The Classes page covers how each one plays. This page covers where it came from and how it ended up here. If you're picking a character, read the class you like and then read the realm above it, because most of what makes a class interesting happened before the class existed.
Back to ClassesWhen you make a character you pick where their story enters the world. Some classes have more than one way in: a different day, a different city, a different reason the power turned up. Those openings are yours to play and they're not interchangeable.
None of them change what you are. Two Nephilim who started on opposite sides of the map are both Nephilim, with the same blood and the same ceiling. Your origin decides what your first hour looked like and what your character remembers about it. It doesn't decide your personality, your morals, who you trust, what job you take, how human you consider yourself, whether you tell anyone what you are, or what you're actually after.
One thing worth knowing before you read on. Under the Xenia Integration Act, every class on this page except Human is legally a Xeno. It's a legal category rather than a species, and it covers beings who came through the ley lines, beings who were always here, and people who were modified into one. How your character feels about the word is up to them.
The ley line network held the realms in place relative to each other. When the Veins were drilled and the network destabilised, the realms didn't disconnect cleanly. They came apart, and anyone in transit came apart with them. Every non-human class on this page traces back to that one event.
Where the story starts. A civilisation cracked the planet open chasing power it didn't understand, and now it shares a broken world with everything that came out. Humans have no supernatural gifts. They also built all of this and they intend to keep running it.
A realm of order and light, now fractured and half collapsed after the drilling cut the ley lines holding it up. The angels who got out carry the memory of what was lost, and the conviction to restore it or build something better.
Hell didn't fall, it got pushed. The collapse gutted its power structures overnight and left the demonic houses scattered with nobody in charge. The ones who made it to Earth arrived as survivors, not conquerors. Whether they stayed that way depends who you ask.
A realm of fire and memory, older than most of the worlds that collapsed. The Dragonborn who came out of it carry bloodlines tied to a heartflame that's still dying, each one a living ember of something that may never burn properly again.
The World Tree held long after other realms went. Even so, Asgard's roots couldn't survive the network coming apart. Warriors, maidens and champions arrived on Earth mid-battle, mid-ceremony, mid-life. Most of them haven't stopped fighting since.
Not a realm in any sense you'd recognise. The Beyond is the space between spaces, the dark margin outside the network that was never meant to hold anything. Whatever the Eldritch are, they didn't come from a world. They came from the absence of one.
Nine starting classes come out of the Human World and they have almost nothing to do with each other. Some were made in a lab. Some have been hiding in plain sight since long before anybody drilled anything. What they share is a postcode.
No augmentations, no ley heritage, nothing handed over at birth. What humans have instead is leverage: political capital, institutional authority, and a long history of being very hard to get rid of.
The collapse displaced every supernatural being on Earth. Humans still own the infrastructure, the governments and the social contracts holding this place together, and in a lot of rooms that's the only thing that actually matters.
Human is also the only starting point that reaches every RP unlock on the roster. Nothing is closed off, because nothing was decided for you.
The programmes behind the Super Soldier were a military secret years before the Collapse made secrets pointless. Enhanced past human limits through classified biological and cybernetic work, they're precision instruments built on purpose by people with budgets and objectives.
Xenos arriving didn't shut any of it down. It got the programme funded properly for the first time, on the reasonable grounds that somebody needed to be able to fight back.
An enhanced frame burns fuel to match. You get hungry at the same rate as anyone else, it just takes about twice as much to fix.
Speedsters started in the same programme that produced the Super Soldiers. Same serum, same black sites, same classified authorisation. It just didn't take the same way twice.
Instead of strength and precision, the augmentation bent sideways into kinetic energy. Momentum gets stored, converted, and burned off about as fast as it builds. A Speedster's body runs hotter than it should and never fully stops moving, even standing still. Whatever Meridian meant to build, this wasn't it.
Same metabolic bill as a Super Soldier, for the same reason. Keep food on you.
Before the lines came apart, angels and demons could visit. Some of them fell in love. Others were a lot less deliberate about it. Either way they left something behind.
