THE COMPENDIUM
Factions
59 entries
House Vandahl
The failing minor Great House clinging to Valenfeld's silver rights, all banners and no coin.
The Ash Covenant
Asheni zealots who hold that the broken god's fire must be fed, never sealed — they raid the wastes for fuel, ore, and captives to throw on the pyres.
The Ashen Moot
The settled old-blood's grudge-court: a standing council of House elders that registers lineage-claims, arbitrates forge-rights, and settles the long Asheni feuds before they become blood.
The Ashen Temple
Soft orthodoxy that wants the relic studied, sanctified, and locked away — for everyone's good, they insist.
The Ashwalkers
An Ashari splinter band who followed the Emberthrone generations ago and now read its cycles as prophecy — the only ones who know the safe paths through the fumarole fields.
The Bellwakes
Defiers of the Hush who steal into the bell-haunted deep to RING what the Mourners spent lifetimes silencing — convinced the echoes have something to say if only they're made loud enough.
The Bonesung-of-the-Vale
Nomad tribes who hold the barrow sacred and the settlers profane, keepers of the relic's oldest name.
The Broken Lances
The rot inside the Marrow Lances — a mutinous wing that has started taking the better coin mid-contract, selling out the very employers they're sworn to.
The Censors
The Listening College's keepers of the locked stacks — who bury the findings too dangerous to publish, and are quietly suspected of hoarding rather than destroying them.
The Charm-Cutters
Bone-charm harvesters who strip the sacred Hollowing Oak of the tribes' hung charms and sell them down the river — quietly, and never twice from the same bough.
The Cinder Quorum
A small crew of grave-breakers and looters who dig the ash-sealed barrow the nomads refuse to touch, hauling out whatever the drifts unseal to fence for coin — all loot, nerve, and a bad name.
The Coldhand Pans
A hard Stoneborn quarry-clan who cut and sell foundation-stone from the lower Leaning Columns and dig out old cut stone and echo-crystal drums to fence as salvage; they winter in Greywater Hollow and reckon the Listening College's diggers claim-jumpers who showed up with a writ.
The Cullers
The Greenwake's beast-hunters — they track and kill the maddened, dangerous animals before they reach the farms and steadings.
The Deep Listeners
The Listening College's radical wing — scholars who tune themselves so deeply to the echoes that they begin, slowly and willingly, to become echoes themselves.
The Deepclan Reavers
Exile Stoneborn clans who quarry the dead Imperium's barrows for bronze and kill any who would stop them.
The Deepcut Pans
Freelance panners scraping a worked-out silver prospect for whatever crystal or silver still fetches coin — and skimming past the Silt Hands' cut on every grain they pull.
The Divers
The Finders' tomb-robbing cell — the crew that ropes down into the barrows, strips the burial goods, and hauls the take up to be fenced for coin.
The Drowned
The Stillwater Order's heresy and warning — monks who used the empty hand to get close to the echoes, then reached for them, and were lost.
The Drowned Fangs
Hessk raiders of the sunken valley who drag the drowned-water's cold onto the shore — and the unwary down into it.
The Ember Lodge
A Gaunt Ledger cell fronting as a mining speculation, really buying up Imperium bronze, scrap, and salvage cheap off the waste to fence dear before anyone else gets a price on it.
The Finders
The Vale's thieves' guild and the stealth player's door — burglars, cutpurses, smugglers and information-brokers who can get anything, into anywhere, for the right price. In the Lean Years, when honest coin dried up, they became the people who always know where the money, the goods, and the secrets really are.
The Free Finders
The splinter inside the Finders that has started keeping the best finds instead of fencing them — skimming the Gaunt Ledger, which in the trade is a hanging offense.
The Frostmaw Brood
A brood of trolls denned in the high northern passes under the oldest and largest of their kind — frost-scarred, regenerating, and old enough to have broken hold-gates before.
The Gaunt Ledger
The coast's great mercantile and smuggling syndicate — accountants with knives who move goods, contraband and grave-silver up and down the Vale and keep better records than the law does. In the Lean Years they got rich the way money always does in a famine: lending dear, buying desperate men's land cheap, and owning the debts of half the frontier.
The Greenwake
Wardens of the living land and the wild player's door — druids, rangers and hunters who keep the Greatwood and the wild reaches, and who stand between the frontier's people and the beasts, blight and famine pressing in on them. In the Lean Years they're the ones who know which woods still hold game and which water won't kill you.
The Greycloaks
The road-company that robs the Vale's caravans wearing no colours at all — grey on grey, gone before a name can be put to them.
The Grimtusk Clan
Tusked, slab-shouldered orc raiders who hold the Sered Spur in war-bands, taking what the stone will not give and pressing the smaller beast-folk off their warrens.
The Hanging Choir
The elder Vyr court of Aelvyrenn — the singers who fled upward after the breaking and who now tend the Riven King, hold the city's silence, and damn the human echo-trade below as the desecration of a wound only they understand. Proud, grieving, and certain they are the world's only true mourners.
The High Moot
The confederation of Korl high-pass holds that keeps the crossings and brokers the strength of the Korl as a people — not as hired muscle for House Vandahl or the Marrow Lances. The holds gather at the Wind-Cut Pass and decide together which lowland wars are worth their backs.
The Hollow Writ
Frontier officers still enforcing the law of a capital that has sent no word in four hundred years — and clinging to that dead mandate because it is the only thing that makes their power real. Stamp, toll, conscript and hang, all in the name of an empire that may no longer exist.
The Iron Cantors
The Sealed Choir's zealot wing — those who would seal not only the echoes but the living people the echoes have touched, for the song's sake.
