The Face

The jungle beneath the cliffs is a dangerous place.

Gnomes are a diminutive people native to the great cliffs beneath the Ginwil plateau's western edge. Until very recently they were unknown outside the scattered settlements of Ginwil, living in small towns cut into the plateau's immense cliff faces and protected by deposits of Fahrstone buried somewhere within the incredibly hard rock.

Gnomish settlements are communities of galleries, ledges, hanging gardens, workshops, stairs, and suspended bridges. The largest extend for miles along the cliff and hundreds of feet vertically, while much of the population lives within shallow alcoves in the stone. Outsiders passing through the jungles below could easily mistake distant windows and terraces for natural shadows or the ruins of some long-abandoned settlement.

Artisans and merchants hold considerable influence among the gnomes. Precision glasswork, mechanisms, ceramics, surveying equipment, and fine instruments are widespread, though craftsmanship tends toward useful and durable objects rather than ornament for its own sake. Tinkering is regarded as both a practical skill and a form of curiosity: gnomes routinely modify household fixtures, test improvised mechanisms, and keep collections of parts for repairs or experiments. Almost every adult is capable of maintaining the lifts, waterworks, and other machinery upon which life on the cliff depends, and many take pleasure in improving them even when they function adequately.

Life on the Edge

Craftsmanship

Lenses

Spectacles are common among gnomes regardless of the wearer's eyesight. The abrupt visual changes of life on a cliff make interchangeable lenses useful: a worker may examine an object at arm's length, inspect a structure hundreds of feet away, enter a dim gallery, and return to an exposed ledge within a matter of minutes.

Most frames therefore allow one or more lenses to be raised, lowered, or exchanged. Expensive sets may contain several hinged lenses on each side, while simpler versions use individual lenses carried in small cases.

The traditional colors correspond with the Five Faces but retain ordinary practical functions.

Clear lenses. Available in different magnifications and used for engraving, machinery, sewing, glasswork, jewelry, and other precision crafts.

Blue inspection lenses. Their tint is favored for distinguishing writing, etched marks, seals, scratches, and maker's stamps against pale surfaces. Merchants and recordkeepers use them heavily.

Green glare lenses. Common among gardeners, herders, builders, and anyone spending long periods on exposed pale stone.

Purple lenses. Usually slightly tinted to reduce haze and frequently ground with mild magnification. Shepherds, lift operators, surveyors, and travelers commonly use them.

Amber lenses. Particularly useful for examining structural seams, worn surfaces, hairline cracks, and machinery in dusty or indistinct conditions.

It is therefore unremarkable for a gnome to change lenses several times during an ordinary conversation or task. This has acquired its own informal body language. Lowering a purple lens may suggest that a claim deserves investigation; amber that something seems amiss; blue that provenance or wording has become important.

Several lenses may also be stacked for specialized work.

Metalworking

Metal is uncommon in the cliff settlements and is therefore used sparingly. The granite itself is abundant, but productive veins are rare and difficult to reach through the near-impermeable rock. Gnomish machinery consequently makes extensive use of stone, glass, ceramic, hardwood, bone, horn, rope, and lacquered cloth, reserving metal for parts where no other material performs as well.

Axles, springs, cutting edges, contacts, catches, and other small precision components are therefore far more likely to be metal than frames or housings. A gnomish winch may have a granite drum, ceramic bearings, braided cable, and only a few thumb-sized pieces of bronze or silver alloy. This economy of material is considered a mark of good workmanship rather than poverty. Among engineers, it is common to boast not of how much fine material a machine contains, but of how little it required.

Much of the cliff's usable metal comes indirectly from cultivated algae. These growths draw minerals from the surface of the granite and reject metallic material from their tissues, leaving isolated crusts, beads, and nodules along the edges of mature colonies. The gnomes do not generally describe this as growing metal. To followers of the Green Hand especially, the distinction is important: the living thing has taken what it requires and expelled what it does not.

The resulting nodules are harvested with stone, ceramic, bone, or glass tools. Metal implements are rarely brought into a living algal garden, and driving metal directly into healthy plant growth is regarded by many gnomes as distasteful or sacrilegious.

Copper and silver are the most commonly recovered useful metals. Gold and other dense metals occur more rarely and are usually present only in small quantities suitable for wire, contacts, ornamentation, or precision work.

Alchemy

A gnomish alchemist separates metal remains from algae in a cliffside groove.

