Rats Beneath the Open Sky: Player Guide

There is a City where once dwelt a god.

The circuit wall, gleaming stone miles high, encloses an area larger than most countries. The gates tower over the tallest clouds. The weather is forever pleasant, and the streets forever clean. Hunger has no hold on those who dwell in paradise, and neither illness nor pain nor ache of any kind can find purchase on those within its walls. Those who are worthy to worship at the feet of the God of the Coming World are welcomed within, and few ever emerge for long: for whatsoever you might wish for, there you shall find it, and whatsoever you might dream of becoming, there you can become.

But not everyone is worthy, and not everyone would wish to be. For it warps the minds of mortals to be given the power of a god; and he who lives beneath a stairway to heaven may come to believe that he has no need for mere mortal loyalties, when he could count amongst his company the stars.

You live in le Bourg, the village of Pontaubert — an unremarkable village, fishing and farming, logging trees and mining clay, in the shadow of a tower which challenges the Sun. You have never been to the Crowned City, and the Crowned City would not welcome you; for you are no heroes, and you are not worthy. You live surrounded by woods and streams, and your road to la Ville, the market town of Vauclerc, is paved not in sapphire and silvers, but with the heavy steps of all the generations that have come before.

There is a world beyond the wood, you know, and a wood beyond that world too; and mountains and rivers and cities filled with creatures you have never seen. There are accomplished great things that have never touched you, done by great men you have never heard of, in ways you would not believe; and little things too, familiar things, but achieved in strange ways you cannot imagine. Sometimes you think you would like to see that world…but even a child knows that not all dreams are meant to be fulfilled, though it may not be wrong to dream.

If you were to leave the village, you would have no money, no supplies, no plan — and no one to turn to in need. Even the most beautiful of dreams need not hold up in the waking world; after all, a few wandering villagers are but rats beneath the open sky.

This is a campaign about people who leave home and see a world far larger than they can inhabit all at once. You start as a villager with no reason to leave, and the early game will give you one. At some point, you will have the opportunity to settle down again — and most reasonable people would. Think about what kind of person keeps walking past that point, and what kind of place he would stop at — or what would need to happen for him to turn back. You don’t need to know the answer yet, but do know that there is nothing more normal than eventually finding the answer, and deciding that this is as far as you go — or even, turning back for a home you thought you left behind.

Your Background

You are a villager of little import, a preteen living in Pontaubert. Children you might be, but you have not been idle throughout your life; you have already begun preparing for life after your parents. Your skills are mostly the sorts of mundane skills that let an honest man or woman make a living: weaving, farming, herding, trapping fish. If your skills have something to do with combat, it is only insofar as you’ve hunted or were aspiring to join the guards, or maybe have very minor spell abilities.

You’ve lived in Pontaubert all your life, and the furthest you’ve ever been is probably wandering the Bald Hill, or the clay pit in neighbouring Argelay, or maybe tagging along to la Ville with your parents during the weekly market days. Some of you may have hoped to apprentice in la Ville, or at least, your parents had hoped you could; alas, there has been no shortage of journeymen and merchants from the Eoran mainland immigrating to Vauclerc, and a great shortage of housing being built in Vauclerc of late; there is scarce room for even a housecat, let alone an apprentice. But no matter; an extra hand is always welcome at home.

Your position in the village depends on your family’s standing, and your future depends much on both your sex and your family situation: if you are the eldest son, you expect to inherit the farm and perhaps marry in your mid to late twenties; if you are a younger son, you might expect the farm to be split if the family farm is large, or might be involved in clearing out some extra land from the surrounding forest for your own future use. If you are a woman, you expect to marry out into another family in your late teens or early twenties, whether another family in Pontaubert or perhaps one further away. It is how life has always been, for almost everyone you know — and you expect life to go on as it always has and always will.

Today, feeling brave or bored or just annoyed at your chores, you have decided to explore a bit further afield than is strictly encouraged. It was not a great act of heroism; chased by an overlarge pair of bees after annoying the local alraune, you fled into the forest, and found an interesting looking cave by happenstance, a muddy stream flowing between two moss-covered boulders. You, of course, expect nothing untoward or really even objectively exciting; this is nothing but an idle bit of fun after the sowing.

Geography

You start, and grew up in, the small village of Pontaubert (population: 260, give or take). Pontaubert is mostly a wheat-farming village like most other villages in the kingdom of Eoran, but there is also an orchard, and both goats and sheep (both for milk and for wool, as well as meat) are plentiful. Pontaubert lies upon the Tialline River and is centred on the Esseness, one of its many tributaries. Right in the middle of the fields is a large sinkhole known as the Tialline Combe, sometime-home to a nymph of the same name.

