you ask.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I notice lies, and I let people know I noticed.
2	I can’t walk past trouble without stepping in.
3	I treat everyone the same, from the mayor to the drunk in the gutter.
4	I remember faces and never forget a grudge.
5	I’m friendly until I have a reason not to be.
6	I always ask one question more than people want to answer.
7	I respect the law, even when I break it.
8	I have a dry joke for every grim situation.

d6	Ideal
1	Justice. Everyone deserves a fair hearing, even strangers. (Lawful)
2	Protection. My job was to keep people safe. It still is. (Good)
3	Order. Without rules, the Frontier eats itself. (Lawful)
4	Mercy. Sometimes the law is wrong, and someone has to say so. (Good)
5	Power. A badge gets people to do what you say. (Evil)
6	Truth. I want to know what really happened, whatever it costs. (Any)

d6	Bond
1	The sheriff I served under, who died protecting the town.
2	The town I swore to protect, which I left behind.
3	A criminal I let go, who may have done worse since.
4	An innocent person hanged on my watch.
5	A wanted notice I carry, for someone I know is innocent.
6	The family of a deputy who died beside me.

d6	Flaw
1	I judge people quickly and rarely change my mind.
2	I bend the rules for people I like.
3	I can’t let go of a case, even when I should.
4	I distrust half-elves and drifters more than I’d admit.
5	I used my badge for something I’m ashamed of.
6	I freeze when I have to make a choice with no right answer.

You grew up on the road, riding a caravan’s circuit from town to town across the Frontier. You know which waystations are safe, which sheriffs are honest, and which towns will not open the gate after dusk no matter who is knocking. You have carried salt, cloth, medicine, news, and the occasional hunter request, and you have buried friends beside the road.

Skill Proficiencies	Animal Handling, Insight
Tool Proficiencies	Vehicles (land), cook’s utensils
Languages	One of your choice
Equipment	A road charm or bell from a town on your circuit, a waterskin, a pouch of salt, a set of traveler’s clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Friends on the Circuit

You know the towns, roads, and waystations of your old circuit as well as your own name. On those roads you can always find shelter before dusk, and folk in those towns will give you a meal and a dry place to sleep, even if it’s in the barn. News reaches you faster than it reaches most people, since everyone on your circuit tells a caravaner what they’ve heard.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I hum road songs constantly and don’t notice I’m doing it.
2	I can’t stay in one place for long without getting restless.
3	I remember everyone’s name, and their children’s names.
4	I barter for everything, even things I could just buy.
5	I always know how many hours of daylight are left.
6	I tell stories about every town we pass, some of them true.
7	I share news freely and gossip even more freely.
8	I keep a little of every town’s dirt in a jar.

d6	Ideal
1	Connection. The towns survive because someone carries things between them. (Good)
2	Honesty. News is free, and it should be true. (Lawful)
3	Wanderlust. There is always another road. (Chaotic)
4	Family. The caravan comes first. (Any)
5	Profit. Every town needs something, and I can sell it. (Neutral)
6	Survival. Get to shelter before dark. Everything else is negotiable. (Neutral)

d6	Bond
1	My family’s wagon, and the family still in it.
2	A town on my circuit that went silent last season.
3	A road grave I stop at every time I pass.
4	A dwarven hold that let my family past the first door.
5	The goliath guide who saved my caravan on the high pass.
6	A travel writ from the golden era, passed down for generations.

d6	Flaw
1	I can’t resist spreading a rumor, even a dangerous one.
2	I never stay long enough to finish what I start.
3	I’m quick to take a side deal that isn’t quite legal.
4	I trust anyone who’s been kind to me on the road.
5	I resent every town that makes me sleep in the barn.
6	I am afraid of what I’ll become if I ever stop moving.

You raised walls for a living. You worked with a building crew, traveling to new settlements and raising the walls, wells, and foundations that let a town survive its first winters. You know what it takes to make a place defensible, and you know exactly how much a wall can hold, and how much it can’t.

