Navigators are a foraging society in the megastructure of Lanthanide Horizon - their sept-vessels, each holding an extended family, wander out from their holy sites in their home cylinder to trade, raid, and gather from their neighbors.
These are character creation rules (kind of) for Navigator PCs - not HP and stats and so on (you have a system for that, I'm sure), nor classes (honestly I don't have a clue how I'm doing progression, maybe some kind of Wolves Upon the Coast ripoff classless scheme? or just make everyone B/X fighters or thieves or something, I'm not your boss), but equipment for the moneyless Navigational economy, and backgrounds in the style of this set for Sustainers.
Communal Starting Equipment
The economic "person" in Navigator life is not the individual, but the sept (an extended clan/family, of about 15 adults and as many children). Within the sept, goods are shared, passed back and forth without money or debt. These goods can be Household (where there are enough that it is assumed that any member of the sept can get their hands on them when they need), Counted (where they are freely accessible, but the number of them is tracked), and Prestigious (where access to them must be earned).
[You could also literally call them "common", "uncommon", and "rare".]
Each sept starts with the following items in these classes:
Household: food, water, pots, jars, cooking utensils, clothes, """torches""", woven-wire rope.
Counted: ten spears (medium), six foil softsuits (unarmored, 2 hour air supply), twelve crowbars, a barrel of mead.
Prestigious: nothing.
and the backgrounds of the first set of PCs generated provide extra equipment in one category or another.
Backgrounds
1. Land-Islander
Your sept-mates hover near the sun, and their feet never touch the earth unless they wish it. The taller the tower, the more weight on the foundation.
Skill: one of Animal Handling/Climbing/Mimicry
Items Provided:
Counted: two dozen chickens.
Prestigious: an electric, propeller-driven ultralight.
Perk: You always know where the nearest food source, water source, and vantage point are.
2. Pilot
Some septs eke out scorned lives on the Volume's surface, their ships irreparable or lost. Count yourself lucky.
Skill: one of Singing/Mapmaking/Weather Prediction
Items Provided:
Counted: an extra barrel of fuel and oxidizer, in case of emergency.
Prestigious: a grainy black-and-white thermal monocular.
Perk: In your hands, sept-vessels move with perfect agility, even under bad conditions. Pull a backflip under gravity with a broken engine, if you want. If you find traces of another sept-vessel, you can track it unerringly.
3. Ship-Tender
When the pilot pulls a backflip under gravity with a broken engine, it's your sworn duty to hit them upside the head.
Skill: one of Electrical Engineering/Propellant Chemistry/Weaving
Items Provided:
Counted: a wrench set, a set of screwdrivers, a corded power drill.
4. Comms Operator
It is so terrible to be alone.
Skill: one of Poetry/Low-Light Vision/Memorization
Household: small mirrors of polished metal.
Perk: the ability to read and write in Navigator semaphore, permitting communication between septs without sending messengers (or other inconveniences).
5. Espatier
A practiced hand with the axe and rifle, a survivor of koryos rites of passage (and thus, a full adult), but not yet awarded with steel mask and wolf-skin cloak.
Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Acrobatics/Demolition
Items Provided:
Household: light throwing-darts.
Prestigious: an ulfheðinn's garb - demon-faced mask, feather mantle, and chains of medallions (heavy armor, 6 hour air supply) and six doses of their moxibustion compounds (doubled movement speed, two attacks per round, immunity to pain, injury, fear, & unconsciousness, chance of stroke, amnesia, blown blood vessels). Not yet yours.
6. Exorcist
Sacrifices in the present world turn into pure springs and beautiful orchards in the next. Shirk your responsibilities and the dead of the next world crawl back to this one, spreading malfunction and disease.
Skill: one of Medicine/Theology/Vigilance
Items Provided:
Counted: eight honey-soaked antiseptic bandages, eight doses of anesthetic injection, a pair of drums.
Perk: at a glance, you can see someone's current and maximum HP, if they are ill, and (if they are) whether or not they will recover. You are expected to travel - members of other septs, and even other Assemblies, have a 2-in-6 chance of recognizing you from an earlier visit.
7. Lawspeaker
An honorable Navigator will not permit themselves to be slighted. It takes caution to silence their feuds without blood spilled.Skill: Law, unsurprisingly, plus one of Intimidation/History/Wrestling
Items Provided:
Prestigious: a stone wrist-guard badge of office, in pure sapphire. Worn by you, and none other.
- Who is really in control here?
- What is about to happen?
- What trait rules this person?
- What here is not what it appears to be?
8. Gunsmith Aspirant
Skill: one of History/Intimidation/Diligence
Items Provided:
Household: lead ball bearings.
Counted: your tools: forge, barrel-reaming machine, hammers & mandrels, anvil, etc.
9. Foreman
The great Assembly-Ships will, someday, sail to the next world. But there is so much work to be done.
Skill: one of Architecture/Wire-reading ("green plastic tubes with yellow chevrons are filled with molten salt")/Mining
Items Provided:
Household: PVC pipe, dim LED status lights, rebar.
Counted: four tubes of caulk, a full set of stick welding equipment (twenty rods of consumable electrode, mask, gloves, power supply).
10. Katabatist
On the surface of the Volume, like the pupil of an eye, is a six-mile wide hole, and a ten-trillion-mile long tunnel. No one has, yet, made it to its end (apart from the spirits of the dead, of course) - but you've gotten closer than most.
Skill: one of Endure/Tracking/Logistics
Starting Items:
Household: apotropaic icons, to cast out your pallidness and your empty eyes.