The River Tialline runs an hour’s walk to the southwest; it can be forded to the west, towards the hilly Hauterive region and the sleepy hamlet of Boscpetit, or to the south, along the Old Road. About two hours south along the road is Torredebosc, a small fortification which has stood there since time immemorial — or at least nobody remembers it being built. A makeshift marketplace is set up here every week, and it is the closest thing you have to a town square. Across from Boscpetit is Terrefroid, another wheat-farming village roughly the same size as yours and close enough that you certainly know people from there; women marry between the two villages often enough. Terrefroid is the domain of a frost nymph, and the village produces and exports ice even in the summer, which is a source of mild and entirely good-natured envy.

Just to the north of Pontaubert is a large pond, or perhaps a small lake, maintained for the past twenty years by the work of a crew of industrious and curiously overweight beavers. The pond is always full of slow-moving and easily caught fish, but the beavers can be somewhat grumpy if people stick around for too long. Past the pond is the old graveyard, where the dead of Pontaubert are buried; the yard was set up prior to the beavers moving in, and the Cryptlord Masseinelle refuses to move to a more easily accessed spot. The village is surrounded on all sides by the meadows and light forests of the Grisebois, and villagers frequently visit it to gather firewood, collect mushrooms, or check their hunting traps. To the north, three days away, the forest deepens into the domain of Chlôme, the Rotting Veil, where a dead and wrathful divinity has turned the woods themselves against the living — or so it is said. The River Tialline curves that way and cuts off any approach, which suits everyone fine. You have no business going so far from home.

The nearest town is Vauclerc, about eight hours east by foot and four by horseback. The town is large (by your standards) and has a number of specialist craftsmen and boasts an impressive wooden wall dotted with a few towers. Many villagers are only faintly aware they owe allegiance to the King of Eoran, and they certainly don’t know who it currently is. Instead, they decide communal matters via the village council, and refer serious problems to the feudal lord in Vauclerc. It has been some time since Eustache de Vauclerc has received any petitions from Pontaubert, though.

Beyond all of this — past the mountains, past the mist, past the rivers and the forests you have never crossed — there is a great deal of world you know almost nothing about. You have heard of Châtelleries, the colonial capital, but never seen it. You have heard of Eoran proper, across the Rook’s Sea, but could not point to it on a map, if you had a map at all. It is said that dwarves once lived in the Vivier Peak nearby, and that somewhere further still there are men who fly, but you find that rather hard to believe. To the northeast lies the road to the Crowned City, a month’s walk through barren land, and sometimes wild-eyed adventurers pass through on their way there. They do not stay long, and you do not ask too many questions.

Playable Races

You live in a Mannish village in a Mannish colony of a Mannish kingdom, and what follows describes peoples you have heard of, met once, or have never seen. The full cosmic essay on each race is linked on a separate page, but what matters in Pontaubert is sketched below.

Men — The Lastborn

Bigger, stronger, and — according to some — greater than their cousins, Men rule this late Second World. They have long lifespans and mighty bodies, and an exceptionally strong drive towards greatness, a drive to leave a legacy, that borders on psychosis. No other race has ever produced as many heroes per-capita as the race of Men, and it seems unlikely any ever will: Men, after all, do not like competition.

This is what most people in Pontaubert are, and what most people you will ever meet are: indeed, the word Man may well be synonymous with person for you. The village is Mannish, Châtelleries is Mannish, Eoran across the sea is Mannish. As far as you know Pantokra’s church is the church of Men, and the laws of the village are Mannish laws. If you play a Man, no one will look twice at you, nobody will ask where you came from, and nothing in Pontaubert will surprise itself by accommodating you.

Elves — Life Ever-Ending

Ancient beyond telling, far predating any other mortal race, the elves were the first of those doomed to die, and the last race born touching the First World, where time is a thing walked through and the seasons were ruled by royalty. Known for their friendliness, admired for their beauty, elves never age past their physical prime; but their vaunted agelessness comes at a steep price — no elf lives far past their fiftieth birthday, and all are born knowing the day they will die.

There is already an elf in Pontaubert. Her name is Charlotte. She is nearly forty and looks twenty, she is the village seamstress and one of the wealthiest people in Pontaubert (after Jacques and Marion), and she has slept with most of your friends’ fathers, a few of their mothers, and possibly some of your friends themselves. Nobody minds, except possibly Charlotte sometimes. If you play an elf, she is your mother, and she has told you from birth that some things — like marriage and love — are just not made for people like you and her. Elves may be a tiny minority of the region’s populace, but most villages of any size have one, and ours is Charlotte.