Gnomish alchemy is strongly associated with the separation, concentration, and reuse of materials that the cliff provides only reluctantly.

The most important alchemical industry is the cultivation of mineral-feeding algae. These colonies are grown in shallow runnels carved into exposed granite, where water passes slowly across the rock beneath the living growth. The algae dissolve minute quantities of mineral matter, retain useful salts, and precipitate unwanted metals outside their tissues. Mature gardens may therefore appear as long green streaks across the cliff, with rows of small ceramic cups beneath them to catch flakes and nodules washed loose by water.

Different varieties favor different conditions and produce different wastes. A colony known for silver may cease producing when the underlying stone changes composition, while another may unexpectedly begin concentrating lead, arsenic, or some other dangerous material. Gardeners maintain the colonies; alchemists test and refine what they leave behind.

The practice has a particular theological significance. Followers of the Green Hand often describe the process as purification rather than manufacture. "Gold is what the living thing refused" is a common expression in settlements with extensive metal gardens.

Alchemy is also used to make use of the enormous quantity of stone waste produced by life on the cliff. Anchor holes, cisterns, ledges, stairs, and foundations all create fragments of granite which are crushed through progressively finer mills. Coarse material becomes masonry fill or abrasive grit. Finer grades become manufactured sand.

The finest grades are further washed and separated to isolate silica-rich material for glassmaking. Gnomes distinguish numerous forms of processed grit and sand according to use, including mortar sand, polishing flour, glass sand, and rougher grades used in climbing or machinery.

Very little material is discarded outright. In a place where both the jungle below and the Brow above restrict trade, finding a second use for waste is considered as valuable a skill as creating something new.

Cartography

Gnomish maps are usually oriented to the cliff rather than to the compass.

On most maps, up means toward the Brow and down means toward the jungle below. This remains true regardless of the actual direction the cliff faces. North and south are used when necessary, particularly in dealings with outsiders, but they are secondary to the practical geography of ascent, descent, and traversable routes.

A conventional map viewed from above is often of little use to a cliff-dweller. Two homes may lie only a few yards apart horizontally while being separated by an overhang, a hundred-foot drop, or the absence of a safe anchor point. Gnomish maps therefore tend to represent the cliff as though the viewer were suspended opposite its face.

These face maps emphasize ledges, ropeways, lifts, ladders, stairs, water channels, anchor points, overhangs, sheep paths, and sections of smooth or unstable rock. Elevation is usually given greater visual importance than horizontal distance.

A second common form is the route map. These reduce settlements to a network of connected stations and paths, often with little regard for physical scale. A lift, stair, or rope bridge may be shown as a simple line between two points even if the actual route crosses a considerable distance. Outsiders sometimes find these maps confusing because places which appear adjacent may be far apart in space, while distant-looking points may be only a short climb from one another.

Directions likewise tend to be given in terms of movement through the cliff rather than compass bearings. A gnome might instruct a traveler to go "down two bells, cross at the blue winch, then rise one ledge," expecting the listener to understand the sequence of known lifts and crossings.

Travel distance is often described by effort rather than by length. A short climb across an exposed face may be considered farther than a much longer descent by lift. This has led gnomish surveyors to produce maps which resemble engineering drawings or transit diagrams as much as conventional charts.

For outsiders, the most reliable rule is simple: on a gnomish map, the cliff itself is the world, and the Brow is always at the top.

Belief and Custom

Gnomish "religion" is commonly also described as the Face, a collection of five ways through which the world may be understood. Each is represented by a colored lens, and many gnomes own several such lenses, exchanging them according to the work before them. A shepherd might wear one while tending a flock, another while repairing a gate, and a third while settling an argument among family. To change lenses is not generally regarded as changing faith. It is simply an admission that no single way of seeing is sufficient for every problem.

The common saying, "Before you decide, improve your sight," summarizes this attitude. Another, more theological expression is: "A face is given. What it shows is made."

Every Face is understood to possess both clarity and distortion. The same virtue, followed without restraint, becomes a sickness. Curiosity becomes obsession; memory becomes confinement; improvement becomes control. Gnomish teachers sometimes compare this to a flawed lens: the fault is not that it shows nothing, but that one forgets the image has been bent.