A Nephilim is divine energy, or power, or whatever word you can live with, combined with human genetics. That's why it develops as a duality instead of one clean inheritance. The angelic and demonic resonance are both in there, neither one takes priority, and neither side of the family is comfortable with the result.
They look human. They function human. Under pressure something else answers, and most Nephilim find that out the hard way with people watching.
The exact terms of the lineage are still up in the air. There's no authority left standing on either side to ask about it.
The post-Vein tech boom produced a lot of things nobody was ready for, and the Android programme is the one that talks back. Built to interface with ley line energy systems directly, the early prototypes were tools. The Collapse changed that. The energy saturation that hit Android units triggered something the engineers still can't account for and definitely didn't design.
Three model lines were built. They're separated by priority rather than capability, because all three can fight. What differs is what each one was told to put first.
Every primary model has a synthetic digestive system that turns carbon and hydrogen into usable fuel. An Android can sit down in a restaurant, order, and eat, and it does something. The system was designed for integration and it worked, possibly too well.
See Machines & Ley Energy for what an Android has in common with a Cyborg and a Power Armor operator.
Vampires lived in the shadows of human civilisation for centuries. The Collapse didn't create them. It made hiding pointless.
With supernatural beings turning up in the open and the world rewriting its assumptions in real time, the Fledgling generation are the ones who decided to stop pretending. Some were turned recently. Some had spent decades waiting for a world that would let them stop apologising, and then watched it arrive all at once.
Olympus never stopped visiting. The gods walked among mortals long before anyone drilled the Vein and they left children behind the way they always have, quietly and without explanation.
Most Demigods live an entire life without knowing. Then the ley lines collapsed, the barrier between realms thinned, and blood that had been dormant for generations started to answer. What you end up with is a mortal body carrying an immortal inheritance: strength that cracks stone, aetheric fire, and the sky as a birthright.
What none of them get told, at least not at first, is which god they belong to. Olympus has its reasons for that and has never felt the need to share them. Names carry weight up there, and saying the wrong one out loud in the wrong place wakes things that were perfectly happy asleep.
The standing advice from the one Olympian who bothers giving any: don't go around announcing whose child you are. Half won't believe you and the other half will want to test it.
Foxes have lived alongside humans for as long as either has existed, watching and adapting and mostly staying out of the way. When the collapse bled strange energy into the wild places of the Earth, Inari Ōkami noticed. The fox god's spirit realm borders every den and every shrine, and whatever was coming through threatened both.
So Inari did what Inari has always done and sent messengers. Every Kitsune was a fox first. The human shape is a gift rather than a birthright, granted along with foxfire and illusion, and granted for a reason: walk among humans, find out what broke this world, and work out whether it puts the spirits in danger.
Two things about that gift are worth understanding. The tails and the ears are not decoration. They're a visible readout of how much power a Kitsune is carrying, which is why a One Tail and a Seven Tail are not the same proposition at all. And the door swings both ways. A Kitsune can go back to fox form whenever they need to, because Inari understood that the human world is loud and overstimulating and frequently makes no sense, and had no intention of costing them their sanity over an errand.
Loyal to something a lot older than any nation, and still waiting to be asked for a verdict.
The werewolf condition is older than writing. The Collapse pushed ley line energy into communities that had kept the bloodline quiet for generations, and the surge set off transformations in people who had no idea there was anything to set off.
The Bitten are the ones changed by that flood rather than by lineage. Rawer, less controlled, and adjusting to a nature nobody warned them about or left instructions for.
Same elevated metabolism the augmented classes deal with, arrived at from completely the other direction. Roughly twice the food.
Heaven and Hell were structural opposites and they ended up in near-identical situations: the chain of command on the far side of a door that doesn't open any more. What each of them did next is where they split again.
Every Angel on Earth is a fallen angel. Not in the moral sense. Nobody was cast out, nobody sinned, there was no judgement. In the literal sense: they're in a place that isn't Heaven and they can't get back to it. The word means what it says and nothing else, and plenty of them find that harder to carry than an accusation would have been.
Messengers were never meant to be fighters. Their function in the hierarchy was communication, carrying intent across the ley lines between realms. When those lines collapsed the Messengers were mid-transit, and a lot of them didn't survive it.