Skill Proficiencies	Athletics, Perception
Tool Proficiencies	Mason’s tools, carpenter’s tools
Equipment	A set of mason’s tools, your crew’s token, a set of common clothes with a leather apron, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Crew Standing

Building crews recognize your crew’s mark, and you can find work, food, and a place to sleep with any crew you meet. You can read the mark stones hidden in a town’s buildings, learning who built what and roughly when. Towns whose walls your crew raised remember you, and will usually do you a favor if you ask.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I judge every town by its walls.
2	I can’t stop fixing things, even things that aren’t mine.
3	I work hard and expect everyone else to do the same.
4	I laugh loud and often, especially after a long day.
5	I have a story for every scar on my hands.
6	I know when to stop working, and nothing will make me work after dusk.
7	I talk to walls as if they can hear me.
8	I take pride in plain, solid things.

d6	Ideal
1	Community. A town is the people behind its walls. (Good)
2	Craft. Build it right or don’t build it at all. (Lawful)
3	Progress. Every wall we raise pushes the dark back a little. (Good)
4	Crew. My crew is my family, whatever anyone else says. (Any)
5	Fair Pay. The towns stand on our work. They can afford to pay for it. (Neutral)
6	Independence. I build where I choose, for whom I choose. (Chaotic)

d6	Bond
1	My crew, living and dead.
2	A town whose first wall I raised, now in danger.
3	My grandparent’s mark stone, in the wall of a town that was destroyed.
4	A dwarven hold that would not let me through the gate.
5	A Magen who worked beside me on the crew for years.
6	A town that skipped the wall supper, and owes my crew a debt.

d6	Flaw
1	I hold grudges against towns that underpaid us.
2	I trust stone more than people.
3	I take risks on unsafe structures to prove I can.
4	I resent anyone born behind a hold’s gate.
5	I blame myself for every wall that ever failed.
6	I can’t admit when something is beyond repair.

You worked the saloon circuit: traveling from town to town, performing for supper and a room, carrying news and songs between settlements that rarely hear from each other. You know how to hold a room, how to read a crowd, and how to leave before a town turns on you. Every town knows your face, and hardly anyone knows you.

Skill Proficiencies	Performance, Persuasion
Tool Proficiencies	Disguise kit, one type of musical instrument
Equipment	A musical instrument (one of your choice), a favor from an admirer, a costume, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Saloon Welcome

Any saloon, trading post, or waystation on the Frontier will give you a meal and a place to sleep in exchange for a performance, as long as you perform every night you stay. Locals talk freely around a performer, and you can learn a town’s rumors, troubles, and open hunter requests in a single evening.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I turn every conversation into a performance.
2	I learn one song from every town I pass through.
3	I never admit to being tired, bored, or afraid.
4	I charm strangers easily and friends with difficulty.
5	I carry news like it’s precious, and tell it like it’s a story.
6	I take criticism of my act very personally.
7	I can sleep anywhere, at any time, in any position.
8	I know a hundred songs about hunters, and none of them are accurate.

d6	Ideal
1	Joy. The Frontier needs laughter more than it needs walls. (Good)
2	Truth. My songs carry the news, and news should be true. (Lawful)
3	Freedom. I go where the road takes me. (Chaotic)
4	Fame. I want every saloon on the Frontier to know my name. (Any)
5	Memory. Someone has to remember the towns that are gone. (Good)
6	Opportunity. Every crowd has something I can use. (Neutral)

d6	Bond
1	A song I wrote about a town that no longer exists.
2	The halfling caravan I traveled with for years.
3	A rival performer who stole my best material.
4	An admirer’s favor, from someone I never saw again.
5	The saloon where I first performed, and its owner.
6	A changeling friend whose secret I’ve kept for years.

d6	Flaw
1	I embellish everything, including the truth.
2	I can’t resist an audience, even a dangerous one.
3	I leave before things get serious, every time.
4	I spend money as fast as I earn it.
5	I’ve carried a false rumor that got people hurt.
6	I care more about the applause than the people clapping.

You trained with a hunter company. You drilled at dawn, learned the company’s code, and swore to finish every contract or die trying. Maybe you earned full membership, maybe you washed out, or maybe the company is gone now and you are one of the few who remain. Either way, the discipline stayed with you.

