The surface is a lie. There is no surface. It’s caves all the way down and all the way up.

Good Day, Diggers!

It hasn't quite been a full day since we launched, but we're already at 80% of our funding target and closing in on 400 backers! Please continue to spread the word about this project and let's see if we can't hit our funding target before my next update tomorrow!

Besides the launch yesterday, one of the best things about the campaign was getting access to the first three chapters from the book! Backers can access that first draft manuscript preview in our Welcome Aboard Update or by clicking <HERE>

Today, I want to review our first manuscript preview a little bit, look at some of the "Paths" into The World Below and maybe have a poll about what our favorites are so far? 

But I also want to help out the team by gathering any feedback for the writers and developers based on what you've read so far. We crowdfund these projects because Backers Make It Better, and sharing the draft manuscript sections allow us to note errata or point out parts that need clarification. Onyx Path has created a special The World Below Feedback Form that you can use to submit any corrections or comments directly to the development and writing team so they can have some guidance during the next rounds of development and editing.

The World Below is a place where a person needs a purpose. Without one, the world will consume you one way or another. These purposes are named “Paths.”

Paths are sometimes referred to as adaptations, backgrounds, professions, philosophies, or religions. But whichever way you cut it, “path” is the common noun for a character’s skillset (“I see you follow the Hunter’s path”), the common verb for a character’s actions when following their ambitions (“Alaryck’s pathing his way to the Obscura, I hear”), and the common adjective for describing a character’s dedication, obsession, or faltering attachment to the same (“You’re so damn path-struck you don’t know if you’re breathing or drowning.”)

In The World Below, each character starts their journey with three Paths. These Paths are summarized as: 

Dawn (the product of their settlement or community, guild, dogma, and ancestry). Settlements and communities exist everywhere in the World Below, populated by people of varying dogmas, ancestries, and guilds. Despite this, all its denizens share one cause: survival and protecting one’s own. Everyone has their own origin and aim, and they call these their Dawns. Characters may possess many as they grow in experience.

Dialectic (the way in which their spirit, mind, and body attune to the World Below). Adventurers interacting with the phenomena of the World Below find their spirits and minds changing through a development known as the Dialectic, where a character’s attunement to and understanding of an energy or element allows them to work wonders. 

Calling (their profession, the role they occupy in their settlement or party, the way they carry themselves, or the fate to which they’re most dedicated). Characters have a destined role, their Callings. Whether a Hunter riding grand insects into battle or scouting safe tunnels for their family, a Silhouette creeping through the caves to deliver a lethal shot to a target, or a Kaosist manipulating raw magic through their body and mind, all Callings have their place.

Today, let's look at the first of these Paths and review some of a character's Dawn options.

Ancestry is an important element of character creation to consider when thinking of how a character might view traditions, what their familial relationships are, and how they might appear. A character’s ancestry has no direct bearing on their Skills, Attributes, or Aspirations, as it’s not the case that all people of a certain heritage share a predisposition toward physicality, the sciences, or similar.

Ancestry: Darv

Few peoples in the World Below are so committed to celebrating their ancestry and trying to follow the ideals their predecessors laid down as the darvs. They sing the songs of their grandparents and have their family trees tattooed or engraved into their skins, with family crests often prominently stenciled into their foreheads. For all their perceived insularity, however, darvs have traditions relating to giving aid to those in need, especially when an injured traveler or wandering orphan stumbles into their care.

Ancestry: Elv
Of all the cultural traditions passed down from elv to elv, the most prominent one is their curiosity. Elvkin often repeat the mantra that “we buried the secrets of the world; it’s up to us to unearth them.” This sense of curiosity encourages a strong tradition of exploration and sharing their findings with others. Many elvkin believe in a utopian glade of immense size, buried somewhere in the World Below, waiting for them. They call this place Pan and ascribe it a religious and cultural importance.