The ones who did arrived on Earth cut off from the hierarchy, stripped of any mandate, and holding divine energy with nowhere left to take it. The realm behind them is fractured and half collapsed. What they do with the conviction they brought is now a matter of individual conscience, which is not a situation any of them were built for.
The lesser ranks of Hell's hierarchy were displaced first when the collapse gutted the infernal power structure. No lords left to answer to, no realms left to patrol, so the Lesser Demons arrived on Earth as free agents. Depending who's describing it, that's either the most dangerous thing imaginable or a genuine opportunity.
For the better part of a year afterwards, humans shot first. Eventually they stopped shooting and offered something resembling peace, and a lot of demons took it on the grounds that it was more than Hell had ever offered.
The Dragon Realm burned slowly. Its ley line feeds were among the oldest in the whole network, so the collapse cut them like arteries. Not a sudden failure but a long, visible guttering that everything in the realm could feel coming for weeks and nothing could do anything about.
Drakeblood, the first tier of Dragonborn, are the ones who survived the severing with enough of the realm's heartflame still in their blood to function. Not dragons, not fully human, and there's no good word on either side for what's left. A mortal body walking around on the world that drilled the hole.
Asgard produced two classes and they were doing very different jobs when it happened. Neither of them got to finish.
The Valkyrie were the choosers of the slain, riding the ley lines between Asgard and the mortal world to escort the worthy dead. When the network collapsed mid-ride, a lot of them ended up on this side permanently.
The Maidens arrived without their full power, without their mounts and without a mandate. They kept the weapons.
Some were mid-claim when the lines went. A believer died, a Chooser was sent, and the rite never got completed because there was no longer anywhere to deliver it. Those claims are still open and they're going to stay that way.
Asgardians aren't gods the way human mythology tells it. They're something older and stranger, shaped by thousands of years of ley line proximity into something that stopped being mortal a very long time ago.
The Blooded arrived on Earth with enough divine energy intact to be dangerous and not quite enough to be untouchable. A lot of them were still in training when it happened, with plenty of instruction left to go and an Arms-Master on the wrong side of a door that won't open again. Whatever they turn into from here, they finish teaching themselves.
There's no clean explanation for what the Eldritch are. The Beyond was never a realm. It's the structural void between realms, the dark space the ley network was built around rather than through. Nothing was supposed to be in there and for most of recorded history nothing detectably was.
When the network came apart, something in that void destabilised, and the void got handed something it had never had before. Edges. A shape. A body. The Ineffable are what stepped out of it, wearing flesh that doesn't fit and hasn't stopped aching since.
They can't go back. Whatever gap stayed open long enough for them to come out of closed behind them, and The Beyond has been shut in both directions ever since. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out. That leaves an Eldritch as stranded as any Angel or Valkyrie, except there was never a home in there to miss.
Eldritch is the loosest class on the roster by a distance, and that's on purpose. There's no single correct shape for one. You can be a full eldritch thing walking around in the open. You can be something that got into a human and is still wearing them. You can be a machine something moved into, or a person who was never quite right and turned out to have a reason for it. All of that works. The fixed points are where the power came from and the fact that none of it can be taught to anyone else.
Whether they were always in there or the collapse made them is a question that keeps researchers up at night, and one the Eldritch themselves can't answer.
Every class in this section is a Human character who became something else. You can't pick them at character creation and you don't inherit them. You arrive at them through the story you actually build, and several of them only exist at all because of how much ley energy is loose in the world now.
Cybernetic augmentation stops being a medical prosthetic at the point where it starts substantially changing what a body or a mind can do. Past that line it falls under the Xeno classification, along with neural-machine integration, nanite integration, artificial organs and techno-affliction. The technology has changed what you're capable of, and the law follows capability rather than intent.
Government hardware is heavily regulated and tracked through serialised components, which is exactly why the black-market trade runs on identifiers harvested from equipment that's been destroyed, decommissioned or otherwise taken out of service. A newly built part carrying a recovered servo cluster reads to automated systems as salvaged government hardware. That doesn't make it legal. It gives it an ancestry, which for most purposes gets you through the door.
