# Terhia: Heroes — Cultures, Institutions, Factions, Coin, and Tongues

**v0.4 — 14 October 2026** (v0.3 11 October; v0.2 26 September; v0.1 25 September). **v0.4 adds three ways into character creation — Quick Start, Standard, Full — as a table under the thirteen steps (§1), from the review handoff of 14 October 2026 (Terhia-Heroes-Review-Handoff.md, changes C17–C19), and register row CF28; PG §1.4 carries the summary (PG v0.9, H88); nothing else changes.** Companion to Terhia-Heroes-Players-Guide.md v0.9 (PG), Terhia-Heroes-Game-Masters-Guide.md v0.8 (GMG), and Terhia-Heroes-Grand-Beasts.md v0.4 (GB). **v0.3 reprices weapons for the class weapons of PG v0.8 §4.1 (§6.5) and adds register row CF27; nothing else changes.** **v0.2 adds the grade-and-rank rule to §4.4 and the rank-up floors to §5.2, from the advancement pass (PG v0.7 §13.4–13.5; GMG v0.6 §9.1), and register row CF26; nothing else changes.** v0.1: Companion to Terhia-Heroes-Players-Guide.md v0.4 (PG), Terhia-Heroes-Game-Masters-Guide.md v0.3 (GMG), and Terhia-Heroes-Grand-Beasts.md v0.1. Built against Terhia-Canon.md v1.2: Part I (Premise; Moons and Calendar), Part V whole (Biome; Culture; Homelands; Homeland Reference Table; Economic Baseline with Money, Kind and Labor, Population Magnitudes, Anchor Prices, Phase Cascade; the six Culture Profiles; Material Signatures; the Common Tongue; Common Tongue Distribution; Naming and Address), Part VI whole (Institutions; Ethos; Ethos Statements and the D3 scope note; Class; Terminology; Governance; Faction table and vacant cells; Force Types; Consolidated Class Matrix; Institution Summary), Part VII (Gold Crown Theology: the Doctrine, Doctrinal Status by Moon, the God Matrix and Register, Sacramental Apparatus, Frictions), XI.6 (Do-not-re-raise), R.8 (Deferred Workstreams). From the GMG: §7.8 (relics and the registries), §8 (contracts, reward table, reputation tracks, consequences), §9.1 (rank-up recognition), §9.3 (fares). Those GMG sections are the rules of record wherever this file points to them. Mechanics and reference only; no adventures. Every rule that touches a canon sentence or a GMG rule is a CF-row in §8 for Joe's ratification. Canon is not edited by this file; neither is the GMG. The PG is edited in its v0.4 (§1.4, §16, §17 rows H51–H59) to carry the player's side of this file; those edits are listed in §8.2. **A table can play from the working readings as written.**

**Scope.** What a player character is in the world, beyond class: the procedure for building an identity at creation (§1); the six cultures as a player plays them (§2); the twelve homelands (§3); the three institutions and how each reads each ethos (§4); the twelve factions, affiliation, and the reputation tracks (§5); coin, kind, and debts that are not money (§6); tongues, the Common Tongue, and the lexical gap (§7); the register (§8). What this file does not do: put a culture, homeland, or institution on the attribute line, or tie one to a class or a school. Canon XI.6 rules out the essence reading ("no school assigned to any culture as an essence"), and the design test of PG §1.3 has no room for it. Identity changes what a character can be believed about, filed as, owed, and understood on. It never changes what the character rolls to hit.

**Status against canon.** Everything in §2–§7 that describes the world is [C] in Canon and is restated, not re-decided; a sentence is quoted where it is load-bearing. The additions are table mechanics: the creation effects of the ethos × charter table (CF3), the laws you carry (CF4), the lexical-gap rule (CF5), the three fluency levels (CF6), faction affiliation (CF9, CF10), the price table and starting coin (CF12, CF13), the debts block (CF14), and the sheet fields (PG H51–H59). Two constraints from XI.6 are enforced as rules of this file. **No culture is an essence:** nothing here modifies an attribute, a class, or a school. **No word is coined:** the six tongues are named by their cultures, the two Unsaan registers by their canon names (Asran, Kalani), Umutu cohorts by phase and year, and the lexical-gap table names concepts in the Common Tongue, as Canon does. Numbers are records (Canon Discipline 5): every price that is not a canon anchor is marked as the game's figure, and an episode's figure governs.

**Reading order.** A player building a character: §1, then the culture entry (§2), the homeland (§3), the standing table (§4.3), §6.1, and §7.1. A GM before the first session in a homeland: that homeland's entry (§3), §4, and the factions the party will meet (§5). §5.2 (the reputation tracks) and §6.6 (debts) are the two things the sheet asks the GM to keep current.

**Vocabulary.** *Charter* = the institution a character is registered, attuned, or recognized under (Canon Part VI: institution = charter, ethos = belief). *Home* = a character's ethos inside its own charter. *Filed* = written on a registry (the Ledger's or the Assay's); the Chimera files no one. *Full / Market / None* = the three levels of the Common Tongue (§7.1). *Track* = one of the GMG's four reputation tracks (§5.2).

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## 1. Identity at creation

Thirteen steps, in this order, after the class is chosen (PG §1.1). Each step names the sheet field it fills (PG §16) and the section that holds the choices. Nothing in the thirteen changes a number in PG §3–§4.

| # | Step | Sheet field | Where the choices are |
|:-:|:--|:--|:--|
| 1 | **Culture.** One of six. | Culture | §2 |
| 2 | **Homeland.** One of the culture's two, by default. A character born in a homeland of another culture is a minority there; the homeland entry says what that costs and what it does not (§3.0). | Homeland · Charter of record (default) | §3 |
| 3 | **Settlement of birth.** The seat, one of the towns, or none: the road, the drove-lines, the fire country, a boat, a caravan. | Born at | §3 |
| 4 | **Household.** The household or lineage that raised you, from the culture's list or your own within its profile. It decides your coin (§6.5), your tongues (§7.1), and half of what you are owed and owe (§6.6). | Household | §2, each entry |
| 5 | **Born.** Day, phase, year (`48 Velquor 1222`). The present year is 1245. The phase supplies the culture's age marker: winters (Menneske), years (Renlei, Unsaan, Yamana), the age-set cohort (Umutu: phase and year), the birth-moon (Tangata). | Born · Age | §2, each entry, *Age and birth* |
| 6 | **Name.** Four fields: the full name in the culture's form; what you are called; what a registry files; how you introduce yourself formally. The four are usually four different strings. | Full name · Called · Registry name · Introduction | §2, each entry, *Name*; the table in §7.5 |
| 7 | **Tongues.** Your culture's tongue at Full. The Common Tongue at Full, Market, or None by household and registration. One neighbor tongue at Market if the household trades across a border. | Tongues | §7.1, §7.2 |
| 8 | **Ethos and moon.** Set by the class (PG §1.1; Canon Part VI). Not a choice. | Ethos · Moon | PG §1.1 |
| 9 | **Charter of record.** The homeland's institution, unless you were trained, registered, or recognized elsewhere. Read the standing table for your ethos in that charter: it sets your registry status and your starting reputation step. | Charter of record · Registry status · Tracks | §4.3, §4.4 |
| 10 | **Faction.** None, or one affiliation. Most level-1 characters have none; the file, favor, recognition, or credit comes first. | Faction · Standing in it | §5.3, §5.4 |
| 11 | **Coin and kind.** Starting coin by household standing; kind by household; debts owed and held. | Coin · Kind · Debts | §6.5, §6.6 |
| 12 | **The laws you carry, and the word you hold.** Copied from the culture entry: the three laws, and the one concept your tongue holds in a word that the Common Tongue does not. | Laws · Word | §2, each entry; §7.3 |
| 13 | **God** (Crown homelands only; optional). The Lender's local name, or the Steward's for an Elementalist. Written by the player, never assigned by a rule. | God | §4.5 |

**Three ways in.** The thirteen steps can be taken at three depths. A table that wants a sheet in minutes makes fewer choices now and fills the rest in play; none of the thirteen is removed, and in the Quick Start row each appears once — chosen, set by a choice, or deferred.

| Way in | Chosen, and set by those choices | Deferred, with the default taken |
|:--|:--|:--|
| **Quick Start** | 1 Culture · 2 Homeland (one of the culture's two) · 4 Household (one line from the culture's list) · 6 Name (one string for all four fields) — and set by those choices, with no further choice: 8–9 (ethos and moon from the class; the homeland's charter; status and starting step from §4.3) · 11 coin by the household's standing (§6.5), kind and debts none except the "nothing" tier's one debt · 12 copied from the culture entry | 3 born at: the seat · 5 born: year only, 1245 − age; phase blank · 7 own tongue at Full; the Common Tongue by the household rule of §7.1 · 10 faction: none · 13 god: blank |
| **Standard** | + 3 · 5 the full date · 6 the four fields · 7 a neighbor tongue if the household trades across a border · 10 a Member affiliation if the household supplies one (§5.3) · 11 kind and debts (§6.6) | 13; the written introduction and the look |
| **Full** | All thirteen, with the introduction, the look, and the god written | — |

All three produce the same sheet (PG §16) and the same character. A deferred field has a default, not a penalty; the GM fills it when a scene first asks for it. CF1 holds at every way in: nothing above the attribute line changes a number below it. The five choices that carry a Quick Start character are class, culture, homeland, household, and name.

**What identity never does.** No culture, homeland, household, charter, or faction adds to or subtracts from an attribute, a defense, Vigor, Strain Capacity, damage, or an attack roll. None restricts or grants a class or school. None changes a class ability. Everything identity does at the table runs through three levers, all social or procedural: **Advantage or Disadvantage on a check** (the laws you carry, §2; the lexical gap, §7.3; a certificate shown to a Renlei, §2.2), **a procedural right** (guest-right, road sanctuary, market truce, a witnessed word, a closed way — each culture entry names its own), and **what is filed, owed, or refused** (§4–§6). A GM who finds a culture wanting a combat number has found the essence reading, and XI.6 says no.

**Minorities and the road.** A Menneske born in Zand-Kala, a Renlei in Tinwara, a Tangata child of a Puketai pilot raised at Shakoui: the culture entry is still theirs (name, tongue, laws, word), the homeland entry is still where they were born (charter, coin, levy), and the two disagree. The disagreement is the character. §3.0 gives the two rules.

---

## 2. The six cultures

Six entries, one shape. **Homelands** and **charters**. **Tongue** and where the Common Tongue lives. **Name** — the four fields, with canon exemplars where canon has them. **The laws you carry** — the culture's three laws, each with what it means for a character. **The word you hold** — the lexical gap. **Age and birth.** **Households** — kinds to choose from, gathered from the profile and the Economic Baseline (CF20). **Look** — cloth, building, staple, mount, craft, palette, for description and for painting the figure (CF21). **Who misreads you** — the canon frictions, as they land on a player character. **At home in each charter.**

**The laws you carry (CF4).** Every character knows their culture's three laws the way they know their own name. *At the table:* on your culture's ground, or dealing with anyone of your culture, you have **Advantage** on any check that turns on one of those laws — you know how the law runs, who keeps it, and what it costs to break. Off your ground the law still binds you, and the other party may not know it exists; the GM plays the gap, and the lexical-gap rule (§7.3) is usually where it shows. The Advantage is on checks only. It never touches an attack roll.

**No names are coined here.** The exemplar names are canon's (Appendix A and Part IX). For the two cultures with no named individual in canon — Umutu and Tangata — the form is given and the player supplies the name; XI.6 reserves that casting to episodes, and a player character is one (CF16).

---

### 2.1 Menneske

**Homelands.** Isavík (Gold Crown) and Grimskov (Blue Accord), facing each other across Svarthavet. **Inspiration register:** Scandinavian. **Biomes:** tundra, taiga, evergreen, grassland.

**Tongue.** The Menneske tongue: one language, low dialect drift — "the strait keeps both shores talking, trading, and marrying." Writing exists to remind, not to bind; the spoken word binds. The Common Tongue lives at the Ormsvík factors' houses, the Stenhavn harbor-master's office, the Accord registry and the Kaldmark garrison in Grimskov, and the parishes in Isavík. Fishing crews and inland households hold market words.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* personal name, then the toponymic — *of* a settlement, or the settlement's stem as a byname. Aslaug of Stenhavn; Halvard Sten; Sunniva. A toponymic, not a patronymic (Canon D4).
- *Called:* the personal name; the byname among strangers.
- *Registry name:* name, settlement, and moot of record. Sentences and debts written in years, with a note that "three winters" is three years. The note is wrong.
- *Introduction:* name and household, before witnesses; the settlement if away from it.

**The laws you carry.**
- **Witness-law.** A thing said before three witnesses binds; paper is the memory of the word, not the word itself. *For you:* an agreement you make before three witnesses is settled, and you may hold anyone to one so witnessed (Advantage, above; a Menneske NPC needs no check at all). An agreement you only signed binds you in Accord or Crown law and not in your own. You comply with the Manifest Rule fully and resent it fully: it asks you to say everything twice.
- **Ice-law.** The first keel through new harbor ice held that channel's toll for the winter. Suspended at Stenhavn 1169–74 because no keel got through; extinguished there by the Escrow lease; the channel lines still carry the names of the last families to hold them. *For you:* you know the channel lines and whose names they carry. A Stenhavn pilot will tell you which family's line you are on, and expect you to know why that matters.
- **Winter-count.** Sentences, exiles, and debts of honor are measured in winters, not years. *For you:* your debts on the sheet (§6.6) are written in winters. A registry converts them to years with an explanatory note. What the note gets wrong is the GM's to decide when it comes up, and it comes up.

**The word you hold.** *Assent given by staying silent.* The Common Tongue needs a sentence and a witness. Your silence is consideration, and assent can live inside it; an Unsaan will fill it, a Renlei will want it written, and neither has heard you agree.

**Age and birth.** Counted in winters. The year turns at the Longest Night, 1 Velquor, which the Menneske keep the eve of: households lamp-lit until dawn, the year's debts spoken aloud and forgiven or affirmed before the calendar turns. Since 1230 the night carries a second weight that nobody names.

**Households** (choose one, or name your own inside the profile).
- A boat-owning household of Ormsvík or Stenhavn — comfortable; the difference shows at the Longest Night by how many lamps stay lit.
- A crewing household — not comfortable; the boat is another's.
- An Ormsvík factor's house, or the Stenhavn harbor-master's office — the ones rich in coin.
- A timber house of Ulvskov; a wool-and-horse holding of Kaldmark.
- A parish sacrist's longhouse (Isavík) — the Crown's officer, who lives where the moot meets.
- An Accord examiner's or registry clerk's household (Grimskov) — holds the office; presents rulings to the moot for hearing.
- A household that left Hvítadal after 1230 — *she counted, and we left.*

**Look.** Wool from Kaldmark; sealskin, tar-proofed for sea wear. Timber-and-turf longhouses banked against wind. Fish, barley, imported grain. Sledges and shag ponies inland, boats before almost anything else — a Menneske child can usually row before reliably lying. The tally: notched posts and tally-sticks at the moot ground; clinker-built boats. **Palette:** lamp-amber on the Longest Night; ice-white; turf-brown; tar-black timber; the grey of Svarthavet.

