Hearth Communities
Editor's Note: I've changed the name of the campaign setting from it's working title - Hearth - to Coderra. I've left the text alone, though, as I'm not going through and changing everything.
In my last post, I walked through some touchstones for Hearth, a high fantasy campaign I'm putting together for my players. In that post, I highlighted the need to separate the setting from the frame - what is true in one corner of the world may not be in another.
I'm not to the frame part of the work yet, but it's still time to talk about Communities. There are likely to be universal truths to some Communities across all corners of Hearth. Let's get to it (in a particular order).
Wanderborne
I wanted to start here, because in a way, the Wanderborne community is the true rulers of Hearth. While most people hide away in their cities, the vast spreads of wilds are ruled by a very few.
The fractured realities of Hearth lend themselves to hardened Wanderborne. Pockets of broken time, insane god, weather that can go from desert wasteland to frozen hellscape in an evening: these are conditions that forge Wanderborne into veteran adventurers at a very young age.
Every Wanderborne community is very familiar with death and loss, and likely has ways of honoring and remembering the dead even with their minimalist lifestyle. Wanderborne are likely looked at with distrust and even disgust in the cities, but they are a necessary backbone for the minimal amount of trade between the enclaves.
Wanderborne are the few and the proud who have chosen freedom over safety, who have fled the power of the Gildcrowns to seek their own destiny. Whatever else a given community might value, they share that to their core.
Hearth Wanderborne are often guarded, resilient, controlled, direct, and brutally pragmatic.
Wildborne
Wildborne, as such, wouldn't exist in Hearth. Other than the urban environment, there are almost no real pockets of a "stable" ecosystem. The Lightfoot ability is good, though, and should be recycled.
But.
One of the principles I want to commit to is everything in Daggerheart exists in Hearth. I love when Keith Baker acknowledges that a thing in D&D isn't really his fantasy, but is someone else's and so must have a corner in his world.
So what is the Wildborne community?
- It's the Lightfoot feature
- It's that appreciation of the wilderness and the environment
- It's that tree/elf/ranger vibe
The first one's easy enough, I'll fold that stealth into another community, just you wait. The second one's also fine: if that's what a player wants, then the Wanderborne is right there. And honestly, I'd be fine with a player describing their background as part of a nomad community in touch with nature and taking the Wildborne feature. Reskinning is the key to Daggerheart.
As for #3...
Highborne
In a world with dystopian cities only ever so slightly preferable to the outside, those who rule the cities are possessed of the kind of power that warps and twists. Those who work for the Gildcrowns - the merchant guilds that control the cities - are privileged. Those who rule the Gildcrowns are greater than even the gods.
In Hearth, being part of a Highborne community means the same things it does in other Daggerheart settings: just with less focus on the "nobility" and more focus on "the brutality of class privilege". Your parents weren't necessarily nobles, just oligarchs. Your parents weren't queens or barons but high administrators, merchants, or even Sigils of the Gildcrowns.
Loreborne and Orderborne
These work much the same as you would expect: in a world where magic is debt and divinity is infrastructure, those who understand academic and divine practices are commonplace. Indeed, that may be the only major difference between these communities in Hearth and as presented in the book: there are a lot more of them.
Ridgeborne aka Outerborne
In the same manor as the Wildborne, Ridgeborne in Hearth isn't really a "thing" - mountains can be worn away by magic in a matter of years, and new mountain ranges can erupt over a season as ancient vaults, forgotten astral dreadnoughts, and even the corpses of gods erupt toward the surface.
But there is a special kind of hardy person who lives outside the cities and could be described as Steady: the Outerborne.
Outerborne are laborers who do the work of the city that can't be done in the city. Rarely more than a harried day away from the wards and walls of a Gildcrown enclave, Outerborne do the farming, mining, and toxic alchemy required to make a modern city work. They live and labor in small groups just outside the city - sometimes even built right up against the walls of the city themselves. They are citizens of their city - if lower in status - and when mystic chaos descends they can find safety within.
Seaborne aka Skyborne
Once again, environmentally defined communities don't work as well in a setting where the environment is so mutable. There is plenty of open sea in the world of Hearth, but next year it's a desert. A basin fills in overnight and magic brings forth entire ecosystems from other dimensions. A community can't exist as a purely seafaring group.
So, we take to the skies.
We'll call the community Skyborne, which operates similarly to Wanderborne, except the nomadism is in the sky. This is still a vehicle and crew based community, similar to Skyborne. We'll rename Know the Tide to In the Wind, but it's the same ability - an understanding of how to stay ahead of the storm and sense what's coming in the wind.
Slyborne
Crime in crowded dystopian cities is rampant. Indeed, the difference between the Slyborne and the Highborne is one of success and class, not methodology.
Slyborne exist in Hearth, no notes.
Underborne
When we talk about traditional Underborne, we're probably talking about Outerborne, hiding below ground in cramped refineries or mines.
The Underborne in Hearth are as likely to live in the cities, down at the base of the towers, where the light never shines. The layers of people below the layers of filth. The cities are cramped and the poorest usually live at the bottom, farming mushrooms and tending to the little gods and trying to get by as the city attempts to crush them.
Out in the wilderness, there are vaults of survivors, hidden from the wild magic. Deep below the surface, vaulters live in the crowded confines of safety that aren't true cities. These communities, too, are Underborne.
That's eight of nine. I've lost one, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Because I like the idea of a "core 8" that exist in all cities, and a special community for each frame. We'll see when I get to outlining exactly what a specific Pitch/Frame might look like.
Alright, that's Communities. Thanks for following along. If you're reading this then I've already started working on Ancestries, of which there are twice as many.