The Unseen Craft

A blade without a hilt — and every Working tests the hand that grips it.

Steel Age is not a high-magic setting. Scholars reckon that one person in five hundred has the potential, and one in a thousand practises. Most learned voices hold that magic is shaped through the Nine, yet its deepest root seems tied to the unnamed, unseen Tenth — a presence little understood and less trusted.

Those who wield it are not a separate profession of robed mystics standing behind the shield wall. They are warriors, judges, hunters, priests and wanderers first, who reach for the Craft when necessity, discipline or conviction demands it.

How it works

• Only the Omen-Born — your birth omen fixes your Path, and it cannot be exchanged or added to.
• Ten Paths, seventy-two Workings — a Path is a disciplined ascent, not a toolkit. Power expands vertically, never laterally.
• Strain, not spell slots — nothing is prepared and nothing is spent. Every Working pushes back, first with faltering force, then exhaustion, then blood.
• Casting takes time — a Working in combat spans two segments. Interrupt the caster and it fails, and the Strain is owed anyway.
• Ritual work is noticed — power drawn deliberately, without the cover of violence and urgency, gathers weight. Something notices what lingers.

Prized when it solves what no steel or coin can. Distrusted always.