**Who misreads you.** *Renlei:* paper against word — Renlei arbiters weight manifests over sworn testimony, and you hear yourself called a liar, politely, in writing. *Unsaan:* they fill your silence as courtesy and read your pause as refusal; Bahr Sufra grain contracts have misfired on this for a century. *Internally:* cross-strait marriages file twice, once with a Crown parish and once with an Accord registry; every wedding toast has a joke about which copy is real. By witness-law, neither.

**At home in each charter.** *Isavík (Crown):* the parishes schedule the Namaris rites around moot days rather than over them; reverie is proscribed under the Edict and thinly enforced — the sacrists live in the same longhouses as the hunters who keep Skoglind's rites as "wood-luck"; since 1230 the parish says a beast rose from Frostvatn and the households say it kept the old appointment, and the Chancel has ruled nothing. *Grimskov (Accord):* examiners hold the offices and present rulings to the moot for *hearing* — not approval; a century of Accord reports note that the assemblies "serve no procedural function," and they convene. The Escrow levy is a line in the homeland budget and a Stenhavn grief.

---

### 2.2 Renlei

**Homelands.** Zhenshui and Tienling, both Blue Accord — the one culture wholly inside a single charter. **Inspiration register:** East Asian. **Biomes:** taiga, evergreen, grassland, desert edge.

**Tongue.** The Renlei tongue. The Common Tongue lives everywhere a certificate does: the examination boards, the registries, the portal stations, the canal frontage, the caravan guild houses of Shakou and Yunmen, the harbor at Shakoui. It is thinnest in the millet country and on the barges, where the certified daughter interprets for her parents at the registry desk.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* family name first, then a given name of one or two syllables. Luo Deshi; Feng Zhao; Wen Suyin. Family-first (Canon D4).
- *Called:* the family name and the standing; a Renlei without standing is addressed by trade.
- *Registry name:* the seal, then the name — authority lives in the seal; the certification grade on every file.
- *Introduction:* family name, given name, and board standing. The certificate is the introduction.

**The laws you carry.**
- **Seal law.** Authority lives in the seal, not the signer. A sealed unsigned document binds; a signed unsealed one is a draft. Seal forgery has been a capital matter since the Manifest War. *For you:* you read seals — whose, what grade, whether the wax is the registry's (§7.4). A document without a seal is, to you, a conversation.
- **Phase-contract law.** Every contract names the moon phase of performance, because cost does: "an Orrivane price" is cheap, "a Velquor price" is not. *For you:* you never agree a price without its phase, and you notice when someone else has (§6.3).
- **Examination standing.** Civil standing accrues by certification, and not only for practitioners — millers, pilots, midwives, well-diggers sit for boards. A dispute between parties of unequal certification is heard by an examiner of higher standing than either, which in remote districts means a season's wait. Renlei wait. *For you:* your registry grade is your civil standing. Showing a certificate of higher grade than the other party's, to a Renlei, is Advantage on the Standing check that follows; showing it to a Tangata is saying your word twice.

**The word you hold.** *A price quoted with its moon phase included.* The Common Tongue needs a clause and a schedule.

**Age and birth.** Years. Board days are civic festivals: the village feeds everyone, including the examiner, who by regulation pays for his own portion and by custom is never allowed to. The five phase-turn days are market truces and family observances; the Velquor turn is for sweeping graves and settling the year's sealed accounts.

**Households.**
- An examiner's household, or a canal-frontage holder's — the ones rich in coin.
- A caravan guild house of Shakou or Yunmen — which remembers the Interdiction as *the fat years* and holds a lantern feast it does not explain.
- A portal-station family (Guru-presided stations; Canon Part I).
- A certified trade household — miller, pilot, midwife, well-digger — with the certificate on the wall.
- A barge household of the Lianshui; a millet household of the north; a dryland-wheat household toward the Shalei edge.
- A Shakoui guild household that buried crew in 1204 and remembers the officers' names.
- A household with a certified daughter and uncertified parents — the split runs through households.

**Look.** Hemp and ramie for work; silk for board dress and seal ribbons. Timber-frame on canal frontage, tiled; the certificate wall where another culture would post its shrine. Millet and river fish in the north, dryland wheat toward the desert. Barge trains and ox roads on the Lianshui; portal stations at the seats. Seal-cutting and document wax; lantern-making for the caravan towns' feast. **Palette:** ink-black, seal-wax red, canal-water white, lantern-paper gold.

**Who misreads you.** *Menneske:* oath-only dealing is unauditable — a word before three witnesses is, in the standard joke, three more people to bribe; they hear the joke. *Tangata:* Puketai. You observe the Passage Agreements to the letter while your institution maintains they cannot exist; you hold both positions without discomfort, and the Tangata find it funnier than offensive. *Umutu:* on truce ground no claims are pressed and no instruments drawn — and to the Umutu, papers are instruments. A Renlei factor pressing a sealed debt at Tinwara has committed a serious offense while following his own law precisely. *Outsiders generally:* the customs cutters at Shakoui flew Accord colors, but the officers' names were Renlei. You are blamed for Accord policy, and cannot always say where your customs end and the Accord's procedures begin, because for six generations they have been the same offices.

**At home in each charter.** Both Accord. Zhenshui sells certification itself — every board fee on the Accord's side of the map is paid at Baishui or to an examiner it trained — and staffs the portals. Tienling's caravan towns are their own register. There is no elsewhere for a Renlei; a Renlei in Crown or Chimera territory is a foreigner and knows it.

---

### 2.3 Unsaan

**Homelands.** Bahr-Al-Asra (Gold Crown) and Zand-Kala (Blue Accord). **Inspiration register:** Middle Eastern, in two branches. **Biomes:** savanna, desert, grassland, deciduous forest.

**Tongue.** One language, two registers, audible in the map itself. **Asran** is the register of the citadel and the rites — Marj-Al-Sidr, Qasr-Al-Rimal, Bab-Al-Ghaf — what one prays and rules in. **Kalani** is the register of gardens and contracts — Dasht-Anar, Sabz-Rud, Bagh-Shirin — what one plants and bargains in. Most Unsaan hold both and switch mid-sentence; which register a speaker chooses for a clause is itself information. On the sheet: *Unsaan (Asran, Kalani)*, or one register if the household held only one. The Common Tongue lives at the citadel, in the arbiter-judges' courts, on the Bahr Sufra caravan strings, and in every Zand-Kala law office; the orchards and the garden allotments hold market words.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* personal name and house, in Asran; personal name and garden-name, in Kalani — Golnar *Sabz*. An office-holder takes the name of the place that holds the office and surrenders their own: *al-Rimal*.
- *Called:* the personal name and the register you are speaking in.
- *Registry name:* the name as given. A garden-name is filed as a family name and is not asked about; Kalani has a particular way of not asking.
- *Introduction:* the house and its hospitality standing — whose roof, how many nights.

**The laws you carry.**
- **Guest-right.** Three nights inviolable; the host answers for the guest's conduct; not until the third night may the host ask the guest's business. *For you:* under any Unsaan roof you may claim three nights and will be given them, and while you hold them the host answers for you — to the arbiter, the examiner, or the column at the door. Under your own roof you owe them to whoever arrives, including the one you would rather not shelter. *The third-night questions of 1164–66* are the record of what that costs.
- **Shade-and-water servitudes.** A wall's midday shade belongs to the road, not the wall's owner; town wells carry public draw-hours. *For you:* you know the draw-hours of every well you pass and the shade-line of every street, and you know that an Umutu working the windlass at an Unsaan well is not fouling it.
- **Name law.** An office-holder takes the place-name so that the office cannot pass by blood; the name dies back to the place at each succession. *For you:* if you ever hold an office, you lose your name to it. This is the law by which a Menneske-born Sunniva and a Teocalli-born Citlali could hold an Unsaan citadel's seat.

**The word you hold.** *The third night, when a host may ask a guest's business.* The Common Tongue needs a paragraph of apology.

**Age and birth.** Years. The observance the whole culture shares is the sitting of accounts at each phase turn, when a household's ledger is read aloud — and the ledger tallies debts of hospitality, not money: who was fed, who was sheltered, who owes a roof. A household's standing is this ledger (§6.6).

**Households.**
- A citadel household of Qasr-Al-Rimal — the Crown's largest employer.
- A caravan house on the Bahr Sufra — rich in coin, second only to the Chancel.
- A fig-and-date orchard household on the savanna meadows of Marj-Al-Sidr.
- The forest gate at Bab-Al-Ghaf, taxing the hardwood.
- A garden allotment of Zand-Kala — irrigation shares are the title.
- A law house of Dasht-Anar — the best contract lawyers on either continent, an export.
- A garden-name household — a family that converted its name and its past to blank pages in the Purge years, and is not asked.
- An arbiter-judge's house (Bahr-Al-Asra); a garden-council household (Zand-Kala), its seat filled by Accord examination.

**Look.** Cotton; undyed white for the rites in Asran, dyed garden-cloth in Kalani. Courtyard houses built around water in Zand-Kala; the desert citadel; walls whose midday shade belongs to the road. Figs and dates; pomegranates and garden produce. Camel and horse strings on the Bahr Sufra. Channel-work and irrigation shares; contract calligraphy in two registers. **Palette:** sand-gold, shade-blue, pomegranate red, and the specific red of the ink the Chancel imports from Zand-Kala.

**Who misreads you.** *Menneske:* you fill silence as courtesy — to leave a guest in silence is to starve him at the table — and they read the filling as pressure. *Umutu:* well law against well law; your draw-hours read to them as generosity rationed by clock, and their give-back demands read to you as a toll dressed as virtue; a recorded cause of brawls at the Sufra crossings. *Internally:* the citadel hears Kalani contract-speech as haggling in church; Kalani hears Asran rite-speech as a price hidden inside a prayer.

**At home in each charter.** *Bahr-Al-Asra (Crown):* arbiter-judges seated under the Chancel; the Chancel is the Crown's treasury, so the homeland's tax is the Crown's income; the Purge was administered from here, and guest-right sheltered its refugees in every Asran town it touched. *Zand-Kala (Accord):* garden councils seated by examination — the First Examiner came up through them; the homeland that absorbed the Purge's families under garden-names.

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### 2.4 Yamana

**Homelands.** Teocalli (Gold Crown) and Yaxkulu (Green Chimera), adjacent on the western continent — the culture the century split deepest. **Inspiration register:** Mesoamerican. **Biomes:** deciduous forest, grassland, chaparral, desert edge.

**Tongue.** The Yamana tongue. The Common Tongue lives in the Tepemitla precincts and the Chancel's offices, with the runner lineages (who carry news to registries), and at the Sakbeha causeway checkpoints. Terrace households and road-keeper lineages hold market words; in Yaxkulu it is thinner still, since nothing there is written in it except the Concord's minutes.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* personal names in the Tepemitla / Amilpan / Ometzin register — Ometzin; Citlali — and, formally, the oldest inherited duty.
- *Called:* the personal name; a runner by lineage.
- *Registry name:* name and file. The Ledger closes the file at death; Yamana probate expects the duties to transfer. The grief-cases at registry desks are that sentence.
- *Introduction:* by the oldest inherited duty. "I keep the ramp at the Sakbeha culvert; it was my grandmother's grandmother's."

**The laws you carry.**
- **Road law.** The white causeways — raised, paved, dead straight — are right-of-way and sanctuary both; blood spilled on a causeway owes double penance, a rule older than the Crown's presence. *For you:* on a causeway you are in sanctuary and so is your enemy. A fight that starts on the road is a double sacrilege before it is anything else, and every Yamana in sight will remember which of you drew.
- **Duty inheritance.** Obligations survive the dead; an unmet duty passes with the estate and can be older than anyone living. *For you:* your oldest inherited duty is on the sheet (§6.6), and it is yours whether or not you ever met the person who incurred it. A registry clerk marking a dead relative's file *closed* has just told you your inheritance does not exist.
- **Water law at the terraces.** The same irrigation customs run in both homelands under different paperwork — Amilpan's turns allotted on the Namaris circuit calendar, Yaxkulu's by Threnis claim through the Concord. *For you:* you know the turns; you find it funnier than either charter does.

**The word you hold.** *A duty inherited from someone you never met.* The Common Tongue needs a probate filing.

**Age and birth.** Years. Road-sweeping processions at every phase turn, in both homelands, under both charters — the one shared rite the Edict could not touch, because the Crown's own processions use the causeways. A grandmother in Xalcoyan and her proscribed sister in Kinha sweep the same road from opposite ends.

**Households.**
- A terrace-holding lineage, with its road-keeping duty attached to the land.
- A road-keeper lineage — the duty is the household.
- A runner lineage: causeway runners carry news faster than riders, hold formal standing in both homelands, are on no roll (they owe the road, not the precinct), and are the one profession the checkpoints never delayed, even in the war years.
- A precinct officer's household of Tepemitla (Teocalli) — the ones rich in coin, with the terrace lineages.
- A speaker-circle household of Witzmul (Yaxkulu).
- An Ash-and-Antler founding lineage (Yaxkulu; §5.4).
- A Kinha well household, on the desert edge that the compact does not ward.
- A family with a cousin on the other side of the Sakbeha checkpoints who could not be written to in the war years.

**Look.** Cotton, woven; a lineage's oldest duty shown in the border pattern. Hill towns and terraces in the deciduous forest; the white causeways. Maize on the terrace walls, beans and chiles in the margins. No heavy draft; porters, pack llamas on the hill routes, causeway runners. Causeway stonework; the knotted cord the runner lineages carry in Ixtlamani's name. **Palette:** causeway white, forest green, maize gold, chile red, the red of double penance.

**Who misreads you.** *Renlei:* the accounts of the dead — a closed file against a transferred duty. *Umutu:* where the white roads cross the drove-lines, road law says the road is sanctuary and passage law says the herd does not stop; the compromise everywhere is culverts and ramps, and the annual argument over who maintains them is functionally a shared holiday. *Internally:* the Edict. A practice that is a crime on one side of a causeway and an inheritance on the other, sometimes within one family — managed daily, quietly, and never once brought to either charter, on the shared understanding that neither would survive being asked.

**At home in each charter.** *Teocalli (Crown):* administered through the temple precincts under the Chancel; the Crown's ritual heartland; the Edict of Amilpan was issued from here, against practices Yamana kin hold sacred across the border. *Yaxkulu (Chimera):* speaker-circles seated in the Concord; Ash-and-Antler's founding lineages; the causeway checkpoints that doubled in the war years. *The war we did not quite fight* — the two homelands never fought, which is not the same as peace.

