Campaign Tools

Session Preparation

A prepared Ix session has exactly four elements.

One: A faction front that is going to tick this session whether or not the players touch it. This is the world moving on its own. It produces the ambient pressure that makes Ix feel alive. It does not need to be an encounter. It can be a notice posted in the market, a death-keeper seen working the district, a registered household that was not registered last week.

Two: One player-character thread that will get direct attention this session. Not all of them, one. Pick the one with the most forward energy right now (the most recently activated objective, the most recent discovery, the most obvious next step) and prepare what happens when it is pursued. Let the others move through faction clock events and background texture.

Three: Two or three specific locations that are fully prepared and ready for unstructured exploration if the party decides to go there. Not every location they might visit: the ones they are most likely to visit based on where session ended. If they are investigating the Merchants' Quarter, prepare three specific places in the Quarter: one you expect them to go to, one you expect might be interesting if they look around, one you expect to be a dead end that still feels inhabited.

Four: One planned complication: not a surprise obstacle, but a situation that genuinely complicates a decision the party will face. A contact who gives accurate information that creates a dilemma rather than a solution. An NPC who wants something incompatible with what the party wants but is not hostile. A piece of the faction clock that arrives early because one tick happened off-screen.

Prepare these four things. Prepare them fully. Arrive at the table with them ready. Everything else is response.

Session Shape in Ix

A typical Ix session has three zones:

Opening: The world delivers. Faction clock tick-events arrive. NPCs the party has relationships with make contact. The setting shows something it would have shown regardless of the party's involvement. This establishes the world's continuity and signals that things were happening while the party was not looking.

Middle: The party pursues. Investigation, travel, social negotiation, confrontation. This is where the two or three prepared locations get used, where the player-character thread advances, and where the prepared complication arrives. The middle is the longest zone and the most responsive to what the party does. The GM's job here is to play the world honestly: what does each NPC actually want? What does each faction actually know? What actually happens if the party does this?

Closing: Something changes. The session does not end at the midpoint of a scene. It ends after a definable change in the world: a faction front completes or fails, a player character thread reaches a decision point or a revelation, a relationship shifts, a location is altered. The change does not have to be dramatic. It has to be real.

The First Session

The first session of an Ix campaign has one job: establish that the world has weight and that the party's choices in it matter.

Do not use the first session to deliver exposition. Deliver the world through situation. An immediate problem that requires the party to interact with at least two of the pressure systems (divine, soul economy, planar, factional) is better than a prologue that explains the same information. Let them discover what they discover. Trust that the setting rewards investigation.

Concrete starter situations that work for Ix first sessions:

• A death-keeper is working a site the party passes through; the soul she is trying to protect has been intercepted; she will ask for help with the recovery.
• An Accord keeper arrives at the inn where the party is staying and requests a witness for a contract signing, but one party to the contract is not what they appear.
• The rift at the edge of town has been stable for thirty years and opened again last night; something came through that should not have been on the other side.
• A party member's Background connection is in trouble with something institutional: an Oshalan inquiry, an infernal debt claim, a Themela court case with more weight than it should have.

Each of these opens into the campaign's living world without requiring exposition.

Between Sessions

The GM's between-session work for Ix:

Advance faction clocks. For every faction with an active front, determine whether the party's last session affected it. Advance untouched fronts by one tick. Pull back affected fronts as appropriate. Note what the next tick produces and whether it is visible.

Update NPC states. Note any NPC whose situation changed based on what the party did. Did the party tell someone something? That person now knows it. Did the party help or harm an NPC? That NPC's behavior and available support changes accordingly.

Check divine attention. If the party did anything involving a deity's portfolio, a significant death, a significant contract violation, a public act of faith or faithlessness, note whether that deity's agents would have observed it. If yes, decide what the observation produces. Not necessarily an encounter. Sometimes a note in an archive. Sometimes an Accord keeper sends a polite inquiry.

Prepare the next session's four elements. Pick the faction front that will tick. Pick the player-character thread. Pick the three locations. Design the complication.

XP and Advancement

Ix uses session-based XP distribution rather than milestone or encounter-based advancement. Each session in which a character was meaningfully present earns them XP equal to the chronicle tier: a starting chronicle distributes 15–20 XP per session.

Additionally, specific events earn bonus XP outside the session award:

• Completing a faction front (either resolving it or preventing it): +5 XP to involved characters
• Resolving a soul-economy threat (recovering an intercepted soul, voiding an infernal contract, protecting a dying person's passage): +5 XP to involved characters
• A significant relationship milestone (an NPC relationship changes tier, a divine relationship produces a tangible consequence): +5 XP to the character most responsible

Do not announce the bonus XP while it is being earned. Declare it at session end with a brief explanation of what earned it. This reinforces that the meaningful work was meaningful.