Skill Proficiencies	Athletics, Intimidation
Tool Proficiencies	One type of gaming set, vehicles (land)
Equipment	A sash or token in your company’s colors, a copy of your company’s contract terms, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Company Hall

Your company, or its reputation, still opens doors. Hunter company halls will give you food and a bed, and members of your own company will vouch for you, lend you gear, and come to your aid if they hear you’re in trouble. Towns that have hired your company will treat you with respect. In return, your company expects you to uphold its name, and it will hear about it if you don’t.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I drill every morning, wherever I am.
2	I follow orders well and give them better.
3	I treat every job like a contract, even favors for friends.
4	I polish my gear when I’m nervous.
5	I tell old company stories to anyone who will listen.
6	I speak bluntly and expect the same.
7	I keep my company’s colors on me at all times.
8	I am uncomfortable without a clear chain of command.

d6	Ideal
1	Duty. A contract signed is a contract finished. (Lawful)
2	Brotherhood. The company is my family. (Any)
3	Glory. I want my company’s name spoken in every hunter hall. (Any)
4	Protection. We fight so the towns don’t have to. (Good)
5	Discipline. Discipline keeps you alive when courage runs out. (Lawful)
6	Independence. The company taught me everything, and now I’m on my own. (Chaotic)

d6	Bond
1	My captain, who took a chance on me.
2	A company that was destroyed on a Noble contract.
3	A contract my company broke before I joined, which I intend to make right.
4	The recruit I trained with, now a rival.
5	An aasimar my company protects, whom I’d die for.
6	The town that hired my company for my first contract.

d6	Flaw
1	I obey orders even when I shouldn’t.
2	I look down on hunters who work without a company.
3	I’m reckless when my company’s honor is questioned.
4	I can’t forgive a broken promise.
5	I secretly doubt I’m good enough for my company’s colors.
6	I will do anything, including terrible things, to finish a contract.

You were somebody in the Capitol: a scholar, a clerk, an engineer, a researcher at the Institute, which studies the Nobility. Then you fell out of favor. Maybe you asked the wrong question, read the wrong book, or trusted the wrong superior. Now you are on extended field duty on the Frontier, with an education, a letter of assignment, and very little idea how to survive.

Skill Proficiencies	Arcana, History
Languages	Two of your choice; the old court tongue is a common choice for those who studied the Nobility
Equipment	A bottle of ink, a quill, a small knife, a letter of assignment for field duty, a set of once-fine clothes now gone threadbare, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Letter of Assignment

Your papers still carry the Capitol’s seal. Officers of the Frontier Defense Force and Capitol agents treat you as an official and will share information with you, and Commerce Guild waystations will give you shelter and a meal on the Capitol’s account. You can also send letters to colleagues in the Capitol, and some of them will answer. Someone in the Capitol wanted you out of the way, though, and your credentials may draw their attention as easily as anyone’s help.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I explain things nobody asked me to explain.
2	I keep a journal of everything I see on the Frontier, for a book no one will publish.
3	I flinch at loud noises and pretend I didn’t.
4	I am polite to a fault, even to things trying to kill me.
5	I can’t stop comparing the Frontier to the Capitol, usually unfavorably.
6	I am fascinated by golden era ruins in a way that worries my companions.
7	I miss good food more than I miss my old position.
8	I am quietly delighted every time I survive something.

d6	Ideal
1	Knowledge. The lost sciences can save the Frontier, if we recover them. (Good)
2	Order. The Revolutionary Government’s authority is all that stands between us and chaos. (Lawful)
3	Truth. The Capitol banned the wrong books, and I intend to find out why. (Chaotic)
4	Redemption. I will earn my way back. (Any)
5	Curiosity. I don’t care about the Capitol anymore. I care about what’s out here. (Neutral)
6	Ambition. The Frontier is full of discoveries, and the credit will be mine. (Evil)

d6	Bond
1	The colleague who betrayed me, whom I intend to confront.
2	A banned book I smuggled out of the Capitol.
3	My family, who still live in the Ninth Ward and don’t know where I am.
4	My mentor at the university, the only one who still writes to me.
5	A discovery I made that got me exiled.
6	The Frontier town that took me in when I arrived with nothing.

d6	Flaw
1	I look down on Frontier folk, even when I try not to.
2	I will take any risk if it means getting back into the Capitol.
3	I trust official papers more than people.
4	I know something the Revolutionary Government wants buried, and I can’t keep quiet.
5	I panic in the open country after dark.
6	I hoard knowledge and share it only when it benefits me.