---

### 2.5 Umutu

**Homelands.** Oasira (Gold Crown) and Zulwazi (Green Chimera). **Inspiration register:** Saharan African. **Biomes:** savanna, desert, grassland, chaparral. The Antler War was fought across Umutu ground from both directions, and the peace was signed on it, at Tinwara, the market-truce ground — the only ground both belligerents could stand on.

**Tongue.** The Umutu tongue. The Common Tongue lives at the Tinwara and Marendi markets, in the Oasira parishes, and with whoever treats with the Ledger's estimators; the drove-lines and the keeper lineages hold market words, and the Ledger counts Zulwazi from the market returns because it cannot count anyone else.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* personal name, the age-set cohort name, and the well or keeper lineage as the second name.
- *Called:* the cohort name, where the stranger knows the cohorts; otherwise the well.
- *Registry name:* the name, and a number for the cohort — the one conversion the Ledger makes that no Umutu recognizes.
- *Introduction:* cohort, then well. The age-set answers "how old"; the well answers "whose."

**The laws you carry.**
- **Water law.** Wells are trusts, never property; every draw creates a give-back debt — labor on the well, not water — and the well's ledger is kept by its keeper lineage. *The well remembers* is a legal maxim first and folklore second. *For you:* every draw you take is a debt in days on the sheet (§6.6), and the keeper knows the count before you do. A day owed to the well converts to nothing. At an Unsaan well with draw-hours you are, locally, a stranger fouling the mechanism.
- **Passage law.** The drove-lines have precedence over planted verge in drought years, and the herds do not stop. *For you:* a shrine on a drove-line is an enclosure of the road; the first fires of 1178 were the removal of an obstruction. You know where the lines run, which is what a herder knows and a map does not.
- **Market truce.** On truce ground — Tinwara, Marendi — no claims are pressed, no instruments drawn, knives or papers, and all parties feed at one fire. *For you:* on truce ground you are safe from your creditors and your enemies, and so are they from you. A Renlei factor with a sealed debt is holding a drawn instrument.

**The word you hold.** *Water owed back to a well.* The Common Tongue needs "debt," which is wrong.

**Age and birth.** The age-set. Cohorts are cut by birth phase: five a year, each named, each initiated together, each carrying its phase-name for life. Ask an Umutu their age and the answer is a cohort. On the sheet the cohort is written as its phase and year — *the Saelura cohort of 1222* — because canon coins no cohort names and this file coins none (CF15). Well ceremonies fall in Saelura, when the water holds: deepening, lining, and give-back labor scheduled to the red moon.

**Households.**
- A keeper lineage of a named well — rich in standing, counted in the well-ledgers rather than coin.
- A drove-line household — herders on the seasonal circuits, somewhere else on the Namaris circuit when the tithe roll is taken.
- A cattle household rich in one poverty and poor in the other; it knows which its neighbors weigh heavier.
- A Tinwara or Marendi market household, on truce ground.
- A parish household of Azelra (Oasira) — tithing to the shrine, arguing with the keeper lineage about whose well it is.
- An age-set council elder's household.
- A Kwazira highland household; an Ulundwe salt household; a Mto Azari river-trade household.
- A household on well ground that passed to Accord-creditor hands in 1228 — the third claimant no one wanted.

**Look.** Hides and leather; bought cloth. Mud-brick and thorn-fence compounds; the well town at Azelra. Cattle — milk and meat; grain bought in drought years. Cattle circuits on the drove-lines; river trade down the Mto Azari to Marendi. Well-lining and windlass-work, done as give-back. **Palette:** ochre, thorn-grey, dust, and the red moon on held water.

**Who misreads you.** *Unsaan:* draw-hours against give-back, reciprocally. *Tangata:* the Rangitahu burn schedules drift smoke across Zulwazi grazing; an unscheduled fire reads as an attack on pasture; the Concord docket's perennial item. The Tangata note that you do not attend the fire sessions and then protest the smoke. *The Crown, inside Oasira:* parish against keeper lineage over whether a shrine's well is Chancel property or a trust the Chancel prays beside; the Benefice Crisis settled nothing except that there is now a third wrong answer.

**At home in each charter.** *Oasira (Crown):* shrine parishes over keeper lineages and age-set councils; Ulanga's gift read by the Crown as a loan with a lender and by water law as a trust with give-back — near enough to confuse, far enough to fight. *Zulwazi (Chimera):* Concord claims over the same lineages and councils; no charter tax, because the Concord levies nothing; claims settled in cattle and well-labor. The Zulwazi speakers declined to gloat in the Concord minutes after 1228. The minutes record the declining.

---

### 2.6 Tangata

**Homelands.** Awanui and Koremu, both Green Chimera — wholly Chimera, as the Renlei are wholly Accord. **Inspiration register:** Polynesian. **Biomes:** tropical rainforest, evergreen, grassland, red-sand desert edge.

**Tongue.** The Tangata tongue. The Common Tongue lives with navigators and way-keepers who treat with outsiders, the Puketai pilots (the Passage Agreements are filed by the Ledger under their names), the Onekura salt branch that trades to the interior, and whoever collects a way-toll from a caravan. Nothing in Tangata territory is written in it except the Concord's minutes and the Tithe's receipts; everyone else holds market words or none.

**Name.**
- *Full name:* personal name and birth-moon — the moon as a named affiliation — and the house-lineage.
- *Called:* name and birth-moon.
- *Registry name:* rarely; the Chimera registers no one. The Ledger files a Tangata captain who treats with it by ship and birth-moon.
- *Introduction:* name, birth-moon, house, and — for a navigator — the channels claimed, by telling their tales.

**The laws you carry.**
- **Way law.** Channels, passes, and paths are named, have keepers, and transit is negotiated. *For you:* every way you travel has a keeper and a toll, and you know how to find the first and pay the second. The Passage Agreements are not a novelty to you; they are way law extended to a reef that started answering.
- **Closed ground.** A keeper or council may close ground or water by declaration; violation is a Concord matter; closures lapse at the phase turn unless renewed. *For you:* you can tell closed from not-yet-open, which is the word you hold. You can also close ground, if you are a keeper, and be held to renewing only what you mean.
- **Fire law.** The Rangitahu burn rights are held by lineage, scheduled to Threnis, never sold and often lent; the taxing of through-traffic on the inland routes asserts jurisdiction over the way — a report would concede the Ledger's right to know what moves on it. *For you:* the toll is the point. The Black Meridian understands this perfectly, and pays.

**The word you hold.** *A way that is closed, as distinct from not yet open.* The Common Tongue needs two words that miss it.

**Age and birth.** The birth-moon: read in Lake Marama's night water for the Koremu-born, in the swells of Te Moana Rangi for the Awanui-born; the moon of one's birth-night is an affiliation carried for life — a berth, not a destiny. On the sheet it is the phase of the birth date. Launchings and first-crossings mark every stage of a life; the Passage Agreements are renewed at Puketai each Threnis, the harbor's chief festival, fifteen years old and conducted as if ancient, which by Tangata reckoning it is.

**Households.**
- A navigator house of Awanui — navigator standing is inheritable property in effect; the ones rich in anything.
- A house-lineage council household of Waimotu, Rotokere, or Motuweka.
- A burn-right lineage of Rangitahu — never sold, often lent.
- A pilot family of Puketai, whose names are on the Passage Agreements.
- An Onekura salt-pan branch, trading across to the interior.
- A lineage that keeps and taxes an inland way.
- A river-craft household on the Waimotu river-island; a taro-and-fish household of the rainforest.

**Look.** Bark-cloth and plaited fiber; sail-matting. The river-island seat at Waimotu; settlements oriented to their water, the first thing shown to a guest and the last thing named in the evening. Taro and fish; fire-managed game at Rangitahu; salt at Onekura. Outriggers and river craft. Hull-carving; the chart told as a story. **Palette:** reef-green, river-brown, burn-smoke white over Rangitahu, red sand at Onekura.

**Who misreads you.** *Renlei:* a captain asking for your word in writing is asking you to say it twice, the second time weaker; the request is always granted and always remembered. *Umutu:* burn notice is posted with the Concord; the herders do not attend the fire sessions and then protest the smoke, which you respect less than either open objection or silence. *The Crown:* the Tithe's collectors are travelers on a named way and owe the toll; the Tithe pays it and books it as alms; both sides content with mutually exclusive descriptions of the same coin.

**At home in each charter.** Both Chimera. House-lineage councils in the settlements, navigator standing on the water; Tangata claimants hold many of the Concord's Threnis-territory seats. Charters are a real thing one plans around without mistaking them for law. A Tangata in Accord or Crown territory is a foreigner who owes the way-toll and finds no keeper to pay it to.

---

## 3. The twelve homelands

### 3.0 Two rules

**Charter of record.** A homeland's institution is the charter a character born there is registered, attuned, or recognized under, by default (Canon: alignment column, ratified). It can be changed: a Grimskov Menneske trained at Baishui is on the Ledger's file; a Zulwazi Umutu who took a parish letter at Azelra is on the Chancel's; a Renlei who walked into the fire country and stayed is recognized by a keeper and filed nowhere. The sheet records the charter the character actually stands under; the homeland is where they were born (CF2).

**Minorities.** A character of one culture born in another culture's homeland keeps the culture entry (name, tongue, laws, word) and takes the homeland entry (charter, coin, levy, what is rich). The laws you carry give Advantage among your own people and on your own ground; a minority has neither at home, and has them the moment a countryman walks in. The lexical gap (§7.3) runs both ways across the household's threshold.

### 3.1 Reference table

Culture, charter, biomes, settlements (seat first), and the century are Canon Part V; coin is §6.1; magnitude is the record's figure, with the record named, and the record cannot see what the last column says (Canon: Population Magnitudes).

| Homeland | Culture | Charter | Biomes | Settlements (seat first) | Coin | Magnitude (record) | What the record cannot see |
|:--|:-:|:-:|:--|:--|:-:|:--|:--|
| Isavík | Menneske | Gold Crown | Tundra, Taiga, Evergreen | Ormsvík (harbor seat), Hvítadal (tundra valley), Skarfell (taiga ridge) | gilts | ~120,000 (Chancel tithe roll, households × parish factor) | Hvítadal's two abandoned winters were never subtracted |
| Grimskov | Menneske | Blue Accord | Tundra, Taiga, Grassland | Ulvskov (taiga timber town), Stenhavn (stone harbor), Kaldmark (grassland garrison) | seals | ~150,000 (Ledger census; the moot's count read beside it) | Crews of boats registered elsewhere |
| Zhenshui | Renlei | Blue Accord | Taiga, Evergreen, Grassland | Baishui (river seat; First Examiner's seat), Songlin (evergreen pine), Yunmen (highland gate) | seals | ~700,000 (Ledger census) | The unregistered, the Ledger's own largest confidential estimate |
| Tienling | Renlei | Blue Accord | Evergreen, Grassland, Desert | Shihmen (evergreen foothill gate), Pingyeh (grassland market), Shakou (desert-edge caravan post), Shakoui (evergreen-coast harbor) | seals | ~400,000 (Ledger census) | Caravan populations in transit; Shakou doubles at every phase turn |
| Zulwazi | Umutu | Green Chimera | Savanna, Desert, Chaparral | Mbezwa (savanna market seat), Kwazira (chaparral highland), Ulundwe (desert margin) | none minted; seals at market | ~150,000 (Ledger estimate from Tinwara returns; the Concord counts no one) | Everyone who does not come to market |
| Oasira | Umutu | Gold Crown | Savanna, Desert, Grassland | Azelra (desert well town), Tinwara (savanna caravan crossroads), Marendi (grassland market) | gilts | ~180,000 (Chancel tithe roll) | Herders on the drove-lines; the keeper lineages count wells, not people |
| Koremu | Tangata | Green Chimera | Tropical Rainforest, Grassland, Desert | Motuweka (rainforest river), Rangitahu (grassland fire country), Onekura (red-sand desert edge) | none; the traveler's coin at the way | ~120,000 (Ledger estimate from Tithe receipts and Meridian way-tolls) | The fire country between burns |
| Awanui | Tangata | Green Chimera | Tropical Rainforest, Evergreen, Grassland | Waimotu (river-island seat), Rotokere (evergreen lake), Puketai (coastal hill) | none; the traveler's coin at the way | ~200,000 (Ledger estimate from Puketai pilotage manifests) | Every settlement upriver of the pilot's last mark |
| Yaxkulu | Yamana | Green Chimera | Deciduous Forest, Grassland, Desert | Witzmul (forest hill seat), Sakbeha (grassland causeway town), Kinha (desert well) | none; labor on the causeways | ~250,000 (Ash-and-Antler's warding assessment, bought by the Accord as a census) | The desert wells at Kinha, which the compact does not ward |
| Teocalli | Yamana | Gold Crown | Deciduous Forest, Grassland, Chaparral | Tepemitla (forest hill seat; Crown ritual heartland), Amilpan (irrigated grassland), Xalcoyan (chaparral scrub) | gilts | ~350,000 (Chancel tithe roll) | Runner lineages, who owe the road and are on no roll |
| Bahr-Al-Asra | Unsaan | Gold Crown | Savanna, Desert, Deciduous Forest | Marj-Al-Sidr (savanna meadow seat), Qasr-Al-Rimal (desert citadel; pontifical seat), Bab-Al-Ghaf (forest gate) | gilts | ~300,000 (Chancel tithe roll; the citadel's household counted separately) | Caravan houses in transit; guests within their three nights, by law |
| Zand-Kala | Unsaan | Blue Accord | Savanna, Grassland, Deciduous Forest | Dasht-Anar (grassland plain seat), Sabz-Rud (forest river), Bagh-Shirin (savanna garden) | seals | ~250,000 (Ledger census by garden allotment) | Garden-name households — counted, not asked |

Alignment count: Blue Accord 4, Gold Crown 4, Green Chimera 4. Settlements: 37 (Tienling holds four; not to be balanced — XI.6).

### 3.2 The entries

Each gives what the homeland sells and buys, who is rich there, land tenure, the charter tax and the local levy (what a household there owes, §6.4), the century's marks a character born there grew up hearing, and — for the four Crown homelands — the gods (§4.5). What is rich is a fact about who counted: the Chimera homelands hold no one rich in coin, "which the Ledger records as poverty and the Concord does not record at all."

**Isavík** (Menneske · Gold Crown). Sells salt fish, sealskin, and harbor services at Ormsvík; cannot do without grain and iron. Household freehold by moot record; the parish holds shrine ground only. Charter tax: households, in fish and labor-days, assessed by the parish on the Namaris circuit. Largest expense: imported grain — the Frost taught every Menneske exactly how much. Rich: boat-owning households and the Ormsvík factors. The century: the 1172 fleet actions across Svarthavet, Menneske firing on Menneske; the Frostvatn manifestation of 1230–32 that rose on the Longest Night; Hvítadal abandoned two winters and counted on the tithe roll as if it came back whole. Gods: Solvør (Lender), Brandvér (Steward), Tálvin (Witness), Skoglind (Sower, proscribed), Vatnmor (Debtor, anathema — and the lake mother of every deep lake, who rose from Frostvatn in view of the faithful).

