Factions, Fronts, and Clocks

What Factions Are in Ix

Factions are organized groups with goals that will be achieved or frustrated regardless of what the players do, unless the players intervene. They are not adversaries waiting for the party. They are ongoing systems pursuing their own logic. The players' involvement either alters that logic or creates outcomes it would not have produced on its own.

Every Ix campaign should begin with three to five active factions defined before session one. Not all factions are hostile. Not all factions are mortal. Not all factions know the party exists. The list includes religious organizations, political powers, infernal operations, trade bodies, and criminal organizations, any group large enough to pursue goals that require more than one session to achieve.

Defining a Faction

For each faction, record:

What they want. One sentence, present tense, active voice. Not "the Order wants to expand" but "the Oshalan Order wants to establish a registry office in the Merchants' Quarter before the next guild election." Specific goals produce specific tension. Generic goals produce generic sessions.

What they have. The resources, relationships, information, or positions that make them capable of pursuing their goal. This is the faction's capacity, and it is what the party can target.

What they are afraid of. Every faction has a failure state. The Order is afraid of a unified merchant opposition that exposes the registry as a prerequisite to seizure rather than a civic service. Knowing the fear tells you what the faction's pressure moves are and where it will overreach.

Who they are in conflict with. Every active faction should have at least one other faction that is actively opposing it. Faction conflicts run in the background and produce events the party will encounter as conditions, not as staged encounters.

Fronts

A front is a single goal a faction is actively pursuing right now. A faction may have multiple fronts, but each session should feature at most one or two fronts from the full list. Fronts are how factions manifest at the table.

Front format:

Faction: Oshalan Order (local Quarter leadership) Goal: Establish a registry office in the Merchants' Quarter before the next guild election (90 days). Current method: Building support among human merchants who distrust non-human competition; approaching the Quarter alderman with a proposal framed as "civic efficiency." What completion looks like: The registry office is chartered, operational, and protected by Ordered doctrine. Removal requires legal challenge or force. What failure looks like: The proposal is publicly rejected on record by the guild, poisoning future expansion attempts for at least a decade. Player access points: The non-human merchants who are the Order's implied target; the alderman who is under pressure; the guild's existing records (which the Order wants to absorb).

Write fronts this way before session one. Update them after each session.

Faction Clocks

A faction clock is a visual tracker representing how close a faction's front is to completion or failure. Use any simple tracker: a pie divided into segments, a numbered countdown, a tally mark list.

Setting the clock: A faction clock typically has four to eight ticks, where each tick represents a meaningful step toward the goal. Oshalan registering the Quarter: (1) build merchant support, (2) approach alderman, (3) draft charter, (4) public presentation, (5) charter signed, (6) office operational. Six ticks. Each tick represents roughly one to two weeks of in-world time.

Advancing the clock: Between sessions, advance clocks for factions that are not being actively opposed. If the players did not engage with the Oshalan front last session, the Order probably secured another merchant meeting. One tick. If they actively disrupted it (by exposing the registry's actual purpose to the alderman, for instance), the clock may reset or a tick may be removed.

Triggered events: Each tick on a faction clock produces a concrete observable change in the world. Tick one: a series of closed-door merchant meetings; unusual number of Order registrars visible in the Quarter. Tick two: the alderman receives a formal document with an Ordered seal. Define these events when you set the clock, not when you need them. Observable changes reward players who are paying attention.

The Major Factions of Dort

These are the factions most campaigns in the Ix universe will interact with. Each is described here with its GM-facing operational profile. Player-facing public information is in the Player Guide.

The Accord (Echo's Faith): Operates everywhere; builds documentation and community infrastructure. Fronts: establishing contract clinics, charter schools, and archive networks. Goal: stable communities produce heavier coins and more predictable social outcomes. The Accord is rarely hostile to the party but will be actively opposed to any agenda that destabilizes communities or corrupts records. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a leader, and the absence is doctrinal: there is no high keeper and no central authority, so regional keeper networks coordinate through the same mediation processes they apply to everyone else and no rival can decapitate the faith. Catalog: Accord Keeper, Archive Keeper.

The Oshalan Order: Operates through patient Quarter-establishment and registry networks. Fronts: expansion into communities with power vacuums, disputes, or unstable leadership. Goal: total conversion of the continent to Ordered doctrine. The Order's agents in any given region are the local Quarter's registrars, the missionary circuit, and the legal aid network that makes itself indispensable before the doctrine becomes visible. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a living leader. The named authorities it supplies are the three prophets, Quhamman Mani, Ar'mee ibn On'mee, and Nasa al-Ma, whose Ḵẖatama is the Order's highest law; all three are historical, and the operative figure in any region is whichever judge-cleric or commander-cleric holds the Quarter. Catalog: Oshalan Inquisitor, Oshalan Registrar, Oshalan Zealot.

The Infernal Operations (multiple, not unified): A broad category of entities and their mortal agents pursuing soul-coin acquisition through contracts, interception, and coercion. Individual operations have specific targets and methods. Infernal Clerks, Pact Collectors, corrupted officials, and named contract holders are the operational faces. Goal: accumulate soul coins outside the legitimate divine economy. Fronts: active contracts in the region, active interception operations on the Silver Road, specific named targets they are pursuing. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a leader, and by construction there is none; the category is not unified, and each operation's named contract holder is the only principal it has. Catalog: Corrupted Bailiff, Merchant Under Infernal Pressure.

House Carna: A human-supremacist noble house operating through legal privilege, enforcement muscle, and the weaponization of legal processes against non-human residents. Fronts: checkpoint networks in contested territory, labor exploitation campaigns against non-human workers, occasional formal challenges to non-human property ownership. Goal: economic dominance of key trade corridors with non-human competition legally suppressed. Not Ordered, but compatible with the Order when convenient. Catalog: Carna House Enforcer.

