Ashborn

Identity

You come from people whose bodies made peace with bad air. Your kind live where the sky sits low and grey: downwind of fires that never go out, in valleys where the ground smokes, in streets under a forest of chimneys. Others find you hardy, a little uncanny and often unlucky, because wherever the Ashborn thrive, something went wrong first. Most Ashborn would answer that it went wrong a long time ago, and that they are what came next.

Sensory palette

Grey on grey: skin like cooled cinder, eye-rims pale as sifted ash, a low voice with grit in it, and the smell of a hearth the morning after. Ash-Sight shows as nothing at all, only an Ashborn walking straight where everyone else gropes along the wall. Ash Breath is a dry bark and a puff of grit that falls at once: never a cloud, never a spark, never flame. The Ashborn are what is left after a fire, not the fire.

In Different Worlds

The rules above never change. Only the names, looks and stories below do.

Ashwinter (Gritty low magic · After the fall)

• Who they are there. The Ashborn of Ashwinter live under the heaviest ash: in the holds of the Volcanic Ash Zones, along the Cinder Fjords, and in any village that has stood downwind long enough. By their own account, which others dispute, their line began when their foremothers breathed the first ash after the First Ashfall and lived, and their children came out grey. Any culture can bear them: fjord-born Ashborn take fjord names, march-born ones take hearth names.
• What they are called. In candle-speech, the Downwind. The fjordholds say askfolk, and old fjord-folk still say soot-born, a by-name heard only in an old speaker’s mouth. Their traits go by plain names: Ash-Sight is smoke-eyes, Ashen Lungs a pyre-chest, and Ash Breath the grey cough.
• How they look and sound. Grey skin that darkens in the creases like soot in a knuckle; eye-rims pale as old pyre-ash; a voice that sounds as if it has been talking through smoke all day, because it has. In the Ash Zones’ holds they carry chips of black glass from the vents and walk easy on ground that thuds underfoot. On the fjords they smell of tar and brine like everyone on the shingle, and they are the ones who can stand at the pyre’s edge until the last name is called. Raised in the Marches, they smell of peat-smoke and bread like any hearth-child. In an ash storm, the Downwind lead the line.
• How others see them. Pyre-tenders and ash-guides are wanted everywhere and trusted almost nowhere: people downwind of a pyre want someone who can stand in its smoke, and also wonder why they can. The Ashborn are no people’s villains, and no faith calls them cursed by birth, though hardliners of every faith have tried.
• Story hook. At Skarvik, Jarl Bersi wants an Ashborn crew to take the last pyre-ship out under full smoke, because no one else can stand on its deck once it is lit. The Order of the Unlit Pyre offers the same crew a year’s grain to bring the dead ashore for the Laying instead. The dead aboard have names, and their families are waiting on the shingle. The crew’s helmsman is a player character’s cousin.
• Rules caveat. None. Ashwinter’s ash, its pyre-smoke and its ash storms are nonmagical, so Ash-Sight and Ashen Lungs work in them.

A smog-choked foundry city (Arcane-industrial)

• Who they are there. Three generations deep in the smelter districts, the families who worked the stacks, the flues and the slag-yards longest started having grey-skinned children who never coughed. Now the Ashborn are a people of the industrial quarters, and every foundry wants them on the high stacks.
• What they are called. Stackborn on the payroll; flue-rats in the mouths of people who mean it badly. Ash-Sight is clear-eye, Ashen Lungs iron lungs, and Ash Breath a soot-spit.
• How they look and sound. Soot-grey, soot-streaked even when they’re clean, with the quarter’s flat vowels and a cough that sounds like a laugh. They smell of coke-smoke and hot iron. In a smoke-filled engine hall an Ashborn walks straight to the valve while everyone else follows the wall.
• How others see them. Indispensable and underpaid; the city’s guild ordinances still list “smoke-tolerant labour” as a rate, not a trade.
• Story hook. A foundry fire has trapped the night shift. The owner’s insurer pays only if the cause was an accident; the Ashborn foreman who walked out of the smoke says it was not.
• Rules caveat. None. Ordinary factory smoke is nonmagical, so Ash-Sight and Ashen Lungs work in it; a smog that a spell, a magic item, another magical effect or a class feature created is outside both.

The city between the planes (Planar crossroads)

• Who they are there. Ashborn are one people among hundreds in a hub city where every plane’s travellers pass through. They come, by their own account, from a realm of cinder plains and a sky of slow-falling ash, and nobody in the crossroads city thinks that strange.
• What they are called. Greyfolk in the city’s trade-tongue. Their home word for themselves translates as “those who breathe the after-fire”. Ash-Sight is the clear, Ashen Lungs the after-fire breath, and Ash Breath a cinder-word, which is rude.
• How they look and sound. Ash-grey skin with a faint sheen like cooled glass, eyes that reflect lamplight dully, and a dry, crackling way of speaking.
• How others see them. As useful neighbours in a city where alchemists’ smoke and other planes’ air both leak into the streets: Ashborn run the bathhouses’ steam rooms and the incense-markets’ back stalls.
• Story hook. An Ashborn incense-seller is found unconscious in a smoke that should never have hurt her. Whatever burned in that room was not ordinary smoke.
• Rules caveat. None. The Ashborn’s home realm is story; no trait depends on it, and an Ashborn born in the city has every trait.

Origins and Inspiration

The Ashborn are drawn from real ash-famines, not from real peoples. The Laki eruption of 1783–84 in Iceland poisoned the air and the grass, and the famine that followed, remembered as the Móðuharðindin (“the mist hardships”), is usually reckoned to have killed about a fifth of the island’s people (estimates vary). The eruption of Tambora in 1815 darkened skies far beyond Indonesia and made 1816 the “Year Without a Summer” across much of Europe and North America. Both gave the image of a sky gone grey and of the people who outlasted it. Everything else, the grey skin, the ash-proof lungs and the grit-cough, is fantasy biology, invented for a people who are what survival under such a sky made. No real people is the Ashborn’s model.