Rewards and Wealth

Coin is a pacing tool. A party that can already buy everything at their stage stops reading the equipment chapter, and a party that can buy nothing stops engaging with the economy at all. Set an expected rate by campaign stage, then let individual hauls vary around it. Prices are not repeated here; every band referenced below lives in the Player's Guide, Equipment, Services, and Flargons.

Campaign Stages

A stage is defined by total XP earned in play after character creation, not by session count and not by character level, which Ix does not use. The per-session award does not change between stages; it stays at 15 to 20 XP (XP and Advancement, above). What changes is what the accumulated XP has made the party capable of, and therefore what they are hired for and what they can carry away.

Read the coin column as a party total across the whole session, not a per-character award, and not a guaranteed payment. A session with no violence and no sold cargo pays nothing, and that is correct. What the column controls is the average over a stage: if the party is consistently landing above the band, the next stage's prices arrive early and the equipment chapter stops mattering.

Lifestyle is the floor, not the target. Upkeep at the listed tier is the cost of being where the party already is. A character who stops paying it drops a tier and loses the social access that tier bought, which is usually a faction consequence before it is a mechanical one. Characters between adventures in a city pay upkeep; characters in the field pay rations and stabling instead.

Loot by Adversary Tier and by Source

What an adversary carries and what a site holds are two different questions. Answer the first from tier, the second from source, and add them.

A Nemesis carrying no coin is a legitimate and often better result. What a Nemesis has is a key, a ledger, a seal, a contract, or a name, and those are worth more to the campaign than a purse.

Roll the relic chance once per site, before the session, not once per body. If it comes up, design the item with the four-part tool in Chapter Seven before play, because an item improvised at the table acquires properties you will spend the rest of the campaign regretting.

Selling harvest takes a buyer and a check. Every catalog harvest row names a buyer, a check, and a complication alongside its Typical Value. The party does not convert a carcass to coin by killing it. They convert it by finding the natural philosopher, the wardwright, or the fence who wants it, passing the listed check, and accepting the listed complication. Treat a large harvest as a trade run (Trade and Mercantile Play, below) rather than a lump payment.

Hoards and Lairs

A dragon hoard in Ix is mostly objects, not coin. Every dragon entry in the Adversary Catalog says so in its harvest table: the Anchor keeps orbital hoard objects, the Ore keeps foundation stones, the Prism keeps drained items, the Tide keeps wreckage, the Umbral keeps last things. Each of those rows lists a buyer and an authentication check because each object has a prior owner, and that owner is the adventure.

Build a lair in three parts:

• Harvest. Where the catalog entry prints a harvest table, use it unchanged. For a true dragon this is the largest single component, commonly 3,000 to 250,000 gf across three or four rows, and most of it requires a Hard or Severe check to take intact.
• Coin. Keep the coin portion smaller than the harvest portion, so the party has to do the work of selling. A drake lair holds 1,000 to 5,000 gf. A young dragon's lair holds 100 to 400 Gold Bars. An established Nemesis dragon's lair holds 400 to 1,500 Gold Bars, and an Elder variant doubles that.
• Claimed objects. At least a third of the hoard's stated value should be objects someone can name. Returning one settles a debt, opens a faction, or reopens a land dispute. Selling it makes an enemy who knows what was sold.

Drake lairs (Cave Drake, Wyvern, Tunnel Drake, and the other Elite entries) hold accumulated goods rather than a hoard: one or two harvest rows, salvaged gear, and the belongings of whoever the drake ate. Do not give an Elite a Nemesis hoard because the fight was hard.

Placing Magic Items

Consumables and augmentations are bought, crafted, and priced. They are not loot placement; they are shopping, and their price bands are in the Player's Guide. Bespoke and sentient items cannot be bought at any price, because no mortal can make one. Those are the items this section governs.

Attunement caps the whole system. A bearer holds attuned permanent items up to their Willpower. Placing more bespoke items than the party's combined Willpower will hold does not make them richer; it makes the items inert and the reward meaningless. Before placing an item, count what the intended bearer is already carrying.

Use Disposition only for sentient items. A bespoke item has properties and possibly a catch. A sentient item has a Disposition toward its current bearer and moves along that track based on how the bearer treats it and whether they honor its nature. Start a found sentient item at Wary unless the circumstances of the finding argue otherwise, and move it one step at most per session, in the direction the bearer's conduct earned. Announce the movement in fiction, never as a number. When bearer and item want different things, contest Discipline against the item's Willpower, as Chapter Seven directs. A sentient item that has been Accepting for six sessions with no test is not a character; it is a stat bonus with a name.

Rewards That Are Not Coin

The rewards that change a campaign are the ones that change what is possible, not the ones that change what is affordable. Five kinds work reliably in Ix:

• A favor. A specific named NPC owes the party one specific thing, and the party knows what it is. Vague goodwill is not a reward; a stated favor is.
• A title or commission. A White Rose commission, a guild rank, an Accord standing. It buys access to procedures, not dice.
• Land or a holding. It generates upkeep, tenants, obligations, and a place a faction can threaten.
• Faction standing. The cleanest version is mechanical: remove a tick from a hostile faction's clock, add one to a friendly front, or give the party the right to set a front themselves (Chapter Six).
• A retainer. A season of an elite retainer's wage prepaid, or a retainer who starts one step higher on Loyalty than their template allows (Hirelings, Followers, and Retainers, below).