**Grimskov** (Menneske · Blue Accord). Sells timber (Ulvskov), wool and horses (Kaldmark), harbor tolls (Stenhavn); cannot do without grain in bad years and the leased harbor Guru every year. Household freehold, Accord registry of title. Charter tax: households and timber houses, in coin, assessed by Ledger examiners; the Escrow lease — 5,200 seals a year in 1244, the largest line in the budget after grain — passed through in harbor dues. Rich: the timber houses and the Stenhavn harbor-master. The century: the Long Frost of 1169–76, when no keel got through and the Kaldmark garrison spent its winters on bread riots; Aslaug of Stenhavn's thirty-one years at the harbor, which the Menneske across the strait credit to Brandvér — folk credit, not parish, since Stenhavn is an Accord harbor.

**Zhenshui** (Renlei · Blue Accord). Sells certification itself — examiners, boards, portal staffing — with millet, river fish, and barge freight on the Lianshui; cannot do without metal and dryland wheat. Registered title; canal frontage is the valuable land. Charter tax: everyone with a certificate, in coin, by certification grade. Largest expense: board fees and the schooling that leads to them. Rich: examiners and canal-frontage holders. Why Baishui is rich: every practitioner, miller, pilot, and midwife on the Accord's side of the map pays a board fee at Baishui or to an examiner it trained, and the seal is worth nothing unless Baishui issues it. The century: the General Register of 1149; the Yunmen Lag of 1198, whose dilation fault produced real travelers out of true and the Ninth-Day Traveler custom that feeds them; the Baishui poisoning of 1211, whose only witness the Ledger declined and whose killer it has not named in thirty-five years.

**Tienling** (Renlei · Blue Accord). Sells caravan services (Shakou, Yunmen), harbor freight (Shakoui), dryland wheat (Pingyeh); cannot do without timber and rice. Registered title; caravanserai leases held by guild houses. Charter tax: guild houses in coin on manifests; farmers in kind. Largest expense: water rights on the desert edge, paid in labor. Rich: the caravan guild houses. The century: the Concordat of Pingyeh, 1146; the Shalei Desert burrow-dominant of 1155; the Interdiction — *the fat years* — when every portal stood dark and everything moved through Shakou's gate; the Shakoui incident of 1204, nine guild crew dead under Accord customs cutters with Renlei officers.

**Zulwazi** (Umutu · Green Chimera). Sells cattle, hides, chaparral hardwood, salt from Ulundwe; cannot do without iron and cloth. Wells as trusts under keeper lineages; grazing by drove-line precedence; no freehold. Charter tax: none — the Concord levies nothing; claims settled in cattle and well-labor. Largest expense: give-back labor on the well, counted in days. Rich: keeper lineages, in standing. The century: Antler War ground; the Rangitahu smoke docket, renewed as reliably as the truce at Marendi.

**Oasira** (Umutu · Gold Crown). Sells cattle, market services at Tinwara and Marendi, shrine pilgrimage revenue; cannot do without grain in drought years. Wells as trusts under parish shrines — the contested layer; some well ground in Accord-creditor hands since 1228. Charter tax: households in cattle and tithe to the parish; creditors in coin to the Accord on the sold land. Largest expense: give-back labor, then tithe. Rich: keeper lineages, in standing. The century: the shrine burnings of 1178–80, built on drove-lines; the Marendi Standstill of 1184, which the record credits to Unsworn compact rules and Marendi credits to the ground; the Treaty of Tinwara, 1187, on the only ground both belligerents could stand on; the Benefice Crisis of 1226–28, whose voided miracles were Oasira healings. Gods: Ulanga (Lender, with friction), Mwaki (Steward), Kihesa (Witness — the counter of cohorts), Nyamasi (Sower, proscribed; the 1178 shrines were built on her roads), Nari (Debtor — Ziwa Nari is the well whose keeper never came back).

**Koremu** (Tangata · Green Chimera). Sells fire-country game and hides (Rangitahu), salt (Onekura), taro; cannot do without metal. House-lineage holding; burn rights by lineage, lent, never sold. Charter tax: none; way-tolls on through-traffic. Largest expense: nothing bought — the labor the lineage owes the way. Rich: the burn-right lineages. The century: the burn-rights docket; the Lake Marama birth-moons, read in the night water.

**Awanui** (Tangata · Green Chimera). Sells reef and river fish, timber, and pilotage — the Passage Agreements made pilotage the harbor's export; cannot do without metal and cloth. House-lineage holding; navigator standing is inheritable property in effect. Charter tax: none; way-tolls. Largest expense: boats. Rich: the navigator houses. The century: Saelura healing anomalies from 1218; the Puketai Passage Agreements of 1224, signed by navigators with a reef that started answering, and filed by the Ledger under their names while the Ledger's own position holds they cannot exist.

**Yaxkulu** (Yamana · Green Chimera). Sells maize, warding contracts (Ash-and-Antler), runner services; cannot do without salt and metal. Terrace holding by duty inheritance; road-keeping duties attach to land. Charter tax: none; Concord dockets settle in labor on the causeways. Largest expense: road duty, paid in days. Rich: runner lineages and the warding compacts. The century: Ash-and-Antler's founding lineages; the Sakbeha causeway checkpoints that doubled in the war years; Cuauhnantli worshipped openly across the causeway from the town that proscribed her.

**Teocalli** (Yamana · Gold Crown). Sells maize, beans, chiles, temple pilgrimage, runner services; cannot do without salt and metal. Terrace holding by duty inheritance; precinct land held by the Chancel. Charter tax: households in kind to the precinct; the Chancel remits to Qasr-Al-Rimal. Largest expense: road duty, then precinct tithe. Rich: precinct officers and terrace-holding lineages. The century: the Tepemitla assassination of 1163 — a Sacrist-General killed on the road, in the Lender's phase, a double sacrilege before the theologians finished defining the first; the Edict of Amilpan, 1189; Citlali al-Rimal born here. Gods: Teoxihuitl (Lender — the white road is his count), Tletzin (Steward), Ixtlamani (Witness — the runner's god, the tally of inherited duties), Cuauhnantli (Sower, proscribed), Yohualtzin (Debtor — a creditor in local telling, a thief in the Crown's; the Crown's anathema cannot be enforced against probate).

**Bahr-Al-Asra** (Unsaan · Gold Crown). Sells figs, dates, hardwood (Bab-Al-Ghaf), caravan services on the Bahr Sufra, and the Crown itself — the citadel is the largest employer; cannot do without grain, on Sufra contracts with Grimskov that misfire on silence. Arbiter-judged tenure under the Chancel; shade-and-water servitudes encumber every wall. Charter tax: households and caravan houses in coin and kind to the Chancel — the Chancel is the Crown's treasury, so this homeland's tax is the Crown's income. Largest expense: hospitality — the ledger of who was fed is a real cost, and a household's standing is spent on it. Rich: the Chancel, then the caravan houses. The century: the Purge of 1164–66, administered from Qasr-Al-Rimal and colliding with guest-right in every Asran town — *the third-night questions*. Gods: Al-Muqrid (the Lender — the proper name of doctrine, in Asran), Sahib-Al-Rimal (Steward — the citadel is named for his ground, so every Sacrist-General carries a Saelura epithet by name law, and doctrine reads it as a place-name), Al-Katib (Witness — the Scribe; the Assay's room is the Scribe's room), Umm-Al-Ghaf (Sower, proscribed — her shade law is kept by everyone and called religious by no one), Al-Dayf (Debtor — the Guest of the Unwritten Guest; guest-right keeps him three nights anyway).

**Zand-Kala** (Unsaan · Blue Accord). Sells pomegranates, garden produce, and contract law — the best lawyers on either continent are an export; cannot do without timber. Garden-council allotment under Accord examination; irrigation shares are the title. Charter tax: households in coin by garden allotment; lawyers by certification grade. Largest expense: water shares. Rich: lawyers and large garden allotments. The century: absorbed the Purge's families under garden-names; Golnar Sabz's origin, First Examiner since 1233.

---

## 4. The three institutions

### 4.1 The three charters

Canon Part VI, Institution Summary, with the coin (§6.1) and the Ethos Statement each institution would recognize as its own.

| Institution | Ethos | Moon | Governance | Seat | Head (1245) | Registry stance | Coin | Holds |
|:--|:-:|:-:|:-:|:--|:--|:--|:-:|:--|
| **Blue Accord** | Rationalist | Orrivane | Meritocracy | Baishui, Zhenshui | First Examiner Golnar Sabz (1233–) | General Register 1149; Second Register 1212–14 | seal, eighth | "What can be measured is true"; "standing is examined, not inherited"; "a license is a measurement made durable" |
| **Gold Crown** | Devout | Namaris | Theocracy | Qasr-Al-Rimal, Bahr-Al-Asra (ritual heartland: Tepemitla, Teocalli) | Sacrist-General Citlali al-Rimal (1239–) | Parallel registry via the Indigo Assay within a decade of 1149 | gilt | "Every life is a span of years lent, not owned"; "grace is countable"; "a miracle is a transfer that can be certified" |
| **Green Chimera** | Reverie | Threnis | Tribal | None; the Bramble Concord's speakership rotates by Threnis phase | None, on principle | Refused, and refuses | none minted | "Perception is relational, not mathematical"; "nothing is registered"; "ground is claimed by phase and held by presence" |

Governance: Theocracy → Gold Crown → Devout; Meritocracy → Blue Accord → Rationalist; Tribal → Green Chimera → Reverie. Ethos is belief and institution is charter; the two axes are independent (Canon Part VI, Faction). A character's ethos comes from the class. A character's charter comes from where they stand.

### 4.2 What each records, and what it cannot see

The Design Thesis at the institutional scale. A table that plays it: what the party's charter can tell them is bounded by the last column, and the thing the contract turns on is usually there.

| Institution | What it records | The record it counts by | What it cannot see |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| **Blue Accord** | Practitioners by school and rank; measured casting cost from Adept (the cost file); certificates of every trade; the census; portal manifests; the phase rate; residue declared under the Manifest Rule | The Ledger census (the Second Register base of 1214 carried forward); the Orrivane rolls | The unregistered — its own confidential estimate puts them at their largest in Zhenshui; the sworn word; the ground; anything it classifies as anecdotal, which is everything it cannot measure. It cannot heal, so it studies the healer. It declined the only testimony at Baishui and has spent thirty-five years unable to name a killer |
| **Gold Crown** | Lent years — every Apostle's transfer, certified by the Assay; benefice; the tithe roll (households × parish factor); land title; the Scribe's copy of every commission | The Chancel tithe roll | What the lineages count — wells, cohorts, inherited duties, runners on no roll, guests within their three nights, herders elsewhere on the circuit; the Sower's healing and the Debtor's testimony, by doctrine; and since 1 Velquor 1230, what rose from Frostvatn, on which it has ruled nothing |
| **Green Chimera** | Nothing. The Concord's minutes are the one written thing; the Tithe's receipts are the Crown's | No one — "the Concord counts no one"; the Ledger estimates the Chimera homelands from market returns, pilotage manifests, way-tolls, and a warding assessment | A count. "The Circles keep no count, so they cannot show that the readings are rising, only that the ground has changed." A file. A price in coin — the Ledger records the Chimera's coinlessness as poverty |

### 4.3 The standing table: how your charter reads your ethos

Twelve cells, one per ethos × charter. Each gives the word for you there, what file you have, the reputation step you start at (§5.2), and the flag the GM plays. The four *Home* cells are the class triads of Canon's Consolidated Class Matrix; the other eight are the vacant cells of the Faction table and the frictions of Parts VII and IX, read as what they do to a character (CF3). Starting steps are the game's figures. **Status is read against the territory you are in:** the sheet holds your home status; when you cross a charter line, read the cell for your ethos in that charter instead.

| Your ethos ↓ / your charter → | **Blue Accord** | **Gold Crown** | **Green Chimera** |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| **Rationalist** (Sorcerer, Vanguard, Artificer) | **Home.** Licensed, filed, priced. *File:* the Ledger's, with a cost file from Adept. *Start:* Ledger file 1 (Noted). *Flag:* none. What is registered can be taxed, pegged to the phase, and cited as evidence — including against you | **Chartered guest.** The Assay's charter; the Witness, tolerated — "keeps the count; cannot lend, cannot take." A Sorcerer here is an Assay examiner or a private practitioner the Assay would like to count; a Vanguard or Artificer serves the columns and arsenals by contract. *File:* the Assay files as the Ledger does, with a parish added. *Start:* Ledger file 1; Chancel favor 0. *Flag:* none — but the Crown's own auditors bankrupted it once, and a Rationalist who says so aloud in Qasr-Al-Rimal is remembered | **Individual.** No tribal body can adjudicate a merit claim; you operate as yourself or as a Quorum contractor, never as a faction (vacant cell). *File:* none; the Ledger counts you from the market returns if you come to market. *Start:* Circle recognition 0. *Flag:* none, and nothing to hold onto — a certificate is a piece of paper here |
| **Devout** (Elementalist, Paladin, Apostle) | **Chartered.** The Firstday Watch is Accord-chartered; Elementalists are registered by function (harbor-keeping, aquifer-holding — "Elementalist" is a Crown title); an Apostle is registered like any practitioner, and a healing is measured, not sacramental — no benefice. *File:* the Ledger's. *Start:* Ledger file 1. *Flag:* none. A Paladin here is a column with no rite to escort | **Home.** Sacramental; Assay-certified; benefice-bearing. Transfer at Guru is the creed performed in full. *File:* the Assay's roll; the tithe roll. *Start:* Chancel favor 1 (Heard of). *Flag:* none — the Doctrine's three transgressions are yours to keep, and *counterfeiting a transfer* unmakes the claimant | **Under treaty.** The Namarite Tithe; on a named way you are a traveler and owe the toll, which the Tithe pays and books as alms. *File:* the Tithe's receipts. *Start:* Chancel favor 0; Circle recognition 0. *Flag:* none. A shrine on a drove-line is an obstruction; a Paladin near one is the reason the Antler War started |
| **Reverie** (Warden, Berserker, Apothecarist) | **Licensed where the Accord cannot staff.** Ash-and-Antler holds Accord license for frontier warding; the Ledger's file heading for Nature is "experimental mercy techniques" — efficacy acknowledged, legitimacy denied; a Berserker is a muster the Quorum has a word for and the Ledger does not. *File:* the Ledger's, under those headings. *Start:* Ledger file 1. *Flag:* none, and no standing beyond the license: the Accord pays the compact for what it cannot do and files the payment as poverty | **Proscribed.** The Edict of Amilpan, 1189: reverie is "the heresy nearest its own practice" — the Sower's, giving life without a ledger. Rites survive as habit (wood-luck at Skarfell; the road-sweeping the Crown's own processions use). *File:* none until identified; the Assay's copy after. *Start:* Chancel favor 0; Circle recognition 1 — the lineages that keep the Sowers' rites know you. *Flag:* **Proscribed.** Your practice is a crime here. A Reading of you by a Crown-attuned practitioner, or an inspection, starts enforcement — a column on flat ground, and nothing in the trees (GMG §8.5, Assay audit, by analogy; CF19) | **Home.** Recognized by keepers; nothing written; ground claimed by phase and held by presence. *File:* none. *Start:* Circle recognition 1 (Named by a keeper). *Flag:* none. You are the whole of the charter and none of its paper |
| **Ethosless** (Necromancer, Hexblade, Warlock) | **Legible, therefore prosecutable.** The registry makes ethoslessness visible; the Second Register's precursor controls exist because of the Warlock; a Necromancer's Readings are inadmissible. Unregistered by default — "no registry to be late to" (GMG §9.1). *File:* none until noticed; a Register entry when noticed. *Start:* Ledger file 0; Off-Ledger credit 1 (a job, priced high). *Flag:* **Unregistered.** Any Reading by a registered practitioner, any portal manifest, any assessor's confirmation files a Register entry (GMG §8.5). An Unsworn contract is a contract, not a registration | **Anathema.** The Purge of 1164–66 — *taking without the Lender* — and its cell in the Faction table is "officially purged," the one cell whose emptiness is a claim rather than a fact. Guest-right shelters you three nights anyway, under both registers. *File:* none; the Assay's copy if identified. *Start:* Chancel favor 0; Off-Ledger credit 1. *Flag:* **Anathema.** Identification is the Purge's procedure, and the citadel it was administered from is built on a legal duty to shelter you (Part VII, Al-Dayf) | **Received.** "What the Crown anathematizes and the Ledger cannot admit, the Circles receive" — the reader whose testimony no court takes; the Meridian's routes. *File:* none. *Start:* Circle recognition 1; Off-Ledger credit 1. *Flag:* none. Received is not the same as home: the Chimera has no Ethosless body, and the Meridian is a network, not a lodge |