Dwarves — The Makers Made

The dwarves are the lords of the Kingdom Below, but like all else they possess, it was not made by their hands. They are an ancient folk from the early days of the Second World, but they are not the originals, and were never meant to be their own creatures. For the Dawi, as they call themselves, are a mighty race created for purpose, moulded with intent. They were shaped by skill no dwarf has, and for reasons no dwarf knows: and their makers and their masters died long ago, leaving behind servants who still wear chains.

There are no dwarves in Pontaubert, and there have been none in living memory. There were dwarves at Vivier Peak once, in time before any grandparent in the village can remember; the hold is empty now and not spoken of. If you play a dwarf, you and your family came from somewhere else — most likely the hold near what Men call the Sallen Breach, and their reasons are not for Men to know. You were born in Pontaubert and raised as one of theirs, and they thought of you as, perhaps, a short Man with a specific temperament to Making. They treated you, mostly, with good grace, though they did not always succeed at not staring.

Pseudodemons — Refugees from Reality

Descent from a demon leaves traces in mortals. Not in the blood, exactly — blood is just blood. It leaves traces in the way the world fits around them: poorly. They are one step out of time with a world that was not built for a broken thing, and through the cracks of that broken thing the light of the Other Side leaks. Yet the cracks illuminate, and being a step away from the world of instances gives them a vantage point no one else has…if they can bear the vertigo.

There are no pseudodemons in Pontaubert. There is one in Vauclerc — Yvette d’Eaurgenteé, a travelling singer who last passed through Pontaubert four years ago; the older children remember her songs. So the village has seen a pseudodemon, at intervals and briefly, and that is the entire extent of its experience. If you play one, you are something the older villagers have a name for and a vague memory of, and the younger ones know only as a word their parents use. They do not despise you, not exactly — but everyone knows, and yourself most of all, that you do not truly fit in.

Xian — To Break Faith with Fate

Mortals, unneeded and unwanted by Heaven, are doomed to be crushed by the weight of their own mediocrity. And so the Xian, born with mortal hearts into bodies never meant for mediocre things, ever seek to take from Heaven what was not given. But paradise is not always kind to those who reach it, nor to those who are born inside; and the frog who wriggles free of the well finds only a larger well, and above their head a higher Heaven still.

There has never been a Xian in Pontaubert. No one has ever heard of them, and few could understand, even if they had. If you play a Xian you are not from Pontaubert, and you do not live there. But you do not live far. Your mother is Saysahn, member of the Censorate of the Eternal Empire, and you live in the Crowned City, a land where even perfection seems an understatement. But for whatever reason, the place that is beyond perfect had no place for you in it — and so you left, and found yourself friends of your own choosing — or at least, you think you’re the one doing the choosing.

Major and Local Gods

There are five major gods which you would’ve encountered regularly regardless of your background, and which are therefore widely known and often worshipped in your village:

Pantokra is the god your village prays to most. His pastor, Tancrède, gives sermons on the green every week, and his church is the only institution most of you will ever deal with beyond the village council. Unlike the other gods, he asks for faith, not just respect. Pantokra cares about justice, oaths, and doing right by your neighbour, and he answers prayers — not with miracles, but with a sense of what you ought to do. All the great laws and all the little customs are his to enforce, and all the promises and all the compromises mortals make to each other; and more than any other god, his will is done because people believe it should be, for faith, too, is a sort of power, when everyone shares an object.

Ninanna is Pantokra’s daughter, and where her father preserves, she builds — or rather, she clears the ground so building can happen. She is the goddess of the process of civilization: of the first harvest in new soil, of the wall that keeps the wolves out, of the spear that drives away, of the sword which ends lives, of the taxman and his ledgers. In a colony like Châtelleries, still being carved from the wild, she is at least as relevant as her father, and her shrines outnumber his temples outside the towns. You do not need to like her. You are not supposed to. You are supposed to like her father, and Ninanna provides those imperfect pathways which her father’s perfect ending cannot. It is a sin to kill, but never has there been a war in which none were killed; and the righteous war — or at least, the war considered righteous, and all those other evils men call necessary — are her domain.