Prefer a non-coin reward when the coin award would push the party above their stage band, when the party has already bought everything their stage can use, when the patron is an institution rather than a purse, or when the reward should create an obligation rather than settle one. A noble house that pays in coin is finished with you. A noble house that pays in standing is not.

Building NPCs That Matter

An NPC who appears more than once needs three things: a specific goal they are actively pursuing, a specific fear that shapes how they act under pressure, and at least one concrete relationship to the world: an institution, a person, a debt, or an obligation. With those three elements, you can improvise any conversation or response the party generates.

The goal must be specific. "The merchant wants to protect her business" is not a goal; it is a category. "The merchant needs the Oshalan registrar to approve her goods license before the end of the month or she loses the warehouse lease she has held for twenty years" is a goal. The specificity produces the behavior: she will take risks she would not normally take, she will be friendly to people who can help her, and she will be hostile to anyone who makes the registrar's approval less likely.

The fear produces the tell. Fear is the thing that turns composed NPCs into legible ones at the table. An official who fears public embarrassment will accept bribes in private; push him toward public exposure and the bribe option disappears entirely. An infernal clerk who fears her own contract's terms being examined will use every social tool available to redirect conversation away from that topic, and a player who succeeds at a Perception check can notice the redirection. Write the fear; the behavior follows.

The relationship creates the world. An NPC without relationships is a prop. An NPC who owes the Accord keeper across the street a favor, who went to school with the current guard captain, and who privately funds the Nyxollox death-keeper's hospice has context, and that context can become the party's resource or obstacle depending on what they do with it.

The minimum NPC record:

Recurring NPCs earn a history. An NPC the party has interacted with three or more times should have notes on what happened in each interaction and how their goal, fear, or relationships have changed as a result. An NPC who has been betrayed by the party will not make the same offer twice. An NPC who has been helped will remember it, and so will the Accord's archive, if the help was public enough to constitute an act of record.

Named NPCs in this guide. Several NPCs are named in the faction and campaign chapters of this book. Each is introduced with a goal and context sufficient for immediate use. They are not locked; their behavior evolves with your campaign's events.

Pacing and Rest

End of structured encounter: Recover Strain equal to Willpower when a fight, chase, negotiation, hazard scene, or other structured encounter ends.

Short rest (15 minutes): Recover Strain equal to Willpower. This is in addition to end-of-encounter recovery; if the party finishes a fight and then rests for 15 minutes in relative safety, both recoveries apply. Wounds do not recover during a short rest. A second short rest in the same session requires the party to find genuine safety, not just a pause: a secured room, defensible camp, friendly shelter, or enough distance from pursuit that no one is keeping watch with a weapon already raised.

Full rest (8 hours, safe and uninterrupted): Recover all Strain, except if the character was incapacitated by Strain during the preceding encounter, in which case they recover only half their Strain Points (rounded down). Recover Wounds equal to Might, but only if the character is at 0 or above. A character at negative Wounds must be healed back to 0 first; natural rest cannot proceed from a negative total. Critical Injuries begin their recovery track; most require additional Medicine checks to progress.

Extended recovery (multiple days, receiving care): Required for Severe injuries (61–85) and the Shattered and Maimed entries (101–120), and for any character still at negative Wounds who needs gradual healing. Each day of appropriate care and full rest allows another Medicine check. The GM defines "appropriate care": a healer, a facility, specific medicines, or magical intervention. The 121–150 entries follow the critical care limits in the Player Guide (Chapter Thirteen).

Death, Replacement Characters, and the Wipe

The Critical Injury table in Chapter Nine kills outright only at 141 to 150. Everything above 96 kills on a clock the entry names: Failing at the end of the scene, At Death's Door at the start of the character's next turn, Lights Going Out at the end of the round. Run that clock out loud. Say which beat the character dies on and what would answer it, then let the table decide whether anyone spends the Action, the Fortune Point, or the working. Then stop on the beat, not the scene: the others are still in a fight, and the body is now an objective, because a Revive working is live for roughly 24 hours and nothing else is.

The passage. A player character's soul runs the six-step passage in Chapter Four on the same terms as anyone else's. Open that chapter and run it rather than summarizing it. Three points matter at the table. The river wait is the Revive window, and it closes the moment the soul boards. Judgment is the only decision point, and a live infernal claim is entered there, not earlier. After claim assignment the party is negotiating with an owner, which is a different adventure from contesting a claim.