Religious specialists are usually warlocks rather than priests. Unlike most lay gnomes, they generally wear the color of only one Face. Their devotion is therefore sometimes regarded with both respect and caution. To spend one's life looking through a single lens is a powerful thing, but not necessarily a safe one.

Holy marks of the Faces share a common form: a circle representing the lens itself, altered according to the Face being invoked. These simple signs are commonly scratched onto tools, chalked upon walls, painted onto sheep tags, or worked into the rims of actual lenses.

Symbols of the faces.

The Far Face

The Far Face is associated with the Far Lantern and represents wonder, guidance, discovery, and the desire to understand what lies beyond familiar sight. Its devotees include explorers, astronomers, travelers, experimenters, and those who seek answers that others have learned to leave alone.

In its clearest aspect, the Far Face teaches that ignorance is not safety. The distant light exists to be followed, and questions are valuable precisely because their answers may change the questioner. Gnomes invoking the Far Lantern often do so before journeys, difficult investigations, or any undertaking in which the proper path cannot yet be known.

Its distortion is obsession. A distant answer may remain compelling long after pursuing it has become foolish, dangerous, or cruel. Stories about the Far Face frequently concern people who found what they sought and continued searching anyway. The warning is not against curiosity, but against allowing the object of curiosity to become more important than everything encountered along the way.

Frogs are traditionally associated with the Far Face, particularly those which appear unexpectedly after rain or in places far from standing water.

Its holy mark is a circular lens made into a stylized eye, bearing a five-pointed star within it.

The Far Face is represented by purple glass.

The Crafted Face

The Crafted Face is associated with the Tollmonger and represents workmanship, invention, precision, useful improvement, and the honest accounting of what a creation requires.

Gnomes commonly explain the Tollmonger's title through the belief that every useful creation exacts a toll. A lighter bridge may require more maintenance, a faster machine more careful handling, and a labor-saving device greater skill from those who repair it. A good inventor understands this cost before beginning work; a poor one merely arranges for somebody else to pay it. "Know the toll before you turn the wheel" is a common admonition among gnomish craftsmen.

Gnomes make relatively little distinction between an inventor, an artisan, and a competent repairer. Life upon the cliffs requires almost everyone to understand ropes, fasteners, waterworks, simple machinery, and structural maintenance to some degree. In many guilds, finished work is also tolled before acceptance: glass, pottery, braces, housings, and other rigid pieces are lightly struck and their resulting tone examined for faults. The expression "let it pay its toll" has consequently come to mean allowing a piece of work to prove its quality rather than trusting appearances.

Commerce is commonly included within the Crafted Face. A merchant creates something no less real than a smith or glassworker: a useful connection between people who possess different goods, information, or skills. Maker's marks are common, and the reputation of an artisan may follow an object long after it has passed into other hands.

The distortion of the Crafted Face is exploitation. The belief that every creation has a cost can become an excuse to decide that someone else ought to bear it. Inventors are particularly warned against reducing laborers, customers, apprentices, or even entire communities to components in a larger design. The Tollmonger asks what an invention costs; the dangerous craftsman asks only who can be made to pay.

Its holy mark is a circle with a small, simple hammer suspended from its upper rim, poised above the empty center.

The Crafted Face is represented by clear glass.

The Remembering Face

The Remembering Face is associated with the Shepherd of Names and represents memory, identity, stewardship, tradition, and the preservation of things which would otherwise be lost.

Names are particularly important within this Face. To name something is to distinguish it from the world around it; to remember the name is to preserve that distinction. Genealogies, agreements, old paths, craft methods, family stories, songs, boundary stones, and the names of the dead all fall within the Shepherd's keeping.

Sheep are sacred to the Remembering Face. Gnomish explanations vary, but most emphasize the shepherd's obligation to know a flock as more than an undifferentiated mass. A good shepherd recognizes individuals, remembers their histories, and notices when one is absent.

In its clearest aspect, the Remembering Face prevents people and things from disappearing merely because they are no longer convenient to remember. Its distortion is entrapment. Memory can preserve an old injury as readily as an old kindness, and a name can become a cage. Families, guilds, and communities devoted too strongly to the Remembering Face may become unwilling to permit anyone to outgrow an old reputation, occupation, debt, or role.

A common warning among its devotees holds that "a true name must still belong to the one who bears it."

Its holy mark is a circle from whose upper rim rise two curved horns. The horns bend slightly inward, simultaneously suggesting a ram, a pair of enclosing hands, and an open book.

