Group

Cinderfolk

The valley's older, hearth-centered people and the community at the emotional center of Breathsalt.

Notes

Their culture is animist and shaped by manners, hearths, and deep-hearth taboos rather than state power.

Economy: small and local. Goats for milk and meat, an apple orchard, crops in rows, timber, and the seasonal hearthsalt mine. They have a currency and occasionally trade outside the valley, at a scale limited by what one runner can carry over a poor road.

Breathsalt is behind-the-scenes fuel for heat and light, not the trade good. Heat is their native competence; they have a greenhouse, wells and some river control without indoor plumbing, and heat water at the hearth. Whether they can make glass is open.

They are smart, resourceful, and pragmatic, and they have already solved, in cruder form, most problems that heat, hands, and water can solve. What they cannot make is what an industrial scale makes: cold on demand, precision, and reach.

Canonical record

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "id": "cinderfolk",
  "name": "Cinderfolk",
  "aliases": [],
  "summary": "The valley's older, hearth-centered people and the community at the emotional center of Breathsalt.",
  "details": [
    "Their culture is animist and shaped by manners, hearths, and deep-hearth taboos rather than state power.",
    "Economy: small and local. Goats for milk and meat, an apple orchard, crops in rows, timber, and the seasonal hearthsalt mine. They have a currency and occasionally trade outside the valley, at a scale limited by what one runner can carry over a poor road.",
    "Breathsalt is behind-the-scenes fuel for heat and light, not the trade good. Heat is their native competence; they have a greenhouse, wells and some river control without indoor plumbing, and heat water at the hearth. Whether they can make glass is open.",
    "They are smart, resourceful, and pragmatic, and they have already solved, in cruder form, most problems that heat, hands, and water can solve. What they cannot make is what an industrial scale makes: cold on demand, precision, and reach."
  ],
  "relations": [],
  "supersededByRefs": [],
  "history": [
    {
      "id": "cinderfolk-world-cinderfolk",
      "at": "2026-09-08T01:09:31.579Z",
      "summary": "Protected the Cinderfolk premise.",
      "reason": "Their worldview ties ordinary village life to the dangerous geology below it.",
      "mentions": [],
      "source": {
        "kind": "review-migration",
        "label": "Prototype review: world-cinderfolk",
        "locator": "archive/migrations/2026-09-08-prototype-review.json#review.answers.world-cinderfolk"
      }
    },
    {
      "id": "cinderfolk-economy-recorded",
      "at": "2026-09-13T22:00:00.000Z",
      "summary": "Recorded the Cinderfolk economy and technical competence.",
      "reason": "An earlier conversation had settled these but never wrote them down; the sweetener could not be judged without them. The owner supplied them again.",
      "mentions": [
        "ref:breathsalt",
        "ref:village-goat",
        "ref:orchard-court",
        "ref:long-road",
        "ref:tam"
      ],
      "source": {
        "kind": "conversation",
        "label": "Kilnrath sweetener and next-levels discussion, 2026-09-13"
      }
    }
  ],
  "kind": "group",
  "categories": [
    "culture",
    "community"
  ],
  "image": "assets/groups/wrought-naturalism/cinderfolk.webp"
}