Courts Every character belongs to one allegiance: one of the seven courts, the Courtless or the Outlaws. Ranks are in Ranks; open rank claims are in #claims. Every empty throne is held by a regent, a staff NPC, until a claimant takes it.
🌙 Night Court
- Seat: House of Wind, above Velaris. Old nobility rules the Hewn City.
- Temper: secretive, proud, fiercely loyal to its own. Prythian believes the Night Court is all nightmare; Velaris prefers it that way.
- Common gifts: darkness, shadow, mind-work, starlight.
- Court Power: darkness and night, and the strongest mind-gifts in Prythian.
- Watch for: the Illyrian war-bands, who obey whoever can make them.
☀️ Day Court
- Seat: City of Day.
- Temper: learned, ordered, contemptuous of ignorance. Knowledge is currency, and the court is rich.
- Common gifts: light, fire, spell-cleaving, truth-sense.
- Court Power: sunlight, and the unmaking of spells.
- Watch for: the sealed stacks of the Great Library, and the Peregryns' own politics.
🌅 Dawn Court
- Seat: Cliffside Palace.
- Temper: gentle on the surface, relentlessly inventive beneath. Its healers are welcome everywhere; its inventors are watched everywhere.
- Common gifts: healing, light, artifice.
- Court Power: healing and renewal.
- Watch for: the Halls of Healing are neutral ground. Drawing steel there is a crime in every court.
🌸 Spring Court
- Seat: Spring Manor.
- Temper: courtly, passionate, slow to forgive. Spring guards the Wall and the holes in it.
- Common gifts: growth, shapeshifting, beast-speech.
- Court Power: growth, and the shifting of shape.
- Watch for: Rosehall, abandoned since the war, and the Calanmai fires.
🌊 Summer Court
- Seat: Island Palace, in Adriata.
- Temper: merchant-princes, rich and wary. Twice burned, never trusting.
- Common gifts: water, tide, sea-weather.
- Court Power: water and the tides.
- Watch for: the treasury everyone covets, and the pirates of the Sapphire Reefs.
🍂 Autumn Court
- Seat: Forest House.
- Temper: ambitious, fiery, at war with itself. Heirs have a habit of dying young.
- Common gifts: fire, woodcraft, the hunt.
- Court Power: fire and the turning year.
- Watch for: the Great Hunt in the Hunting Grounds.
❄️ Winter Court
- Seat: Winter Palace.
- Temper: patient, stoic, long-memoried. Winter endures what kills other courts.
- Common gifts: ice, snow, cold.
- Court Power: ice and the deep cold.
- Watch for: the White Wastes, where cold kills faster than steel.
🔥 Courtless
Wanderers, mercenaries, scholars, merchants and anyone who never swore to a court.
- Free to travel anywhere outside court cities. Entering a court's lands takes a writ, a guide or a believable reason.
- No court training (see Abilities), no court missions, no court protection.
- Rank by reputation: Wanderer, C-Class, B-Class, A-Class (see Ranks).
- A courtless character may swear to a court in play at any time.
🗝️ Outlaws
Oathbreakers who fled their court with its secrets, and criminals every court wants dead.
- Former rank is stripped. Standing is a Bounty class (see Ranks).
- Death-enabled whenever recognized by someone who would reasonably know them.
- Hunting parties may join any outlaw's thread they could reasonably track.
- Redemption exists, rarely, and only in play.