Yersinia is feared before she is worshipped. She is the goddess of disease, and disease is what happens when you break her rules. She is the goddess of medicine, also; she is the one who breaks your body and the one who can fix it, and she has made it everyone’s problem to figure out which of her taboos they have violated when the fever comes, and how much they need to pay to fix it. Her rules are ancient, arbitrary, and absolute, and every household in Pontaubert observes them without question, because the alternative is boils. You do not love Yersinia. You do not even like her. But you wash your hands, you cook your meat, you do not touch the sick without precautions, because Yersinia may not always be watching, but there is always a chance she is.

Epaeives is the goddess you do not name lightly. She rules the underworld, and all souls pass to her in time. She does not kill, does not scheme, does not hunger for the living. She regards the mortal world with the patience of someone who has never been in a hurry. She is cold and she is distant and she does not care about you, specifically, at all. You observe her festivals so that your parents and grandparents are treated well on the other side. You do not try to contact the dead without paying her price. You do not think too hard about what happens after.

Veil is the goddess who makes it rain, who blesses the harvest, who helps you get pregnant when you want to and sometimes when you don’t. She does not care about your marriage, your politics, or your values; she cares that things are alive and come alive. She needs no festivals but has many nonetheless; and even beyond the festivals dedicated to her, every holiday to every other god, great or small, is also holy to her, for all things celebrated for what they are are her domain. Her rite is that of abandon and being as one will, to forget the strictures and the things you pretend to care about until all that remains is the face behind the mask.

Beyond the major gods, there are also a great deal of minor gods that people pay their respects to in everyday life. Examples include Calccur, the god of locks (and his archnemesis, Ureme, god of lockpicking), and Loring, the god of grain threshing. Most of these have little power beyond their domain or locale and so are less relevant for adventurers, who do not tend to stay in the same place for extended periods of the time, but are very important for professionals or in people’s day-to-day lives.

Tutelary spirits such as the local kitchen gods (every kitchen has one) and door gods (most houses have one, in charge of their doors) also somewhat fulfil the role of a god by protecting their charges and offering minor assistance to mortals that pay them respect; a door god can jam the door against burglars or rattle loudly when picked, and a kitchen god can make bread rise quickly and turn a mediocre meal into a hearty one. Offending local gods is not as devastating as offending e.g. Veil, who can end entire cities or countries if truly angered, but you will still regret it when your door keeps opening and slamming against the wall from “a gust of wind” when you’re about to fall asleep, or when all your knives go dull right as you’ve misplaced your sharpening stone and all your starters mysteriously die.

Of course, talk about deities would not be complete without mentioning Tialline, the nymph of the local pond who commands near-absolute power within her own domain, and Masseinelle, the cryptlord which rules the drowned graveyard of Pontaubert, and keeps the dead from rising in exchange for minor tribute and company.

Daily Life

Time is measured in bells, so named because Pantokran temples are supposed to ring their bells about that often; they are also called hours. Three bells make a watch and two bells make a spoke, with eight watches or twelve spokes in a day. Hausōs, the Sun, is inconsistent about rising and setting and occasionally stops or speeds up during the course of the day, so while sunup and sundown usually mark the beginning and end of the working day, time in cities like Vauclerc is kept by water clocks, hourglasses, and other more reliable tools for cloudy days or indoor work, when the spokes themselves aren’t visible. In Pontaubert there is rarely a need to specify more precisely than “early afternoon” or “soon after sundown.” Measurements such as pots (the time it takes to make a large pot of vegetable soup, about 20 minutes) or hails (the time it takes to say the opening prayer of Pantokra out loud, roughly 5 minutes) are also used for intervals, as in “I’ll meet you after a pot” — probably originating from an actual pot of soup that needed to be made first.

A week is ten days, and four weeks make a month. Most of those days are workdays, though “workday” in a peasant sense means anywhere from two watches of active labour up to a full sunup-to-sundown push depending on the season; a farmer who has already done what needs doing goes home. Once a week the nearer villagers walk south to Torredebosc for the local market — you have probably been many times — and every few weeks Jacques or someone else with business at a larger town makes the eight-hour walk east to Vauclerc for what cannot be had closer. Most trade within the village runs on favours rather than money; currency is for taxes, the Vauclerc trip, and things from further away than Vauclerc.

Most trade within the village is not currency but favours: you helped patch a neighbour’s roof last month, they lend you a scythe now, and the ledger is kept in nobody’s head in particular but the women somehow always know who has taken but not given back. Formal money is used mostly for taxes, for the Vauclerc trip, and for anything that has come from further away than Vauclerc.