The Remembering Face is represented by blue glass.

The Living Face

The Living Face is associated with the Green Hand and represents cultivation, health, abundance, patience, family, and the deliberate encouragement of growth.

The Green Hand is invoked by farmers, healers, cooks, parents, brewers, herders, and anyone whose work consists less of making something directly than of creating the conditions in which it can flourish. Its followers often distinguish between construction and cultivation: a stool is built, but a garden, a flock, a friendship, or a child must be allowed to become.

In its clearest aspect, the Living Face teaches patience and stewardship. Growth cannot always be hurried, and healthy things frequently require room rather than intervention.

Its distortion is consumption. Growth without limit crowds out everything around it. Protection can become smothering; hospitality can become obligation; a family can refuse to release its children; a prosperous guild can swallow every smaller competitor while insisting that expansion is proof of health. The Green Hand's oldest warning is that a garden in which only one thing thrives is not necessarily a healthy garden.

Its holy mark is a circle interrupted at its lower rim by three rounded shoots rising into the center. Depending upon the hand that draws it, these may resemble seedlings, roots, or three fingers reaching upward.

The Living Face is represented by green glass.

The Mended Face

An amber warlock ponders renumeration.

The Mended Face is associated with the Gear and represents repair, correction, reform, adaptation, and the belief that something need not remain as it was merely because it has always been that way.

The Gear is popular among repairers, organizers, civic reformers, machinists, and craftspeople who specialize in modifying existing work rather than beginning anew. The distinction between the Crafted and Mended Faces is important to gnomes: the Tollmonger asks how something might be made, while the Gear asks why something already made should remain unchanged.

Its clearest aspect is improvement through attention. A cracked wheel can be repaired. A cumbersome tradition can be simplified. A bad law can be replaced. A failed design can be altered rather than discarded. To admit that something does not work is not shameful under the Mended Face; refusing to correct a known fault often is.

Its distortion is control. Once one begins looking for faults, faults can be found everywhere. Devotion to improvement can become perfectionism, standardization, meddling, and eventually the conviction that nothing should be permitted to remain different merely because it wishes to. Gnomish stories about the Gear frequently end with an immaculate machine that no longer serves the people for whom it was built.

The Mended Face therefore carries a simple caution: "Mend what is broken. Ask before mending what is merely different."

Its holy mark is an abstract gear. The Mended Face is represented by amber glass.

Warlocks

Gnomish religious practice has no direct equivalent to the large clerical institutions common elsewhere in the world. Individuals granted unusual power by one of the patrons of the Five Faces instead serve as priests, advisers, celebrants, and specialists. Outsiders generally identify these individuals as warlocks.

Unlike ordinary gnomes, a warlock traditionally wears lenses of only one color.

A servant of the Far Lantern may own many purple lenses of differing strength, but does not wear green, blue, amber, or clear glass. The same restriction applies to the other Faces. This serves as both religious vestment and immediate identification of the individual's vocation.

Purple warlocks advise travelers, investigate unusual phenomena, and interpret signs. Clear warlocks oversee difficult craftsmanship and the dedication of workshops. Blue warlocks maintain records, memorials, and questions of identity or ownership. Green warlocks attend births, illnesses, agriculture, and livestock. Amber warlocks frequently serve as mediators in disputes and investigations of civic failure.

These positions need not be hereditary and do not constitute a unified priesthood.

Ecology

The Face is poor country for large animals but rich in specialized life. Almost everything that persists here has adapted either to the narrow ledges and exposed granite of the cliff itself or to the warm air rising from the jungle below. Gnomish settlements have consequently developed alongside a surprisingly dense collection of small animals, cultivated crops, and seasonal migrants.

The distinction between wild and cultivated ecology is not always clear. Cisterns provide habitat for frogs, sheep graze both settled and abandoned ledges, crops are grown wherever soil can be retained, and homes are built with niches for useful animals. A healthy settlement is expected to support more life than merely the gnomes who inhabit it.

Cliff Sheep

Small, broad-hooved sheep inhabit both settled ledges and the wild Face. Domestic flocks provide wool, milk, meat, hide, horn, and bone, making them among the most economically important animals available to the cliff settlements.

Sheep are sacred to the Shepherd of Names, but this does not prohibit their slaughter. A sheep taken for food should be properly identified, its death recorded, and as much of the animal used as possible. Waste is considered disrespectful in a way that killing the animal is not.