### 4.4 Registry status

One word on the sheet, from this list, read against the territory (above). GMG §9.1 is the rule of record for what each recognition looks like and costs; this table is its vocabulary (CF23).

| Status | Means | Held by |
|:--|:--|:--|
| **Registered** (grade) | On the Ledger's file: rank, examiner, phase; a cost file from Adept (Canon XI.2 form 1). Board fee 2 / 8 / 30 seals by rank; the Guru roll by petition | Any school registered in Accord territory, or at an Assay desk that files in the Ledger's form |
| **Attuned** (grade) | On the Assay's roll: Apostles by rite in Namaris; every other school by the Assay's counters; benefice-bearing certification (form 2). Tithe, not fee | Devout at home; Rationalists under the Assay's charter |
| **Recognized** | A keeper said it before whoever was there. Nothing written. When the keeper says so | Reverie at home; anyone a keeper names |
| **Unregistered** | The party knows; the registries do not — until a Reading, an inspection, or a manifest files it (GMG §8.5) | The Ethosless schools by default; anyone who ranked up with no recognition |
| **Proscribed** | Reverie in Crown territory since 1189: a crime, thinly enforced in trees | A Warden, Berserker, or Apothecarist standing on Crown ground |
| **Anathema** | The Ethosless in Crown territory since 1164 | A Necromancer, Hexblade, or Warlock standing on Crown ground |
| **Off-Ledger** | Unlicensed by choice, in direct inversion of the registry; an affiliation, not only an absence (§5.4) | Anyone who has struck their name, or never gave it |

**Grade and rank.** A grade never exceeds the character's rank. A grade below rank is legal: the tier of posting the character may take is set by the grade, and the gap between what the character can do and what is on file is what GMG §8.5 prosecutes once noticed. A rank is earned in play (PG §13.4–13.5); the status records it, or does not (GMG §9.1).

A character can carry two: *Registered (Adept) — Proscribed on Crown ground* is an Accord-licensed Warden of Ash-and-Antler at Amilpan. The sheet has room for both.

### 4.5 The Crown's doctrine, for the four Crown homelands

Part VII covers Isavík, Teocalli, Bahr-Al-Asra, and Oasira only. Grimskov, Zand-Kala, Yaxkulu, and Zulwazi share the pantheons by culture and not the Crown's ranking, which stops at the charter line. The Renlei and the Tangata have no gods anywhere in canon, as a scope decision (D3): the Renlei because certification displaced the household cult, the Tangata because they have named ways, keepers, birth-moons, and a channel whose keeper has not been born yet. Nothing here assigns a god to any character; the sheet's God line is the player's to fill or leave (CF17).

**The Doctrine of Lent Years**, as the Chancel teaches it, in brief: every life is a span of years lent, not owned, and the Namaris phase is the audit; an Apostle does not create life but reallocates lent years, the Apostle's own aging being the debit; a miracle is a transfer that can be certified, which is the Assay's warrant; the god has one name in doctrine — **Al-Muqrid**, the Lender, in Asran — and four in the homelands; three transgressions — *taking without the Lender* (Necrotic), *giving outside the ledger* (Nature, and reverie generally), *counterfeiting a transfer* (fraud); and the lesser faces are the Lender's household, classed by moon.

| Moon | Face | Crown status | For a character |
|:-:|:--|:--|:--|
| Namaris | The Lender (four names) | Canonical | An Apostle's god; the audit is the phase |
| Saelura | Steward | Sanctioned; the Elementalists' patron | "Keeps the Lender's house — harbor, fire, water, ground" |
| Orrivane | Witness | Tolerated; the Assay's patron | "Keeps the count; cannot lend, cannot take" |
| Threnis | Sower | Proscribed (Edict of Amilpan, 1189) | What a Reverie character is called on Crown ground |
| Velquor | Debtor | Anathema (Purge, 1164) | What an Ethosless character is called on Crown ground; whose night the Firstday Watch keeps for the Accord |

| Homeland (culture) | Namaris — Lender | Saelura — Steward | Orrivane — Witness | Threnis — Sower | Velquor — Debtor |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| **Isavík** (Menneske) | Solvør — the returning sun; the count of winters | Brandvér — hearth-fire, harbor-fire, the breaking of ice | Tálvin — the tally-stick; the fourth witness at the moot | Skoglind — taiga, the hunt, wood-luck | Vatnmor — the lake mother; rose from Frostvatn, 1 Velquor 1230 |
| **Teocalli** (Yamana) | Teoxihuitl — the year-count, the white road | Tletzin — terrace fire, kiln, lime, the irrigation burn | Ixtlamani — the knower; the runner's god; the tally of duties | Cuauhnantli — tree-mother; maize; worshipped openly across the causeway | Yohualtzin — the night; the unfinished duty; a creditor locally, a thief in doctrine |
| **Bahr-Al-Asra** (Unsaan) | Al-Muqrid — the Lender; the proper name of doctrine | Sahib-Al-Rimal — lord of the sands; the citadel ground | Al-Katib — the scribe; the sitting of accounts | Umm-Al-Ghaf — mother of the ghaf tree; the shade law | Al-Dayf — the Guest; kept three nights by law |
| **Oasira** (Umutu) | Ulanga — dry-season sun; the well's yield, read as trust or loan | Mwaki — fire; the red-moon water when the oases hold | Kihesa — the counter; the age-set cohorts; the well-ledger | Nyamasi — grass mother; the drove-line; the 1178 shrines stood on her roads | Nari — the keeper who did not come back; Ziwa Nari |

Five frictions this layer leaves open for a table (Canon Part VII): Isavík's parishes and households disagree about 1230 and the Chancel has ruled nothing; the al-Rimal name is a Saelura epithet no Sacrist-General has been asked about; Ulanga's well is in litigation between parish and keeper lineage; Yohualtzin is party to every Yamana estate and the anathema cannot be enforced against probate; the Crown's own seat owes its anathema three nights.

### 4.6 The local layer

The charter is the top of the stack. What a character actually deals with in a settlement is the layer beneath it, which every culture kept when the charter arrived (Canon Part V, Governance and law, each profile).

| Homeland | The charter's officer | The local body beneath it | What the local body can do to you |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| Isavík | Parish sacrist (Chancel) | The moot — the standing assembly of a settlement's households, on fixed days; rites scheduled around it | Hear you before three witnesses; bind you by the word; count your winters |
| Grimskov | Accord examiner (holds the office) | The moot — hears the examiner's rulings; hearing, not approval | The same; and name the channel line you are on |
| Zhenshui, Tienling | Examination boards (all the way down) | The boards are the local body; the caravan guild houses at Shakou and Yunmen keep their own register | Grade you; hear your dispute by an examiner of higher standing than either party, after a season's wait |
| Bahr-Al-Asra | Arbiter-judges under the Chancel | The household and its hospitality ledger, read aloud at the phase turn | Shelter you three nights and answer for you; ask your business on the third; spend standing on you |
| Zand-Kala | Garden councils, seats filled by Accord examination | The same, and the law houses | Allot water; not ask about a garden-name |
| Teocalli | Temple precincts under the Chancel | Road-keeper lineages; runner lineages (on no roll) | Hold you to a duty older than anyone living; carry your news faster than a rider; make the road sanctuary |
| Yaxkulu | Speaker-circles seated in the Concord | The same lineages; Ash-and-Antler's compact | The same; and double the checkpoint |
| Oasira | Shrine parishes (Chancel) | Well-keeper lineages; age-set councils | Count your draws in days; cut you into a cohort; refuse you the water if the well remembers you owe |
| Zulwazi | Concord claims | The same lineages and councils; the market truce at Mbezwa's reach | The same; and press no claim on truce ground, nor let you |
| Awanui, Koremu | Concord seats (many of them Tangata) | House-lineage councils; navigator standing on the water; keepers of ways; burn lineages | Close a way to you; name the toll; refuse a channel to anyone who cannot tell its tale |

---

## 5. The twelve factions

### 5.1 The matrix

Canon Part VI. Ethos = belief; institution = charter; the axes are independent. Institution takes five values: Blue Accord, Gold Crown, Green Chimera, None, All-by-contract. Each ethos holds exactly three factions; column counts Blue 3, Gold 2, Green 3, None 3, All 1.

| Faction | Ethos | Institution | Function (canon) | Track it moves (§5.2) |
|:--|:-:|:-:|:--|:--|
| The Cobalt Ledger | Rationalist | Blue Accord | Registers practitioners and records measured casting cost; issues licenses by school | Ledger file |
| The Indigo Assay | Rationalist | Gold Crown | Examiners chartered by the Crown to verify Divine attunement and authenticate miracle claims; fraud voids benefice | Chancel favor; a Ledger-form file |
| Steel Quorum | Rationalist | None | Independent military-technical council; sells command doctrine and asset allocation to any buyer, priced by demonstrated result | None of the four — the buyer's |
| Firstday Watch | Devout | Blue Accord | Keeps the calendar of record and the 1 Velquor observance; Accord-chartered because phase timing governs casting cost and license terms | Ledger file |
| Gilt Chancel | Devout | Gold Crown | Administrative body of the Namaris-phase rites; holds temple treasury and land title | Chancel favor |
| The Namarite Tithe | Devout | Green Chimera | Maintains shrines and assesses Divine service in Chimera territory under treaty; collection follows the Namaris circuit | Chancel favor; Circle recognition by the toll |
| Ash-and-Antler | Reverie | Blue Accord | Hunting and warding compact, Tangata and Yamana in origin; Accord-licensed for frontier warding the Accord cannot staff | Circle recognition; Ledger file for the license |
| Bramble Concord | Reverie | Green Chimera | Standing negotiation between tribal claimants over Threnis-phase territory | Circle recognition |
| The Sedge Circles | Reverie | None | Decentralized Nature-school lodges; membership by initiation, chartered by no one | Circle recognition |
| Black Meridian | Ethosless | Green Chimera | Smuggling network timed to Velquor's phase; moves Necrotic material along Threnis-territory routes the tribes tax but do not report | Off-Ledger credit; Circle recognition by the toll |
| The Off-Ledger | Ethosless | None | Unlicensed practitioners operating in direct inversion of Cobalt Ledger registry | Off-Ledger credit |
| The Unsworn | Ethosless | All (contract) | Mercenary compact under simultaneous contract to all three institutions; the contracts are the allegiance-refusal | Off-Ledger credit; the principal's track by whose contract you hold |

**The vacant cells** carry information a player can use. *Rationalist × Green:* no tribal body can adjudicate a merit claim — a Rationalist in Chimera territory is an individual or a Quorum contractor. *Devout × None:* the ethos requires the Crown's sacramental apparatus; a detached Devout reverts to the Chancel or lapses Ethosless. *Reverie × Gold:* the Crown polices the heresy nearest its own practice. *Ethosless × Blue:* the registry makes ethoslessness legible; the niche exists only as its inversion, the Off-Ledger. *Ethosless × Gold:* officially purged — "the one cell whose emptiness is a claim rather than a fact; if a hidden faction ever exists, this is its slot." A campaign may fill that cell. Canon has not, and this file does not.

### 5.2 The four reputation tracks

GMG §8.4 is the rule of record: one track per institution, 0–5, plus the Off-Ledger; each step names what it unlocks; a step lost is a Register entry, an audit, or a closed way (GMG §8.5). Restated here for the player's sheet (CF11).

| Step | Ledger file (Accord) | Chancel favor (Crown) | Circle recognition (Chimera) | Off-Ledger credit |
|:-:|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| 0 | No file | Unknown | Strangers on the way | No jobs |
| 1 | Noted | Heard of | Named by a keeper | A job, priced high |
| 2 | Licensed for contracts of the tier | Parish letter | A way opened once | Jobs at market price |
| 3 | Preferred: postings sent before they are posted | Commissioned | A season's welcome | Jobs priced in relics |
| 4 | Of record: the file is cited as evidence | Benefice-bearing | A share of the ground | The principal's name |
| 5 | On the roll (Master+) | The Chancel's rite | A seat at the fire session | A company of your own |

**Coupling** (GMG §8.4): standing with one moves the others — +2 with the Chancel is −1 with the Circles; a Ledger file of record is what the Off-Ledger charges for. **What moves a track:** a contract done (GMG §8.3: +1 at Novice, +1 or +2 at Adept, +2 at Master, +3 and a treaty matter at Guru), a consequence (GMG §8.5), and the faction entries below (each names the step its gift arrives at). **Naming note:** the GMG calls the Chimera track "Sedge Circles (recognition)"; the Chimera's charter body in canon is the Bramble Concord, and the Circles are chartered by no one. This file reads the track as *Circle recognition* — keepers, Circle initiates, and the Concord's fire sessions together, which is what steps 1–5 already describe — and flags the name for Joe (CF11). **Rank-up** (GMG §9.1): recognition at the phase turn raises the matching track to a floor — Ledger file 2 on registration, Chancel favor 2 on attunement, Circle recognition 1 on a keeper's word.

### 5.3 Affiliation

Three relations, one word each on the sheet (CF9).