The replacement character. The default is the new character's species starting XP plus the party's average XP earned in play, banked and spent however the player chooses, with no obligation to rebuild the dead character's role. They enter at the next scene break, and you owe the table a reason they were there before the session ends. The alternative, entry at species starting XP with no earned share, makes death cost progression as well as the character; use it only if the group agreed to that in session one, never as a ruling made after the first funeral.

Retainers step up. A combat retainer or trusted specialist already on the party's books (Hirelings, Followers, and Retainers, below) is the cleanest bridge into the empty seat. Promote the profile to a full NPC, hand the sheet to the player if they want it, and set Loyalty from where the death left it. A retainer who watched an employer die does not inherit that employer's Morale.

A party wipe. A wipe ends a chronicle, not the campaign. Every coin forms and every passage runs, so the world keeps a record: filed contracts sit in the Accord archive, and the Nyxollox Death-Keepers who witnessed the deaths, or failed to, know who died unattended and where (Chapter Six). Advance every clock the party was contesting to completion or one tick short of it, then open the next chronicle inside those consequences. The new party is hired by, investigating, or living under whatever the old party failed to stop, and recovering the bodies is a job someone will pay for.

Building Encounters

An encounter is not a stat block: it is a situation with participants. The adversaries are one element; the location, the objective, and the exit conditions are the rest.

Encounter sizing for a party of four starting-tier characters:

These are rough guidelines, not formulas. What makes an encounter hard is not numbers: it is adversary abilities that complicate the party's strategy. An Elite with an ability that neutralizes the party's biggest asset can be harder than two Elites without one.

Scaling for party size: Remove 1 Elite or 3–4 Minions per missing party member. Add 1 Elite or 3–4 Minions per additional party member beyond four.

The three encounter questions:

1. What does the enemy want? (Their objective, not just "defeat the players.")
2. What does the party want? (Does killing every enemy achieve it, or does the party need something else?)
3. What is the terrain? (Name two features before rolling initiative.)

Encounter objectives beyond "defeat the enemies": The most interesting encounters have a second track running alongside the combat. Enemies who are delaying while something else completes. A civilian the party must protect. A document that must not leave the building. A contract being signed in the next room. Adding an objective beyond "reduce enemies to 0 Wounds" makes every Boon and Bane spend feel like a genuine decision.

When to skip the encounter: A chase or social encounter often produces more meaningful decisions than a combat encounter at the same dramatic moment. If the answer to the situation is "fight these people until they stop," consider whether pursuing, negotiating, or investigating produces a more interesting scene. Combat is right when the stakes require it and wrong when it is the path of least narrative resistance.

Encounter Budgets Beyond Starting Tier

The sizing table above is calibrated for a party of four starting-tier characters. Past that point, size encounters with a budget instead of a composition list, because the same budget can be spent on more adversaries, on better ones, or on the same ones made more dangerous.

The Budget Unit

The budget is denominated in XP, and it is the same XP the Adversary Catalog refers to when a chapter tells you to build an adversary up from its base stat block by spending XP equal to a talent's Tier cost. Talent Tier costs are the player-side costs in the Player's Guide: 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 XP for Tiers 1 through 5. Adversary talents and adversary bodies come out of the same pool.

An Elite that has bought two Tier 2 talents costs 30 XP, the same as a bare Nemesis, and that is the correct trade. A specialist Elite built to break the party's favored tactic is worth a Nemesis body, and it dies faster.

Budgets by Campaign Stage

Stages are defined in Rewards and Wealth, above.

Party size: adjust by 10 XP per character above or below four, at every stage. This is the same adjustment as the sizing table's "remove one Elite or three to four Minions per missing party member," stated in budget terms.

Worked examples. A Veteran Hard encounter is 60 XP. Spend it as one Nemesis, one Elite, and a Tier 4 talent on the Elite (30 + 10 + 20), or as two Elites, two Minion groups, and a Tier 4 talent on one Elite (10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 20). A Renowned Extreme encounter is 120 XP. Spend it as two Nemeses (60), one Elite (10), two Minion groups (20), and 30 XP of talents distributed where they hurt most, or as one Nemesis carrying 50 XP of talents (80) supported by four Minion groups (40).

Budget is a sanity check, not a promise. What actually makes an encounter hard is an ability that complicates the party's plan, which is why talents cost the same as bodies.

Scaling an Encounter

Four levers, in order of how much they change the encounter:

• Add a Nemesis (+30 XP). The largest single step available. It converts a fight into a fight with a decision in it, because a Nemesis has Peril, acts on its own agenda, and can leave. Do not add a second Nemesis to punish a party that is winning; add one because the fiction produced one.
• Double the Minion groups (+10 XP per group). The cheapest pressure that does not raise lethality much. More groups mean more initiative slots, more board control, and more attention the party has to spend, while each group still dies to a single good round. Use this when you want the party stretched, not injured.
• Terrain (free). Costs no budget and changes more than most talents. Name two features before initiative, per Building Encounters, above. A terrain hazard is what the sizing table already uses to push a Nemesis encounter from Hard to Extreme.
• Peril. Give a Nemesis a Peril track starting at 2, as Chapter Thirteen directs, and raise it to 3 for a Renowned-stage Nemesis. This pool belongs to that Nemesis and is separate from the session Peril economy, in which the GM's Peril Points flip back and forth with player Fortune Points (Chapter Nine). Spend a Nemesis's Peril to change the encounter's shape rather than to add damage, and say aloud when you spend it.

