The Keep › Abeir Toril
Five hundred years after the Weave broke, the walls that keep the world out are owned by somebody, your spellcasting is a financed implant, and everything past the city limit belongs to the thing the wall was built to stop.
Magic stopped regulating itself, because what regulated it is what broke. Arcane fixes made the hole bigger — every one of them is made of the broken thing. What worked was salvage: containment hardware cracked open and miniaturised, which turned out to do more than contain. A vessel that holds a leak can also aim it.
The moment that was true, magic became a product. You do not cast. You run hardware, on a payment plan, for a company that can repossess it.
Then you know this. What's renamed, what's identical, and the one rule that's new.
Step by stepLifepath, Role, Marks, and how much chrome your body will actually tolerate.
TwelveOne class is one implant. Pick the implant and you have picked the life.
Load & CapacityWhere it goes, what it weighs, and what happens when you carry too much.
There is only installation. Every number on your sheet traces to an installed piece of hardware. A class is not a tree of thirty nodes — it is one implant with twenty Marks, and Mark N grants exactly what that class gets at level N.
Your character sheet is an install manifest.
Your Capacity is your CON plus your highest Mark — and your highest Mark is also part of your Load, so it cancels. A single-Role character has exactly CON points of room for optional chrome at Mk1, and still exactly CON points at Mk20.
Anyone can become one thing completely. Being two things is what takes an exceptional constitution, because a second Role adds its whole Mark to your Load and gives nothing back.
Every Role implant has a lienholder — the company that made it, licenses it, and can come and take it back. Your subclass is firmware, and it was specced by them, not chosen by you.
You are not an adventurer with equipment. You are a person carrying something expensive that belongs to someone else.
Everything else — price, legality, who repossesses it — hangs off those three numbers. The chrome page has the detail.
| The Wall | A containment vessel at civic scale, wrapped around a city. It is what keeps the outside out, and it is owned. That is the whole political economy in one sentence. |
| Outside it | No containment, therefore no reliable causality. Country where magic behaves like weather and nothing stays fixed. The road between two cities is the most dangerous commercial activity in the world. |
| Eddies | €$. A Role Mark costs Mark × 1,000, and the first one is free — somebody fronted it, and they remember. |
| The Abyss | The one thing nobody ever contained. It is why demons still come through a wall that holds everything else, and the only arrangements anyone has with that side are private and expensive. |