- **Member.** You belong. The faction admits its own ethos, and each entry says who else it admits and how (by initiation, by contract, by not registering). **One Member affiliation at a time.** Its register is yours: contracts reach you in its form (GMG §8.2), its gift and its demand apply, and the track it moves starts at 1 if it was 0.
- **Contractor.** You work for it under a contract that runs and ends. Any number, as contracts run; any ethos where the entry allows. The Unsworn's simultaneous contracts and the Quorum's doctrine are this relation for everyone.
- **Marked.** It has something on you — a Register entry, the Assay's copy, a closed way, an Off-Ledger price, a Watch entry. Not chosen. Listed under Debts (§6.6) as well.

A level-1 character usually has no Member affiliation; the file, favor, recognition, or credit comes first. A GM may allow one at creation where the household supplies it — an Ash-and-Antler founding lineage, a garden-name household that the Off-Ledger already knows, a navigator house with a Concord seat.

### 5.4 The entries

Each gives: what it is (canon); who it admits; how one joins; what it gives, and at which step of its track; what it asks; what it files or holds; what it cannot see; and one canon hook. The gift and demand lines are this file's readings of the Function column (CF10).

**The Cobalt Ledger** — Rationalist · Blue Accord · Ledger file. *What it is:* registers practitioners and records measured casting cost; issues licenses by school; strikes the seal at Baishui under the First Examiner's warrant; keeps the census, the portal manifests, and the phase rate. *Admits:* Rationalists as members; Sorcerers are its apparatus (research, documentation, portal staffing), and examiners of any Accord school sit its boards. Every registered practitioner is on its file without being a member. *Joining:* sit a board, take the seal, pay the fee (2 / 8 / 30 seals by rank; the Guru roll by petition). *Gives:* the license and the tier's postings (2); postings before they are posted (3); the file as evidence and a manifest without inspection (4); the roll (5); the seal, which binds as a sealed document does. *Asks:* the board fee by grade; the Manifest Rule — residue declared; the cost read aloud and a waiver signed at each rank from Adept; disputes heard by examination standing. *Files:* rank, stage, examiner, phase (Canon XI.2 form 1); residue; Register entries; you, if you brought a relic to be identified. *Cannot see:* what is not measured — the sworn word, the ground, the unregistered. *Hook:* it declined the only testimony available at Baishui, 1211, and cannot name the killer.

**The Indigo Assay** — Rationalist · Gold Crown · Chancel favor, with a Ledger-form file. *What it is:* examiners chartered by the Crown to verify Divine attunement and authenticate miracle claims; a void ruling unmakes benefice; a parallel registry within a decade of 1149; the Scribe's room at Qasr-Al-Rimal. *Admits:* Rationalists — Sorcerers, the Witness's clergy, tolerated. An Apostle is its subject, never its member. *Joining:* the Ledger's seal first; then the Crown's charter; an Orrivane examiner of record. *Gives:* the reading a Chancel commission requires (3); certification that makes a benefice (4); the Assay's roll. *Asks:* the count kept honest against anyone — the Crown chartered auditors because a ledger requires them, and the auditors bankrupted the Crown in 1226–28 by doing their job. *Files:* as the Ledger does, with a parish added; the Scribe's copy of every commission. *Cannot see:* the Sower's healing and the Debtor's testimony — by doctrine, not instrument; it can certify a transfer and cannot say what a well remembers. *Hook:* the Disputed Seat, 1236–39 — counterfeiting a transfer unmakes the claimant.

**Steel Quorum** — Rationalist · None · no track of its own. *What it is:* an independent military-technical council that sells command doctrine and asset allocation to any buyer, priced by demonstrated result; fields no one; defined the platoon (forty foot under one officer) and rates every martial Guru against it; sold identical blockade doctrine to both Menneske fleets in 1172 and both sides of every war since. *Admits:* Rationalists by result — Vanguards (the doctrine manuals' word), Artificers (arsenals), Sorcerers (allocation). Anyone the doctrine is sold to is a contractor. *Joining:* a demonstrated result. The Quorum's word for you is a number. *Gives:* doctrine — the drill (GMG §5), an encounter read as asset allocation; a name both sides of the next war will buy. Its gift moves the buyer's track, not its own. *Asks:* results; neutrality — it has never refused a buyer. *Files:* its own results ledger; nothing on a registry. *Cannot see:* a muster ("whoever came") and a way with a keeper; it could not take a walled town's worth of Mwamba foothills with any doctrine it sold.

**Firstday Watch** — Devout · Blue Accord · Ledger file. *What it is:* keeps the calendar of record and the 1 Velquor observance; Accord-chartered because phase timing governs casting cost and license terms; keeps the Debtor's night — which the Crown does not — so that it can be counted; its entries are the record of prior Guru-tier events (Canon Appendix D). *Admits:* Devout under Accord charter — the one Devout body that needs no sacramental apparatus; Elementalists registered by function, Accord-side Apostles and Paladins. *Joining:* the Watch's roll; the phase turns kept. *Gives:* the phase of record for every contract (2); a Watch entry, which all three institutions cite when a Guru-tier event is disputed (4); standing at every phase-turn truce. *Asks:* the observance kept; the phase named on every price; the Longest Night's eve awake. *Files:* the calendar; the Watch entries. *Cannot see:* what a phase means to the people who live in it — the Menneske eve, the cohort, the birth-moon. It counts the night, not what is kept on it.

**Gilt Chancel** — Devout · Gold Crown · Chancel favor. *What it is:* the administrative body of the Namaris-phase rites; holds temple treasury and land title; strikes the gilt at Qasr-Al-Rimal; issues benefice paper against certified miracles; the Crown's treasury — Bahr-Al-Asra's tax is its income. *Admits:* Devout — Apostles (transfer), Elementalists (stewardship), Paladins (the columns; "the Chancel's problems that have walls"); sacrists and precinct officers. *Joining:* the parish; attunement by rite (Apostles, in Namaris) or by the Assay's counters (others); the tithe. *Gives:* a parish letter (2); a commission (3; GMG §8.2); benefice (4); the rite (5); the columns at your back on anything flat. *Asks:* tithe, not fee; Velquor-line residue surrendered; work attributed to the commissioned alone — "assistance by unregistered practitioners voids the benefice"; the three transgressions kept. *Files:* the tithe roll; benefice paper; land title. *Cannot see:* anything the lineages count; the Sower's rite that its own processions walk; what rose from Frostvatn.

**The Namarite Tithe** — Devout · Green Chimera · Chancel favor; pays into Circle recognition by the toll. *What it is:* maintains shrines and assesses Divine service in Chimera territory under treaty; collection follows the Namaris circuit; pays Tangata way-tolls and books them as alms; the Ledger estimates Koremu from its receipts. *Admits:* Devout under treaty — collectors, shrine-keepers, Apostles serving on Chimera ground. *Joining:* the circuit; a shrine assigned. *Gives:* a shrine to stand in on Chimera ground (1); a receipt the Ledger will read (2); passage on named ways, at the toll (3). *Asks:* the toll paid and booked as alms; nothing written beyond the receipt; the circuit kept to Namaris; and no shrine on a drove-line, since 1178. *Files:* receipts. *Cannot see:* what the toll is — an assertion of jurisdiction over the way. It sees alms. Both sides are content with mutually exclusive descriptions of the same coin.

**Ash-and-Antler** — Reverie · Blue Accord (licensed) · Circle recognition; a Ledger file for the license. *What it is:* a hunting and warding compact, Tangata and Yamana in origin; Accord-licensed for the frontier warding the Accord cannot staff; a Master warden's season on prepared ground is 60 seals, half in advance; refused Crown contracts at triple rate in 1181; led the Mwamba cull across a full phase turn; its warding assessment is what the Accord buys as Yaxkulu's census; charter renewals of 1244. *Admits:* Reverie — Wardens (the compact's working art; its contracts say "warden"), Apothecarists, Berserkers at the muster; Tangata and Yamana lineages by origin, any Reverie by contract. *Joining:* a season on prepared ground under a Master; the compact's word. *Gives:* contracts by the season (2); prepared ground and the compact at your back (3); a name the Accord pays for and the Crown once tried to (4). *Asks:* the ground held; the dependency read where the keeper asked for it, never attrition; the Crown's rate refused. *Files:* charter renewals; the assessment; the Ledger's license file. *Cannot see:* its own Masters' cost — "the watch-broken sleep, the unclosing eye" — which the compact prices at nothing because no contract can, and the Ledger's cost file on the same warden reads in stages. One person, two documents.

**Bramble Concord** — Reverie · Green Chimera · Circle recognition. *What it is:* a standing negotiation between tribal claimants over Threnis-phase territory; no head, on principle, and no list of precedence; the speakership rotates by Threnis phase; dockets (burn rights, smoke); minutes — the one thing the Chimera writes. *Admits:* claimants — Tangata hold many of the Threnis-territory seats; Yaxkulu speaker-circles; Zulwazi speakers. A seat is a claim, and a claim is Reverie by definition: ground claimed by phase and held by presence. *Joining:* a claim made in Threnis and held by being there. *Gives:* a docket heard (3); closed ground declared, and a violation made a Concord matter (4); the speakership for a phase, at Guru (5; GMG §8.3). *Asks:* presence — a claim not renewed lapses at the turn, which keeps the map of the forbidden current. *Files:* minutes only; the minutes record that the Zulwazi speakers declined to gloat. *Cannot see:* a count.

**The Sedge Circles** — Reverie · None · Circle recognition. *What it is:* decentralized Nature-school lodges; membership by initiation; chartered by no one; the keeper of the Sedge oral record, which counts the Purge at three times the Crown's figure. *Admits:* Apothecarists; Reverie generally, by initiation; many keepers are initiates. *Joining:* initiation — a keeper says it, before whoever is there. *Gives:* a request in the Circle's form (GMG §8.2) — the thing wanted, said once; a way opened (2); a season's welcome (3); a share of the ground (4); and what the Crown anathematizes and the Ledger cannot admit, received. *Asks:* nothing written; the ground's things left to the ground; a name kept. *Files:* nothing; remembers everything. *Cannot see:* the Ledger's kind of truth. "One cannot always cure, and is there anyway."

**Black Meridian** — Ethosless · Green Chimera · Off-Ledger credit; pays into Circle recognition by the toll. *What it is:* a smuggling network timed to Velquor's phase; moves Necrotic material along Threnis-territory routes the tribes tax but do not report; understands fire law perfectly, and pays. *Admits:* the Ethosless — Necromancers (the material is theirs to read), Hexblades as escort, Warlocks (dosing) — and anyone who carries cargo in the black phase. *Joining:* a passage carried; a toll paid in the traveler's coin and recorded in none. *Gives:* passage for Velquor-line residue that is contraband in Crown territory and inadmissible in the Accord's (2); the routes (3); a principal not named (4). *Asks:* Velquor timing; the toll; nothing declared, anywhere. *Files:* nothing. *Cannot see:* what the material is to the Crown — an anathema, not a cargo — which is why the Meridian and the Purge are two descriptions of one trade.

**The Off-Ledger** — Ethosless · None · Off-Ledger credit. *What it is:* unlicensed practitioners operating in direct inversion of the Ledger's registry; the niche the Second Register created by making the unregistered prosecutable. *Admits:* any unregistered practitioner; the Ethosless schools by default; registered practitioners who go off it. *Joining:* not registering, or striking your name — a job's price (GMG §8.2). *Gives:* jobs priced in kind — a relic, a passage, a debt cancelled, a name struck from a roll (2–3); the principal's name (4); a company of your own (5). *Asks:* the word kept — "the word binds, or the next job does not come"; residue to the principal, or the price halved; simultaneous contract assumed; no witness. *Files:* nothing; a Ledger file of record is what it charges for. *Cannot see:* a cost file. It has your Marks and no table to read them across.

**The Unsworn** — Ethosless · All (contract) · Off-Ledger credit; the principal's track by whose contract you hold. *What it is:* a mercenary compact under simultaneous contract to all three institutions; the contracts are the allegiance-refusal; companies; the escort of record; a company stands down against another company of the compact in view of both principals (Marendi, 1184 — which the record credits and Marendi does not); the Frostvatn consolidated contract of 1230–32, the compact's first and only. *Admits:* the Ethosless — Hexblades (Sword/Shield lines; Unsworn contracts say "escort of record"), Warlocks (bought by all), Necromancers under contract; any school under a company's contract. Officers' contracts are written in the Common Tongue. *Joining:* a company's contract; the compact rules. *Gives:* a contract that is your standing in three charters at once (2); the stand-down (3); a company (5). *Asks:* the compact rules kept — the stand-down before both principals; simultaneous contract honored; no allegiance sworn. *Files:* contracts, with the principal; nothing on a registry. *Cannot see:* what it is loyal to. The contracts are the answer, and the compact gives no other.

---

## 6. Coin and kind

### 6.1 Two mints, no third

Canon Part V, Money. The Cobalt Ledger strikes the **seal**, a silver coin bearing the Baishui seal, under the First Examiner's warrant; a sealed coin binds as a sealed document does, and clipping one is seal forgery — capital since the Manifest War. Its fraction is the **eighth**, copper, eight to the seal. The Gilt Chancel strikes the **gilt**, gold-washed silver, at Qasr-Al-Rimal; benefice paper is denominated in gilts. The Green Chimera mints nothing and never has. Both coins pass everywhere.

| Coin | Mint | Metal | Fraction | Where it is "coin" |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| **Seal** | Cobalt Ledger, Baishui | Silver, bearing the Baishui seal | 8 **eighths** (copper) | The four Accord homelands; every registry, board, and portal station |
| **Gilt** | Gilt Chancel, Qasr-Al-Rimal | Gold-washed silver | — (fractions in seals and eighths at the Ledger's rate) | The four Crown homelands; every parish, precinct, and benefice |
| — | The Chimera mints nothing | — | — | The four Chimera homelands: the traveler's coin at the way, kind and labor everywhere else |

**Rates.** The Ledger publishes a rate at each phase turn; the caravan houses keep their own; the two disagree by the width of a caravan house's margin. Rates of Orrivane 1244, Ledger table: **one gilt to one seal and two eighths at Baishui; one gilt to one seal at Qasr-Al-Rimal** by the Chancel's table — not a discrepancy but a mint favoring its own coin. *At the table:* the rate the party gets is the table it is standing before. A Ledger desk gives 1 gilt = 1s 2e; a Chancel desk gives 1 = 1; a caravan house gives whichever is worse for the party, by its margin, unless the party has standing with it.

**Notation on the sheet.** Seals and eighths as `12s 3e`; gilts as `4g`. Never total the two: a character carries seals *and* gilts, converts at a desk, and the desk files the conversion.