What not to scale. Do not raise Wounds or Resistance above the catalog values to compensate for a party that is performing well. The catalog is canon for those numbers, and inflating them produces a longer fight, not a harder one. Spend budget on talents, add bodies, or change the terrain and the objective.

Trade and Mercantile Play

Haggling (Player's Guide, Equipment, Services, and Flargons) settles a single price between a buyer and a seller over a specific item. Trade is the larger game: buying cheap in one market, carrying goods through risk, and selling dear in another where demand, timing, relationships, and logistics all matter. The principle that keeps the two distinct is simple, haggling changes a deal; trade creates the deal.

Use this subsystem for caravans, ships, and bulk cargo, grain, ore, timber, cloth, spices, salt, arms, livestock, salvage. Do not reach for it when the party is unloading three goblin swords and a candlestick; that is haggling, or just vendor pricing. And keep it light: ordinary merchants turn a modest profit under ordinary conditions. A good roll improves the margin; a bad one thins it or invites trouble. It should rarely wipe a trader out; that is what a Calamity is for.

Trade uses the skills the world already has: Negotiation for commercial dealing, Streetwise for market intelligence and contacts, and the relevant Lore for knowing routes and goods. Transport legs use Survival, Operate, Piloting, Riding, or Leadership as the leg demands.

The Trade Loop

A run has four steps, each a chance for profit, loss, or a story: identify the opportunity, buy the cargo, transport it, sell it.

Step 1, Identify the Opportunity. One check (Streetwise, Negotiation, or Lore) to find what is undervalued here and wanted elsewhere.

Modifiers: local contacts or a merchant network, +1 Boon; recent market intelligence, +1 Boon; operating outside a familiar region, +1 Bane; a market disrupted by war, plague, or blockade, +1 Trial; illegal or politically sensitive goods, +1 Trial. Success names a profitable commodity and destination; failure means the route is ordinary or crowded; a Calamity means the tip is wrong, stale, manipulated, or already worked by rivals.

Step 2, Buy the Cargo. Only roll if the players are actively trying to improve their terms. Accepting normal wholesale needs no roll, trade should not force dice for routine business.

Step 3, Transport the Cargo. Risk is what keeps trade from becoming a spreadsheet. Make one check per meaningful leg (a long route has several) using the skill the leg demands, Survival overland, Operate or Piloting by water or air, Riding for a beast train, Leadership to hold a caravan together. Legs can also draw on the chase and aerial-combat rules in Chapter Fourteen when a journey turns violent.

Bake ordinary loss into the expected margin; the roll decides whether this run beats or trails the norm.

Step 4, Sell the Cargo. One check (Negotiation or Streetwise) to convert cargo into coin.

Modifiers: goods urgently needed, remove 1 Trial; high quality or a trusted relationship or the freedom to wait for better buyers, +1 Boon each; arrived late or needing immediate cash, +1 Bane each; a market flooded by competitors or illegal goods, +1 Trial each.

Profit Bands

Do not count individual coins unless the campaign is about commerce. Set a base margin by route, then adjust by how the run actually went.

Example. A trader buys 500 gf of iron tools in a mining town for a frontier settlement, a regional opportunity, base 20%. The purchase roll succeeds (+10%); the transport leg fails (−10%); the sale succeeds. Net margin 20%, a 600 gf sale. Money made, but the rough leg cost the better outcome.

Capacity and Market Size

Trade is bounded by capital (coin tied up in stock), cargo space (wagons, pack animals, ships, warehouses), time (travel, loading, inspection), and risk, and by how much a market can actually absorb. A starving village may need salt and still be unable to buy a shipload of it.

Market Tags, Not Price Lists

You do not need a commodity table for every settlement, give each a few tags, and the cheap, the dear, and the story all become obvious at a glance. (Names below are illustrative; tag your own settlements.)

• Greyharbor — exports fish, salt, timber · imports grain, iron tools, cloth · complication heavy tariffs · trait major port.
• Redvale — exports wool, horses, leather · imports salt, wine, worked metal · complication bandit activity · trait seasonal market.
• Stonewatch — exports ore, stone, weapons · imports food, lamp oil, livestock · complication guild monopoly · trait mining town.

Market Events

Markets that change make trade a story. Drop a temporary event on a settlement and treat it as a hook, not just background.