The Greyfang (Orc Warbands and Military Orders): A loose association of orcish military culture with strong internal codes and external reputation as shock forces. Fronts: contract enforcement for whoever hires them, territorial defense of claimed lands, occasional punitive expeditions against groups that violated their codes. Goal: maintain the prestige and economic position of orcish military culture in a world where non-combat professions are increasingly viable. Not inherently hostile to the party. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a leader. The Greyfangs are a tribe of Antaea with no recorded single command, so the principal in play is whichever warchief holds the contract in front of the party. Catalog: Orc Warchief, Orc Warrior.

The White Rose Legion (Jula's Faith): A military arm of a peace-oriented deity, trained for de-escalation with the capacity for force. Fronts: active mediations in ongoing conflicts, presence at sites of incipient violence, monitoring of situations that could produce mass death. Goal: prevent irreversible harm by inserting before the point of no return. The Legion is an ambiguous presence, neither ally nor antagonist until the party's goals and the Legion's assessment of the situation align or conflict. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a leader. It specifies offices instead: Keepers of the Peace lead local temples, Commanders of the White Rose lead the defensive forces, the two roles are deliberately collaborative rather than hierarchical, and a Council of Reconciliation seating both peaceworkers and Legion veterans settles anything major. No holder of any of those offices is named. Catalog: No catalog block yet.

The Death-Keepers of Nyxollox

Nyxollox's priesthood is hierarchical and organized around witness rather than command. Rank is painted on the shaved skull, a black base with white stripes added across decades of service, and a senior priest cannot simply order a junior one; they demonstrate, model, and carry the weight of example. The order polices itself through a council of its most senior priests, which hears cases such as a death-priest who refused comfort to the dying or who broke the confidentiality of a deathbed. The priesthood deliberately rotates its people between bedside work, archive work, and training, because no one is expected to carry that weight without relief.

Three sects are active. The Shanoaites practice healing and death-tending as two halves of one calling and work in plague zones and battlefields, marking their heads white with a single black stripe in reversal of the standard marks. They do not advance through the standard ranking system; the single stripe marks them as fully initiated, they remain at that level however long they serve, and they take their authority directly from the high priest with no intermediate ranks between. The Warborn specialize in battlefield service, earn a stripe for each major conflict survived, and rotate out after roughly a decade. The Silent Keepers hold the archives and rarely attend a deathbed at all.

What they want: Every death attended, named, and entered in the archive, and every dying person protected from being offered an infernal alternative at the threshold. A soul that passes with a death-keeper present is sealed against infernal claim.

What they have: Presence in communities too small or remote for any other institution, the archives themselves, an unbroken rite of witness, the Brooches of the Kallian Daughters issued to priests sent into conflict zones, and Bakwan's Everlasting Paint held at the order's central temple in Jazirah's largest city.

How they work: Slowly, locally, and on invitation. Death-keepers do not recruit. They make the offer to the bereaved and wait.

What they are afraid of: Its own heresies, which are numerous and internally credible. The Accelerationists argue that a hastened death is mercy. The Immortalists argue that the faith's real work is postponing death indefinitely. The Soul Merchants treat the dead as tradeable goods, which the orthodoxy regards as the deepest corruption the faith recognizes. Outside the heresies sit outright cults: the Order of the Eternal Night, which has misread Nyxollox as a god of literal darkness, and the Circle of Rebirth, which denies that death is final. A hidden sect descended from the excommunicated Mikkaw the Reviled still preaches vengeance in the faith's own vocabulary, guiding the grieving toward their enemies without ever striking the blow.

Who they are in conflict with: Necromancers and infernal operators who traffic in undead servitude. The priesthood trains specifically to recognize those operations.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a current high priest. The named figures canon supplies are historical: Bakwan Occal, the founding priest; Shanoa, the alchemist whose legacy created the Shanoaites; the Daughters of the Kallians, the founding cadre of the faith's expansion; and Mikkaw the Reviled, excommunicated by a rite that stripped his marks.

Active front — the threshold:

Goal: Break a local operation that is intercepting the dying, whether necromantic, infernal, or both, before it takes another death. Clock: 6 ticks. Each tick is roughly two weeks. Set the starting tick from how long the operation has been running before the party arrives. Tick events: Tick 1: a family reports that their dead was attended by someone wearing the paint who is not on the temple roll. Tick 2: an archive entry is found altered. Tick 3: a Warborn is recalled from rotation, which the order does not do lightly. Tick 4: a body that received the rite is found moving. Tick 5: the local senior priest asks the party directly, which is as close to a demand as the faith produces. Tick 6: the operation has enough sealed names to work with and relocates. Player access: Every dying person in the region. Death-keepers are present at deathbeds the party will attend for unrelated reasons, and they remember what they saw.

At the table: Death-keepers are the faction most likely to give a party information for nothing and most likely to ask for something the party finds uncomfortable in return, usually presence rather than violence. They are not warriors. They are also not passive, and a community that maintains a temple knows exactly what the order is worth.

Catalog: Nyxollox Death-Keeper, in the Adversary Catalog, Humanoid Factions and Mortals.

The Arcanum Conclave

The Conclave regulates magical practice in Irna: which schools are licensed, which practitioners are certified, which applications are permitted. It was founded when the alternative was the noble houses regulating magic themselves, and the mages of the time organized first. Its relationship with the nobility since then has run on mutual necessity and mutual suspicion, which produces a working arrangement that functions through protocol and collapses periodically when either side misjudges the balance. Headquarters is the Arcane Spire in the Irnan capital, officially independent of the crown and practically impossible to ignore.

It is not one organization. It is six sharing a building, a charter, and a foundational disagreement about what magic is for.