### 6.2 Kind and labor

Canon Part V, Kind and Labor. Where a homeland's tax or a contract's price says "in kind" or "in labor," the conversion is whichever table applies, and the household knows which.

| Unit | Ledger assessment table | Chancel tithe table | Umutu well-ledger | Tangata way |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| A labor-day | 1 eighth | one-tenth of a gilt | A day. Converts to nothing; *the well remembers* days | Stated in the traveler's coin; recorded in none |
| A head of cattle | 6 seals (the Tinwara returns) | Not rated; tithed by the head | Standing | — |
| A roof for a night | — | — | — | — (an Unsaan hospitality ledger tallies it and no table converts it) |

### 6.3 What the sky prices

Canon Part V, Phase Cascade (D2). Moon-phase pricing applies to castings, portal and airship fares, and Guru leases: what is priced by the sky is what is cast, or carried by what is cast. Staples move with freight cost, lagged and damped. "A Velquor price" on bread is a figure of speech; on a healing, a fare, or a lease it is a tariff. GMG §9.3 carries the fare multipliers (×1 in Orrivane; ×1.5 in Saelura and Namaris; ×2 in Velquor and Threnis) and the rule for trade scenes: **name the phase; price the casting, the fare, or the lease by it; let the bread move a little, and late.** A Renlei never agrees a price without its phase (§2.2), and every Renlei contract names the phase of performance.

### 6.4 What you owe at home

The charter tax and the local levy, by homeland (Canon Part V, Economic Baseline, condensed; CF18). Charter tax answers "who pays" at the charter level; the local levy sits underneath it and is what a household actually feels.

| Homeland | Charter tax — who pays, in what | Local levy underneath | The household's largest ordinary expense |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| Isavík | Households, in fish and labor-days, assessed by the parish on the Namaris circuit | Parish assessment; ice-law's memory | Imported grain |
| Grimskov | Households and timber houses, in coin, assessed by Ledger examiners | The Escrow levy, passed through in harbor dues | Grain, then the Escrow levy |
| Zhenshui | Everyone with a certificate, in coin, by certification grade | Board fees | Board fees and the schooling that leads to them |
| Tienling | Guild houses in coin on manifests; farmers in kind | Water rights on the desert edge, paid in labor | Water rights |
| Zulwazi | None — the Concord levies nothing; claims settled in cattle and well-labor | Give-back on the well, in days | Give-back labor |
| Oasira | Households in cattle and tithe to the parish; creditors in coin to the Accord on the sold land | Give-back on the well | Give-back, then tithe |
| Koremu | None at charter level; way-tolls on through-traffic | The labor the lineage owes the way | Nothing bought; the way's labor |
| Awanui | None at charter level; way-tolls | The way | Boats |
| Yaxkulu | None at charter level; Concord dockets settle in labor on the causeways | Road duty, in days | Road duty |
| Teocalli | Households in kind to the precinct; the Chancel remits to Qasr-Al-Rimal | Road duty; precinct tithe | Road duty, then tithe |
| Bahr-Al-Asra | Households and caravan houses in coin and kind to the Chancel — the Crown's income | Hospitality — the ledger of who was fed | Hospitality; standing is spent on it |
| Zand-Kala | Households in coin by garden allotment; lawyers by certification grade | Water shares | Water shares |

### 6.5 Prices, and starting coin

**Prices are the game's figures**, not the world's (Canon Discipline 5; the GMG §9.3 precedent, G17). Where an episode states a price, the episode's figure governs. The canon anchors are marked; everything else is scaled from them: a labor-day is an eighth, a head of cattle six seals, a Master warden's season sixty (CF12).

| Item | Price | Source |
|:--|:--|:--|
| A labor-day's wage | 1 eighth | Canon anchor (Ledger assessment table) |
| A day's food and a bed — hostel, caravanserai, a parish guest-room | 1 eighth; in kind more often | Game figure (the caravan fare is 1 eighth a day, GMG §9.3) |
| A week's provisions on the road | 1 seal | Game figure |
| Simple weapon (club, hand-ax, sling) | 1–2 seals | Game figure |
| Magic and Alchemy class weapon: staff / dagger / mace / focus / scythe | 1 / 2 / 2 / 3 / 4 seals | Game figure; a focus is ground glass, a rod, a book, or a token — its price is the maker's |
| Martial class weapon (longsword, glaive, longbow and quiver, maul, great-ax) | 5–8 seals | Game figure; a longsword is a head of cattle |
| Light / medium / heavy armor | 4 / 12 / 30 seals | Game figure; heavy armor is a Master's board fee |
| Shield | 3 seals | Game figure |
| Shag pony / horse / camel / pack llama | 10 / 20 / 25 / 8 seals | Game figure; Yamana keep no heavy draft |
| A boat share (Menneske) | 40 seals; an outrigger is not bought — it is a lineage's | Game figure |
| Adept-grade gear piece / Master-grade, commissioned | 15 / 80 seals; Guru-grade is never sold — named, awarded | Game figure; GMG §8.3 |
| Flask or vial materials (Artificer, Warlock) | 1 eighth each | Game figure |
| A sealed contract drawn at a registry / by a Zand-Kala law house | 1 / 3 seals | Game figure |
| An interpreter for a day at a registry desk | 2 eighths | Game figure |
| Board fee, Novice / Adept / Master | 2 / 8 / 30 seals; Guru by petition | GMG §9.1 |
| Portal fare, seat to seat | 4 seals base, × the phase | GMG §9.3 |
| Airship / caravan / harbor passage | Half the portal fare / 1 eighth a day / 1 seal a day | GMG §9.3 |
| A Ledger-registered Apothecarist's session ("experimental mercy") | 2 seals at an Orrivane price; a Velquor price is double | Game figure; Phase Cascade |
| An Apostle's transfer | Not sold. Benefice, in gilts, on the Assay's certification | Canon Part VII |
| A Master warden's season on prepared ground | 60 seals, half in advance | Canon anchor |
| A harbor Guru's lease, by the year | 5,200 seals (Stenhavn, 1244) | Canon anchor |
| A well draw (Umutu ground) | A day owed to the well | Canon, water law |
| A night under an Unsaan roof | Not priced; a roof owed on the host's ledger | Canon, guest-right |
| A way-toll (Chimera ground) | In the traveler's coin, stated by the keeper — an eighth to a seal a head for a day of way — and recorded nowhere | Game figure inside canon's rule |

**Starting coin, by household standing** (CF13). Chosen from the household (§2). The coinless households are not poor; the Ledger records them as poor.

| Household standing | Starting coin | And |
|:--|:--|:--|
| **Rich in coin** — a factor's house, an examiner's, a guild or caravan house, a timber house, a law house, a precinct officer's | 12 seals, or 10 gilts in a Crown homeland | A letter of introduction in the household's register |
| **Ordinary** — a boat-owning household, a certified trade, a terrace lineage, a parish household, an orchard, a garden allotment | 4 seals, or 3 gilts | The class kit (PG §13.1) |
| **Rich in standing, not coin** — a keeper lineage, a navigator house, a burn lineage, a runner lineage, a road-keeper lineage | 1 seal at most | A claim written under Kind and Debts held: two head of cattle; a boat's place; a well's credit in days; a way's toll-right; a duty that is also a standing |
| **Nothing** — a crewing household, a household that left Hvítadal, a garden-name household with a blank page, the road | 1 seal | A debt owed, chosen by the player (§6.6) |

### 6.6 Debts that are not money

Five cultures keep a ledger that no assessment table converts, and the sheet keeps it under **Debts — owed / held** (CF14). A registry that converts one of these to coin or years is wrong in a way the GM decides when it matters.

| Debt | Culture and law | Unit | Owed means | Held means |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| **Winters** | Menneske — winter-count | A winter | A sentence, an exile, a debt of honor still running; spoken aloud on the Longest Night's eve and forgiven or affirmed | Someone owes you a winter; you say so at the eve or you don't |
| **Well-days** | Umutu — water law | A day of labor on the well | Every draw you took; the keeper knows the count | Your lineage keeps a well; the days owed to it are yours to call |
| **A duty** | Yamana — duty inheritance | The duty itself, named | Your oldest inherited duty, and any you took on with an estate | A duty someone owes your lineage, older than either of you |
| **A roof** | Unsaan — guest-right and the sitting of accounts | A night sheltered, a guest fed | Nights you took under a roof; read aloud at the phase turn | Nights you gave; your household's standing is this column |
| **A way** | Tangata — way law and fire law | A toll, a way opened, a way closed to you | The toll unpaid; the way you were told was closed | A way you keep; a toll owed to your lineage |
| **A name** | Circles; the Off-Ledger | A name kept, or struck | A name you were trusted with | A name kept for you |
| **A Mark** (GMG §8.6) | Any contract | One Mark | A price denominated in something you did not know you had | — |
| **Coin, phase-dated** | Renlei — phase-contract law; the Ledger | Seals, with the phase of performance | A sealed account not yet settled at the Velquor turn | A sealed debt you hold — never pressed on truce ground |

The Marked relation of §5.3 lives here too: a Register entry, an Assay copy, a closed way, an Off-Ledger price.

---

## 7. Tongues

### 7.1 The six tongues and the Common Tongue

Canon Part I, Premise: each culture has its own language; there is a Common Tongue shared across all, "depending on education level." Canon Part V, Common Tongue Distribution, says where. No word of any tongue is coined in canon or here (XI.6; R.8).

| Culture | Tongue | Registers | The Common Tongue is Full in | Market words in |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| Menneske | The Menneske tongue — one language, low drift across the strait | — | Factors' houses, the harbor-master's office, the registry, the garrison, the parishes | Fishing crews, inland households, the moot |
| Renlei | The Renlei tongue | — | Everywhere a certificate is: boards, registries, portal stations, guild houses, the harbor | The millet country and the barges; the uncertified parents of a certified daughter |
| Unsaan | One language, two registers | **Asran** (citadel, rites); **Kalani** (gardens, contracts) | The citadel, the courts, the caravan strings, the law houses | Orchards and allotments |
| Yamana | The Yamana tongue | — | The precincts, the runner lineages, the checkpoints | Terraces, road-keeper lineages; thinner still in Yaxkulu |
| Umutu | The Umutu tongue | — | The markets, the parishes, whoever treats with the Ledger's estimators | Drove-lines, keeper lineages |
| Tangata | The Tangata tongue | — | Navigators and keepers who treat with outsiders, the Puketai pilots, the Onekura salt branch, the toll-takers | Everyone else, or none — nothing there is written in it but the minutes and the receipts |

**Three levels** (CF6).
- **Full.** You speak it as the registries write it, and read it. No penalty on any check made in it. You can sit a board, read a posting, argue a contract, be a witness of record.
- **Market.** A few dozen words of market and toll: buy, sell, pay, count, ask the way, name a price and its phase. Anything past that — a hearing, a contract clause, a poster's lie — is at **Disadvantage**, and comes out in the registry-word paraphrase of §7.6, unless an interpreter is present. You cannot read it.
- **None.** An interpreter, or nothing.

**At creation** (CF6, CF7). Your culture's tongue at Full (both Unsaan registers unless the household held one). The **Common Tongue at Full** if you are Registered or Attuned, or if your household is one canon names as having it: a registry, board, or portal household; clergy or a Chancel office; a caravan, harbor, factor's, guild, or customs house; a navigator or keeper who treats with outsiders; a runner lineage; a law house; an Unsworn company. **At Market** otherwise — terrace, herd, fish, well, burn, crew, orchard, allotment, the moot's inland households. **None** only by the player's choice: a monolingual character is a deliberate one, and §7.6 says how they speak. **One neighbor tongue at Market** if the household trades across a border and the GM agrees: a Bahr Sufra caravan house holds Menneske (the grain contracts); a Shakou guild house holds Umutu or Unsaan; a Tinwara market household holds Renlei; a Puketai pilot family holds Renlei; a Kaldmark holding holds nothing but its own.

### 7.2 Raising a tongue

The **Trade** talent (PG §13.2 — "Name a trade, tongue, or craft: add your Rank Bonus to its checks") taken for a tongue raises it one level — None to Market, Market to Full — or, if it is already at Full, adds the Rank Bonus to checks made in it, as written (CF7; PG H55). A GM may also raise Market to Full for a phase (80 days) spent working in the tongue at a desk, a market, or a harbor; nothing raises None to Full in less than two.

### 7.3 The lexical gap

Canon Part V, The Common Tongue: "Most cross-cultural disputes in the record follow one pattern: a speaker deploys a concept their language holds in one word, the Common Tongue paraphrase comes back subtly wrong, and both parties proceed on different sentences while believing they heard the same one."

| Culture | Holds one word for | The Common Tongue needs |
|:-:|:--|:--|
| Menneske | Assent given by staying silent | A sentence, and a witness |
| Renlei | A price quoted with its moon phase included | A clause and a schedule |
| Unsaan | The third night, when a host may ask a guest's business | A paragraph of apology |
| Yamana | A duty inherited from someone you never met | A probate filing |
| Umutu | Water owed back to a well | "Debt," which is wrong |
| Tangata | A way that is closed, as distinct from not yet open | Two words that miss it |

**The rule** (CF5). When a scene turns on one of the six concepts and the parties are of different cultures speaking the Common Tongue, the check to be understood *on that point* — Standing, Reckoning, whatever the GM sets — is at **Disadvantage** for the speaker whose word it is. The Disadvantage is removed if the listener holds the speaker's tongue at Full, or an interpreter who holds both at Full is present. **An interpreter is a character** — a PC or an NPC — and their presence in the scene is a fact about who has standing in it: the GM says so aloud. The gap is not a penalty to engineer around; it is the Design Thesis at the table. A party of two cultures hears two sentences, and the second one is usually where the contract's lie is (GMG §8.6).

*Example.* A Menneske Warden and an Unsaan Apostle sit with a Kalani caravan factor over a grain contract. The Warden falls silent to consider the price. The factor fills the silence, twice, courteously, and the Warden's player rolls Standing at Disadvantage to be heard agreeing. The Apostle holds Kalani at Full and says one word: the Disadvantage is gone, and the GM notes that the Apostle now has standing in the scene the Warden does not.

### 7.4 Documents and words

Three ways a thing binds, and what each is worth to the others (game figures in the checks; CF22).

- **The seal** (Renlei; the Ledger). A sealed unsigned document binds; a signed unsealed one is a draft. Reading a seal's grade and registry is a Reckoning check, Moderate (13); telling a forged seal from a true one is Hard (16), Severe (19) for a Master's or Guru's seal. Forging one is a capital matter in Accord territory. A Renlei has Advantage on all three on Accord ground (§2.2).
- **The witnessed word** (Menneske). A thing said before three witnesses binds. The Ledger records it as testimony and classifies it as anecdotal unless sealed; Renlei arbiters weight manifests over it. A Menneske has Advantage on holding anyone to it (§2.1).
- **The navigator's word** (Tangata). Binds on the water as a seal binds paper, and for the same reason: the whole system fails if it can be doubted. Asked for in writing, it is said twice, the second time weaker — and the request is remembered.

The Firstday Watch's calendar is the phase of record for all three.