Flocks commonly wear small tuned bells, allowing shepherds to distinguish animals and groups by sound even when an intervening ledge blocks them from sight. Particularly old bloodlines may have records extending through many generations, and shepherds often know far more of a flock's ancestry than an outsider might expect.

Cliff Frogs

Small purple and violet frogs inhabit seepages, cisterns, hanging gardens, and cracks in the plateau stone. They are excellent climbers and have a habit of appearing in places which seem inaccessible even to gnomes.

The discovery of a frog in a newly opened gallery, dry cistern, or isolated cleft is often taken as evidence that another route or water source exists nearby. For this reason they have long been associated with the Far Lantern and with travelers generally. Deliberately harming one is widely considered unlucky.

Many settlements actively encourage frog populations. Shallow water dishes and small stone niches are built near lifts, cisterns, gardens, and other damp places where insects gather. This practice becomes particularly important during the great moth migrations.

Moth Haze

At irregular intervals, enormous populations of moths rise from the jungle below and follow the warm currents along the Face. Some migrations pass in a few nights. Others become seasonal plagues, with such numbers of insects moving past the settlements that walls, ropes, roofs, and open water acquire a coating of shed scales.

A herd of cliff sheep stare down at a moth migration as the scale haze rises.

These scales are extremely fine and faintly magical. Suspended in the updrafts, they produce an iridescent haze which interferes with long-distance vision. Straight edges appear slightly doubled, ropes seem displaced from their true positions, and distant ledges may look wider, narrower, or occasionally continuous where a gap actually exists.

On level ground the effect would be an inconvenience. On the Face it is a serious hazard.

Purple lenses are commonly worn by surveyors, shepherds, travelers, and rescue crews because their tint cuts much of the moth-scale shimmer and allows more reliable judgment of distant edges. Heavier versions are used during severe migrations. This practical association between purple glass, distant sight, and safe travel is one reason the color is strongly tied to the Far Face.

Long exposure to dense haze can produce more severe effects. Peripheral movement becomes difficult to distinguish from illusion, distant sounds may seem unusually close, and sufferers sometimes become fixated upon particular shapes or movements far along the cliff. Gnomes describe the latter condition as becoming long-eyed. Children are taught never to follow a path visible only through heavy haze.

Cliff frogs consume enormous numbers of migrating moths and are therefore treated as an important natural defense. Frog populations frequently become conspicuously fat during migration years, and their behavior is watched closely by shepherds and settlement keepers. "The frogs know before the lenses do" is a common expression for recognizing an environmental warning before instruments confirm it.

A good frog year is consequently an ambiguous blessing: it usually means the frogs are thriving because the moths are everywhere.

After major migrations, masked workers wearing dark purple lenses clear accumulated scales from cisterns, mechanisms, ropes, and walking surfaces. Small quantities are retained for pigments, lens treatments, lacquer, and alchemical use, but most are simply swept from the settlement before the next wind can return them to the air.

Cliff Crops

Cultivation on the Face depends on terraces, hanging gardens, and any crack or shelf capable of holding soil. Gnomes favor compact crops with strong roots and short growing seasons, especially cliff beans, redroot tubers, bitterleaf greens, dwarf onions, and small varieties of squash. These plants tolerate thin soil, sharp temperature changes, and the constant danger of losing a harvest to wind or falling stone.

Beans and tubers provide the bulk of the ordinary diet. Bitterleaf is harvested young for food and allowed to mature for medicinal teas, while dwarf onions are prized because they store well through the dry season. Squash and other trailing plants are trained along ropes and trellises, where their vines can occupy space that would otherwise be useless.

Soil is carried to the gardens in baskets, then held in place with woven roots, low stone walls, and ceramic edging. Compost, ash, and carefully measured water are treated as valuable resources. A terrace that loses its soil is not merely damaged; it may take several years of hauling and rebuilding before it can be planted again.

Some settlements maintain seed houses in cool galleries, recording which varieties thrive at particular elevations and exposures. Seeds are exchanged during seasonal gatherings, and a successful new strain may be named for the ledge, family, or storm that first produced it. The Green Hand teaches that a crop should be judged not only by its yield but by whether it leaves the terrace capable of bearing another harvest.

The Upper Face

Gnomish settlements extend high upon the cliff walls, but do not reach the top.