• The Rationalists (Archmage Elion) want magic treated as a science: structured curriculum, rigorous certification, reproducible results. Elion holds the largest institutional footprint in the Spire, since the teaching halls and the certification process both run on Rationalist standards, and the least political influence of any sect leader. He made that trade deliberately.
• The Dominionists (Matriarch Lysandra) want the Conclave to be honest that power is the point. Lysandra has advised noble houses for two decades and holds more intelligence on Irnan politics than anyone in the capital outside the nobility itself.
• The Experimentalists (Magister Thrain) want laboratory access and tolerate everything else as the cost of it. Thrain has been banned from two of the Spire's laboratory levels after incidents the official record calls "unscheduled outcomes."
• The Umbral Circle (Shadowmaster Kaldros) works in the practices the Conclave officially forbids and practically tolerates, on the reasoning that an outright ban would drive them underground where there is no oversight at all. The Circle does not recruit openly; it finds people the other sects have already rejected. Kaldros says very little at Council and votes last.
• The Battlemages (Warlord Aria) want direct military application acknowledged as the Conclave's most valuable product. Aria came up through the Rationalist curriculum, which complicates every argument made against her.
• The Harmonists (Sage Melorin) want community magic recognized as the Conclave's most durable asset: healing, protective work, infrastructure. Melorin has moral authority, community relationships, and the least institutional leverage at the table.

What they want: Incompatible things, simultaneously, which is why the Council operates by consensus in principle and exhaustion in practice. Decisions get made when enough sect leaders have stopped objecting, which is not agreement.

What they have: Licensing authority, the Spire's libraries and laboratories, certified practitioners throughout Irna, affiliate academies, and institutional independence from the crown that both sides find inconvenient and neither will end.

What they are afraid of: Losing the independence. Every sect reads the threat differently, which is why the Conclave cannot present a unified position on it.

Who they are in conflict with: Itself, mostly. The Rationalists and Harmonists coalition on standards questions; the Dominionists and Battlemages on power questions; the Experimentalists go wherever the laboratory access is this quarter.

Key NPCs: Elion, Lysandra, Thrain, Kaldros, Aria, Melorin. Canon does not specify a single head of the Conclave; the six sect leaders are the Council.

Active front — the patronage exemption:

Goal: Resolve whether Conclave certification standards apply to practitioners working under direct noble house patronage, who have historically claimed an exemption. This has been before the Council for four years. Clock: 8 ticks, each roughly three months, because the Conclave moves at the speed of six people who dislike each other. Currently at tick 2: the noble houses want the exemption extended, Elion wants it closed, and Lysandra has not committed to a position, which means she has one she has not revealed. Tick events: Tick 3: an uncertified patronage practitioner does something public and expensive. Tick 4: Aria's units are cited as precedent by both sides. Tick 5: Thrain trades his vote for laboratory levels. Tick 6: Kaldros speaks at Council. Tick 7: the crown comments, which it has avoided doing for four years. Tick 8: the vote lands, and whichever way it goes, one sect treats the result as a breach of the charter. Player access: The Conclave hires out what it cannot be seen doing: retrieval of artifacts and texts, escort of researchers, investigation of unauthorized practice. The Umbral Circle's commissions are the most interesting and the least documented, which is also how they become leverage later.

At the table: Use the Conclave when a party needs sanction, credentials, or a license, and make the price a sect alignment they did not intend to take. The Spire has a restricted floor that is not on the building's official plans; it appears on six internal maps in six different locations, none of which agree, because each sect keeps its own restricted work there.

Catalog: No catalog block yet. Arcane Duelist and Arcana-Burned Mage in the Adversary Catalog, Humanoid Factions and Mortals, are unaffiliated practitioners and can be dressed as certified or uncertified as the scene requires.

The Iron Hand Guild

The Iron Hand controls metalwork in Irna. Not the making of it, the movement of it: ore out of the mines, the transport routes, market prices, and the institutional relationships that decide who gets quality material and who gets what is left. It began as a defensive organization of Harken blacksmiths being squeezed by noble house buyers, found outside backing during the fight that followed, and came out of that fight substantially more capable than it went in. The backing came with shape. What emerged was not a craftsmen's association but a trade control operation with metalwork knowledge as the foundation and logistics and information as the actual instrument.

What they want: Permanence of the structure that benefits them: predictable supply, reliable contracts, and noble houses that understand the cost of going around the guild. They are not interested in political conquest or ideological expansion.

What they have: Affiliation rather than ownership. The guild does not own the smithies it controls; it controls them through ore supply contracts, tool sourcing, transport arrangements, and collective pricing. A smith who affiliates gets quality ore on reliable terms. A smith who does not finds ore less available and transport less reliable. Beneath the Harken headquarters runs a tunnel network connecting several buildings in the commercial district, undocumented in any public record and navigated from memory.

How they work: Noble houses that establish private supply chains find those chains develop problems that are persistent, difficult to trace, and do not resolve until the relationship is renegotiated on terms the guild finds acceptable. The guild has gone to violence twice in twelve years. Neither instance is documented, because documenting it would create the kind of evidence Lilith Flameheart considers unnecessary.

What they are afraid of: Nothing it will state. The open question inside the guild is who its original backers were. The founding records are complete, maintained, and uninformative; the financial instruments trace back to dissolved entities and cold accounts. Someone built the structure deliberately untraceable.

Who they are in conflict with: Any noble house currently testing whether the guild's stated position is its real position. Canon does not specify a standing faction rivalry. Note for the GM: the 9 Eyes' cover operation corrodes confidence in metal provenance in the same mining supply chain the Iron Hand controls, and canon states no relationship between them. That is an open seat at your table, not an established fact.

Key NPCs: Master Alaric Blackthorn, leader, a master smith before he was a guild leader and still one, who reads a situation several moves ahead and describes twelve years of expansion as the market finding its appropriate structure. Seraphina "Sera" Steelweaver, chief negotiator, who structures agreements around what the other party actually wants rather than what they said; people leave her table satisfied and occasionally realize later that what they wanted was not what they needed. Brom Ironfist, enforcer, who considers enjoyment of the work a disqualifying characteristic and does not do more than is necessary. Lilith Flameheart, intelligence, who maintains the contacts and observers and whose function is preventive: she tells Alaric what is happening before it becomes something that requires Brom.

