Peoples

Culture · Community

Cinderfolk

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

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.

Culture · Polity

Kilnrath

A young engineering federation born from a schism and hungry for breathsalt.

Kilnrath should feel warm, intentional, industrial, and politically intelligible.

A much larger, industrialized civilization than the Cinderfolk. Their technology is an earthier, cleaner, more primitive cousin of steampunk: crude motors on a coal-like fuel, engineering at a scale and with an ethos the village never needed. Their breakthroughs come from that energy source and those motors, and the side effects and unexpected uses of both are where their gifts come from.

They have used breathsalt only a little and built almost no infrastructure on it, but they know that harnessed properly it is enormously more efficient than their fuel, closer to the gap between coal and nuclear than to an incremental gain.

They arrived by road with vehicles, not by rail. Their first offer is fair and useful: tools that make the village's mining faster and safer, a fair price for the surplus, and regular wagon runs on the Long Road that the village may use.

Kilnrath gadgets are the intended source of Kip's early-game items.

Culture · Polity · Institution

Seraphate

An old theocratic empire built around transferable divine grace.

It may seek to destroy or drown the motherlode rather than let Kilnrath control it.