The Keepers of the Deep
The Hessk salvors-and-divers brotherhood and harbor council that governs Sresh-Dar as a free-port, holds the salvage-rights of the drowned valley, and keeps the water-trade out of any crown's or House's hand. They run the wharves, license the dives, and arbitrate who may strip which wreck.
The Kneeling Drowned
Drowned penitents who tend the flooded shrine but have begun listening to its echoes instead of binding them — a soft heresy the Ashen Temple rows out to correct.
The Korl War-Band
Giant-blooded Korl raiders who reckon any unwalled holding fair plunder and any lowlander fair sport.
The Listening College
The Vale's secular college of salvage and natural philosophy — and the arcane player's door. Antiquarians and relic-engineers who study the dead Imperium's works to make them useful: better tools, real arcana, an explanation for why the world is failing. A mocked fringe inside it insists the cause is the old ringing; the rest just want the salvage to pay.
The Lower Wardens
A handful of House Vandahl servants sworn to a duty the house will not admit exists: keeping the sealed lower halls of the Sered catacombs shut, and keeping what the house buried down there out of anyone else's hands.
The Marrow Lances
The free company every power in the Vale hires and none of them trusts — the neutral sword, and the martial player's door. In the Lean Years, when no house can keep a standing army, the Lances are the army everyone rents: escorts, garrisons, sieges, and the work too bloody to put a name to.
The Meltwardens
Frost-bound recluses who guard the meltwater source in the high northern cave and have gone half-feral tending a deep cold echo they will not let anyone disturb — or seal.
The Mourners of the Hush
Grief-keepers who tend the Vale's restless dead and want the echoes — Sunder's Echo included — sung back to silence.
The Old Lances
The oathbound veterans of the Marrow Lances — to them a paid oath is sacred and a broken one is death, the company's word made flesh.
The Pyre Wardens
A Hollow Writ garrison detail at Ashfall Town, nominally holding House Vandahl's mineral rights to the waste — in practice, four bored soldiers and a commander who knows this posting is a punishment.
The Redhook Crew
Human road-thieves of the Vale who have grown bold enough to camp in plain sight off the east road and rob carts within sight of the gate.
The Reshi Marauders
Caravan-folk turned road-reavers who strike from the dark with gold eyes and are gone before the dust settles.
The Resonants
The ambitious inner ring above the Listening College — arcanists who mean to wield recovered Imperium arcana and old relics for real power, advantage, and the wealth that buying it brings.
The Rime-Skinners
Frostbitten outcasts who den deeper in Frostmaw Cave than the rime-stalkers themselves, surviving by skinning beasts for pelts and frost-glands and — in lean winters — robbing anyone weaker on the Karth road. Half the reason House Vandahl keeps a watch on the ford.
The Rootbound
The Greenwake's radicals who let too much of the wild into themselves — feral land-wardens half-merged with the Greatwood, who hold the deep forest by tooth, root, and rot.
The Sap-Drinkers
A heretic splinter of the Rootbound who broke off to drink the amber sap their wardens only hoard — a wild forest drug-cult that runs feral on the stuff, hooked, hungry, and half-rooted in the deep galleries.
The Scorch Seekers
A salvage crew camped two seasons in the fumarole fields, mapping the deadly approach to the Cindervault for the haul they mean to carry out — the old echo-crystal and relics down there fetch a fortune to the right buyer.
The Sealed Choir
A militant reform church and the faith player's guild — grown rich and powerful in the Lean Years by being the thing that actually shows up: feeding the hungry, tending the sick and the dead, and keeping order where the failing house and the absent empire do not. Charity in one hand, doctrine and growing worldly power in the other.
The Silt Hands
Coastal smugglers who move contraband and stolen goods and sell to whoever pays, and the law to whoever pays more. It's about coin and owning the routes.
The Skritch Warren
A teeming goblin warren of the eastern hills — small, vicious things that skulk in numbers, cut from ambush, and break the moment the odds turn.
The Soft Choir
The Sealed Choir's gentle wing — the old Ashen Temple reformed from within, who mend the living first and seal only what truly cannot be saved.
The Stillwater Order
Ascetic monks and the unarmed player's door — the one faction whose answer to a grasping, collapsing world is to want nothing, owe nothing, and so be beholden to no power. In years when every other power is bought, the Order is the only voice no one can buy.
The Stonewright Moot
The masons-and-smiths hall of the deep galleries under the Northern Rampart — the craft-institution above the Stoneborn clans that holds the bridges, forges and quarry-rights, sets clan-law and the price of stone and iron, and keeps the great works standing through the collapse.
The Tide-Pickers
Living salvage-divers who race the twice-daily tide into the drowned Tidewrack shrine to strip its altar — defying both the drowned faithful who keep it and the Ashen Temple that claims them, and moving the take through Sresha Silt's smugglers.
The Unsealing
A heretic splinter of barrow-keepers who believe Sunder's Echo was never meant to be kept asleep — and work, in the dark of the Echo of Vallen, to wake what the prophecy says to leave sealed.
The Vyr Discord
A cabal of Vyr who chase the broken chord past reason, trading flesh and sanity for raw magicka.
The Wandering Cups
The Stillwater Order's mendicant monks who walk the Vale's roads with empty bowls — begging, teaching the empty hand, and carrying the Order's quiet into a loud world.
The Wheelmoot
The Reshi road-nation's caravan-kinship: the moot of trade-clan elders who keep the southern roads, the waystations, and the caravan-law open through the Lean Years. It is the road folk's own civil body — it settles road-debts and feuds between the clans so the wheels keep turning.