Prestigious: a red plastic keycard. The only thing you brought back.
Perk: You are beneath notice. Passive machines (those built for noncombat purposes) don't notice you unless you attack them, and you will always be attacked last by combat machines and Firstborn.
11. Lictor
Guards and enforcers for the Imperious, pulled from the warriors of the septs.
Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Authority/Wrestling
Items Provided:
Counted: four heavy
greataxes - executioners' tools. Two sets of beautiful (+1 to Reaction)
clothes patterned with processions of floating figures in spacesuits.
12. Legalist
Why should the law be secreted away in the minds of lawspeakers and selectmen? Why can I not see it before me?
Skill: Law, plus one of Foreign Lands/Oratory/Fleeing
Starting Items:
Counted: a pot of ink and 20 sheets of pressed paper.
Prestigious: a multi-jointed mechanical limb from the foreign Oasis Kingdoms, currently attached to no one. Sometimes it twitches.
Perk: literacy - eloquence, even - in the language of the Oases.
13. Stowaway
Desperation claimed you.
Skill: two of Foraging/Disguise/Climb
Items Provided:
Nothing. That's the point, isn't it?
Perk: You don't pass out when exposed to vacuum. You'll still asphyxiate - but you'll stay awake the whole time.
14. Former Imperious
Just a year ago, your words rang with the unquestionable tone of a monarch. But power waxes and wanes, and now you are a man like any other.
Skill: one of Authority/Logistics/Knowing Your Neighbors
Items Provided:
Household: shimmering banners and a bit too much pride.
Prestigious: a set of jewelry, each displaying a particular Vibe to your fellow Navigators:
- Sapphire diadem: aura of legal authority.
- Four extremely dense bluish-white rings: aura of occulted knowledge.
- Tangled bismuth necklace: aura of courage.
- Bracelet of wound aluminum thread: aura of surplus.
- Titanium cylinder of a cord: aura of piety.
- Copper earrings: aura of military skill.
Perk: you still hold some fragment of weight. Among foreigners, you are always the most prominent member of a group, and your presence can be tuned to inspire awe or fear in onlookers. Your fellow Navigators would scoff at attempts to use either of these powers among them. If you return to your former position, members of your Assembly would treat every word from you as a Command.
15. Quartermaster
Why spend blood for goods in a raid when you can get everything you want just from talking?
Skill: one of Logistics/Foreign Lands/Smuggling
Items Provided:
Counted: a pallet's worth of scented purplish lumber, four beautiful tapestries, and a crate of dried ephedra tea.
Prestigious: a songline - a rhyming, rhythmic mnemonic-fable that leads to a place outside the Volume. Yours leads to...
- the Spire, favored-city and greatest of the Oasis Kingdoms. There are many copies of this songline (as Navigators head to the Spire often, for trade or mercenary work), but yours conceals a rare shortcut.
- an endless expanse of columnar joints, each made of house-sized metal cubes. The foreign Walker-Herds carve their walking cities out of these blocks, and set them to wandering among the vastnesses of the vault.
- a maze of black glass tunnels too thin to fit a sept-vessel down, where faces of pointillist light dance and whisper behind the walls.
- the cenote chambers of the painted immortals, now said to be closed as their armies quintuple their numbers in preparation for their march.
Perk: when you seek a rare good in a population center, roll 1d6: on a 6 you find exactly what you hope for. On a 3-5 it has an issue or condition (works poorly, a bad deal, stolen goods), and on a 1-2 you find nothing.
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| Simon Roy |
16. Enemy
You can't remember who started it.
Skill: one of +2 to-hit/Drinking/Intimidation
Items Provided:
Household: light dueling knives, painted to leave dyed scars - along with some extra paint-powder.
Counted: four shields, carved with screaming faces.
Perk: If you roll 1 on a damage die, reroll it and take the second result. If you roll the maximum result on a damage die, it explodes. A member of your Assembly feuds with you - if you meet, there will be blood.
17. Shrine Keeper
Each sept has a chosen ancestor, and keeps tablets of their history in the midst of their vessel.
Skill: Theology, plus one of Oratory/Knowing Your Neighbors/Diligence
Items Provided:
Household: fine incense and ephedra tea.
Perk: for ritual reasons, you are inviolable. Assuming you keep your pious reputation, and haven't struck first, Navigators must Save with Will in order to harm you.
18. Salvager
There is nothing new in the world.
Skill: one of Wire-reading/Demolition/Low-Light Vision
Items Provided:
Counted: three cutting torches with 15 minutes' supply of fuel and oxidizer. Six wire cutters.
Perk: you don't need to roll to avoid damaging parts pulled from a ship or machine. (I probably have to write some kind of table for pulling apart robots 🤔 mmm procedures)
19. Skald
Navigators are, with the exception of the Imperious, fiercely egalitarian. It is your responsibility to insult the successful and the Select. Drag them back to earth with you.
Skill: one of Poetry/Sleight of Hand/Fleeing
Items Provided:
Household: musical instruments (long panpipes, morsings, & musical bows)
Perk: each season, either choose to receive an unkind rumor on a certain topic, or add a rumor of your own into the ecosystem.
20. Ropemaker
Even at the end of time, a ship still goes through a lot of rope.
Skill: one of Endure/Climb/Weaving
Items Provided:
Counted: a wire, fifty feet long, that moves on its own like a serpent. It was decided that this was your problem.
Perk: rope tied with your strange knots can carry twice its normal weight, and is treated as dynamic despite its construction (i.e. you can tie yourself to it, fall, and Not have your spine explode).
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