A year turns through the Spokes, the astronomical divisions by which the world remembers what season it is. Sowing runs from just after the year’s first thaw through the middle of the growing months; harvest fills the weeks before the winds turn cold; between them are the long green months of tending and weeding and watching for pests. Winter is quiet — the farmwork thins, the days are short, the animals stay closer to home, and wolves come closer to the fences at night than they will risk any other season. Early spring, when the grain-stores are lowest and the goblin warrens are hungriest, is when goblins are boldest; a family that has lost livestock in the spring has probably lost it to goblins, not to wolves. The village bathes in the sweatroom two or three times each week when it is not too cold to walk to it, and once a week when it is; everyone bathes together, and since everyone is there, any funny business is basically impossible.

A life has a shape, and the shape does not change, though there may be a great deal of variation within it. A child is watched over by Nilafellatar, the goddess of children and childbirth, from birth until puberty; children begin doing small work around eight — carrying, fetching, watching younger siblings, minding animals within sight of the house — and drift into more serious work as they grow. Puberty is marked by a ritual severance from Nilafellatar: a small cutting done at the household shrine, after which the child is expected to attend confession alone. Marriage follows in the years after: for women, most commonly around twenty, though anywhere from sixteen into the middle twenties is unremarkable; for men, most commonly around twenty-two, though the window extends into the late twenties without much comment. Widows and widowers remarry when they wish and when they can. After marriage comes the long adult stretch of work and children and the running of a household, and after that, old age — a villager who reaches sixty is doing well, though a few make it further.

Family and Economy

The household, not the individual, is the unit that matters. When people speak of the village’s forty-odd families they mean forty-odd hearths and forty-odd sets of strip fields, not forty-odd people; a person who is not attached to a household is a problem to be solved. Adult children stay in their parents’ household until they marry into another one or found one of their own; unmarried adults and childless widows are absorbed by a relative’s household if at all possible. A person entirely alone is rare, and the village is uneasy about them.

Farms are not farmsteads. Each family holds strips of land scattered through the village grounds — some good, some poor, some near the river and some far — with the arrangement having been settled somewhere in the last two centuries and not much revisited since. Wheat is the staple, but every household grows legumes and vegetables and gathers mushrooms to keep the diet varied. Cloth is the most common store of value: it does not spoil, it does not get eaten by mice, and Vauclerc will take it in trade when nothing else will. Most work within the village runs on favours rather than on money — you helped roof a neighbour’s shed last spring, they lend you a scythe now, and the ledger is kept in nobody’s head but somehow always balances and somehow there is not a wife anywhere who does not know which house has taken but not given back. Currency changes hands mostly for taxes, for the Vauclerc trip, and for what has come from further away than Vauclerc: a tenth of the harvest goes to the town in tax, and another tenth to the gods, and after that the household keeps what it grows.

Children begin working around eight — carrying, fetching, watching animals and younger siblings — and are worth their keep by twelve. A large family is an economic asset, not a burden, provided the fields are large enough to feed them all. Among adults, the rough division is that men work the fields most of the year and women work the fields at sowing and harvest and the house the rest of the time. This is what most households settle into, not a rule. A huntress who refuses housework will have a hard time marrying, because she needs a husband willing to keep the house in her place, and few men in Pontaubert are willing or indeed able; a farmer’s son who prefers weaving to ploughing will have similar trouble, because a wife who works the fields year-round expects a husband who works them alongside her. Two men or two women who want to be together in that way are not driven out per-se, but a household of only men or only women is essentially impossible: there is no one to do the other side of the yearly work, and no one to bear children. The arrangement is treated less as a household than as two adults who have arranged their private life peculiarly. The village finds it strange, and talks.

Marriage is how households form. Two families agree that a son from one and a daughter from the other will be a household together, and the daughter’s family provides a dowry — a portion of goods and cloth and sometimes small livestock that establishes the new household as a going concern. Within Pontaubert dowries are small, because everyone already knows what everyone else has and there is not much to prove; a daughter who marries into Vauclerc or further afield gets a significantly larger one, because the receiving household does not know her family and the dowry does the work of introduction. Women most commonly marry around twenty, though anywhere from sixteen to twenty-five is unremarkable; men most commonly around twenty-two, though the window runs into the early thirties without much comment. A marriage that has not happened by then is usually because the person in question is unlucky, unpleasant, or Charlotte. Not every child inherits: the eldest usually keeps the strips their family has always worked, and younger children either marry into another household, clear new fields at the edge of the wood if there are any left worth clearing, or go to Vauclerc and try their luck. Vauclerc is close, there is work, and the village keeps in touch, but it is always rather less preferable than staying at home.

