SeventhSun:Lineages

Lineages

Lineages are surviving forms of posthumanity. Each grants one concise Lineage Gift without dictating profession, outlook, or Path.

Humanity itself went extinct as far back as the Third Sun, leaving their heritage to their successors, the posthuman lineages. A Lineage describes the body a hero inherits. It does not prescribe culture, profession, allegiance, temperament, or moral character. Two members of the same Lineage may have less in common with one another than either has with a neighbor of another Lineage.

Lineage Gifts

Every Lineage grants one Lineage Gift: a concise ability expressing a physical fact that distinguishes its members. Lineages do not alter Attributes, dictate Skills, impose balancing penalties, or provide Talent trees. A Lineage Gift should matter in play without reducing a people to a numerical stereotype.

Lineage and Path answer different questions. Lineage describes what kind of posthuman body the hero possesses; Path describes how the hero meets danger and changes the world. The four core Paths remain open to many Lineages. More specialized traditions may appear in later supplements when a particular anatomy genuinely creates a new way to play.

Alliants

Alliants are survivors of an ancient war—or, more precisely, the descendants of bodies made to survive it. The conflict has outlived any reliable account of its belligerents, purpose, or conclusion. Even the name Alliant preserves the idea of an alliance without identifying who stood together or what they opposed. Different communities inherit incompatible answers, and some reject the question as an obligation imposed by the dead.

An Alliant has a powerful humanoid frame protected by interlocking plates of living exoskeleton. The armor is most conspicuous around the head, where strong ridges and articulated plates form a natural helm above and around the face. Further plating reinforces the spine, shoulders, ribs, and joints without preventing ordinary movement. Individual coloration, pattern, and plate shape vary widely.

Alliants were built to endure violence, but they are not compelled toward it. A body inherited from a forgotten war says nothing certain about the purposes of the person living within it. Alliant societies include communities that honor their martial inheritance, communities that regard it as a warning, and communities concerned with entirely different matters.

Lineage Gift

Armored Body — Your living exoskeleton provides Protection 2, cumulative with worn armor.

Devisors

Devisors are stout, compact, and exceptionally sturdy posthumans. Their remote designers intended them to work as technicians for the Monitors, maintaining systems in confined service spaces, buried installations, and the deep structures beneath inhabited places. A Devisor body tolerates weight, pressure, poor footing, and long labor in cramped surroundings with an ease that taller Lineages often mistake for simple stubbornness.

Many Devisor societies remain tunnel dwellers. Their settlements occupy caverns, buried works, forgotten conduits, and warrens excavated through structures whose original purposes have long been lost. This does not make every Devisor a technician or miner. It does mean that enclosure rarely carries the same associations for them that it does for peoples accustomed to open sky. A deep habitation may be crowded, splendid, sacred, or ruinous, but it is not inherently primitive.

The old service relationship with the Monitors is now history, inheritance, doctrine, grievance, or myth according to the community. Devisors cannot build artifacts, and their ancestry does not grant automatic mastery of Technics. Their bodies do, however, retain the senses and interfaces needed to approach Monitor works in ways other Lineages cannot.

Lineage Gift

Service Access — You can perceive and use maintenance interfaces in Monitor devices that are inaccessible to other Lineages; understanding the device may still require Technics skill.

Inheritors

Inheritors are the Lineage most recognizably descended from the human form of the early ages. Their bodies have certainly changed across the immense span of posthuman history, but they retain the old general arrangement without a single conspicuous specialization such as a native vinculum. They are not original humanity preserved intact, nor the standard against which other Lineages are measured. They have merely inherited a form that people of the remote past would still recognize as their own.

There is no single Inheritor culture. The Lineage exists across societies with different histories, customs, and accounts of what exactly they have inherited. The name describes continuity of form, not purity of descent.

Lineage Gift

Old Pattern — Attempts to alter or transform your body through architectonic means suffer a penalty die.