The final portion of the ascent is affected by an unstable region usually called the Brow. Travel through it becomes increasingly unreliable. Distances are difficult to estimate, unusual effects of the Flows become more common, and expeditions attempting the final ascent have historically suffered severe losses.

The Brow has been studied for generations. Stairs, galleries, and climbing routes reach remarkably close to the plateau rim, but no dependable passage to the upper surface is known.

The unexplored land immediately overhead consequently occupies a strange place in gnomish culture: physically nearby, plainly visible from parts of the Face, and nevertheless more inaccessible than countries hundreds of miles away.

The Low Jungle

Travel downward is possible, but difficult.

The protective influence of the plateau's Fahrstone weakens toward the base of the cliffs. Beyond it lies the dense Ginwil jungle, where heavy vegetation, dangerous animals, unstable ground, and exposure to Flux make permanent camps difficult to maintain.

Gnomish travel methods are also poorly suited to the region. Their settlements depend upon fixed routes, long sightlines, elevation markers, ropes, bridges, and signals across open cliff faces. Beneath the jungle canopy these advantages largely disappear.

Expeditions into the low country do occur, particularly for unusual plants, animals, or materials, but historically there has been little incentive for large-scale settlement. Routes frequently become unusable after Shifts, and many communities consider travel into the jungle a specialized and dangerous occupation.

For most of their history the gnomes consequently remained on the Face: protected by the stone, surrounded by known roads and markets, and with few reasons to descend into a wilderness which offered more danger than profit.

Fahrstone

White Fahrstone makes large gnomish settlements possible, but surprisingly little of the mineral is actively mined.

The stone protecting a community may lie hundreds of feet from the nearest inhabited gallery, and its exact size and position are often unknown. Removing Fahrstone without understanding the shape of a deposit risks weakening the field protecting a settlement. Excavation may also compromise the cliff itself.

As a consequence, reckless prospecting carries both legal and religious prohibitions.

A common maxim warns:

Work the Face. Do not wound it blindly.

Known exposed deposits may be carefully worked when necessary, but generations of observations, surveys, and field measurements are generally preferred to exploratory mining.

New Backgrounds

Bioalchemist

You were trained to tend the living processes by which the Face gives up otherwise inaccessible materials. Perhaps you maintained mineral-feeding algal gardens, tested the nodules they rejected, purified glass sand, or worked in a small laboratory identifying useful substances among the cliff's waste. Your trade lies somewhere between gardener, alchemist, and mineralogist.

Skill Proficiencies

Nature, Investigation

Tool Proficiencies

Alchemist's supplies, herbalism kit

Equipment

A set of alchemist's supplies, a ceramic specimen box containing several harmless algal samples, a glass testing rod, work clothes, a small Green Hand token or lens case, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Read the Residue

Your training has taught you to recognize the signs left by extraction, cultivation, and crude chemical processing. By examining a workshop, garden, mine waste, drainage channel, or similar site, you can usually determine what broad sort of material was being cultivated, refined, discarded, or sought there, provided the process is one with which a working alchemist could reasonably be familiar.

Other alchemists, apothecaries, mineral gardeners, and similar tradespeople recognize you as a fellow practitioner. In a settlement where such workers are present, you can generally secure access to mundane laboratory space, basic reference material, and advice about locally available reagents.

Suggested Characteristics

Bioalchemists tend to regard supposedly useless material with suspicion. Most have learned that waste is simply a substance whose second purpose has not yet been discovered.

Personality Trait: I keep small samples of anything I cannot immediately identify.

Ideal: Utility. Nothing should be discarded while it can still become something useful.

Bond: I learned my trade in a particular garden or workshop, and its people remain my professional family.

Flaw: I have difficulty leaving an interesting substance alone simply because everyone else says it is dangerous.

Lens Grinder

You make, repair, fit, or evaluate the colored lenses through which gnomes protect their eyes and honor the Faces. The trade demands steady hands, knowledge of glass, and an understanding of the practical differences between lenses intended for haze, close work, glare, inspection, or ordinary wear.

Some lens grinders are devotional craftsmen. Others regard theology as something customers bring into an otherwise exacting optical trade.