Widows and widowers remarry when they wish, and this attracts no comment. A widow with a farm to run and children to feed is a desirable match. She comes with land, tools, and a proven household; she has borne children and can be counted on to bear more. A widower with the same land is likewise. Second marriages are usually more practical than first ones, but out of a matter of custom happen no earlier than a year after the first. A widow who chooses not to remarry is absorbed into an adult son’s or daughter’s household if he or she has one, and a sibling’s if she does not. Widows who insist on running their own household alone are unusual but not unheard of; the village calls them stubborn.

Justice and Ethics

Serious crime is rare in a village of forty families where everyone knows everyone. What comes up more often is minor damage, minor theft, minor disputes over strips of land or the fence between them or the water rights on a shared ditch, and these get handled without any formal apparatus at all — by the two neighbours involved talking it out, and if they cannot, by pulling in a third neighbour, and if that does not work, by the council. The council is not called that exactly, and is not called anything in particular; it is what you say when you mean “Jacques and Tancrède and Bertrand and Bayard and Sebille and Perrin and Charlotte, meeting at Jacques’s when there is something to decide.”

The council does not meet on schedule. It meets when someone raises something and disperses when the matter is settled. Most of what it does is arbitration — deciding which of two neighbours is owed what by the other, and how the debt gets paid. For serious wrongs that cannot be solved by an apology and restitution the council imposes public rebuke — being formally called out at an assembly of the household heads, or standing at the church door on a feast day while everyone passes in — and Tancrède handles the religious side of whatever needs handling. At the far end of what the council can impose on its own is exile: driving someone out of the village entirely, refusing them the fields, refusing them a household to attach to. This is the strongest thing the village can do without going to Vauclerc, and it happens rarely enough that only Bertrand remembers it, and then faintly as a thing from childhood.

When something is beyond the council, the case goes to Vauclerc. Serious theft, violence that lands a man in bed for more than a few days, homicide, anything involving titles or inheritance disputes above the scale the council can arbitrate — Jacques makes the walk east, usually with the offender in tow, and the town’s court handles it under whatever the region’s law says. The village has no power to imprison, no power to whip, no power to execute; those are Vauclerc’s tools, applied by Vauclerc’s men. In the memory of anyone currently alive this has happened perhaps three or four times, and of those only one is remembered by anyone younger than Sebille.

Sacrilege — offending a god badly enough that the god may act — is handled through the same denouncement-and-shaming apparatus, with one addition: the village makes it very public, very fast, that the offender is not one of them. A god who has been wronged generally wants to get at the person who wronged them, not at their neighbours; if the village demonstrates plainly enough that the offender is on their own, the god will pass over the village and pursue the offender directly. Tialline is bound to her waters, and an offender who flees far enough from a river or a well may live out their life; Ninanna is everywhere, and an offender she has decided to pursue is dead the moment they are alone with themselves. Sacrilege of this order has never happened as far as anyone remembers, and the village has no formal or informal playbook for it.

Adultery is one of the few offences where the religious and the social apparatus both engage in full force. A Pantokran marriage includes vows of loyalty sworn to Pantokra himself, so adultery is perjury on top of everything else it is — an offence against the god, not just against the spouse. Tancrède handles the religious side: confession, penance, public shaming if it comes to that. The council handles the household side: whether the couple can go on, whether one party is owed something by the other, whether either household has grounds to demand restitution. Formal separation is rare and requires escalation to the ecclesiastical layer in Vauclerc, but it does happen. More commonly the betrayed spouse simply goes home to live with their birth family or living relatives.

Bastardy is where adultery becomes catastrophic. A child born to two unmarried people is only a minor scandal: the couple marries, the child is legitimate, and the village welcomes the new household after Redagunths lectures them on the right order of things. A child born of adultery is a different creature. There is no clean resolution: the wronged spouse can accept the child and the household absorbs the damage, or the child is quietly moved into another household that will take it, or the whole matter spills into open scandal and two households are broken at once.

Feud — a household taking vengeance for a wrong the council failed or refused to address — is technically forbidden and has not happened in Pontaubert in living memory. It is remembered as something that used to happen in the old days, and it is remembered as a reason why the council is to be respected.

Magic

Magic is well-known among the people of Pontaubert. Tialline’s very existence is magic of some kind; certainly it is not something available to mere mortals.