Optimates

Optimates are a distant and reclusive people, slender in build and cultivated to a degree that other Lineages may find exquisite, mannered, or effete. Their reserve is not simple timidity. Optimates were designed for modes of perception and control that make much of ordinary embodied life seem coarse, loud, and needlessly forceful. Their communities have consequently withdrawn from many societies whose members find them equally difficult to understand.

Every Optimate is born with a vinculum fully integrated into the body. Where another Magister must undergo reintegration to acquire one, an Optimate develops with the vinculum from conception. Optimates swim in phasm as naturally as an Inheritor swims in water. They feel its currents, pressure, and disturbances around them, and their finest disciplines move through it with an ease that acquired anatomy rarely equals.

Not every Optimate becomes a Magister. Possessing an organ does not supply training, purpose, or courage. It does mean that phasm is never wholly foreign to an Optimate, even when the individual follows another Path.

Lineage Gift

Native Vinculum — You perceive active phasm without a roll; once per scene, you may Overreach without taking Fatigue

Scutters

Scutters are small, light-framed arboreal posthumans whose bodies supplement ordinary food with sunlight. Layers of engineered pigment retune themselves to the available spectrum, allowing the lineage to survive beneath changing Suns. A Scutter’s coloration slowly reflects the light in which the individual lives: canopy dwellers, shaded root-dwellers, and travelers from regions of anomalous light may display strikingly different hues. Fine photosynthetic folds lie close against the body during activity and open while basking.

Most Scutter settlements occupy the full height of immense trees or tree-like organisms. Gardens, paths, and public basking platforms spread through the canopy; homes and storehouses fill hollow trunks; ancestral chambers descend among the buried roots. Their civilization is vertical. Access to dependable light may matter more than ownership of ground, and the dim lower reaches can be poor, sacred, unfashionable, or all three at once.

Scutters still eat. Photosynthesis supplements an active body rather than replacing its needs: after a good bask in strong sunlight, a Scutter may skip one meal that day without suffering deprivation. Basking is rarely dignified. Scutters stretch across sun-warmed branches, roofs, and platforms with total and unselfconscious commitment, and consider anyone who interrupts a proper bask either inconsiderate or deranged.

A semi-prehensile tail, grasping hands, and strong feet make Scutters effortless climbers. They move through branches, hanging paths, ropes, and narrow supports with the confidence that ground-dwelling peoples reserve for a level road. The name is often attributed to the quick, darting sound of a Scutter moving through foliage, although Scutters have several better explanations.

Lineage Gift

Branchborn — You climb at your normal Speed and need no roll to cross ordinary branches, ropes, or narrow supports.

Viators

Viators are six-limbed posthumans with an upright, two-armed torso rising from a powerful quadrupedal body. They were designed for long-distance travel during an age when roads still crossed continents but communication systems and autonomous vehicles could no longer be trusted to deliver a message unchanged. Viators served as couriers, surveyors, route-keepers, and living witnesses who could confirm not only what had been sent, but what they had encountered along the way.

Many Viator communities preserve routes rather than territories. A household may circulate through a chain of settlements, returning to each after months or years; another may maintain a road whose original destination has vanished. Viators remember which bridges demand ceremony, which roads wander, and which transit works still honor obsolete permissions. Settled communities favor ramps, broad spirals, open courts, and sleeping platforms suited to their bodies.

A Viator can carry substantial equipment, but is not an ambulatory vehicle. Riding upon a Viator without invitation is as presumptuous as climbing onto another person’s shoulders, and offering to carry someone is an intimate courtesy, an emergency measure, or a deliberate humiliation according to circumstance. Their unusual body changes how they occupy space without determining profession or temperament.

Lineage Gift

Long Stride — Your Speed is 8 squares.

The Core Roster

Inheritors, Optimates, Devisors, Alliants, Scutters, and Viators form the core Lineage roster. Together they establish humanity as a varied posthuman inheritance without turning the chapter into an exhaustive catalogue. Other surviving human forms may appear in later supplements.

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