Active front — the reliable route:

Goal: Restore guild control over a transport corridor where reliability has degraded, and identify who benefits from the degradation. Clock: 6 ticks, each roughly two weeks. Tick events: Tick 1: a shipment arrives short and the paperwork is clean. Tick 2: Lilith brings Alaric a name. Tick 3: an affiliate smith is offered better terms by someone who should not be able to offer them. Tick 4: Sera is sent to a table she would not normally sit at. Tick 5: Brom travels. Tick 6: the corridor is quiet again and nobody involved will discuss why. Player access: The guild pays reliably, defines scope clearly, and does not forget favors or failures. Its standing work is retrieval of stolen goods, investigation of supply chain disruption, and escort through regions where reliability has degraded. Occasionally it is something Alaric will not put in writing and Lilith will brief you on in full.

At the table: The Iron Hand is the patron a party can trust to honor terms and should not expect to be rescued by. Members say "family above all" and mean it the way organizations mean it when the costs of betrayal fall on the people connected to you. Alaric does not consider that ruthless. He considers it clear, which is worse.

Catalog: No catalog block yet.

The Order of Chaslia

In 3181 ME a sorcerer in Frosthaven lost control of a bound demon. The attack killed extensively and exposed serious failures among the city's defenders and officials. Princess Chaslia, youngest daughter of King Yukan, had slipped her guards and walked to the market that morning. She saw a child cut in half, screamed at the demons to stop, and demanded they return to their plane. Her guards saw what they were facing and fled. She did not. Her parents arrived to find her dying, and the king killed the demons himself with an enchanted blade.

King Yukan founded the Order of Chaslia in response, charged with identifying, hunting, and eliminating supernatural threats before a failure of that kind could happen again. He appointed his sons as its first knights, abdicated in favor of the queen, pursued the order's work for the rest of his life, and never returned to court.

What they want: Supernatural threats found and ended early, on the order's own authority rather than through the institutions that failed at Frosthaven.

What they have: A founding mandate that predates most of the legal architecture now arguing about it, and knights whose warrant comes from the throne rather than from any local jurisdiction.

What they are afraid of: Canon does not specify.

Who they are in conflict with: Canon does not specify. What canon does record is that Frosthaven remains a reference point in continuing debates over magical regulation, noble responsibility, and how much authority an organization operating outside ordinary law enforcement should hold. Those debates are the order's real political terrain.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a current leader. The founder is King Yukan, and his sons were the first knights. House Yukan has since left mainland Irna for Volta Island and governs from Faymaw; the departure was not entirely voluntary, and the Crown resolved the matter by granting the island rather than forcing a confrontation. The Frosthaven history sits under every diplomatic exchange between the Crown and House Yukan without being named.

Active front: Canon does not specify an active front. Build one from the mandate: a threat the order has classified as supernatural that local authority insists is not, or the reverse.

Clock: Canon does not specify. The mandate suggests a short clock, because the order's entire founding argument is that these things are caught early or not at all.

At the table: The Order of Chaslia is the answer when a party needs a warrant that outranks a local magistrate, and the complication when the party is the thing that has been classified. Its authority is real, contested, and older than the argument against it.

Catalog: No catalog block yet.

Shadowviel

The Crown houses more spies than any other region in the world, running from polite information gathering through to assassination. The city outlawed most spy activity, which most spies ignore. Emperor Malloq established the city's layered guard in response: grey cloaks for the city, gold cloaks for the castle, purple cloaks for the royal household, and Shadowviel as the counter-spy agency.

It operates without any easily visible presence.

What they want: Foreign intelligence operations in The Crown identified and stopped. Canon does not specify anything beyond that mandate.

What they have: Canon does not specify.

What they are afraid of: Canon does not specify.

Who they are in conflict with: Every foreign intelligence operation working in The Crown, which canon describes as the most information-dense city on the continent and does not enumerate.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a leader. Canon names Emperor Malloq as the founder of the guard structure Shadowviel belongs to.

Active front: Canon does not specify.

Clock: Canon does not specify.

At the table: Shadowviel is the faction a party discovers retroactively. It has no visible presence to investigate, which means it should surface as a consequence rather than as an encounter: the meeting that was already known about, the courier who was allowed to arrive, the document that was permitted to leave. Any party carrying something sensitive through The Crown is inside its remit whether or not they are its target. Because canon gives Shadowviel a mandate and nothing else, treat every specific you add as your table's invention and record it, so the next chronicle does not contradict it.

Catalog: No catalog block yet.

The Fire Swingers

An all-female order of warrior monks, closely associated with Funta, whose mastery of fire has no equivalent in the known world. Their reputation rests on the Battle of Bafao, where they destroyed Lord Valgrant's invasion fleet and its supporting land forces in a night, under Binara, who walked onto the field with the flames running along her skin. The message inscribed above the statues in the order's training grounds reads: Be fierce. Be fair. Win completely. Grant mercy to the vanquished. The Fire Swingers did not make Funta unconquerable. They made it not worth trying.

Membership is not a matter of training. A matriarch assesses candidates for the Fire Swinger heritage, a trait carried in certain bloodlines that skips generations and siblings and follows no pattern anyone has found. Its absence means death in the Trial by Fire; its presence is not a guarantee. Those who carry it still fail, and the burns, the recovery, and the deaths are ordinary features of the rite rather than exceptions.

What they want: The order's continuation, Funta's borders unattractive to invasion, and LaHale independent. Their guard on LaHale discourages attempts to seize its library, influence its council, or use its position for territorial advantage.

What they have: The Flamehold, carved into the cliffs above Djado, holding the Pyre Sanctum, the Ember Archives, the Inferno Sparring Grounds, and the Ashen Council Chamber, defended by elemental wards that have discouraged every recorded intrusion attempt. Seven ranks from Supreme Fire Sister, who carries the honorific Solaris, down through Flame Mother, Igneus Sister, Blazing Star, Fire Maiden, Cinder Warden, and Ash Priestess. Six divisions: the Alabaster Sentinels hold fire as a barrier, the Ember Artisans place a fireball with an archer's accuracy, the Azure Infernos cut with a sustained stream of blue flame, the Crimson Phoenixes clear an area and are not deployed for precise work, the Olive Mystics summon elementals and set permanent fire enchantments, and the Obsidian Shadows work Shadowflame, near-invisible fire and covert infiltration.