Of course this does raise the question of what, exactly, one means by the word magic. One question that is sometimes debated by young men and women with too much breath in their lungs and too little work to occupy their minds is whether or not there is a difference between the magic of Tialline causing the river to teem with already-cooked fish, the magic of the rain, and the magic of a bird’s flight. No consistent conclusion has ever been reached, and some even disagree that a bird’s flight or the falling rain can be considered magic at all, though what the difference is between these things and what Tialline or a door-god might do is not immediately obvious.

Whatever one calls it, most of what a villager encounters in a lifetime is ambient: things that certain creatures and places do because they are what they are. Tialline commands her waters because she is Tialline. A door-god jams the door against burglars because that is what door-gods do. A kitchen-god makes the bread rise because it is a kitchen-god. Rituals are a mere extension of this: you leave the fish skeleton, you rub the garlic on the hay, you put a mud doll in Yersinia’s shrine to suffer your blue fingers for you, and things go, mostly, the way you hoped. Rituals are not feared. They happen every few weeks in every household. A woman trying for a child, a farmer coaxing clever fish back to the traps, a boy trying to be rid of warts — none of them are doing anything anyone would call remarkable.

Spellwork is different. A spellcaster, or thaumaturge, is largely indistinguishable from any ordinary person, but even the least of spellcasters can kill a man with a touch, or with an orb of pale light that streaks twenty paces in an instant. Villagers do not fear thaumaturges the way they fear demonic influence or the Rotting Veil; they fear them the way they fear a man with a bared sword. The Fair Folk cannot be reasoned with, but they can be propitiated, and a nymph in a bad mood can be waited out. A thaumaturge is a person, and people carry grudges, and a thaumaturge with a grudge and a decent line of sight can end you before you know a spell has been cast at all. It is not a fear of superstition, but of violence and of power. There are no true thaumaturges in Pontaubert — unless you are one.

The exception is a cleric of a familiar god — most obviously, a cleric of Pantokra, whose casting is understood to be Pantokra himself reaching through her rather than anything the caster is doing herself. A cleric of Pantokra is trusted about as far as Pantokra is trusted, which is quite far.

What a Thaumaturge Is

A thaumaturge is a person who has learned to produce, through training and effort, the sorts of effects that other creatures produce simply by being what they are. A faerie does not cast glamour; glamour is what a faerie is, in the way that flight is what a bird is. A thaumaturge, being a mortal with none of these innate capabilities, produces glamour — or fire, or light, or force — by reaching for it, and shaping the reach into a specific form. The gift for reaching is inborn: without it, no amount of study or prayer will call a spark. But the gift alone is inert. It has to be turned on, and that is what a thaumaturge learns to do.

There are three great branches of thaumaturgy, distinguished by what the caster does with the gift once it is active.

Magecraft is the study of the rules by which the world works, and the art of nudging those rules from within. A mage is a naturalist and a scholar as much as anything else; her spells are, in effect, small exceptions carved carefully into the shape of the ordinary, and to carve them she has to understand the ordinary very well. She tweaks the world in ways that follow the rules, and maybe the rules themselves slightly, and what results are perhaps not entirely natural — but it is hard to say it is unnatural, either. The classical image of a wizard — the man with the books, the diagrams, the words that hover slightly off the pages — is a mage.

Theurgy is the art of borrowing. A theurge does not, in the strictest sense, cast spells at all: she opens a channel to some other creature — a god, a nymph, a demon, a dead thing that still speaks — and lets that creature’s power through her, packaged as something that resembles a spell, powered by the body it reaches through. What theurgy asks of its caster is not learning but attunement, the ability to be, briefly, a hollow shape through which someone else’s power flows. A theurge whose channel opens to a specific god is called a cleric of that god.

This is a distinct role from that of a priest: Tancrède is a priest, and he administers the church, gives sermons, and acts, generally, as the voice of his god in the world. A cleric is their outstretched hand and mailed fist, and while some clerics are priests and a few priests are clerics, the two are not the same job.

Druidism is a branch of theurgy in which the borrowing is done from the ambient possibility of the Ethereal itself, or from the too-real substance of the House Behind the World, rather than from a personified being. It resembles nature magic; it is related to it. But it is both older and more powerful than anything that could be called natural.

Pseudotheosis, more commonly called goetia, is the art of bluff, the art of ego, the art of almost-becoming-a-god. A goetic, or pseudotheotic, does not know the rules and does not borrow from anyone; she screams at the world, in effect, until it agrees she is the kind of creature who ought to be able to do the thing she is trying to do, and reluctantly lets her do it. Goetia is the most temperamental of the three branches — its practitioners are frequently self-taught, because the discipline is not one that teaches well, and its effects are wild in a way the others are not. To succeed at goetia is, briefly, to convince reality that you are a demon or a god or a nymph, and to reality’s credit it does not stay convinced for long.