Haggling Inside a Trade Run

The two systems connect without replacing each other. The trade rolls decide whether the opportunity is good; a haggle may sharpen one term of it: the purchase price, the sale price, credit, tariffs, storage, shipping, or an exclusivity arrangement. Cap the stacking: one trade roll to structure the transaction, and one haggling roll to press for a single additional concession. A successful haggle improves the margin by about 5% or wins a non-cash benefit; failure creates friction or closes that supplier. That keeps haggling useful without letting players pile negotiation rolls onto the same cargo.

Hirelings, Followers, and Retainers

Adventurers do not have to do everything themselves. They can hire porters to carry gear, teamsters to drive wagons, guides to cross strange country, guards to protect a caravan, healers to tend the wounded, or specialists to solve problems beyond the party's skill. Collectively these NPCs are retainers, and they let a party operate at a larger scale without becoming a second adventuring group the players run.

Retainers stay NPCs under your control. They are not spare player characters, and they do not accept unreasonable risk just because they were paid. A cook will make meals on a hard road; a caravan guard will fight off bandits. Neither agreed to descend into a crypt and trade blows with the dead unless that was plainly part of the deal.

Use the lightest detail the situation needs, and only roll when the answer could change the scene. A porter needs no check to carry a pack down a normal road, but may need a Dedication check to keep going once a wyvern is known to stalk the pass. A cook needs no check to make dinner, but may need a Flexibility check to pick up a spear when the camp is ambushed.

Defining a Retainer

A retainer is described by seven traits. The first three are fixed at hiring; the last four are living values you adjust in play.

Competence comes from the retainer's profile and skills; Dedication and Flexibility measure willingness, not ability. A cook with high Flexibility may grab a spear in a crisis: that does not make the cook a soldier.

Skill Tiers, Wages, and Hazard Pay

These wages assume ordinary work in ordinary conditions; the employer also covers food, lodging, transport, and necessary gear. (The Player's Guide Services table lists the same baseline rates.)

A specialist may charge by the task instead of the day; a physician giving ongoing care runs about 10 gf/day plus costly medicines. Hazard pay scales the wage when the work is dangerous:

A retainer may take a dangerous job below rate out of Loyalty, desperation, shared belief, or personal stake, but that is the exception, not the default.

Morale

Morale is the retainer's current confidence and sense of safety. It changes often, begins at 0, and never leaves the range −2 to +2.

Raise Morale by 1 for a fair bonus after danger, protecting retainers at real cost, good food or healing in hardship, a hard job well finished, or unusual fairness. Lower it by 1 for a missed payment, poor provisions, a concealed danger, avoidable casualties, abandonment, or abusive and reckless orders. A retainer at −2 may leave at the first chance; one at +2 may stay even when offered more elsewhere.

Loyalty

Loyalty is how hard it is to turn a retainer against their employer, to bribe, intimidate, or manipulate them into betrayal, theft, or looking the other way. Most new hires start at 1; someone who joins from friendship or shared belief may start at 2.

When someone tries to corrupt a retainer, they roll the appropriate social skill at Average, and you upgrade the difficulty once for each point of the retainer's Loyalty (Trial Dice become Crisis Dice). Adjust with Boon/Bane for the specific ask: unpaid or mistreated retainer, or asked only to ignore a minor infraction, or facing real danger for refusing → Boon Dice to the corrupter; harm to innocents, a violation of the retainer's core beliefs, or a retainer treated exceptionally well → Bane Dice. Loyalty moves slowly, up only through sustained fair treatment, shared hardship, or a real act of trust; down through serious mistreatment or betrayal.

Dedication

Dedication is willingness to do the agreed job when it turns unpleasant or dangerous. No check for routine work, only when an agreed duty becomes unusually hard. The retainer rolls Willpower alone (no skill; this reflects gut resolve, not training). Build the pool using Willpower as both the die count and the upgrade source; then upgrade the positive dice once per point of Dedication (so a retainer with Willpower 2 and Dedication 2 rolls 2 Mastery Dice). Apply Morale. Most start at 1; seasoned professionals at 2.

On success the retainer carries on; on failure they refuse, retreat, freeze, seek safety, or demand new terms.

Flexibility

Flexibility is willingness to take on work outside the agreed role. The retainer rolls Willpower alone, upgrade once per point of Flexibility, apply Morale (same pool construction as Dedication above). Most start at 0 or 1. On success they will attempt the task, still using their own actual skills to resolve it.

Starting Values and Stat Templates

Build a retainer fast from one of these value packages, then hang a stat template and a role package on it. The values are guidelines: a desperate mercenary, frightened guide, or idealistic squire may vary.

All templates use baseline characteristics MIG 2 · AGI 2 · INT 2 · SAV 2 · WIL 2 · CHA 2 unless noted. Like all Minions and Elites, retainers do not track Strain; Strain results against them convert to Wounds at 1:1 (see Chapter Nine).