### 7.5 Names

Canon Part V, Naming and Address, condensed to the four sheet fields (CF16). Exemplars are canon's; no name is coined; Umutu and Tangata names are the player's, as episode casting (XI.6).

| Culture | Full name | Called | Registry files | Formal introduction |
|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|
| Menneske | Personal name, then the toponymic — *of* a settlement, or its stem as a byname (Aslaug of Stenhavn; Halvard Sten) | The personal name; the byname among strangers | Name, settlement, moot of record; winters as years, with a wrong note | Name and household, before witnesses; the settlement if away |
| Renlei | Family name first, then a given name of one or two syllables (Luo Deshi; Wen Suyin) | Family name and standing; by trade if no standing | The seal, then the name; the grade on every file | Family name, given name, board standing — the certificate |
| Unsaan | Personal name and house (Asran); personal name and garden-name (Kalani) — Golnar *Sabz*; an office-holder takes the place-name (*al-Rimal*) | Personal name, in the register spoken | The name as given; a garden-name filed as a family name and not asked about | The house and its hospitality standing — whose roof, how many nights |
| Yamana | Personal name in the Tepemitla / Amilpan / Ometzin register (Ometzin; Citlali); formally, the oldest inherited duty | The personal name; a runner by lineage | Name and file; closed at death, which is the grief-case | By the oldest inherited duty |
| Umutu | Personal name, the cohort (phase and year), the well or keeper lineage | The cohort, where known; otherwise the well | The name and a number for the cohort, which no Umutu recognizes | Cohort, then well |
| Tangata | Personal name, birth-moon, house-lineage | Name and birth-moon | Rarely; by ship and birth-moon if the Ledger must | Name, birth-moon, house; a navigator adds the channels claimed, by their tales |

### 7.6 Registry words and working words

Canon Part VI, Terminology. The class, school, and rank names are Common Tongue registry vocabulary — what the Ledger, the Assay, and contract law use. Practitioners use the working terms.

| Registry term | Working term | Note |
|:--|:--|:--|
| Sorcerer / Arcane | Overlay work; "running the overlay"; substrate editing at Guru | "Sorcerer" is a licensing category |
| Apothecarist / Nature | Attunement; channel work; somatic integration | The Ledger's file heading is "experimental mercy techniques" |
| Necromancer / Necrotic | Boundary reading; boundary holding at Guru; "reader" | The registry's word and, in Crown territory, the Purge's |
| Apostle / Divine | Boon work; transfer at Guru | Crown liturgical usage is "transfer" |
| Elementalist / Elemental | Sustained work; harbor-keeping, aquifer-holding | A Crown title; Accord-side Elementals are registered by function |
| Vanguard / Glaive | Zone work; "holding the circle" | Steel Quorum doctrine manuals use "Vanguard" |
| Paladin / Hammer | The column; "holding flat" | Crown title |
| Warden / Longbow | Overwatch; warding | Ash-and-Antler's contracts say "warden" |
| Berserker / Ax | The gate; "opening" and "calling-back" | Tribal musters do not use "berserker"; it is the Quorum's word |
| Hexblade / Sword-Shield | Escort; counter-practitioner work | Unsworn contracts say "escort of record" |
| Artificer / Light Arts | Bench work; bonding (familiars) | Ledger certification category |
| Warlock / Dark Arts | Dosing; the pharmacopoeia | No institution uses the word officially |
| Novice / Adept / Master / Guru | — | Ledger examination grades, adopted by all three; the Chimera uses them only with registries |

*At the table.* Practitioners speaking to practitioners use the working terms; documents, hearings, and outsiders use the registry terms. A character who uses the registry word for their own school is telling the table something. Non-practitioners have no registry word for what they are; they use their culture's own forms — trade, duty, cohort, birth-moon, garden-name — and the registry's words only for practitioners they have reason to fear or to bill. **A character at Market or None** speaks the Common Tongue short, in registry words they have heard used against them, and the one-word concept of their own tongue comes out as the paraphrase in §7.3 — a sentence and a witness; a probate filing; "debt," which is wrong. The GM narrates a monolingual character in plain prose in their own tongue; the paraphrase is what the other side hears.

---

## 8. Register — for ratification

### 8.1 CF-rows

Same columns as the PG's H-rows and the GMG's G-rows. Nothing here is canon until Joe rules; Canon is untouched. Numbering is module-local (CF-rows) so it never collides with H, G, or GB.

| # | Rule | Canon / GMG touchpoint | Reading taken | Status |
|:-:|:--|:--|:--|:-:|
| CF1 | Culture, homeland, household, charter, and faction modify no attribute, defense, Vigor, Strain, damage, or attack; restrict no class or school (§1) | XI.6 ("no school assigned to any culture as an essence"); PG §1.3 | Direct. All identity mechanics run through Advantage on checks, procedural rights, and what is filed or owed | open |
| CF2 | Charter of record defaults to the homeland's institution and can be changed by registration, attunement, or recognition elsewhere; the sheet holds the actual charter (§3.0) | Part V, Homeland Reference Table (alignment column, ratified) | The alignment is the homeland's, not the person's; culture is not institution | open |
| CF3 | The ethos × charter standing table: word, file, starting track step, flag; status read against the territory (§4.3) | Part VI, Faction table and vacant cells; Class Matrix; Part VII, Doctrinal Status; Part IX (Purge, Edict); GMG §8.4, §9.1 | The eight non-home cells are the vacant cells and frictions read as what they do to a character; starting steps are the game's figures | open |
| CF4 | The laws you carry: Advantage on checks that turn on your culture's three laws, on your ground or with your people; each law's "for you" line (§2) | Part V, each profile's Governance and law | Invention on canon law. Checks only, never attacks. Alternative: no Advantage, laws as procedural rights only | open |
| CF5 | The lexical gap: Disadvantage on the check to be understood on one of the six concepts across cultures in the Common Tongue; removed by the listener's Full fluency or an interpreter with both at Full; the interpreter's presence is a standing fact (§7.3) | Part V, The Common Tongue; Common Tongue Distribution ("an interpreter's presence in a scene is a fact about who has standing in it") | Direct, made mechanical. The Design Thesis applied to speech | open |
| CF6 | Common Tongue at Full / Market / None; assignment by registration and household (§7.1) | Part V, Common Tongue Distribution (who has it; who does not) | Direct reading of the canon list; "Market" is canon's "a few dozen words of market and toll"; Full includes reading, Market does not | open |
| CF7 | The Trade talent taken for a tongue raises it one level; at Full it adds RB as written; a phase of work raises Market to Full at the GM's call (§7.2) | PG §13.2 (H27); Part V, Distribution ("learned where those are") | Extension of an existing talent; no new talent | open |
| CF8 | No word coined: tongues named by culture; Asran and Kalani; cohorts as phase and year (§2.5, §7.1) | XI.6 (conlang coinage); R.8 | Direct | open |
| CF9 | Affiliation: Member (one at a time; own ethos or as the entry admits; the track starts at 1) / Contractor (any number, any ethos the entry allows) / Marked (§5.3) | Part VI, Faction ("ethos = belief, institution = charter") | Invention; the one-Member cap keeps a character's register single, which is what a posting needs | open |
| CF10 | Faction entries: admits, joining, gives (with the step), asks, files, cannot see (§5.4) | Part VI, Faction table Function column; Force Types; Part VII, Sacramental Apparatus; Part IX | Each gift and demand is this file's reading of the Function row; the "cannot see" lines are the Ethos Statements' consequences and the Population Magnitudes' last column | open |
| CF11 | The GMG's four reputation tracks adopted on the player's side; the Chimera track read as "Circle recognition" covering keepers, Circle initiates, and the Concord (§5.2) | GMG §8.4 (G19); Part VI (the Concord is the charter body; the Circles are chartered by no one) | **Naming flag:** the GMG's column heading is "Sedge Circles (recognition)"; the Concord's speakership is at step 5 of the same track. Recommended: rename the GMG column "Circle recognition" or "Chimera (recognition)" and leave the steps as they are | open |
| CF12 | Prices are the game's figures; canon anchors marked; an episode's figure governs (§6.5) | Canon Discipline 5; Part V, Anchor Prices, Kind and Labor; GMG §8.3, §9.1, §9.3 (G17, G18) | The G17 precedent. Heavy armor at 30 (a Master's board fee) and a longsword at 6 (a head of cattle) are scaled to the anchors, not derived from them | open |
| CF13 | Starting coin by household standing: 12 / 4 / 1 / 1 seals (10 / 3 gilts), with a claim or a debt (§6.5) | Part V, "who is actually rich"; Economic Baseline | Game figures. The coinless standing tier is the Chimera's and the lineages' — rich in what the Ledger cannot count | open |
| CF14 | Debts that are not money: winters, well-days, a duty, a roof, a way, a name, a Mark, phase-dated coin; never converted; the sheet's Debts block (§6.6) | Part V, Kind and Labor ("converts nothing"); each culture's law; GMG §8.6 item 7 | Direct; the block is the sheet's, the units are canon's | open |
| CF15 | Age markers: winters (Menneske), years, the cohort as phase and year (Umutu), the birth-moon (Tangata); the Ledger's conversions noted as wrong (§1 step 5; §2) | Part V, Menneske winter-count; Umutu Ritual; Tangata Ritual; Naming and Address | Direct; cohort names left uncoined | open |
| CF16 | Four name fields; registry name by the Naming and Address table; player-invented Umutu and Tangata names as episode casting (§7.5) | Part V, Naming and Address; XI.6 (named Umutu and Tangata individuals: "episode casting may") | Direct; a player character is a casting | open |
| CF17 | God line: Crown homelands only, optional, the player's; the twenty names reproduced; Renlei and Tangata have none (§4.5) | Part VII (scope: four Crown homelands; "nothing in this Part assigns a god to any character"); Part VI D3 scope note | Direct; the line is never filled by a rule | open |
| CF18 | Charter tax and local levy by homeland as "what you owe at home" (§6.4) | Part V, Economic Baseline (tax column; local levies in the profiles) | View; no new figure | open |
| CF19 | Proscribed and Anathema as flags: identification by a Crown-attuned Reading or an inspection starts enforcement — a column on flat ground, nothing in the trees (§4.3, §4.4) | Part VII (Doctrinal Status; Sacramental Apparatus: "enforced the Edict on flat ground and failed to in trees"); Part IX; GMG §8.5 | The Assay-audit consequence extended by analogy to proscription; GMG §8.5's triggers do not name it. Alternative: add a fifth consequence row to GMG §8.5 (**Edict enforcement**) | open |
| CF20 | Household kinds per culture (§2) | Part V, each profile's Daily life; Economic Baseline, "who is actually rich" | View; every household named is in canon; the player may name their own inside the profile | open |
| CF21 | Look and palette lines per culture, for description and figure-painting (§2) | Part V, Material Signatures (fiber, building, staple, mount, craft, palette) | View, verbatim | open |
| CF22 | Seal checks: Moderate to read a grade, Hard to detect a forgery, Severe for a Master's or Guru's seal; capital to forge (§7.4) | Part V, Renlei seal law; Part IX, Manifest War | Game figures inside canon's rule | open |
| CF23 | Registry status vocabulary: Registered, Attuned, Recognized, Unregistered, Proscribed, Anathema, Off-Ledger; two can be held; read against territory (§4.4) | GMG §9.1 (the four recognitions); Part VII; Part IX | A vocabulary for the GMG's rule; "Attuned" is the GMG's "Chancel attunement" | open |
| CF24 | Minorities: culture entry kept, homeland entry taken; the laws' Advantage absent at home and present when a countryman walks in (§3.0) | Part V, Homelands "(dominant Culture)" — dominant, not exclusive; Structural note | Reading: a homeland's culture is its majority; nothing forbids a minority birth | open |
| CF25 | The Ethosless × Gold cell left empty; a campaign may fill it; this file does not (§5.1) | Part VI, vacant cells ("if a hidden faction ever exists, this is its slot") | Direct; reserved to Joe or an episode | open |
| CF26 | A grade never exceeds rank; a grade below rank is legal and sets the tier of posting; recognition at rank-up raises a track to a floor (§4.4, §5.2) | Part VI, Terminology (rank names are Ledger examination grades); Part IX, Second Register | The rule of record is GMG §9.1 (G56) and PG §13.5 (H77); this file carries the vocabulary | open |
| CF27 | Class-weapon prices: Magic and Alchemy weapons 1–4 seals, under the Martial weapons' 5–8 (§6.5) | PG §4.1 (H80) | Game figures; the class kit (PG §13.1) includes the weapon, so the prices matter only for replacement and the Adept-and-up tiers | open |
| CF28 | Three ways in — Quick Start, Standard, Full — over the thirteen steps; each step appears once in each way, chosen, set by a choice, or deferred to a default; the GM fills a deferred field when a scene first asks for it (§1) | None; it reorders this module's own steps | Five choices carry a Quick Start character: class, culture, homeland, household, name. CF1 holds at every way in; no step is removed. PG §1.4 carries the summary (H88) | open |

### 8.2 PG edits applied in v0.4 and v0.9

| # | PG section | Change | Register |
|:-:|:--|:--|:--|
| 1 | Header | Version note: v0.4, this module named as the source of §1.4, §16, H51–H59 | — |
| 2 | Scope paragraph | "who the character is in the world" added to the player-facing list | — |
| 3 | §1.4 (new) | *Who you are in the world:* the thirteen steps, the never-modifies rule, the standing table condensed, the four tracks, the three fluency levels and the lexical gap, coin notation and starting coin, the debts block, pointers to this file | H51–H57, H59 |
| 4 | §16 | The character sheet replaced: Identity, Standing, Tongues, Coin and kind, and Debts blocks added; every v0.3 block kept | H58 |
| 5 | §17 | Rows H51–H59 | — |
| 6 | §1.4 (v0.9) | *Three ways in:* one paragraph after the thirteen steps — Quick Start, Standard, Full — pointing at the table in §1 here; the sheet (§16) unchanged; row H88 in §17 | H88 |

### 8.3 GMG cross-references not applied (for the next GMG pass)

- §8.4: the Chimera track's heading (CF11).
- §8.5: a fifth consequence row for Edict enforcement, if CF19's alternative is taken.
- §9.1: adopt the registry-status vocabulary of §4.4 (CF23) in the Recognition column.
- §8.3: "Standing (§8.4)" — the reward table's standing steps are what §5.2 restates; no change, a pointer.
- §7.8: the four registry lines on relics point at the faction entries here (Ledger, Chancel, Sedge Circles, Off-Ledger).
- §8.2: the four contract forms are the registers of the four Member affiliations; a pointer from §5.3.

### 8.4 Context note

v0.1 was written in one session after loading Canon Parts V, VI, and VII whole (about 24,000 words), the Canon front matter, XI.6, and R.8; the PG's §0–§4, §13, §15–§17; and the GMG's §7.8, §8, §9.1, §9.3, and §13. The PG's class entries, the GMG's opposition and calibration sections, and the Grand Beasts body were not loaded and are not touched. The ratification pass on this file should load: this file, the PG's §1.4 and §16–§17, Canon Parts V–VI (about 20k tokens), and nothing else. v0.4 was applied from the review handoff after loading §1 and §8 only.