Echoes

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
— Cicero

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Echoes

An Echo is a deed, decision, or event that a character chooses to carry. It is the concrete mark of what the character cares about — personal, shared, or community-defining — and a cornerstone of continuity when individuals fall.

The player elevates a moment into an Echo. The Storyteller may veto only for tone or outright nonsense. One or two Echoes may be declared at character creation; new ones may be created whenever a deed warrants it.

Weight and Capacity

Weight	Name	Meaning
1	Individual	Known and cared for by the character alone
2	Group	Shared among a small circle; not enough alone to shift a Fortune
3	Pivotal	Tied to the community; can move a Fortune

Echo capacity = max(Strength, Dexterity) + Intellect + Authority.

Condition	Effect
Total Echo weight > capacity	–1 die on every roll that involves any of the character’s Echoes
No Echoes at all (Decadence)	–1 die on every roll

The load is not abstract. Too many burdens crack a person. None at all leaves them hollow.

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Leif’s sheet: Strength 2, Dexterity 1, Intellect 2, Authority 2. Capacity is max(2, 1) + 2 + 2 = 6. He has carried nothing all winter (Decadence). After the spring raid he takes on three Echoes whose weights sum to 6 — full load, no over-cap penalty. A fourth weight-1 Echo would push him past capacity.

1. Capacity: 6.
2. No Echoes: Decadence → −1 die on every roll.
3. Weights 1 + 2 + 3 = 6: at capacity — no over-cap penalty.
4. Total weight > 6: −1 die on rolls that involve any of his Echoes (not on unrelated rolls).

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Invocation

When a roll’s context matches one of the character’s Echoes, the player may spend one extra Exertion die beyond the normal limit of one. See dice pool makeup.

Last harvest Leif swore before the hall that the spring above the ash-hill would not fall to the upper tribe. That vow is an Echo. Tonight raiders are at the spring. The Storyteller agrees the scene matches. Leif may put more of himself into the roll than Exertion normally allows.

1. Echo: “Hold the spring against the upper tribe.”
2. Roll: Authority + Command, d8 — ordering the line at the water.
3. Exertion: spend 1 as usual, plus 1 more because the Echo matches (two Exertion dice total).
4. Without a matching Echo: only one Exertion die may be spent on a roll.

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Resolution

An Echo resolves when the table agrees the original concern is settled, broken, transcended, or made irrelevant. Resolution produces one of:

• a personal Trait
• a relationship, favour, or standing shift
• a narrative event or established fact
• if Pivotal: a shift to one Fortune and inclusion among the Foundation Myths

Personal (weight 1) Echoes usually die with the character unless elevated. Group and Pivotal Echoes persist and may be claimed by successors — including as Legacies (an Echo crafted with the Storyteller, not a separate system).

Hierarchy advancement often begins when patronage or a hook becomes an Echo; how it resolves decides rise or fall (Hierarchies).

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Fortunes

The community is tracked by five soft measures called Fortunes. They never produce absolute tallies (no cattle head-counts, no exact census).

Fortunes are not a second character sheet. They describe the community as a whole — how healthy, fed, trusted, feared, and self-sure it is on average. That reading colours every encounter: player characters and NPCs alike, friend and foe. A village on Surplus 0 is not “the same scene with different dice”; hunger, thin stores, and the smell of want walk into every hall and road. Low Cohesion means suspicion flavours speech even between allies. High Standing means outsiders treat anyone of that community with more caution or courtesy. The Storyteller uses Fortunes as ambient pressure and opportunity — scene framing, NPC attitude, what “ordinary life” feels like — not as a stack of modifiers to grind every roll.

Vitality

People and health — how many hands remain, how much loss the group can still take before it breaks.

Cohesion

Trust and order within — whether the kinship still acts as one, or frays into private plots.

Surplus

Food, tools, stores — the material cushion between ordinary winter and desperation.

Standing

How outsiders see the community — treaties, fear, respect, and the weight of the name.

Tradition

Shared memory and self-belief — lore, custom, and what the people still know themselves to be.

Reading the scale

All five Fortunes use the same soft scale. The pillars above are what is measured; the scale is how high each sits. Ratings are impressions, not ledgers.

Rating	State	How it lands at the table
0	Crisis	The lack is visible and constant — it should press almost every scene that touches that Fortune.
1	Strained	Thin margins; people feel it; ordinary plans cost more nerve and more care.
2	Steady	Normal for this people — neither feast nor free-fall.
3	Abundance	Room to breathe; outsiders and members alike read plenty, confidence, or strength in that domain.

Starting Fortunes are set as soft impressions during Campaign Setup. Early play confirms or corrects them. Automation should store the five ratings for the active community.

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Foundation Myths

The three most recent resolved Pivotal Echoes become the community’s active Foundation Myths. Older ones fade from the active set as new pivotal events take their place.

A Foundation Myth exerts a substantial, narrow effect on a defined set of actions. Effects are toggleable and compoundable: the Storyteller crafts a Myth by combining mechanical hooks (Storyteller-only tooling in automation). Possible effect ingredients include:

• free extra Exertion spend, or forced extra Exertion cost, on matching rolls
• situational Advantage or Disadvantage
• one or more specific faces locked onto the Omen die for community-relevant rolls
• extra or reduced Practice gain on matching Skills
• influence on Tide starting point and shift thresholds
• a temporary or permanent Trait available (or denied) to all community members

Triggering: like Echo invocation, a roll must explicitly mark that a Foundation Myth applies (Storyteller or automation roll flow). Free prose alone does not fire effects.

Worked Myth — The Price We Paid

A veteran who was taken as a child by slavers — parents killed, years in chains — hunted the man who did it. The hunt was not his alone. The community that hid him, fed him, and buried the dead made the deed a Pivotal Echo. When it resolved, it became a Foundation Myth.

The Price We Paid (active Myth):

• On a roll tagged against slavers or the slave-take: the actor may spend a free extra Exertion die (does not draw from the pool).
• Streetwise Practice on matching work is counted as if the ruling Foundation were 3 (threshold halved), even if the character’s Guile is 1 or 2.

Same roll — Myth off / on

A community member reads a slaver camp from the town’s alleys. Streetwise, Guile 2. Tagged against slavers only when the Myth is on.

Myth off Myth on

Tag: none. Ordinary Streetwise. Exertion if they spend from the pool. Practice against the Foundation-2 threshold (base 24 or 48, depending on current rank).

The camp is just another dangerous alley. Nothing in the community’s memory helps the dice.

Myths are living. They can be reinforced, corrupted, or overwritten by later events. They are the concrete way a character’s greatest deeds outlive the character and reshape the community that remains.

Related: Introduction (continuity), Character Creation, Automation.

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