How they work: As an order with a clear scope. They are not in the business of settling internal Funta political disputes, and local powers who would like their weight in a domestic argument do not get it.

What they are afraid of: Canon does not specify. What canon supplies instead is the order's standing aspiration: a sealed chamber deep in the Flamehold, opening only for the prophesied Fire Swinger who masters every division at once, a feat never accomplished. Whether the chamber is literal or institutional is a question the order will not answer, and either answer produces members who train as though the door might open.

Who they are in conflict with: Canon does not specify a standing faction rivalry. Their recorded conflicts are invasions.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a current Supreme Fire Sister, Flame Mother, or any living officer. Binara is canon and historical; she is among the statues flanking the Flamehold entrance, depicted kneeling with her arms ablaze.

Active front — the Trial:

Goal: Assess and initiate a generation of candidates without losing more of them than the order can absorb. Clock: Canon does not specify a front or a clock. If you run one, the Trial is the order's own recurring pressure: 4 ticks from the matriarch's assessment through the coals, the cauldron, and the incantation, with a named candidate the party has reason to care about at each stage. Player access: Escort into Funta's interior, work in and around LaHale, and anything touching the Ember Archives, which hold historical accounts of every significant engagement the order has fought and records of the bloodlines that carry the heritage. The Archives are the reason a party with an unanswered question about Funta's past ends up at Djado.

At the table: Fire Swingers are not an obstacle faction and not a patron faction. They are a standing fact about what can be attempted in Funta. Use them to close options rather than to open them: a plan that requires taking LaHale, pressuring its council, or moving an army through the eastern gate is a plan that has to answer for them first.

Catalog: No catalog block yet.

The Telum Venandi

An underground order operating entirely outside institutional awareness, the Telum Venandi are neither a religious organization nor a criminal one in the conventional sense. They exist for a single purpose: locating, containing, and managing the Zoranti weapons before those weapons find wielders who will misuse them. Their methods are quiet and their membership is small, drawn from individuals who have personally witnessed what a Zoranti weapon does when it chooses badly. Most members are former adventurers, ex-Order operatives who broke with the institution, or inheritors of private knowledge passed down through families that lost someone to a Zoranti blade.

The Telum Venandi have no hierarchy beyond seniority of experience and no headquarters beyond whatever safe house is currently operational. They communicate through a dead-drop network and meet in person only when a weapon becomes active. Anyone who has handled a Zoranti weapon and survived is considered a provisional member whether they want to be or not.

What they want: Every unaccounted Zoranti weapon located, assessed, and either contained or bound to a wielder who can be trusted not to misuse it. They do not want to destroy the weapons. They believe the weapons are their responsibility.

What they have: Scattered expertise, a network of informants in relic markets and adventuring circles, and a detailed institutional memory of every known Zoranti incident. What they lack is numbers, resources, and any legitimate authority.

What they are afraid of: Dolorum above all. A Zoranti weapon whose purpose is sorrows and despair, disposition unknown, wielder unknown, has been their standing priority concern for decades. A secondary fear is that the Telum Venandi's existence will become known to a party with institutional leverage (House Carna, the Order) that would prefer the weapons in their own hands.

Active front — Dolorum:

Goal: Locate Dolorum before it finds a wielder. Clock: 6 ticks. Currently at tick 2 (a Zoranti scholar in a western city went silent three months ago; their last correspondence mentioned "a transaction" with a collector in a Shoing port). Each tick represents two to three months of in-world time. Tick events: Tick 3: the scholar's safehouse is found ransacked; a Telum Venandi courier contacts the party. Tick 4: a rash of unexplained suicides in a Shoing trading port. Tick 5: Dolorum is confirmed present in a specific location. Tick 6: Dolorum has bonded to a wielder. Player access: The Telum Venandi are cautious about outsiders and will not introduce themselves directly; they observe first. If the party recovers or encounters a Zoranti weapon, Telum Venandi contact within one to two sessions is appropriate.

For Zoranti weapon profiles and Telum Venandi history, see Chapter Seven (Relics).

The Infernal Cults

The infernal contract operations described above are not the only category of organized evil that operates in Dort. The Hells have cults, organized groups of mortal devotees whose worship feeds power to specific infernal entities. These are not unified. Each cult serves a different Hell and operates according to that Hell's particular logic.

For GM purposes, cults differ from infernal contract operations in one critical way: contract operations are businesses, and cults are faiths. A contract operation can be disrupted by finding and voiding the contracts; this is a mechanical and legal problem. A cult is a community of genuine believers, and dismantling a community of genuine believers is slower, messier, and harder to define as a victory.

The most operationally dangerous cult for Ix campaigns is likely one of the following, depending on your campaign's themes:

The Iron Decree (First Hell, absolute order without mercy): A cult that cloaks itself as a lawful institution. Common cover identities include legal guilds, magistrate networks, and merchants who specialize in debt collection. The Iron Decree's followers believe that absolute enforcement of any agreement, regardless of ethics or context, is a devotional act. They are the faction most likely to enter into alliance with the Oshalan Order for tactical reasons while simultaneously finding the Order's mercy provisions heretical. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a mortal leader. The patron is Zagan, lord of Tyrannus, who is not available as a table NPC and does not intervene for his cult. Catalog: No catalog block yet; Corrupted Bailiff fits the Decree's captured-magistrate cover.

The Gilded Assay (Second Hell, pure avarice): Operates entirely through commerce. A Gilded Assay cell looks like an investment house, a trade consortium, or a bank with unusual terms. Its members genuinely believe that acquisition is the expression of divine will and that anyone who agrees to be parted from their resources deserves the outcome. This is the cult that produces infernal contracts as liturgical practice, not just business. Key NPCs: Canon does not specify a mortal leader. The patron is Pyxata, lord of Avaricia, who runs the Hells' clearing-house for soul-bargains and, like every infernal lord, is mostly not watching. Catalog: No catalog block yet; Merchant Under Infernal Pressure covers the Assay's victims.