Ancestry: Entissia
Entissia group more tightly into family units than most peoples in the World Below. While they possess no predisposition for species-based hostility, they’re aware that among the people who embarked upon the Great Descent, they alone are egg-laying, cold-blooded reptilians. Therefore, they know long-term, safe habitats are vital for their survival and have little understanding for those who feel happier as nomads. This, in turn, leads to their being some of the most reliable keepers of static troves of knowledge and comfortable inhabitants of ancient ruins, provided those ruins can be made secure.

Ancestry: Hobgob

A numerous and varied group, the only cultural commonality that joins the hobgobs is a firm sense of irony, sarcasm, and with it, mischief. The development of this trait is perhaps due to the adversity their ancestors experienced (and they now live with) in the World Below. Since taking their freedom, hobgobs celebrate it with Kaos rocks and deep stones formed into jewelry, not because they think they look good or are even appropriate for their surroundings, but because they identify the Great Descent — and therefore proximity to the Well (or more rarely, the Abyss) as symbolic of their freedom. Hobgobs make up the bulk of Well Keepers for this reason. They enthusiastically adorn clothing with as many pieces of Kaotic ore as they can locate on their adventures.

Ancestry: Human
Humans are stereotypically known for their technological and magical innovations and their energy in the face of dire threat. Humans are writers of stories, inventors of machines, and exploiters of Kaos. This doesn’t mark them out as particularly different from other ancestries, except for the successes they enjoy in such practices. Humans are far from the most populous ancestry in the World Below, and it’s a common refrain from one human to another that “we are not long for this world.” Whether born from a place of hope that escape from the World Below is within reach or a dire sense of stoicism that the fight is already lost, humans tend to see everything as temporary, migrating more in communities than fixed settlements.

Ancestry: Makiru

If the makiru are typified by one ancestral tradition (aside from their pessimistic view of the world to come), it’s their absolute devotion to children, or “pups.” Makiru are born as rats, and as they grow, they develop into their humanoid forms, retaining claws and a rodent’s features but otherwise reaching the average body proportions of a human or elv. Makiru possess an instinctive drive to sacrifice everything for their offspring, even when those pups are adopted or found and don’t bear the same genetic signatures. As far as makiru are concerned, the world may have ended for those in adulthood, but children are destined to build a future on the ashes of the past. They’ll put everything on hold to patch up an injured child.

A character's Dawn also takes root in their settlement or community, guild, or dogma.

Communities and settlements create the pulse of life the World Below so sorely needs to stave off the encroaching Dark. The different between the two is slight, but exists in the eyes of most guilders, who identify as community as “a nomadic or small group, often of a monoculture or monodogma, and unfriendly to the guilds,” while settlements are “population centers, typically unmoving and pluralistic, supporting more than one dogma and guildhouse.” Exceptions exist, but the Moths guild isn’t far off the truth of it. Another way of viewing the difference is that while settlements fortify against dangers, communities would prefer to flee or advance in the face of danger. A character’s community or settlement is the place they call their sanctuary, though they may not visit there as much as they like.

Some Communities and Settlements include:

Community: Bura
This prowling community of intoxicated brewers are the most well-known raiders of the Vast Underneath, and in their chaotic way, reinforce the hegemony of power around the Well. They’re a hodgepodge band of misfits and outcasts, many of whom have fully embraced their Synthesis, making them a form of elemental hazard wherever they choose to roam.

This nomadic monastery’s people spend their lives diligently mapping the World Below, contributing huge volumes of knowledge to the cartographers’ collective libraries and universities. They revere the element of ice, and traditionally clad themselves with armor imbued with elemental properties. Their heavy, studded gauntlets mark them out for their pugilistic hobbies.

Settlement: Oracaster
Few settlements ring so rich and warm as Oracaster. It’s a mainstay settlement, demolished and rebuilt many times over in its capacious caverns and halls, and situated over a closed magma tunnel. Loyalists to the power of the Well have often targeted it, but each time it rebuilds bigger and stronger.