Skill Proficiencies

Perception, Religion

Tool Proficiencies

Glassblower's tools, jeweler's tools

Equipment

Glassblower's tools, a leather roll containing polishing cloths and abrasive powders, one ordinary gnomish colored lens of your choice, a magnifying lens, work clothes, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: A Practiced Eye

You can quickly recognize ordinary defects in lenses, mirrors, cut glass, and similar optical work. You can usually identify the broad purpose of a mundane lens by examining its curvature, tint, mounting, and wear.

Lens grinders and related craftsmen commonly extend professional courtesy to one another. In a community with an established glass trade, you can usually find a bench to work at, obtain small quantities of ordinary glass and abrasives at cost, and learn who made or repaired a distinctive piece of local optical work.

Suggested Characteristics

Lens grinders spend their lives thinking about the difference between seeing something and seeing it correctly.

Personality Trait: I compulsively clean lenses, windows, and polished surfaces while talking.

Ideal: Clarity. A problem should be seen accurately before anyone tries to solve it.

Bond: I still carry a lens made by the person who taught me.

Flaw: Once I decide that I have seen something clearly, I am extremely difficult to persuade that I have misjudged it.

Cliff Shepherd

You tended the small, broad-hooved sheep that graze the Face's scattered ledges. Shepherding here is as much climbing and navigation as animal husbandry. A flock may be spread across several elevations, hidden from sight by folds in the granite and identified only by the tones of its bells.

A good shepherd knows individual animals, bloodlines, routes, water sources, weather signs, and the difference between an accessible ledge and one that merely looks accessible through the moth haze.

Skill Proficiencies

Animal Handling, Survival

Tool Proficiencies

One musical instrument (usually bells, pipes, or another simple signaling instrument)

Languages

One language of your choice

Equipment

A shepherd's crook, 50 feet of hempen rope, a small tuned sheep bell, a blanket, common clothes, a record of several generations of a flock's lineage, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Paths of the Face

You are practiced at identifying routes through steep, broken, or vertical settled terrain. In inhabited cliff country, mountain settlements, quarries, and similar environments, you can usually determine where ordinary residents and livestock are likely to travel, where water is likely to be collected, and which visible routes are intended for regular use.

Shepherds, herders, and rural households generally recognize your profession. Unless you have given them reason not to trust you, such people will usually share local information about grazing, weather, dangerous animals, missing livestock, and passable routes.

Suggested Characteristics

Cliff shepherds are accustomed to long periods alone interrupted by sudden moments in which a small mistake can have catastrophic consequences.

Personality Trait: I recognize people by their voices long before I remember their faces.

Ideal: Stewardship. Anything placed in my care should leave my hands no worse than it entered them.

Bond: I can still name every animal in the first flock entrusted to me.

Flaw: I have a shepherd's habit of treating companions as though I am responsible for deciding what is safe for them.

Liftwright

The Face cannot function without lifts, winches, counterweights, ropeways, ladders, drainage systems, and the innumerable anchors holding them to the granite. You built or maintained this infrastructure.

Liftwrights are not necessarily master inventors. Most are practical mechanics expected to recognize dangerous wear, replace a rope before it fails, balance a load, listen to a bearing, and understand which repairs can wait until morning and which cannot.

Skill Proficiencies

Athletics, Investigation

Tool Proficiencies

Carpenter's tools, tinker's tools

Equipment

Tinker's tools, a light hammer, 50 feet of hempen rope, a pouch of chalk, several ceramic and wooden replacement fittings, work clothes, a Tollmonger maker's mark or guild token, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Know the Toll

When examining an ordinary lift, bridge, pulley system, scaffold, staircase, ropeway, or similar piece of civil infrastructure, you can usually determine its intended function and recognize obvious signs of neglect, excessive load, or improper repair.

Workers responsible for maintaining roads, bridges, lifts, docks, and other public works generally regard you as one of their own. Where such infrastructure exists, you can usually learn who maintains it, where its maintenance access lies, and whether workers have noticed recent failures, unusual loads, or unauthorized modifications.

Suggested Characteristics

Liftwrights are taught that every useful mechanism transfers a burden somewhere. Finding where that burden goes is often the first step in understanding the machine.

Personality Trait: Whenever I enter a room, I notice what is holding everything up.

Ideal: Responsibility. If my work fails, saying that somebody else misused it is poor consolation.

Bond: Somewhere on the Face is a machine, lift, or bridge bearing my mark.

Flaw: I tend to treat social problems as though the correct arrangement of parts must have an objectively best solution.