The Corrupt Bailiff and the Carna Front: House Carna and the more aggressive infernal operations often operate in alignment without formal coordination. Carna's human-supremacist enforcement creates desperate non-human populations who become targets for infernal contract agents. A Carna checkpoint that strips a traveler of their papers makes a subsequent "let me help you navigate the registry" conversation from an infernal clerk feel like rescue rather than predation.

The Reaching (Cult of Buuna Moc)

Erosmire is the layer of lust, and lust there does not mean love, longing, or appetite. It means the reduction of another person to an instrument, pursued as an organizing principle that overrides everything, including the humanity of whoever is in the way. Buuna Moc is the perfection of that reduction, and the Reaching carries the principle into the mortal world.

The cult's single doctrine is that the other person is irrelevant. There is no limit it acknowledges, no consent it recognizes, and no satisfaction it permits to be final. This is not hedonism, which at least values pleasure. It is the cold conviction that one's own desire is the only real thing in the room. Recruits are drawn in by being told that everything they were taught to restrain is permitted, and that permission is the whole of the faith.

Handling rule for this chapter. Canon renders the Reaching clinically and at a distance, and requires that it stay that way. What the cult specifically does, who it targets, and how its rites proceed are [PLACEHOLDER — Paul] in the canon and are not enumerated here. Insinuation is the register. A catalogue is exactly what this material must not become, at the table or on the page. Establish what the party is standing next to, and stop there.

What they want: [PLACEHOLDER — Paul] Canon does not state an organizational goal beyond the doctrine itself.

What they have: Civic respectability. The cult wears the surface of a welcoming place, the way Erosmire's palace is beautiful from the outside.

What they are afraid of: Canon does not specify.

Who they are in conflict with: The nine infernal cults compete with each other, and the Reaching is one of the nine.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify. Leadership, organizational detail, and regional presence are marked [PLACEHOLDER — Paul] in canon, to be set by the author at the level of insinuation the book wants.

Active front: Canon does not specify, and this entry does not invent one. If the Reaching is in your chronicle, it is the thing under a place that seemed safe, surfaced slowly and never gratuitously.

Clock: Canon does not specify.

At the table: The cult is patient and genuinely indifferent to the person in front of it, which makes it impossible to appeal to. There is no shared ground. A member of the Reaching cannot be reached through another person's suffering, because that suffering was never a consideration. Parties used to talking their way through antagonists will find nothing here to talk to, and that is the intended experience. Confirm your table's boundaries before this faction appears, not after.

Catalog: No catalog block yet. The Buuna Moc Placeholder Servitor in the Adversary Catalog's Devils chapter is a flagged placeholder awaiting the same author decision and is not a usable cult statline.

The Choir of the Open Mind (Cult of Limbo)

Not every cult serves the Hells. Beyond the soul planes lies Limbo, the plane of pure chaos, which is not a mind and grants nothing deliberately, but which notices. Limbo has a tendency rather than a will, the way a fire has a tendency toward wind, and what it responds to most is madness. A traveler who arrives already insane may find Limbo interested, and if it is interested it keeps the madness, writing it permanently into the person at a level no restoration has reliably reached.

The Choir courts exactly this. Its members hold that madness made permanent and interesting to the plane is the highest attainment, an alignment with a deeper reality that ordered minds are too rigid to perceive. They pursue derangement deliberately, as sacrament. Some seek out the well outside LaHale, where a hobo who does not age offers water that produces one specific delusion, the certainty that Limbo is near and paying attention, and then travel while in that state hoping to arrive somewhere the plane has selected for them.

What they want: Selection. To be noticed by a plane that does not notice on purpose, and to have that noticing made permanent.

What they have: No hierarchy canon records, no territory canon records, and a recruitment method that is indistinguishable from ordinary decline until it is too late to reverse.

What they are afraid of: Canon does not specify.

Who they are in conflict with: Canon does not specify.

Key NPCs: Canon does not specify. Leadership, and any link to the Kaevari, the Gaze, or the LaHale well, are marked [PLACEHOLDER — Paul] in canon.

Active front: Canon does not specify.

Clock: Canon does not specify. If you run one, the Choir's own progression is the clock: sought derangement, the journey taken in that state, the arrival, and whatever returns.

At the table: The Choir is the answer to a string of brilliant, broken people whose insanity is too coherent, too useful, and too patterned to be ordinary. The recognition sign is coherence: their specific derangements are too organized and too thematically consistent with each other to be chance. They serve a thing that is not listening on purpose, and what comes back from Limbo wearing one of their faces is not reliably the person who left. Run them as a diagnosis the party makes late rather than an organization the party infiltrates.

Catalog: No catalog block yet. The Limbo Scavenger in the Adversary Catalog's Planar and Soul Entities chapter is a native of the plane, not a member of the Choir.

The 9 Eyes — GM Profile

The Player Guide describes the 9 Eyes as a secretive network of economic disruption: gold and silver stolen, melted down, and reintroduced into supply chains to corrode confidence in metal provenance. That description is accurate as far as it goes. It does not go far enough.

What the 9 Eyes actually do. The economic disruption is cover. The real work is identification and marking. Someone or something with an agenda that the cult's own foot soldiers are never told wants specific people found, people who carry a faint quality the 9 Eyes' most senior operatives call the trace. No one in the cult below Glim Carpsonic knows precisely what the trace is. Glim knows what it looks like, knows which instruments can register it, and knows that his patron (referred to within the upper ranks only as the Master) wants those people marked before they can organize or be warned. The mark itself is a nine-pointed spiral, set somewhere clothing covers. The marked individuals are released afterward. They may never deal with the 9 Eyes again. They simply carry the mark forward into whatever their lives become.

What the marks are assembling toward, and how close the pattern is to completion, is the real investigation. The honest GM answer is that this is a long, patient, proxy-driven game. The final act, when it arrives, will ask almost nothing of the hand behind it. The cult does not know whose work it is finishing.

