What You Were, and What You Become
They do not look like heroes. They look like people who have run out of easier options.
In Steel Age you play a human being in Dyrhal, shaped by the bed they were born in, the work their hands were put to, the obligations they were handed before they could refuse them, the skills they picked up along the way, and the people who still know their face.
Who your character becomes is decided in play. Who they are when they first sit down at the table is decided before it: their four attributes, whether they were born under an omen, the station and background that raised them, the skills they start with, and their first Contact.
Everyone in Dyrhal is born into a station: the shrine, the guild, the lord’s household, the land, or the streets outside all four. It is the bargain your character was born into: who fed them and what they were taught to do with their hands in return. It is the world they came out of, not the world they must stay in. You choose one Station, then a Background within it, and then a Contact from it: one person from that world who knew you before the road did.
That Contact is someone with their own work, their own dangers and their own reasons, who knows the character and matters to them, who helps when helping costs them something they can afford and refuses when it does not. When a character falls, if the bond has been maintained, this person may step forward and continue the story of the character’s name.
How it works ◇ Skill Checks · The Character Sheet · Contacts