Your Hearth

About

Your Hearth is your home base. Your Hearth is vitally important as both your retreat from the outside world and the center of your cultivation efforts. It will help you heal, craft, gather, and even train the next generation!

Like you, your Hearth will have a character sheet based on the four concrete elements. Your Hearth can Challenge in some circumstances; these Challenges represent the sum total of your communal effort and can reach stratospheric heights.

Hearth Structure:

  • Center: The Center of your Hearth is the minimum requirements to qualify as a Hearth
    • A crystal suitable to Power your wards and settlement
    • Four critical buildings, each for one of the elements, that represent minimum viability. These are what separate a Hearth with all its benefits from a mere settlement.
    • Air: School
    • Water: Clinic
    • Earth: Garden
    • Fire: Alchemical forge
  • Second ring: This ring has one slot in each of the four elements; you choose what to build in each one
    • Each structure here will consume 1 or more Power from your Crystal
  • Third ring: The outermost structure incorporates Light and Dark (such as “LightAir” and “DarkAir”)
    • Power requirements for the third ring are high
    • You may build both slots if you have the power; for example, you could build both LightAir and DarkAir
    • Third ring structures always require the second ring structure; for example, LightAir would require the Air structure in ring 2

Your Hearth will be strongest in the two elements of its Crystal. It will also suffer a Waxing element, analogous to your Bane, where Power costs are higher.

Notes:

  • Hearth bonuses persist even when you leave the physical bounds of your home.
  • You may be a member of no more than one Hearth at a time; you may change membership at Equilibrium

Founding

Crystals are a precious locus of power, and most owners are not willing to share. For most young cultivators, the only route to a Hearth of your own is to either find an untapped loci or claim one already occupied. Even those crystal loci in the wilds are usually home to ferocious beasts, wild neighbors, or other problems.

Once you have claimed the crystal (and we won’t ask details on how), you will need to prepare your initial settlement. This is a matter of time and resources rather than any particular skill. Even a crude settlement qualifies.

  • Preparing the land: You must have exclusive, unbroken control over the region where you plan to build
    • Generally, this means you have the capability to repel any threats that would threaten construction
    • This does not necessarily mean there are no threats in the region; but you must be able to at least consistently defend yourself
  • Prepare the crystal: 10 Build Downtimes total, distributed as you see fit across your party
    • During this time you must maintain exclusive, unbroken control over the crystal
  • Preparing the Center:
    • Each of the Center structures requires 2 Downtimes to prepare and a payment in Crystal Cores to activate
    • You may build the structures before you can pay in Crystal Cores; they remain dormant. The payment of crystal cores does not require a Downtime; it immediately activates the structure
    • Air: Requires: AirWater, AirEarth, AirFire
    • Water: Requires: AirWater, WaterEarth, WaterFire
    • Earth: Requires: AirEarth, WaterEarth, EarthFire
    • Fire: Requires: AirFire, WaterFire, EarthFire

At the completion of this work, you found a Hearth. Give it a good name!

What about my pad?!

Structures for daily living such as houses and shops are not tracked for your Hearth, and you should freely describe appropriate living circumstances. Of course, unless you are a skilled craftsman, your personal housing is likely to be modest for a starting Hearth.

Power

Harmony provides

Your Crystal provides geomantic Power. This Power is the lifeblood of your Hearth. Without Power, your wards do not function, and the storms of Seln will render your pretty buildings into wreckage!

Power is crucial for:

  • Activating Hearth structures
  • Maintaining Overworld regions under your control
  • Powering Hearth Actions

When you assign Power to structures, that Power may only be changed at Equilibrium thereafter.

Structure requirements

Hearth structures can have specific requirements. For example, you require access to an ocean or river to build a Harbor!

These are tracked as requirements on individual Hearth structures.

Your stable of characters

This system allows you to maintain multiple characters at a time, even if only one is the focus of your active play in most cases. The total cast of characters you control are known as your Stable. Your focal character is your Active Character; the rest are your Stabled Characters.

The storyteller determines when you can generate a new character. Usually this is a result of the passage of time or a circumstance that knocks your Active Character out of play (such as a crippling Wound or being Captured).

While stored, Stabled Characters each take one Downtime. Each maintains their own statistics independent of your Active character.

You may have one character Stabled in each Powered Second Ring structure

  • Maximum of 4 total
  • Thus you may have at most 5 characters (1 active + 4 stabled)

Retirement

Retirement is the logical end for a character that has met a major life goal. Examples:

  • Achieved a secret of cultivation
  • Met a life partner and settled down
  • Had a child
  • Accomplished a great quest

The storyteller and you should collaborate on what counts as a valid goal for retirement. Upon its fulfillment, you may permanently remove the character from play. That character returns to your Hearth and settles into a peaceful life.

You then:

  • Permanently increase your Hearth’s Power by 1

Notes:

  • If your character passes in suitably heroic fashion, the storyteller may grant retirement bonuses in honor of their passing
  • The storyteller may allow you to unretire a character under exceptional circumstances. For example, to rescue your lost son when all other means have failed.
  • Students may not retire. Just like the real world! Isn’t that great? Ah. Haha. Haaaa…

Retirement is not mandatory

Please do not feel pressured to retire characters. The game’s difficulty curve was calculated excluding retirements; you do not need a single retirement to run a campaign.