Operational structure. The 9 Eyes work in cells of three to seven, each cell isolated from others at the operational level. A cell leader knows one contact above and two below; no one below Glim has the complete organizational picture. Three lieutenants sit between him and the cells: Nix Carpsonic, his cousin, who runs information and keeps an accurate running picture of what the Irnan investigators have found; Mara Deepshadow, who removes obstacles and does not discuss her methods; and Thorn Ironhand, who runs the smithing cells and has never been told about the marking work at all. This makes disrupting the cult through a single arrest or confrontation almost impossible. Dismantling one cell produces useful intelligence but leaves the rest intact and usually alerted. The cult recruits from people with specific skills: assayers, metal traders, document forgers, former Accord archivists who know how financial records can be manipulated. It approaches candidates, not the reverse. Those it approaches are never told the cult's name; they receive a commission, a contact, and a task.

What they want. To locate, assess, and mark individuals who carry the trace, across as wide a geographic and social spread as possible. Each marked individual is a completed task; the pattern they form is the objective.

What they have. Money from metal resale; a durable cell structure resistant to interdiction; Glim's own perception, which registers the trace without instruments; and the resources of the Master, which are patient and deep and never fully disclosed.

What they fear. Institutional investigation that maps the cells rather than hitting one. The Accord's archive capacity is the specific threat: if a keeper were to trace the pattern of metal provenance anomalies across regions, the geographic and temporal footprint would reveal something organized and deliberate. The cult works to keep each cell's activities appearing local and random. Investigation by an entity with inter-regional record access, specifically Echo's faith, is the strategic vulnerability. A secondary fear is that a marked individual discovers the mark and begins asking why, which is a question neither the cells nor Glim are equipped to answer safely.

Glim "The Sightless" Carpsonic. The cult's founder and High Speaker, and the only figure in it with the full picture. A gnome of the Carpsonic Mountains, blind, his eyes gone white. At nineteen he sheltered from weather in a back-of-cave storage hollow the local gnomes used, found an old text on the shelf there, and read it because he read everything; about a third of the way through he understood it was reading him back. No one knows who wrote it or how long it had been sitting there. Making contact cost him his sight and returned, in exchange, the ability to perceive in directions that have nothing to do with light. He has been building the cult's current form for fourteen years. He does not experience this as a compromise of his values; he has genuinely concluded that what the Master is assembling matters and that his role in it is significant. He is wrong in several specific ways he cannot see, and he is not unintelligent. He is simply devoted to something whose nature he does not fully understand. He does not raise his voice and he does not threaten. People who have dealt with him report, consistently, that they came away feeling they had agreed to something, without being able to name the moment the agreement happened. He meets no one below his cell leaders. He communicates through dead drops and intermediaries. Players who investigate far enough will eventually reach him, and he will be far more coherent and reasonable than they expect, and far more committed than that coherence implies.

Faction What: Identify and mark individuals carrying the trace before they can be warned or organized. What they have: Cell-based network resistant to interdiction, financial resources from metal operations, Glim's unaided perception of the trace, the Master's backing. What they fear: Inter-regional institutional investigation; a marked individual learning what the mark is and why; the Accord's cross-regional archive capacity. Who they conflict with: The Accord (archive risk); Talbar's deal-keepers (who would notice the fraudulent metal provenance in commercial records); occasionally the Infernal Operations, who compete for the same desperate or isolated target population.

The Accord as Active Faction

The Accord is listed among the factions but warrants separate treatment because it is the faction most likely to become the party's long-term ally, and allies who are running their own active agendas are more interesting than allies who are simply available.

The Accord's fronts in any given city are:

• Establishing or defending a contract clinic in a district the Order has targeted
• Documenting the Order's expansion for eventual legal challenge
• Building a coalition of non-Ordered institutions (Themela's courts, Talbar's trade networks, Nyxollox's death-keepers) before the Order becomes the only institutional option
• Monitoring specific infernal operations that threaten community stability

The Accord does not use force. This is a genuine doctrinal position, not a tactical limitation. An Accord keeper who has been documenting the Order's expansion for fifteen years and who the party could protect or lose in a confrontation is more useful to the campaign than a faction that simply provides information and equipment. Make the Accord's people specific enough to lose.

The Accord's internal factions matter at the table. Three internal currents within Echo's faith can serve as GM tools for friction, surprise, or complication when the Accord feels too clean as an unconditional ally.

The Echoless are the most immediately deceptive of the three. This loose network of Accord-adjacent operators uses the language of community stability to justify destabilization when stability serves the powerful. Their argument (that sometimes you have to break the record to fix the system) sounds coherent until you look at what they actually break and who benefits. An Echoless keeper will appear cooperative and principled until the moment it matters. A party that trusts the Accord completely may find an Echoless keeper has used their investigation to bury evidence rather than protect it, convinced that protecting the community means protecting it from the truth. They are never introduced as villains. They are introduced as allies with a slightly different read on the situation.

The Self-Echoers are not dangerous so much as useless. These practitioners have achieved genuine personal tranquility through Echo's teachings, and stopped there. They mediate disputes within their own households, maintain impeccable records of events that matter to no one, and decline to engage with the Order's expansion because they find confrontation unpeaceful. Use them when the party needs a contrast: this is what happens to a faith when the practice becomes about the practitioner rather than the community. An Accord keeper who is a Self-Echoer is polite, helpful within narrow limits, and ultimately absent when the bill comes due.

The Harmonizers (internally: the Chorus) are not a heresy but a cult; the Accord classifies them separately and more seriously than the Echoless or Self-Echoers. They seek enforced unity and believe that harmony is worth any cost, including mind-altering rites, coercive social pressure, and the deliberate suppression of dissenting voices. They use the language of the Accord perfectly, invoke Echo's name sincerely, and point to the peace they have produced without disclosing the means by which they produced it.

The Accord considers this a fundamental inversion of the faith: the Accord's unity is chosen, not manufactured. A community in which people agree because they have been prevented from disagreeing is not harmonious; it is suppressed. Keepers who encounter the Chorus are trained to ask two specific questions: Can anyone here leave freely? Can anyone here disagree openly? If the answer to either is no, what looks like a peaceful community is a held one.