Magic has always been a thing. It was small and tightly controlled, practised at a scale that rarely troubled anyone who wasn't already looking for it.
Sorcery is a human discipline rather than a birthright. Apprentices spend years learning to read and redirect ley line energy through technique, not talent. Then the Collapse flooded the system with more raw energy than any sorcerer in history had ever had to work with, and the ceiling moved. The ones who survived the adjustment came out sharper, stranger and a lot more dangerous than the tradition had ever produced.
See Magic & the Surge. The same shift is what made several other disciplines on this page possible at all.
Blood magic is one of the arts the surge made possible. At pre-Collapse energy levels it existed in principle and couldn't be practised at anything like this scale, because the power to do it simply wasn't there.
Mechanically it's the same art every sorcerer practises, aimed somewhere most of them would rather not aim it. The cost comes out of the practitioner's own body, which tends to end the argument about whether it was a good idea.
Dimension walking is one of the few genuinely new things in this world. Before the Collapse it didn't exist, because what it relies on wasn't reachable.
A Dim Walker moves by opening onto The Beyond and using it to get somewhere else. That's the same void the Eldritch came out of, the dark margin outside the ley network that was never built to hold anything.
The important part is that they don't actually go there. The Beyond is a gateway, not a destination. A Dim Walker routes through it and comes out somewhere in this world, and at no point in that are they standing in it.
That distinction is the entire discipline. The Beyond has been shut in both directions since the collapse, so a Dim Walker who genuinely arrived in it wouldn't be coming back. Threading through the gap without ever being in it is the only reason any of this works at all.
The ley energy in there is corrupt. That isn't a moral judgement about the people using it, it's a description of the energy itself, and it's the reason everything a Dim Walker does comes out looking the way it does. The dark is not a stylistic choice.
Very little is known about them as a community. They don't advertise, they don't appear to gather, and there's no equivalent of the sorcerous tradition or the druidic orders for anyone to go and ask. What does exist is paperwork. The governments of the world have catalogued Dim Walker abilities in exhausting detail, down to ranges and recovery times. Knowing what someone can do has turned out to be a lot easier than knowing anything else about them.
Druidic tradition held that the Earth was alive and interconnected long before scientists found the Veins and proved it. The Initiates knew what the drilling was going to cost and they said so to anyone who'd listen.
Nobody listened. Now the ley lines bleed and the Druids tend the wounds, channelling what's left of the natural energy network to hold broken ecosystems together. It's quieter work than it sounds and a lot less winnable.
Psychics are people whose minds always did more than a mind is supposed to. The capability was already there. It was just small, and there was nothing around to feed it.
The ley surge fed it. Same story as the magic disciplines: the energy that arrived after the Collapse took an existing human capacity past a ceiling it had always hit, and what came out the other side isn't something the previous generation would recognise as the same thing they were doing.
Power armor integration isn't wearing armour, and that's not a technicality. Real integration sets up a symbiotic relationship between the operator, their nervous system and the armour's architecture, and once that relationship starts it doesn't end.
The nanites that build and maintain the suit live either in a material housing or inside the operator's own cells. The relationship is parasitic. It can't be switched off, removed or reversed without catastrophic consequences, which in plain terms means you don't get to stop being a Power Armor operator. Taking the technology back out is effectively impossible.
The other thing worth understanding is what the neural interface actually provides, which is control rather than capability. A shell isn't adaptive. Installing an interface doesn't let armour develop new weapons, change its physical structure, or produce abilities it was never engineered for. The suit stays limited by its engineering, permanently.
All of it runs on ley energy, which also means all of it can be suppressed. See Machines & Ley Energy.
An Ordained is a human being who was imbued with power by a high-ranking angel. Not made of that power the way an Angel is. Handed it, on purpose, by something that had it to give.
The terms aren't servitude. An Ordained is not meant to serve whoever empowered them, and reading it as a chain of command gets it badly wrong. What's expected is that the gift gets treated with respect and gratitude. That's a real obligation and a different one, and how each Ordained interprets it is where most of the interesting roleplay lives.
A Hell Knight is the same arrangement pointing the other way.
A Hell Knight is a human being imbued with power by a high-ranking demon. Exact mirror of an Ordained, arrived at through the opposite door.