Your family was someone in the golden era. Most old families are elven, descended from servants who rose high in the Nobility’s courts, but some are human or other peoples whose ancestors held rank in the Nobility’s order. The courts are gone, but your family’s name remains, along with its ledger, its old manners, and a history the Frontier has not forgiven.

Skill Proficiencies	History, Persuasion
Tool Proficiencies	One type of gaming set
Languages	The old court tongue
Equipment	A set of fine clothes in an old court style, a pair of gloves, a page copied from your family’s ledger, and a purse containing 25 gp

Feature: The Family Name

Your name opens doors among scholars, archivists, and the Capitol’s institutions, where old families are valued for what they know about the Nobility. It closes doors on the Frontier, where it marks you as a collaborator’s heir. Either way, people remember you. You can usually gain an audience with a scholar or official, and you know how to read old court records, manners, and house marks.

Suggested characteristics

d8	Personality trait
1	I have impeccable manners and use them as armor.
2	I apologize for my family before anyone asks.
3	I stand when someone important enters a room, whether I mean to or not.
4	I know more about the Nobility than I let on.
5	I am proud of my family’s name and dare anyone to object.
6	I am quiet in company and watchful always.
7	I keep my gloves on, even when it’s strange to.
8	I feel responsible for the choices of people I never met.

d6	Ideal
1	Atonement. My family served monsters. I will spend my life making up for it. (Good)
2	Honor. My family’s name should mean something good. (Lawful)
3	Pride. We were chosen for a reason. (Any)
4	Knowledge. What my ancestors saw can help stop the Nobility. (Good)
5	Freedom. I refuse to be defined by a ledger. (Chaotic)
6	Loyalty. Whatever my family was, it is still my family. (Any)

d6	Bond
1	My family’s ledger, and the page someone cut out of it.
2	An ancestor who secretly helped the rebels.
3	A relative still loyal to the old ways.
4	A scholar in the Capitol who studies my family’s history.
5	A Noble who might still remember my family’s name.
6	The half-elven sibling my family refused to claim.

d6	Flaw
1	I look down on people without history.
2	I keep my family’s darkest secrets, even when I shouldn’t.
3	I secretly admire the Nobility’s elegance.
4	I can’t stand being blamed for my ancestors’ choices, and I lash out.
5	I trust other old families more than I should.
6	I’d do anything to keep my family’s name from being further disgraced.

The standard backgrounds work in Masada with a little reframing. Keep their rules as written and adjust the story to fit the Frontier.

• Acolyte: You served in one of the Frontier’s churches, and you have seen what happens when a shrine goes dead.
• Charlatan: You worked confidence games on the circuit, and you know how quickly a town turns on a stranger.
• Criminal: You rode with bandits, smuggled golden era goods past Capitol agents, or both.
• Entertainer: Use the Circuit Performer background instead, or keep the Entertainer as a performer from the Capitol’s stages.
• Folk Hero: You stood up for your town when the hunter never came, and people still talk about it.
• Guild Artisan: You worked for the Commerce Guild, or learned a trade in a gnome’s workshop.
• Hermit: You lived alone in the wilds, perhaps among the world’s original nature, far from any town.
• Noble: Use the Old Family background instead. In Masada, the Nobility are something else entirely.
• Outlander: You grew up at the Frontier’s edges, on the high peaks, or in the wild country between towns.
• Sage: You studied at the Capitol’s university, or taught yourself from books the Capitol would rather you hadn’t read.
• Sailor: You worked river barges or ferries, where every crew stays on the water after dark, though none of them can say why.
• Soldier: You served in the Frontier Defense Force, and you know how thinly it is stretched.
• Urchin: You grew up in the Capitol’s poorest wards, near the city’s unexplored innards.

Playable races. Human, Elf, Half-elf, Dwarf, Half-Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, Goliath, Dragonborn, Aasimar, Changeling, Shifter, Entling, Magen, and Reborn. Half-Dwarf, Entling, Magen, and Reborn use LaserLlama’s versions; where another printing of the same race exists, use LaserLlama’s. Each people has an entry on the Playable Races page.

