Chapter 15 — Step 1: Name & Heritage
Give your character a name. Then choose one of the four peoples of humanity. Your heritage has no mechanical effect on the game — it is purely a roleplaying choice that shapes your character's background, culture, and perspective. Choose the one that fits the Wanderer you want to play, not the one you think is "best"; none of them touches the dice.
What follows is enough to choose and roleplay a heritage. The full history and culture of each people lives in Part VII.
Index§
The four peoples§
Sleepers§
Sleepers were cryogenically frozen and simply waited. Some froze near Earth and carry memories of a world that is now 160,000 light-years and an unimaginable span of time away; some froze near the end of the voyage and hold the culture of Wanderstar's underground civilization. All of them woke up somewhere else, somewhen else, into a life they did not live through. Ballistic arks are still arriving in the present, so Sleepers are still waking up — which makes them living links to lost worlds, perpetually a little out of step with the galaxy around them.
Play a Sleeper if you want a character who is a stranger to their own time — carrying old knowledge, old grief, and a perspective nobody else in the room can share.
Wanderborn§
The Wanderborn are the descendants of those who remained awake on Wanderstar through the entire voyage. They carry the deepest cultural memory of the crossing, and they are physically adapted to the underground, low-gravity world of the rogue planet: pale and elongated, with enormous close-range eyes, large pointed ears, and an instinct for echolocation that produces a faint, constant chittering. They arrived late — ejected when Wanderstar swung through the Shore — into worlds the Seeders had already spent millennia building.
Play a Wanderborn if you want a character shaped body and soul by the voyage itself, at home in the dark and the deep, and arriving into a Shore that was built without them in mind.
Seeders§
Seeders rode the FTL Vanguard ahead of Wanderstar and spent generations terraforming barren worlds in the Shore before anyone else arrived. They are the oldest established civilization in the Shore by a margin of thousands of years. Chronic nutritional hardship across those frontier generations left them shorter and stockier than other humans, with hardy immune systems and weathered skin. They also created the Companions.
Play a Seeder if you want a character from the oldest and most established stock — inheritors of the long, hard work of making the Shore livable, and of the complicated legacy that came with it.
Companions§
Companions are genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals, created by the Seeders as labor and since recognized as full people following the rebellion led by the mythical Sable Thresh-Ember. They are free, and have been for a long time — though what that freedom means in practice, on any given world, is a live question. The lineages are without number; the four most widely recognized are:
- Hounds — dog-stock
- Ferals — cat-stock
- Warrens — rabbit-stock
- Drays — ox-stock (huge and strong, and undeservedly thought dim)
If you play a Companion, choose one of these lineages or invent your own. Each lineage has its own culture and social networks, though all share the legacy of the rebellion.
Play a Companion if you want a character whose people won their personhood within living cultural memory — carrying both the pride of that and the unfinished business of it.
On naming§
Wanderstar names tend to carry heritage and history in them, and each people names itself in its own way:
- Sleepers wear the old names of a world now beyond reach.
- Wanderborn carry no family name at all: they go by an earned descriptive phrase, written whole — Stills-the-Echo, Song-of-the-Hollow.
- Seeders pair a plain, diverse given name with a forged compound surname — a worked material bolted to the tool that shapes it (Titanforge, Slaghewer, Arcwelder).
- Companion family names join a root word — a virtue, trade, or stock — to a suffix that marks allegiance; the most common, "-Ember," is the freedom-suffix taken from Sable Thresh-Ember by all who trace their liberation to the rebellion (Luna Brightpaw-Ember). Their given names are the affectionate pet-names of old Earth — Bella, Cooper, Luna, Bear — worn now by choice.
Follow whatever convention fits your character; there is no fixed rule, and the full naming tables for all four peoples are in Chapter 39. Write the name and heritage at the top of your sheet, and move on to Chapter 16.
Rolling heritage and name at random. Building a Wanderer entirely from the dice? The generator in Chapter 39 covers this step: roll D66 for heritage (the four peoples split the table evenly), a D6 for Companion stock if it comes up, then D66 on the matching name list. It's written for conjuring NPCs on the fly, but it works just as well for your own character.