Offworlders
From Breaking Worlds
Part of a series about Arginese society.
- Humans
- Fay
- Revenants
- The Crown
- Government
- Law
- History
- Social class
- Crafts and learning
- Sexuality and relationships
- Names
See also:
Since the Breaking, unstable rifts to other planes have formed across Arginet and beyond, and through them all manner of creatures have entered the world. Not least of these are humans. Exiled from their own planes, they have must make new lives in a strange and unfamiliar world.
Though these people are tremendously diverse some common strands have emerged. Offworlders - as they are generally known - have said that their old lives feel like half-remembered dreams. Some strong ideas remain, like people they cared for, but places, events, and details all blur and merge.
This effect makes it difficult to learn much of the worlds they once knew: they may appear in Arginet with vague impressions of a terrible war they were fleeing, or a life of unyielding order, or a bucolic paradise they wandered away from and can never return to. As well as competent fighters and promising (though amnesiac) scholars, a number of offworlders have been found who know magic. So far, however, none have arrived with an understanding of the spirits, and none are fay. Different groups have drawn different conclusions from this, and hope that any future discoveries will back up their own agendas…
Playing an offworlder
Mechanically, offworlders are humans, though as they have recently arrived from other worlds and not yet assimilated into Arginese society, there are some restrictions:
- Offworlders may not start out as fay. There are no offworlds where some of the people are fay.
- No offworlds have an understanding of the Spirit World, and therefore offworlders cannot buy Evoker skills until they have “gone native”.
- Offworlders may not start play belonging to one of the three main factions of Arginet.
In addition, you may not have any items from the world your character used to live in which would not make sense in Arginet. Such items (such as guns) would be unlikely to survive the trip through the rift, and if they did, would disintegrate shortly afterwards as Arginet’s reality reasserted itself. Likewise, the partial amnesia suffered by those who fall through rifts will always cause an offworlder to forget anything they knew about making such items.
After a while, offworlders may have assimilated enough into Arginese society that they may begin to learn evocation, and be trusted enough to join a faction. Typically this will come with having started to adopt Arginese clothing, and potentially, although not always, choosing a new name.
Home worlds
We have defined two offworlds from which enough people have landed in Arginet that, despite the partial amnesia suffered by their former denizens, a reasonable amount is known. These are the Praesidium and the Archipelago. Other offworlds will be added to the website later as more is found out about them.
Alternatively, you can play a character from an offworld that you have defined yourself. Player-defined offworlds may (or may not) have magic, and therefore channellers, but as with all offworlds do not have fay, contact with the spirit world, or evokers. Their costume should not take inspiration from any real-world era after the Victorian; we are implementing this hard cutoff of the start of the 20th century so as to always be able to distinguish who is in costume and who is not.
Within these limits, you may define any characteristics you like about an offworld that your character came from. Please keep in mind that discrimination on the basis of real world characteristics such as gender and sexuality is not a theme in Breaking Worlds, and this applies to offworlds as much as it applies to Arginet.