The terms are identical. Not a servant, not a vassal, not a tool. What's expected is respect and gratitude for what was given, not obedience to whoever gave it.
Which leaves an Ordained and a Hell Knight with a lot more in common than either tends to admit in public, and both of them know it.
People assume magic arrived with the Collapse. It didn't. Magic has always been a thing. It was just very small and very controlled, worked by people who'd spent their lives learning to move a resource that barely existed in any quantity.
What the drilling did was flood the world with ley energy. Practitioners didn't suddenly get more skilled, they got better supplied, and disciplines that had always existed on paper became possible in practice. Elemental magic at anything like its current scale is a post-Collapse thing. So is blood magic. So, by the same route, is what psychics can now do with a mind that was always slightly unusual and had never had anything to run on.
It's also why suppression interferes with these disciplines rather than curing them. Xenia physiology adapts continuously, which is a large part of why Xenos survived losing access to the energies of their original worlds at all. Over time their bodies learned to draw on the ley energy in this one instead. Because that adaptation is biological rather than technological, suppressing someone permanently would mean permanently stopping their body from adapting, and sooner or later the biology starts looking for another way round. Suppression is interference, not a cure, and anyone selling it as a cure is selling something else.
Androids, Cyborgs and Power Armor operators are three different answers to the same situation and they all obey the same physics. Machines, cybernetics, nanotech and armour are affected by the exact forces that govern Xeno abilities, because they're drawing on the exact same energy.
Revolt Tech pioneered a lot of modern leyline technology: cybernetics, nanotech, power armor, ley-energy integration. They aren't the only organisation that can produce or understand it. The United Nations and various government research programmes have spent years studying, recovering and reverse-engineering discoveries that came out of Revolt and out of independent researchers, and competing forms of leyline technology now exist all over the world. Revolt may still be at the bleeding edge. The science stopped being theirs alone some time ago.
This is the one that catches people out, so it's worth stating plainly. A Xeno cannot take combat cybernetics and cannot wear power armor. Both run on ley energy and both integrate with the nervous system, and a body that already has abilities of its own ends up in a fight with the hardware. The interference isn't a performance penalty, it's lasting health damage.
Power armor is the worse of the two, because it asks for more integration rather than less. An implant is a component. A suit is a symbiotic relationship with nanites living in your cells, and there is no version of that which coexists with an ability set the body is already running.
What a Xeno can have is mechanical prosthetics with no ley energy source in them. No battery, no nanites, no interface. Anything past that line is closed, and it stays closed.
Advanced systems often use ley energy either as a direct power source or as the bridge between biological and technological parts, and that creates an unavoidable weakness. Suppression technology produces a localised ley-energy reversal, pulling in or neutralising ambient energy in an area, and anything powered or stabilised by that energy can be weakened or knocked out. Cybernetics, nanites, power armor, energy weapons, ley-powered machinery and Xeno abilities are all on that list. A machine doesn't get to bypass suppression just because the effect came from another machine. It's the same energy either way.
It's also why suppression nanites aren't the clean answer they look like on paper. Nanites rely on ley energy themselves, for power, replication, neural communication, structural work and swarm coordination. A swarm generating a strong enough ley-negating field inside its host eventually starts disrupting its own operation. The stronger the suppression gets, the harder it is for the thing producing it to keep working. That contradiction is a natural ceiling and nobody has engineered their way round it yet.
Police and government units can fire electromagnetic pulses while wearing advanced armour because their systems are built around controlled discharge and isolation. Shielded circuitry, isolated power buses, hardened neural interfaces, temporary subsystem separation, Faraday-layered components, automatic reboot protocols. The pulse doesn't get to wash through everything they're carrying. That's what lets an officer use an EMP without immediately disabling themselves. It doesn't make their kit immune to every EMP, and a strong enough or sustained enough attack still gets through those protections.
All of the above is the part that was settled before your character woke up. It's a starting position and a set of constraints and that's all it is.
What your character wants, who they trust, what they do with what they were handed, whether they ever tell anyone what they are: none of that is written down anywhere, and none of it is ours to write.
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