Monstrous races and dhampirs. Monstrous races are not playable. Dhampirs exist in Masada, but only as non-player characters.

Classes. Every class in the Player’s Handbook is available, along with LaserLlama’s alternate classes, the classes in Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else, and the Gunslinger fighter subclass. Each class has a place in the world; see Character Creation for how each one fits.

Backgrounds. Choose one of Masada’s backgrounds or a Player’s Handbook background reframed for the Frontier. Old Family replaces Noble. Survivor and Tinker have mechanical features; the rest work like standard background features.

Languages. Standard 5e languages, plus the old court tongue, the language of the Nobility’s courts and the key to reading golden era records.

Ability scores. Use the standard array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, and 8. Rolled stats aren’t used. Rolling swings too far: either someone gets a great roll, or everyone rerolls until they do.

Starting level. Varies by table. Your DM will tell you where your group begins.

Potions. Drinking a potion yourself is a bonus action. Giving one to somebody else is a full action. You can patch yourself up mid-fight; getting to a dying ally costs you a turn.

Intimidation. Barbarians may use Strength in place of Charisma for Intimidation checks.

Brutal wounds. Dropping to 0 hit points from a critical hit or an overwhelming blow can leave a lasting injury, at the DM’s call. Grievous injuries, lingering statuses, and brutal finishers use the roll tables from Brutal Wounds. A beast’s jaws can leave you with a limp that outlasts the campaign.

Firearms. Guns are a normal part of Frontier combat and use the rules from Arcane Artillery: The Gun Nut’s Guide. Powder and shot are tracked and are a running cost.

Hit points on level-up. You roll your Hit Die and the DM rolls the same die in secret. You then choose which result to keep, without seeing the DM’s. Rolling a 3 and keeping it means never finding out what you passed on.

Death saves. You roll them yourself, privately. You know whether you are stable or two failures down. No one else at the table does, and your character cannot tell them. Someone may spend their last spell slot on a companion who was never in danger, or leave one who was.

Long rests. A long rest requires shelter, security, and real downtime. On the Frontier, that usually means a town, a waystation, or a well-defended camp. A night in the open while something is hunting you restores part of your strength and no more.

The night. The dark belongs to the Nobility’s engineered creatures. Travel after dusk is dangerous, and resting in the open at night invites trouble. Plan your days around reaching shelter before sunset.

Availability. Magic is uncommon. Magic users are those who have dedicated years to studying the Nobility’s lost sciences, and most large towns have one at most. The Capitol’s university trains more. A wizard in a small town is remarkable, and people will want things from you.

How magic works. Magic is not chaos. It can be measured and replicated, but no one alive understands the science behind it. Spells work as written; the world simply treats them as the Nobility’s science rather than a gift of the gods.

Divine magic. Clerics draw on a hidden golden era network beneath the Frontier’s holy sites, which is slowly failing. Divine spells work as written, but some shrines have gone dead, and the DM may rule that the most powerful divine effects, such as returning the dead, need a working holy site or a heavy price.

Paladin oaths. A paladin’s oath is an access code to the Nobility’s old systems. Break it, and you are locked out. Oathbreakers follow the standard rules.

Identify. Reveals partial truths. Golden era devices and cursed items resist it. You may learn that a device is Noble-made and learn nothing about what it will do when it wakes.

Spells. Spells from Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else are available alongside the core spell lists, with DM approval.

Components. Mundane components are assumed. Rare and costly ones are tracked and must be acquired.

These systems are adapted from Grim Hollow. They exist to make afflictions something you solve rather than something you dispel.

Curses. Curses cling and escalate. Remove Curse suppresses a curse; true removal takes a tailored ritual, a rare component, or a narrative act such as atonement or destroying the source. A mark can become nightmares, and nightmares can become worse.

Diseases. Diseases progress in stages and resist magical cures. Expect exhaustion, ability penalties, hallucinations, and contagion. A cleric pouring magic into a fever may hold it steady until someone finds the treatment that actually works.

Transformations. Contact with the Nobility’s works can change a person: a Noble’s blood, a waking ruin, a pact that goes too deep. Transformations run in three stages. Stage one gives minor powers and visible signs. Stage two gives stronger abilities alongside compulsions, vulnerabilities, or stigma. Stage three completes the change and puts your identity, control, or soul in question. Each stage can be resisted, delayed, or reversed, at a price.