Binding is the branch of goetia which is most often considered to be notable enough to steal from by those of the other branches. It is the act of directing your ego not at reality but at a single creature, usually a demon, and buckling their existence such that you are in truth their master. The act is not difficult to name or to imagine. Nobody has ever figured out another way to accomplish it.

None of the three branches is more true or fundamental than the others. They are three different mortal solutions to the same underlying problem, which is that mortals were not made to do the things thaumaturges are trying to do and which greater, older things do without trying.

How a Villager Becomes One

The paths into thaumaturgy generally align with the branches, though not strictly.

Most mages begin as students of someone, because magecraft is not a discipline one stumbles into: it requires reading and thinking about very specific things. Your teacher did not need to be a mage himself, or even know of the connection: but the things a mage learns about are the sorts of things most people dismiss as useless.

Most theurges begin as the object of someone else’s attention — the patron reaches down before the caster reaches up, and the caster’s part is initially just to accept the offer. The caster can, of course, reach up — but rarely is the initial desire to become a theurge, as opposed to just a servant or a friend.

Most goetics begin the way children begin most things: by trying it and getting away with it, and unlike the other branches, goetia is essentially the only branch a peasant can find her way into with no teacher, no patron, and no books.

From Pontaubert specifically, some possibilities:

A traveller taught you things that a villager has no need to know. Someone with the gift passed through Pontaubert, recognized the gift in you, and either stayed long enough to teach you the basics or left something behind — a book, a set of exercises, a way of listening. This is the standard origin for a mage elsewhere, but it is unusual here, because a mage needs to read the kind of book that Pontaubert has no shelf for. If this is you, your teacher was almost certainly not from Pontaubert, almost certainly is not still around, and the training you received is almost certainly incomplete. You will know what you know, and no more, until you find someone who can teach you the next thing.

A patron reached out, and you took their hand. A god, a spirit, a nymph, or something less nameable extended themselves to you and offered you the use of their power. This is how theurgy begins; it is how a cleric’s journey begins, and it is also how a warlock’s pact begins, and how a horror cult begins — the distinction between “chosen by a god” and “made a deal with a lesser thing” is one that blurs at the edges. If this is you, the patron is a specific being with a specific interest in you, and you should know who they are before the campaign begins.

Local candidates who could plausibly reach for a Pontaubert child include Tialline, who has been known to take an interest in children she watches grow up along her banks, Masseinelle, whose interest in the living is generally paternal and generally paid for in company, and of course, any of the great gods, who have their own reasons and rarely make the specifics of what they want back known. Pantokra and Ninanna, specifically, have their organized priesthoods and monastaries, and Tancrède is always happy to give the pious guidance on private prayer; it was never his expectation that it would be answered, but neither he nor anyone else will be grieved that it was.

It is also possible — and worse — that you heard the Voice of the Rotting Veil drifting in from the north woods, and answered it. You have never been to the Rotting Veil. Nobody who has gone has come back. But the Voice does not need you to seek it out, and you cannot always say no.

You are simply attuned to things that mortals are not supposed to be attuned to. Some people find that the gift turns itself on, without any teacher and without any pact. This is essentially the only route into goetia from a place like Pontaubert, and it is one that Pontaubert has been lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to not stumble into, until now — a child with the gift and the right temperament discovers one day that if she screams loudly enough at a bee, it will burst into flame before it can sting her, and then spends the rest of her life refining that. Pseudodemons and elves are somewhat more likely to end up here than others — pseudodemons because the world already sits crooked around them and flinches at their presence, elves because they are a tiny splinter of a greater thing which remembers when the seasons wore crowns — but you do not need to be either, and you can be either without being this.

You learned too much, too fast, with a mind too nimble for its own good. You learned what everyone else in Pontaubert does, but you had the gift none of them had, and you connected patterns none of them saw. This is the other, older path into magecraft, and the one less sanctioned by those who took the first. You did not read a book; you learned lessons that were meant to be useful in a quiet life, and you thought one step further in a direction neither your teacher nor your peers perceived. You do not know what you have learned, and no one can tell you in the detail you want to know. You will know what you know, and no more, until you find someone who can teach you the next thing.

Whichever of these fits, you are, so far as anyone alive in Pontaubert knows, the first thaumaturge the village has ever produced since it was founded just under two centuries ago. The villagers do not know this yet. It will not be a secret you keep for very long, if you want to keep it at all.