Cortex Plus: Wyrd of the Wanderer - Pitch
Wyrd of the Wanderer[edit]
On the ragged fringe of an Empire they built their brutal wall and named it for their distant king.
The Clans know nothing of kings.
The Clans name it Hammerwall, a stark and fundamental refusal of hard stone and harder men, winding through the foothills of the Hartshorn Mountains like a great stone serpent, blocking the passes and closing the trails into the broad and fertile plains of the Clanlands.
On the ragged fringe of an Empire the Clans have been pushed back against the unforgiving peaks, back against the broken chasms that crack its sweeping boreal forests, back against the unseen horrors that ride the mists and seep like death from the black and shattered ground.
In the gathering dusk a baby wails and is abruptly silenced, and every man makes sure it is stone beneath his feet and not naked earth. The Eyeless approaches, her blind head shifting from side to side, tasting the twilight. Will the Wyrd she speaks be a Clan Wyrd, or has yet an-other child been born to walk the Wyrd of the Wanderer?
On the ragged fringe of an Empire, decades pass.
Crouched on an outcropping of native stone, a babe grown to manhood looks down on the Hammerwall. Its stone ramparts bristle with the spears and swords of the luckless and disaffected, cravens and killers, the outcast and abandoned dregs of an Empire.
A thousand thousand horses could not breach that wall.
But a thousand ferrets? Ferrets could slip over, under, and around it with ease and wreak much havoc.
On the ragged fringe of an Empire, beneath the tall mountain pines, the man peers through the gathering mists and bares his teeth.
With the setting sun, he will prove his Wyrd against the Wall, become another cunning ferret set to plunder the granaries and storetowers of an Empire, weakening it from within, bringing it down under the weight of its own vastness.
It remains only to keep stone underfoot and when the stone gives way . . . to outrun the Wraith.
Playing a Wanderer[edit]
In Wyrd of the Wanderer you play a Thane of the Clans whose Wyrd, or prophesied life path, is outside the Clans. Over the past century and a half, your people have been pushed by an ever expanding Empire out of their ancestral lands into the harsh and harrowing mountains of the Hartshorn.
In that time, the Clanclave has met seven times, and by their word, the Clans have simply migrated with each imperial expansion, accepting poorer grazing, hunting, and resources in an effort to live in peace with the ravenous winterwolf that forces them ever on.
Until the Empire built the Hammerwall, trapping the Clans between death and something vastly worse than death.
Something in the ragged mountains is taking people: spirits in the mist that can occupy and enslave the body of any soul, human or animal, caught without salt, stone, or steel underfoot when night falls and the mists rise.
The spirits of the Wraith.
As a Wanderer, your Wyrd does not tie you directly to your Clan, but neither does it leave you unfettered from obligation to kith and kin. Rather, it sets you free to venture forth and serve the Clans from without.
In former generations, the Eyeless might name one child in ten thousand Wanderer; now many are led beyond the hearthfires by that fey and fickle Wyrd.
Sundered from traditional Clan training structures, Wanderers are free to grow and learn as they will, and many choose strange and difficult paths, paths tangled in ancestral magic or even the sacred lore of steel, paths of dearth and corruption, paths of painfully vivid and vibrant life.
Some Wanderers will seek to infiltrate the Empire and do what can be done to turn its pressing tide, be it through trade agreements, political manipulation, alliances with disenfranchised factions within the Empire, or even the simple expedience of spying, sabotage, or in extreme cases, assassination.
Other Wanderers will set forth as diplomatic envoys, seeking out allies in the Deep Hartshorn and if they can be found, the forgotten lands beyond.
Still other Wanderers will seek to learn the secrets behind the Wraith, searching out hints of their ancient civilization, when they were still mortal men, searching out lost lore and artifacts to help keep their threat at bay.
Your task will never be easy. The Wraith protect their secrets with a cold and vicious passion, the denizens of the Hartshorn and beyond can be canny and cruel, and the best citizens of the Empire are as apt to spit in the street, sneering and calling you Kingless, as to aid you in any endeavor. But you are trained and equipped to do what needs to be done, both for your own people, who know and live with the danger of the Wraith every day, and the Empire who has no idea what is creeping towards them in the mists.