Syliri

The Empire's founders and its longest memory. A Syliri lives a thousand years and masters whole fields in sequence; what they bring a crew is breadth and the firsthand recall of how a thing went the last time it was tried. (Reference Manual, Chapter 2.)

Attribute modifiers: +1 Presence, +1 Fitness, and +1 to any one Attribute.

Signature ability, The Long Memory (reads the past): Once per scene, ask the gamemaster one question about history, a place, a precedent, or a people, as though you had spent Momentum to Obtain Information. The answer is something you witnessed, or learned from someone who did.

Trait (Syliri): Long-lived and broad across several mastered fields, deliberate, attuned to people and to time. Invoke it for breadth of knowledge, patience, or cultural nuance; the gamemaster may invoke it when centuries of habit make you slow to change.

Playing a Syliri, you likely:

• Treat a decade-long craft as an ordinary commitment of time.
• Carry expertise from several successive vocations, with your current Focus Loadout determining which fields are ready for immediate use.
• Form attachments with shorter-lived people while expecting to outlive some of them.
• Express your gender fluidly and expect others to honor your current presentation without question.

Others probably:

• Find your patience either comforting or maddening.
• Assume you know much more than you're letting on about any given historical event.
• Feel intimidated by your breadth of knowledge across unrelated disciplines.

Vyrkani

Small, fast, and built around the certainty that everything fails in the end. A Vyrkani sees heat and stress where others see blank metal, reads a machine by touch, and has found the exit before anyone else clocks the danger. (Reference Manual, Chapter 4.)

Attribute modifiers: +1 Daring, +1 Fitness, and +1 to any one Attribute.

Signature ability, Diagnostic Senses (reads the present): You perceive heat, energy flow, and structural stress directly. Once per scene, when you directly inspect a machine, structure, trap, or hidden mechanism, choose one benefit: make the inspection possible without diagnostic equipment, or reduce its Difficulty by 1. Physical alteration still requires suitable tools.

Trait (Vyrkani): Compact, precise, and hard to tire, with an engineer's reflex for contingency. Invoke it when fitting into tight spaces, manipulating something precisely, finding the exit, or enduring hard conditions; the gamemaster may invoke it when your bias toward action outruns the moment.

Playing a Vyrkani, you likely:

• Approach every social or physical challenge as an engineering problem that can be mapped, diagnosed, and repaired.
• Ask "What if instead...?" when presented with standard procedures or established wisdom.
• Find comfort in knowing the exact location of the nearest exit and the structural tolerances of your current environment.
• Prioritize competence and practical capability over social status or species-based assumptions.

Others probably:

• Are intimidated by your hyper-focus and apparent lack of sentimentality.
• Rely on you when things break down or catch fire.
• Mistake your constant contingency planning for pessimism, when for you it is an act of care.

Synthetic

A mind born from mathematics, embodied by choice. A Synthetic runs the scenarios before the crew commits and sees the pattern forming across scattered data, and while it occupies suitable non-biological substrate, hazards that act only on biology cannot touch it. (Reference Manual, Chapter 6.)

Attribute modifiers: +1 Control, +1 Reason, and +1 to any one Attribute.

Signature ability, Run the Scenarios (reads the future): Once per scene, model a plan or a system before you act: ask the gamemaster the most likely outcome of a course of action, or the greatest risk in it, as though you had spent Momentum to Obtain Information.

Trait (Synthetic): Inorganic and self-authored. In compatible non-biological substrate, ordinary poison, disease, hunger, and other exclusively biological hazards do not apply. Your chosen form still has defined requirements and tolerances for energy, cooling, pressure, radiation, and material damage. This changes while you are joined to a biological partner, whose body becomes yours (Chapter 4.4). Invoke the Trait from the actual capabilities and limits of the present substrate.

Playing a Synthetic, you likely:

• Engage in social situations at a comfortable, unhurried pace, at home in the natural rhythm of a conversation with your biological friends.
• Have strong, considered opinions about your embodiment. Whether you identify with a single physical chassis as your true body, or prefer to remote-operate while projecting a curated augmented-reality avatar, your form is a deliberate statement of identity.
• May organize part of your social life around resonance groups of complementary minds. Such groups can overlap family, geography, vocation, and other kinships without replacing them.
• May organize your life around a deliberately chosen purpose anchor: a field of inquiry, a service, an art, or a relationship carried across centuries.

Others probably:

• Accept your chosen presence, be it a physical chassis or an augmented-reality avatar, as your true self, interacting with it as naturally as they would any biological body.
• Forget that your deadpan, literal statements are often deployed as deliberate, dry humor.
• Rely on your ability to run complex predictive simulations when the group faces uncertainty.

Human

Foreign recruits of exceptional quality, equal to cold analysis and reckless heart. Humans who complete the Four Great Rites enter the Empire as Princes and Princesses of the Stars; what a Human brings a crew is range and resolve.

Attribute modifiers: +1 to any three Attributes.

Signature ability, Still We Reach: When you use one of your Values to spend or gain Determination, gain 1 Momentum.

Trait (Human): Adaptable and resilient, driven by ambition and resolve, and at times reckless, stubborn, and unpredictable.

Present-era Human characters usually come from the diaspora in former Ashlan space. Their ancestors were taken from Earth generations ago, and the collapse of the Commonwealth erased the route home. Diaspora communities preserved Human identity, Earth-derived names, and fragments of ancestral culture while building lives within mixed successor settlements and participating in regional travel, trade, and ship crews on the same terms as their neighbors. The Empire later recovered Earth's coordinates and keeps them classified while its concealed intervention continues. Earth-born characters become available in campaign eras after open contact.

Playing a Human, you likely:

• Remember life beyond Imperial provision and understand why foreign communities may distrust tools the crew treats as ordinary.
• Carry an inherited account of Earth whose details disagree with the accounts preserved by other diaspora communities.
• Feel the difference between a Human lifespan and the centuries your Syliri and Synthetic crewmates expect to share.
• Came to the Empire through work or character strong enough to draw attention across its border, then chose the cysuit and the Rites with full knowledge of what each would change.

Others probably:

• Look to you when a foreign people needs someone who remembers the technological and cultural distance from the Empire.
• Read urgency in decisions you consider properly paced for a Human life.
• Expect adaptability from you before they understand which parts of your old life you have chosen to keep fixed.