• Unskilled Laborer (porter, stable hand, camp laborer). Resistance 2; Wounds 5. One role skill at rank 1. Untrained in combat, improvises if forced to fight.
• Skilled Hand (teamster, sailor, hunter, artisan, guide). Raise one relevant characteristic to 3. Resistance 2; Wounds 7. One primary role skill at rank 2, one related skill at rank 1.
• Specialist (physician, engineer, scholar, master artisan). Raise one relevant and one secondary characteristic to 3. Resistance 2; Wounds 8. One specialty skill at rank 3, two related skills at rank 1–2. Use an Elite profile when acting independently.
• Guard or Mercenary (caravan guard, watchman, soldier). MIG 3. Resistance 4 while armored; Wounds 6. Light Melee 1, Light Ranged 1, Perception 1. Basic weapon, light armor. Usually run as Minion groups.
• Veteran Guard or Bodyguard (seasoned soldier, scout, named mercenary). MIG 3, AGI 3, WIL 3. Resistance 5 while armored; Wounds 12. Discipline 2, one combat skill at rank 2 (Light Melee, Heavy Melee, Light Ranged, or Heavy Ranged), Perception 2, one secondary skill 1. Usually an Elite.

Role packages suggest skills without a custom block:

Retainers in Combat

A retainer fights willingly only when combat was part of the role, or when there is no reasonable alternative. Combat-trained retainers act as Minions (guard and mercenary groups) or, for important veterans and named bodyguards, Elites. Noncombat retainers take cover, lead animals clear, shield civilians, or flee; one may pitch in after a successful Flexibility check, but still fights as an untrained profile.

Call for a Dedication check from a combat retainer when the group is cut to half strength, a nearby ally is killed by something frightening, the employer abandons the fight, the enemy looks overwhelming, they are ordered to hold with no line of retreat, or a source with a Fear rating of 3 or higher comes into play. Failure is not always blind panic: they may withdraw in order, take cover, refuse to advance, guard the wounded, or demand a retreat.

Managing Groups

When the party hires many similar retainers, track them as a group, not a roster. A wagon train of eight teamsters, twelve guards, four laborers, and a cook needs one Morale score per category, not twenty-five records; guards share a Minion profile and make a single Dedication check when morale breaks matter. Individuals step out of the group when the story gives them a reason to.

Advancement and Followers

Retainers improve slowly. After a retainer completes a major undertaking, survives substantial danger, or serves faithfully a long while, award a Service Mark; after two, grant one improvement, +1 to Loyalty, Dedication, or Flexibility (max 4); a better role skill; a more capable profile; a signature ability; or graduation into a named follower with goals of their own. A real jump in competence should raise the expected wage.

A follower is a retainer who serves for more than money, friendship, faith, gratitude, family, duty, ambition, a shared cause. They still need provisions, fair treatment, and respect, and they may refuse orders that violate their beliefs or risk them pointlessly. Their bond with the party should matter even when no coin changes hands.

Downtime

Between sessions, or between significant in-fiction time blocks, characters can pursue downtime activities. These are not just bookkeeping: they are the period when faction relationships shift, skills deepen, and debts get paid or called in. One meaningful activity per character per downtime block is the default. A short break (a few days) allows one light activity; a long gap (weeks or more) can accommodate two, or one with more substantial investment.

Only roll when the outcome could change the story. Routine training and ordinary recovery need no dice.

Divine attention and downtime. If a character took significant action involving a deity's portfolio during the preceding session, downtime is when the consequences arrive. The GM should make at least one quiet observation between sessions: a letter from an Accord keeper, a dream that carries weight, a death-keeper who seems to already know what happened. Downtime is where the world catches up.

Opposed Checks

The Exodus NDS Core Rules provide the full opposed-check framework. The short version: when two characters are in direct, active competition, both build and roll dice pools. The character with more net Successes wins; if they tie, the initiating character loses and the defender holds position by default. For even-weighted conflicts like a bidding war, the GM may call it a draw or use Boons to break the tie.

In Ix, opposed checks come up in the following situations most often. Use these as worked examples when teaching the system to new players or resolving unusual cases at the table.

Bluff versus Read. A character making a false claim rolls Deception; the suspicious party rolls Perception. Net Successes determine who wins. On a tie, the listener holds their prior position: a suspicious listener remains unconvinced, while an already-trusting listener may accept the claim but with visible doubts. Boons on the losing side provide useful detail regardless: the listener who fails the Perception check but generates 2 Boons knows something is off, even if they cannot put a finger on what.

Chase pressure. Use the Player Guide's range-band chase procedure as the default. The quarry moves to widen the gap and may spend an Action to introduce an obstacle; the pursuer moves to close the gap and may spend an Action on a called skill check to cut ahead. Use opposed checks only for a direct contest inside that procedure, such as two riders fighting for the same alley mouth or two pilots forcing position in the same air lane. Boons on either side can create terrain events, shortcuts, obstacles, or crowd interference. A Calamity on the quarry is a fall, a wrong turn, or a mount refusing; a Calamity on the pursuer is the same in reverse.