Coinage. Standard 5e coins and prices, minted by the Capitol. Goods cost more the farther you are from the Capitol, and some are simply unavailable in small towns.

Weapons and armor. Expanded weapons and armor from All The Weapons, the Armorer’s Handbook, and Ancestral Weapons are available with DM approval.

Magic items. Magic items are golden era works, recovered from ruins or bought at great cost through the Capitol; the Relics page describes the ones hunters hear about most. Items from Griffon’s Saddlebag and other approved books appear in the world reframed this way. Most are old. Some work perfectly, some half-work, and a few do things no one expected.

Harvesting and crafting. Monster parts can be harvested and crafted using Hamund’s Harvesting Handbook; see the Bestiary for what the Frontier’s creatures yield. On the Frontier, the Nobility’s engineered beasts are the richest source of material, and hunters often make as much from the carcass as from the bounty.

Resources. Rations, torches, ammunition, and tools are tracked. Specialty ammunition made by gnome tinkers can’t be replaced outside the towns where they work.

Hunter pay. For reference, a skilled hireling earns about 2 gp a day. Hunters who can kill a Noble earn at least 25 gp a day. A town’s bounty for a serious threat might be a flat 50 gp or more, scaled to the danger and to what the town can pay.

Travel. A location must be visited in person before magic or other means can bring you there quickly.

Golden era structures. Ruins are dangerous by design. Traps, guardians, and dormant systems are common, and pushing too far can wake something that threatens everyone nearby, not just the party.

The world moves. Factions act, seasons turn, and threats develop whether or not the party is involved. A town you ignore may not be there when you come back.

What everyone remembers. Sunlight and radiance burn the Nobility. That much, every mortal knows. Light is the one weakness the Nobility could not take from anyone.

What mortals forgot. During the golden era, the Nobility reshaped the minds of the peoples they ruled so that they can’t hold on to the Nobility’s other weaknesses. Someone who learns one, or sees it work, forgets it soon after. The customs survive as superstitions no one can explain: no invitations after dark, a stake over the door, running water at the gate.

Who might remember. No one. The dwarves in their sealed holds and the goliaths on their unruled peaks are not exceptions: they never lived under the Nobility, so they never learned what the Nobility later erased from everyone else. What the holds and the peaks pass down is rumor and half-forgotten memory, no more reliable than a Frontier grandmother’s. Light is the only certainty anyone has.

The full list, for players. You know these even when your character doesn’t.

• Sunlight: Sunlight burns and hinders them. Everyone remembers this.
• Radiant damage: Stops a Noble’s regeneration. Everyone remembers this too, which is why the Nobility hunt aasimar on sight.
• Invitations: A Noble can’t enter a home without an invitation from someone who lives there.
• Running water: Running water harms them.
• Stake to the heart: A wooden piercing weapon driven into a Noble’s heart while it is incapacitated in its resting place paralyzes it.
• Holy water: Stops a Noble’s regeneration.

At the table. Any character can act on a forgotten weakness in the moment, if a custom points the way, a rumor turns out to be true, or they stumble onto it. By the end of their next long rest, the knowledge slips away again. The old customs are how people survive without ever knowing why, and a hunter who writes it down finds the page hard to read by morning.

The oldest Nobles. The most powerful Nobles resist some of their weaknesses. Nobles are extremely rare, and most characters will spend their careers dealing with what the Nobility left behind: their engineered beasts, their machines, and their servants.

Beyond the core rules, Masada draws on the following books. Anything from them still needs DM approval at the table.

• Classes, spells, and items: LaserLlama’s alternate classes and races, Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else, the Gunslinger fighter subclass
• Weapons, armor, and firearms: Arcane Artillery: The Gun Nut’s Guide, All The Weapons, the Armorer’s Handbook, Ancestral Weapons
• Items and companions: Griffon’s Saddlebag, the Fluffy Folio
• Harvesting and crafting: Hamund’s Harvesting Handbook
• Rules and systems: Brutal Wounds, Gritty Realism, the Domestic Handbook, the Greasemonkey’s Handbook
• For the DM: Monster Manual Expanded I to III, Adaptable NPCs, Puzzles, Predicaments and Perplexities, and Journey of the Godslayer

How play works

Masada is a world, not a plotted campaign. Like the Vampire Hunter D novels, play is built from jobs: you ride into a town, learn what is really wrong, deal with it, and ride on. A job might take one session or several. Longer threads run underneath, and they go wherever your characters choose to chase them: a Noble’s name overheard in a ruin, a debt, a missing gnome, a light in a castle window that should be dark.

