You know the world now — the Tear, the balance, the factions pulling in every direction. The question is: where do you fit? The answer is your Society. Before you build your character, you build this together.

What Is an Adventuring Society?

A Society is a small, professional outfit — typically four to twelve active members — chartered and funded by a patron faction to handle problems that the faction can’t or won’t handle with its own people. You are not freelancers. You are not mercenaries, though some Societies behave that way. You are institutional — you have a charter, a handler, a budget, access to faction resources, and obligations that come with all of it.

What Your Society Gives You

Funding. Salary, mission bonuses, and expense accounts. Not lavish — enough to live on, with incentives for dangerous or high-priority work.

Gear. Access to faction-supplied equipment, including items that aren’t available on the open market. The equipment your patron provides tells a story about their philosophy — and it shapes how you operate.

Contacts. The patron faction’s network — informants, specialists, safe houses, allied organizations. Who you can call depends on who you work for.

Training. Access to faction specialists for skill development. A scholar-funded Society trains with researchers. A military-funded Society trains with combat instructors.

Mission briefs. You don’t have to find your own work. The patron provides assignments — ranging from routine to extraordinary. Zone surveys. Escort jobs. Artifact recovery. Cult infiltration. Deep Wild expeditions. The work is never boring.

Legitimacy. In a balkanized world where authority is contested, a chartered Society has standing. Not legal authority — standing. People know who you work for. Doors open or close accordingly.

What You Owe Your Patron

Mission completion. The patron assigns work. You do it. Failure is tolerated — sometimes. Repeated failure is not.

Reporting. The patron expects information. What did you see? Who did you encounter? What’s the zone status? The intelligence you gather is often more valuable to the patron than the mission objective itself.

Discretion. The patron’s interests are not always public knowledge. A Society that talks too freely about its assignments may find its charter revoked — or worse.

Loyalty — up to a point. The patron expects you to prioritize their interests. But you are not puppets. A Society that blindly follows every order is a tool. A Society that pushes back on bad orders is a partner. The best patrons understand this. The worst ones don’t.

The Patron Relationship

This is where the tension lives. The patron-Society relationship is the engine of your campaign.

When the patron’s agenda aligns with your morals, the work is clean. Clear a monster den. Escort a caravan. Survey a zone shift. Everyone benefits.

When it doesn’t align, you have a choice:

Follow orders. Complete the mission as briefed. Maintain the relationship. Live with the consequences — and whatever the patron asked you to do, or not see.

Push back. Refuse the mission, modify the objective, or report truthfully even when the patron doesn’t want to hear it. This strains the relationship. Patrons don’t like being told no. But patrons who lose their best Society over a bad order learn to ask differently next time.

Go rogue. Complete the mission in a way the patron didn’t authorize — or actively sabotage it. This is the nuclear option. You may save lives or expose corruption. You will also burn the patron relationship, and in a world where Societies depend on faction backing for gear, contacts, and legitimacy, that is not a small thing.

Changing patrons. Societies can switch factions — but it’s not casual. You bring institutional knowledge, contacts, and potentially classified information with you. The old patron may view this as betrayal. The new patron may view you as a flight risk. The transition is dangerous, dramatic, and rich with story.

Society Archetypes

Societies take different forms depending on their patron and their mission profile. Most blend elements of several archetypes. These are starting points — a vocabulary for what your outfit does.

Archetype	Typical Patron	Core Missions	The Tension
Cult Hunters	Religious institutions	Investigate and dismantle dark magic cults, rogue casters, entities from beyond the Veil	Your patron’s definition of “cult” may not match yours. Is a prayer circle a cult? Is a wild caster a threat?
Zone Surveyors	Government remnants, academic institutions	Map zone boundaries, track gradient shifts, assess stability	The data you collect will be used by your patron — for public safety, or strategic advantage? You may not get to choose.
Asset Recovery	Industrial factions, criminal networks	Retrieve artifacts, prototypes, stolen goods, or people from contested territory	The “asset” may not want to be recovered. The territory may belong to someone with a legitimate claim.
Monster Teams	Government agencies, community defense	Eradicate dangerous creatures — Aetheric beasts, corrupted wildlife, things from beyond the Veil	Not everything that looks like a monster is one. Your patron may want it dead for reasons beyond public safety.
Expedition Crews	Academic institutions, wealthy patrons	Venture into the Reclaimed Wild, Deep Zones, or uncharted territory	You are entering someone else’s home. The communities you “discover” may not welcome being discovered.
Border Runners	Criminal networks, pragmatist factions	Move goods, people, or information across zone borders	You’re keeping communities supplied. You’re also keeping black markets stocked. The line depends on who drew the border.
Fixers	Any patron with messy problems	Negotiation, investigation, mediation, and the occasional application of violence	You solve problems. But every solution creates a new situation, and the patron may not have told you the whole story.