Grapple versus escape. The grappler rolls Unarmed or Athletics; the target rolls Athletics or Reflexes. Net Successes determine whether the Restrained condition applies. On subsequent turns the target may attempt to break free (Action, same opposed roll) rather than waiting for the spell-resist timing.

Bidding in the soul market. When parties compete for the right to oversee a contracted soul, an infernal auction, an Accord mediation, or a contested claim, both sides roll Negotiation opposed. The losing side may not raise the same contract again this session. A Breakthrough on either side introduces a clause that was not on the table.

Ongoing contests (extended opposition). For conflicts that span multiple rounds or scenes, an arm-wrestling match during a tense negotiation, a ship trying to outrun a pursuing corvette across three legs of open air, use the same opposed structure but track cumulative net Successes across multiple rolls. The first side to accumulate a set number (the GM decides at the start; three to five is typical) wins the extended contest. Both sides' Boons and Calamities apply in the round they occur, not accumulated.

Large-Scale Combat

When a battle involves more combatants than the party can face individually, a warband assault, a siege, a naval engagement between fleets, ordinary structured combat breaks down. What matters at that scale is not who lands the next blow but who controls the engagement, holds the line, and breaks the other side's will.

This system resolves large engagements in three phases: First Engagement, Counter Swing, and The Grind, with a final Resolution. Each phase is one check (or several simultaneous ones) building on what came before. The result is a battle that escalates, turns, and resolves in a handful of rolls, with the outcome of each phase shaping the next.

Step 0 — Establish the Armies

Before rolling, define each side's Force Die Pool. This is the pool of Ability Dice (with Mastery upgrades) the commander rolls on each phase check. It reflects size, training, and readiness: not individual skill.

Then apply modifiers to the pool before any roll. Each is a die upgrade or Boon/Bane, not an add:

The difficulty for each phase check is Average (2 Trial Dice) by default. The GM may upgrade one Trial Die to a Crisis Die if the conditions are especially volatile.

The party may intervene directly, assaulting the enemy commander, destroying a siege engine, rallying a broken unit, sabotaging supply lines. Each successful party intervention before or during a phase adds to their side's pool for that phase check.

Phase 1 — First Engagement

Both sides roll their Force pools simultaneously. Read results as follows:

• Net Successes: The side with more net Successes controls the early engagement. They add to their pool for the Counter Swing phase.
• Tied Successes (or neither succeeds): The lines clash with no clear advantage. Neither side earns a Boon going forward, and neither loses a die.
• Net Boons: Spend in the moment: a flanking unit seizes a key position, the artillery finds its range, a reserve is freed up. Translate each spend into a narrative event and one for the GM's side or a small tactical advantage the party can exploit.
• Net Banes: Complications: a unit breaks early, the supply train is vulnerable, a commander falls. Each Bane the losing side accumulates translates into a real setback the GM describes.
• Breakthrough : A decisive tactical success: the enemy's forward line shatters, a siege tower is destroyed, a command tent is overrun. The side that rolled the Breakthrough removes 1 Ability Die from the opponent's pool immediately. Describe the moment.
• Calamity : A catastrophic reversal: a bridge collapses under your own forces, a mage's working misfires into your lines, a betrayal in the command ranks. The side that rolled the Calamity loses 1 Ability Die from its own pool immediately.

Phase 2 — Counter Swing

The losing side of the First Engagement now has the initiative to counterattack, regroup, or adapt. Both sides roll again with their current pools (modified by Boons/dice changes from Phase 1).

Play the result exactly as Phase 1. A Breakthrough again removes a die from the opponent; a Calamity removes one from the roller. Net Successes on the Counter Swing earn a going into The Grind.

After the Counter Swing, recalculate pool sizes. Extra Successes from both phases reduce the opponent's effective force:

• Each 2 net Successes (combined, both phases) removes 1 Ability Die from the losing side's pool going into The Grind.
• Recalculate Boon/Bane modifiers if tactical conditions have meaningfully changed (a fortification was breached, a siege engine was destroyed, reinforcements arrived).

Phase 3 — The Grind

Neither side has broken. Both are now fighting a war of attrition. Roll the current pools.

Interpret results as before. Additionally, after The Grind check: any side that has now lost half or more of its starting pool dice must immediately make a Morale check.

Morale Check: Roll Willpower + Leadership for the commander (or the equivalent if it is an NPC force). Difficulty is:

On success: the force holds. They may take a Bane if the GM has one to spend, but they do not break.

On failure: proceed to Resolution. The failing side must choose retreat or surrender. They do not choose to fight on: the Grind broke them.

Resolution

If one side's pool is exhausted (reaches 0 dice) or their Morale check fails, the battle ends. The winning side dictates terms within what is plausible given the margin of victory.

Party consequences. After any large-scale combat that the party participated in, award XP as for a significant structured encounter (treat it as a Nemesis-level threat for XP purposes). If the party's direct action contributed a Breakthrough, the GM should reflect this in the resolution: they personally turned the engagement, and the winning faction knows it.