Death is real, and it isn’t fudged in either direction. Death saves are rolled privately, and the party never knows how close you are. Wounds can last. The world moves whether or not you’re looking at it, and a town you walk away from may not be there when you come back.

What a job looks like

Brennock’s Ford is a farming town on the border between the Western and Eastern sectors. North of town, on a rise, stands the Glass House, a long hall of dark glass that no one has ever seen inside. Last month, three farmers saw a light moving in it. Two cows are missing from the north pasture. The mayor wants it handled quietly and cheaply. The sheriff wants it handled before someone else goes missing. The town’s elven tutor, who sent the call for help by spell, wants something from inside the Glass House, and hasn’t said what.

Your group takes the job. What happens next depends on what you ask, who you trust, how far into the Glass House you’re willing to go, and what you decide to do when you find out what’s actually been taking the cattle. That’s a Masada session: a town, a problem with more than one side, and a choice at the end that nobody else can make for you.

What you’ll do

Most games follow a hunter company or a scavenger crew. Hunters take contracts from desperate towns. Scavengers go into the golden era structures that everyone else avoids, where the riches are real and so are the guardians, the traps, and the chance of waking something that should have stayed asleep. And very rarely, a job leads to one of the Nobility, awake and hungry. Those are the hunts legends are made of, and most hunters never live to take one.

What the world is like

• The Frontier is dangerous. Towns are isolated, travel is hard, and the night belongs to the Nobility’s engineered creatures. Nobody travels after dark if they can help it.
• The Nobility are rare. Most people live and die without meeting one. What they left behind is the everyday danger: their beasts, their machines, and their servants.
• Mortals forgot. The Nobility took the knowledge of their own weaknesses from the peoples they ruled. The customs survive; the reasons don’t. No one remembers, not even the peoples the Nobility never ruled.
• The past is legend. No one knows the whole story of how the world got this way, and some mysteries are meant to stay unsolved.
• Choices matter. This is dark fantasy, not grimdark. The world is cruel, but what you do changes it, and hope is rare rather than impossible.

Playing here

Masada uses the 2014 rules of D&D 5th edition, with a few setting additions covered on House Rules.

• Peoples: Human, Elf, Half-elf, Dwarf, Half-Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, Goliath, Dragonborn, Aasimar, Changeling, Shifter, Entling, Magen, and Reborn, each with its own entry on Playable Races. Half-Dwarf, Entling, Magen, and Reborn use LaserLlama’s versions. Monstrous races aren’t available.
• Characters: Standard array, no rolled stats. Masada has its own backgrounds, and Character Creation walks you through the whole build.
• Firearms: Guns are part of the Frontier, using the rules from Arcane Artillery: The Gun Nut’s Guide.
• Magic: Every class is available, and each has a place in the world. Wizards study the Nobility’s lost sciences. Clerics draw on a failing network the Nobility built. Druids work with the world’s original nature. Bards carry the news between towns. Warlocks bargain with things that would rather stay unnamed.
• Consequences: Secret death saves, lasting wounds from Brutal Wounds, curses that must be solved rather than dispelled, and long rests that need real shelter.

Content

This is a dark setting written for adults. Horror, violence, death, and choices without clean answers are all part of it. Sexual content is off the table entirely. If there is anything else you would rather not see at the table, mention it when you apply, and it will be handled with care.

Who this game is for

You will enjoy Masada if you like dark, atmospheric stories, mysteries that reward curiosity, and characters with something to lose. It suits players who want their choices to carry weight, who are comfortable with danger that is real, and who are happy to leave some questions unanswered. If you want a lighthearted game or a high-magic world where every problem has a spell for it, this probably isn’t the table for you, and that is completely fine.