Your Gear Tells a Story

The equipment your patron provides reflects their philosophy — and it shapes how you operate in the field.

Restoration-backed Societies receive the best Galvanic technology their patron can supply. Prototype arc weapons. Stabilized resonance coils. Zone-dampening field equipment. The gear is cutting-edge and impressive. The catch: Galvanic gear shifts the balance. A Society loaded with exotics cannot operate subtly in Aetheric territory — your gear announces your presence through the zone gradient.

Awakening-backed Societies receive enchanted equipment and magical support. Warded blades. Pre-charged spell foci. Amulets of protection. The gear is often handmade and idiosyncratic. The catch: magical gear radiates Aetheric residue. You’re visible to anyone with a Detect spell or an aetheric measurement device — which includes most law enforcement in Galvanic zones.

Arrangement-backed Societies receive a pragmatic mix — whatever works. Conventional firearms for reliability. A martial weapon for every member. Maybe one or two Galvanic pieces for emergencies. Maybe a ward acquired through channels that aren’t worth asking about. The catch: a mixed loadout means you’re never optimized for any single environment. Versatile but never dominant.

The Society Ecosystem

You are not the only Society in town. A city of any size has a dozen or more active Societies — some from the same patron, some from rival factions. This density is the point. It’s what makes the ecosystem feel alive, and it’s what gives your Society a reason to exist.

Sibling rivals. Your patron may fund three or four Societies. You compete for the best assignments, the most resources, and the patron’s favor. Which Society gets the high-profile contract? Which one gets the grunt work? The rivalry is personal and persistent.

Cross-faction competition. Two Societies from rival factions hunting the same artifact. Three Societies from different patrons converging on the same lead. Competition across faction lines is sharper and more dangerous, because the stakes include the balance of power between patrons.

Forced alliances. When a threat is too big for one Society — a rogue automaton destroying its way toward a residential district, an entity from beyond the Veil that doesn’t care about faction politics — rivals put differences aside. These forced alliances are tense, productive, and where lasting relationships form. Or where old grievances explode under pressure.

The watchers. Patrons sometimes task their Societies with gathering intelligence on rival Societies. Everyone watches everyone. The smart Societies know they’re being watched.

Building Your Society

This is a Session Zero activity. Before anyone builds a character, the table builds the Society together. The decisions you make here shape the campaign — its politics, its scope, its recurring cast, and the moral landscape you’ll navigate.

Your Society needs five things:

1. A Patron

Who funds you? What do they want? What do they believe about the Aether and the Engine? Use the factions from the previous chapter as a starting point, or create your own. The patron choice is the single most important decision for the campaign — it determines what kind of work you do, what kind of gear you carry, and what kind of moral complications you face.

2. A Charter

What is the Society authorized to do? Cult hunting? Zone survey? General troubleshooting? The charter defines your official scope — and the interesting missions are always the ones that fall outside it.

3. A Handler

The patron’s representative — the NPC who delivers mission briefs, provides resources, and acts as your point of contact with the faction. The handler is the patron made personal. A good handler is an ally. A bad handler is an obstacle. Most are somewhere in between. Work with your GM to sketch this person — they’ll be a recurring presence in your campaign.

4. A Reason to Exist

Why was this Society formed? What problem prompted the patron to charter it? The answer is the seed of your campaign.

“The Greycoats formed this Society because the border zone between the factory district and the Aetheric quarter is becoming ungovernable” is a campaign premise. “The Scholars formed this Society because the last one they sent into the Deep Wild didn’t come back” is a different campaign premise. Both start the same way: four people sitting around a table, deciding what kind of trouble they’re willing to walk into.

5. Your Backing

Backing is your patron’s investment in your Society — a rating from 1 to 5 that determines what equipment they provide, what support you can count on, and the baseline economic position of your members. The default is Backing 3 (Full Package): good equipment, a reliable handler, a decent safehouse, faction training access.

The GM may adjust starting Backing to set the campaign’s tone — Backing 1–2 for gritty, under-resourced campaigns where every job matters, or Backing 4–5 for elite campaigns with deep patron pockets and proportional expectations.

Backing sets a Station Floor for every member — the minimum economic position the patron’s support guarantees. It also determines what faction-specific gear your patron provides. See Patron Backing for the full table.

Your Society also starts with a Ledger — a group-level indicator of your collective financial health. It has four states: Flush (comfortable), Level (normal), Lean (stretched thin), and Dire (charter at risk). Most Societies start at Level. The Ledger moves based on mission outcomes and the passage of time — it’s the “we need work” dial that keeps the story moving. See The Society Ledger for details.

Record your Backing and Ledger on every member’s character sheet in the Society section. The table decides how to keep them in sync.