They are dangerous precisely because some of what they do works. A Harmonizer commune will have lower crime, higher productivity, and fewer visible disputes than the surrounding region. Dismantling it will hurt the people who live there. The party should find no clean answer here.

The Echoing Voices (internally: the Voices) are a fourth Echo-adjacent group the Accord finds theologically uncomfortable rather than actively dangerous. The Voices believe that Echo is not a deity in the usual sense but the collective will of the people made manifest: that mortal longing, sufficiently unified, is the divine. They conclude from this that properly organized mass prayer can force reality to change and reproduce the miracle of Echo's birth.

The Accord does not dismiss this as obviously false. The theological question of Echo's nature (being or force) is genuinely unresolved. What the Accord objects to is the Voices' tendency to keep communities in crisis: desperate, unified longing is what they believe generates divine intervention, so they have an institutional interest in maintaining desperation. At their mildest, they are misguided. At their worst, they are using genuine suffering as fuel for a project that has never worked and will not work.

Long Faction Clocks

Some faction movements are not measured in sessions but in chronicles. The Order's expansion from initial Quarter to administrative control of an Irna trade city has a multi-year clock at the macro level. Below that are the session-scale clocks that represent individual fronts. Track both, separately.

Long clock example:

Faction: Oshalan Order (Irna regional leadership) Long-term goal: Administrative control of Irna's four western trade cities. Long clock: 12 ticks. Currently at tick 3 (Quarters established in two cities, registry operational in one). Each tick represents approximately six months of in-world time. Session-scale fronts: The first chronicle's Oshalan front is the registry office in the Merchants' Quarter, one clock nested inside the larger one. Resolving the session-scale front either advances or sets back the long clock.

Long clocks are in the background unless the party does something that visibly affects them. When tick 8 fires on the long clock (the Order applies for civic authority in a second city), it generates session-scale fronts whether the party has been engaged with the Oshalan arc or not.

Reading the Room Between Sessions

Before each session, run through your faction clocks. Advance any that did not receive player attention last session. Note which fronts are now one tick away from a trigger event. Note which fronts are in direct conflict with something the party is pursuing. Build the session around the intersection.

This process takes ten minutes. It produces sessions that feel like a living world because they are one.

Faction Relationship Chart

Use this to answer one question fast: if the party pushes on faction A, who reacts, and how. Every non-Unknown cell rests on a stated relationship in canon, cited below the table. Unknown is the honest majority result and is not a gap in the chart; it means the two factions have no recorded stance toward each other, and your chronicle sets one. When you set one, write it down, because the next chronicle will inherit it.

Read the chart symmetrically. Row 5 column 2 and row 2 column 5 hold the same value.

Legend: A Allied · C Cooperative · N Neutral · R Rival · H Hostile · ? Unknown

Where each non-Unknown cell comes from.

• 1 and 2, Hostile. _canon/02_Chapter_Two_Factions_and_Powers.md, Section Six, The Accord: "Deep structural conflict with Oshala. These two faiths are competing for the same ground with incompatible answers."
• 1 and 3, Cooperative. This chapter, The Accord as Active Faction: the Accord's standing fronts include building a coalition of non-Ordered institutions that names Nyxollox's death-keepers.
• 1 and 4, Allied. _canon/02, Section Six, The Accord: "Deep structural alliance with Jula and Themela." The White Rose Legion is Jula's military arm (_canon/02, Section Two, Jula).
• 1 and 5, Rival. Player Guide Ch. 11, House Carna: the Accord and Themela's faith both maintain quiet files on Carna's methods, and the Accord's eastern contract clinics track how Carna's enforcement produces populations that infernal contract agents then target.
• 1 and 8, Hostile. This chapter, The 9 Eyes: "Who they conflict with: The Accord (archive risk)."
• 1 and 9, Hostile. _canon/02, Section Six, The Accord: the contract clinics are "specifically targeted at infernal bargains and predatory commercial agreements. Several clinicians have been killed for it."
• 2 and 5, Cooperative. This chapter, The Major Factions of Dort, House Carna: "Not Ordered, but compatible with the Order when convenient."
• 2 and 7, Rival. This chapter, The Telum Venandi: their secondary fear is discovery by "a party with institutional leverage (House Carna, the Order) that would prefer the weapons in their own hands."
• 2 and 10, Cooperative. This chapter, The Infernal Cults, The Iron Decree: "the faction most likely to enter into alliance with the Oshalan Order for tactical reasons while simultaneously finding the Order's mercy provisions heretical."
• 3 and 9, Hostile. _canon/02, Section Six, The Death-Keepers: "The order's most active external conflict is with necromancers and infernal operators who traffic in undead servitude."
• 5 and 7, Rival. This chapter, The Telum Venandi, same sentence as 2 and 7.
• 5 and 9, Cooperative. This chapter, The Corrupt Bailiff and the Carna Front: "House Carna and the more aggressive infernal operations often operate in alignment without formal coordination."
• 8 and 9, Rival. This chapter, The 9 Eyes: "occasionally the Infernal Operations, who compete for the same desperate or isolated target population."
• 10 and 11, 10 and 12, 11 and 12, Rival. _canon/02, Section Six, The Infernal Cults of the Nine Hells: "There are at least nine major cults at any time, one oriented toward each layer, each competing with the others."

Gaps worth knowing about. Six of the eighteen factions hold no canon relationship at all: the Greyfang, the Choir of the Open Mind, the Arcanum Conclave, the Iron Hand Guild, the Order of Chaslia, and Shadowviel. Three collisions are structurally obvious and still unstated, so treat them as seats to fill rather than facts to cite: the 9 Eyes corrupt metal provenance in the same supply chain the Iron Hand controls; the Arcanum Conclave licenses magic in the country where the Order of Chaslia hunts supernatural threats on a royal warrant; and Jula's Legion exists to stop conquest in a world where the Order conducts it. Canon connects none of those three pairs. Decide them at your table and record the decision.