Character sheet Adventurer Record
The sky above Irna is wrong in the way you stop noticing after the first month. A merchant barge catches the high wind three hundred feet up, its hull streaked with the color of the Zephyr-plane it skims against. Below it, on the street where you are standing, a death-keeper in a black-painted skull cap is arguing with a city watchman about jurisdiction over a body. The body is not moving but it is not unoccupied. Somewhere in the harbor district a bell is ringing a pattern that means the rift at the old tannery has opened again. You have maybe twenty minutes before whatever comes through stops being manageable. You are already running.
This is Dort. It is not a world that waits for you.
What Kind of World Is This?
Dort is a feudal world at a point of productive tension: medieval enough to have lords and guilds and muddy roads between walled towns, but pushed forward by enough strange pressure that flying ships move ore, passengers, soldiers, and diplomatic envoys across mountain ranges while priests argue over what their gods' latest omens mean. The technology is roughly medieval-plus (good steel, reliable boats, siege craft, guild-controlled craft production) with aerial trade routes built on a form of planar engineering that most people do not fully understand and do not need to.
The planes are real and proximate. The Arcana plane bleeds into the world at rifts: spatial tears that open without warning, connect to whatever lies on the other side, and sometimes bring things through. A rift at a crossroads market is a hazard to be managed, not a crisis to be solved. Planar proximity varies by region; some areas have rifts that have been open for generations, long enough that the local economy has organized around what comes through; and characters with the right skills can navigate them, read them, or push them shut. They cannot predict when the next one will open. No one can.
The gods are persons. Not abstractions, not symbols, not metaphors for the forces of the natural world. They have territory in the Shattered Domain; the divine plane that formed from the pieces of the primordial being Ix, shattered by its own creations before recorded history. They have alliances, grievances, and genuine economic stakes in the devotion of mortals, because a mortal's soul at death produces real power for the deity who held that person's faith in life. This means the gods take an interest in the quality of your devotion, not just its quantity. It means the clergy of rival faiths are not merely disagreeing about theology. And it means that when a god instructs a priest to do something that seems obviously wrong, there is almost always a reason, and the reason is almost always political.
Flying ships are one of Dort's defining infrastructures. They carry freight, passengers, military patrols, diplomatic missions, and sometimes war, but most people encounter them as expensive transport rather than battlefield engines. The aerial routes above Irna, Jazirah, Shoing, Funta, and Antaea move goods and people faster and more safely than any ground-based alternative. Their crews include merchants, sailors, marines, navigators, engineers, and guards, depending on who owns the ship and what it is carrying.
What Kind of Characters Live Here?
Characters in Ix are made from backgrounds and careers rather than classes. There is no fixed architecture of what a fighter or a mage or a healer is allowed to learn. Your background is where you came from; the social world that shaped your early instincts, the kinds of knowledge you absorbed before you made any deliberate choices. Your career is what you do now, or what you did before you became someone who takes unusual jobs for money.
These two choices define which skills are cheaper for you to advance. They do not grant you skill ranks, and they do not lock you out of anything. A former temple librarian who wants to learn swordsmanship can do so; the cost is just higher because that was never their professional context. A soldier's child who turns to trade has an instinct for both. Anyone can attempt anything. The differences between characters are about where they started and what they have been doing since, not about what they are permitted to do.
Character advancement runs through skills and talents purchased with XP. The system is in Chapter Three, with skills in Chapter Six and talents in Chapter Seven.
What Makes Ix Different?
The campaign setting is built on three pressures that distinguish it from other worlds using this system.
The first is the planar geography. Dort is not a world with one plane underneath it. It is a world embedded in a planar structure where the Arcana plane, the four elemental planes, the Hells, and other places are all real, reachable, and politically relevant. Characters can go to these places. Things from these places come here. The rift on the edge of town is not a narrative device; it is a genuine opening to somewhere else, and what is on the other side varies.
Mastery of planar navigation is a real skill. The Shattered Domain (the plane where the gods actually live) is also real, but it is a different category: the gods' literal home, not a plane you stumble through. Its politics shape the campaign without most characters ever setting foot there.
The second is the divine pressure. The gods are not background flavor. They pursue active agendas, hire mortal agents (sometimes directly, through clergy, and sometimes indirectly, through contractors who may not know the client), and compete with each other for followers, territory, and the soul-weight that constitutes real power. Playing a faithful character means playing someone in a genuine relationship with a divine person who has opinions. Playing a faithless character means navigating a world where that relationship is the organizing fact of everyone around you.
The third is the soul economy. Souls in Dort are real, countable, and valuable. Infernal contracts claim them before death. Necromancers traffic in them. The death-keepers of Nyxollox's faith treat protecting a dying person's passage as a practical profession, because infernal operators with the right tools can intercept an unguarded soul at the threshold. This is not horror decoration. It is a fact of the world, and it produces a specific kind of moral weight around choices that affect life, death, and what happens afterward.
A Note on Companions
This book covers what a player needs to run a character in an Ix campaign. It does not contain everything.
Exodus NDS Core Rules holds the complete mechanical foundation; the full dice system, the edge cases, the options this book summarizes. If something in this book's rules primer does not answer your question, the Core Rules has the answer.
Chapter Four of this book details the core playable species for the Ix Player Guide. Additional peoples and lineages exist elsewhere in Dort, but this book keeps the starting roster focused on the species most likely to appear in a first campaign.
Chapter Nine; Magic in Ix covers both what magic means in the world and the complete casting system: spell blocks, traditions, the full spell list, and the prices power charges in return.
Ix GM Guide is your GM's book. It contains the other half of this world: the hidden histories, the faction agendas, the things that are not player-knowledge. You can read it if you want (it is not prohibited) but it contains genuine spoilers, and knowing what is behind a door changes what it means to open one.