A character’s dogma need not be faith. The important thing is, it’s the part of their Dawn that always drives them forward, to believe there’s hope, or to give them an obstacle to overcome. Dogmas may come in the form of an organized religion, such as the charitable Church of Golthon, or the inquisitorial, World Below-revering Temple of the Benevolent Earth. Alternatively, they might adhere to a loosely bound faith such as the Fortuna-worshiping Casters, who deliver poetic justice to the deserving and good luck to the unfortunate. The Kaos-struck worship the Well as a place of great spiritual significance. Meanwhile, the Hades Tract is a school of philosophy that posits all the World Below’s inhabitants are dead and working through an afterlife. On the face of it, it’s an odd belief; but the Hadeans are convinced of their truth. More still have their own dogmas, codes by which they must follow, or actions they take as holy, unholy, blessed, or cursed. At the far end of the spectrum, are the worshipers of the Lords and Ladies of Rot, known as the Vrot, who devote their existences to furthering Antitheses in league with the many monstrous inhabitants of the World Below.

The dogma aspect of the Dawn Path is deeply personal to each character. Some find cause in communal worship, polemics, or study, while others seek the enlightenment of the solo pilgrimage. Just because every character has a dogma doesn’t imply every character is a fanatic. Some are fair-weather believers in their path and shift the lines whenever they fail to suit. Others are, however, ardent faithful, and many of them find homes in the Temple of the Benevolent Earth or the Well, with all the rhetoric and magical wisdom that comes with it.

The Vast Underneath contains five major guilds. The Union of Cartographers and Stratigraphers is well known throughout the World Below for enlisting brave adventurers in the task of mapping geological strata and discovering safe passages through them. The Company of Artificers are dedicated to crafting everything from the simplest tools and warmest jerkins to extravagant devices and vessels that can sail beyond seaward. The Excavators and Explorers Collective sometimes clash with the Union, but where the latter map, the former dig and put themselves on the line to build safe, long-lasting tunnels between settlements, along with mines for the purpose of unearthing valuable minerals including Kaos rocks. The Kitchen is a culinary guild, to which members pledge fealty in exchange for rare ingredients, insight into the locations of unusual forms of sustenance, and a deep knowledge of poisons. Finally, the Moths are a mercantile enterprise who at one point were a community known as the Nurene, but have since become a nomadic guild of traders, outpost builders, and appraisers.

While adventurers need not claim membership in a guild, it’s highly likely a guild has recruited your character, or perhaps you know of them through someone in your ancestry or community. They’ve trained your character to perform specific tasks, such as survival in the wilderness, the procurement of strange food and drink, or the excavation of deep stones. Guilds are present in every settlement and keep eyes open on the young folk likely to survive into adolescence, as with every up-and-coming adventurer is a means of furthering their influence and knowledge of the World Below. They monitor abilities youths put on display, because every guild is watching for certain sets of attributes.

Guild: The Kitchen
Gastrevores explore sustenance and healthy needs, largely by creating detailed accounts of edible and poisonous substances, work that has given them the moniker “the Kitchen.” They examine the life cycles of slimes, worms, and molds, determine what such things eat themselves and where the most abundant supplies of them are to be found, and what medicines can be derived from them. They also explore sanitation, and the disposal and recycling of wastes (diseases spread by improper disposal, and what lifeforms of the World Below are attracted to large deposits of fresh waste).

Of course, this is only a tiny review of the much larger list of Dawn options and inspirations found in our first manuscript preview. And a character's Dawn is only one of the Paths that they walk in The World Below.

Let me know what your favorite Ancestry is in today's poll! And share your favorite community or guild or Dialectic (and why it's Myceli!) or Calling in the comments for this post! Or debate around the web! Onyx Path's Discord is pretty lively with The World Below chat! Come and join in or start your own thread or post in any discussion zone!

And please continue to spread the word about this campaign! A brand new game from Onyx Path that combines so many different topics and approaches, there's bound to be something for everyone!

Let's keep working towards hitting our funding target, and I'll be back tomorrow with a glimpse at our next manuscript preview section, which contains the rules for the Storypath Ultra system!