Character Creation · Session Zero

SANCTUM

Who are you?

⚠   Before you build a character, build a person   ⚠

Begin
"Your character is not a hero from somewhere else who arrived to fix things.
They are a person of this city — or a person who came to this city —
who has been surviving, climbing, or enduring for as long as they can remember."
Read everything. Make decisions last.
Part One

What Life Actually Looks Like

Before you decide who your character is, understand what their days looked like before the campaign started.

🏚 Image — The Warren Dense Warren streets at night, laundry between buildings, market stalls, crowds, faction emblems faded on walls. ~1800×900px landscape.
The Warren

A Typical Morning

You wake up in rented rooms or a family home that has been in the family since before your grandfather's debt started. Three or four families per floor is normal. The walls are thin. You know everyone's business and they know yours.

Before you leave, you check your tithe schedule. Payment to the Congregation is weekly. Payment to whoever holds your inherited debt is monthly, deducted automatically from wages if you're employed through a faction. If you're working independent, you go to the Scales' relay post to make the payment yourself — which they make deliberately time-consuming.

Work fills most of the day. In the evening the Warren comes alive — street markets, illegal gambling, neighbors sitting outside in a way that stops when a Warden walks through. You eat what you can afford, which is usually enough but not always interesting. Drevka at the Honest Weight knows who is having a hard month and adjusts quietly, without making it a thing.

You go to sleep knowing roughly what tomorrow looks like. This is the Warren's version of stability: not comfort, not freedom, but the predictable shape of your obligations.

The Covenant Ring
The Fear of Slipping
The Covenant Ring runs on a different rhythm — faster, more purposeful, every movement legible as either work or professional display. Debt is current. Identity is visible. The fear here is subtler: not of Collectors at the door, but of the invisible line between managing and falling behind.
The Throat
Pre-Run and Post-Run
The Throat doesn't have typical days. It has days before runs and days after runs, and everything is measured against those. Between runs, the taverns are social in a way outsiders mistake for casual. Everyone knows everyone's count. It is the first professional credential exchanged.
Everywhere
The Weight of Debt
Whatever your background, debt is present. Most people don't experience it as active suffering. It is weather. The suffering comes in the moments when the system makes itself visible: a Collector at the door, a miracle needed, the terms read aloud. The moment you realize your children will carry what you carry.
Part Two

Where You Come From

Your character has been alive for years before the campaign starts. They had work. They had obligations. Choose a background as your foundation — or combine two.

Born in Sanctum
The Faction Worker
Spent years in sponsored employment. Knows the machine from the inside.
You worked for a God — not as a Cleric or Paladin, but as part of the enormous workforce that keeps a faction running. Logistics, administration, enforcement support, messaging, skilled labor. Your debt was managed through wage deduction, which meant your ledger was always current and always felt like it wasn't moving. You were reliable. You were replaceable. You learned more about how the faction actually operates than most outsiders ever do — and some of what you learned sits uncomfortably.
Typical work:Supply chain, administration, courier, skilled trade, security support, hospitality
Born in Sanctum
The Delver
Ran the Shallows, maybe touched the Middle Dark. Got out before it got bad.
You went into the Delve. Maybe as a hauler, maybe as a runner doing fast Shallows work, maybe as a watcher who kept people alive through the first few floors. You know the smell of the First Landing. You know the specific feeling of coming back out. You stopped — for reasons you may or may not be ready to explain. The Itch doesn't go away, which is one reason you're in the kind of financial situation that leads to taking delivery jobs.
Typical work:Material hauling, monster core extraction, Delve navigation, emergency field care
Born in Sanctum
The Street Professional
Made a living in the Warren's informal economy. Knows every gap in the system.
You never had a faction employment contract. You worked the gray space — running messages that couldn't go through official channels, doing jobs that didn't appear on any ledger. Your debt stayed current through means you don't always fully describe to new people. You are good at reading situations quickly and bad at trusting institutions.
Typical work:Courier, fixer's assistant, fence, debt navigator, unlicensed trader, odd jobs of variable legality
Born in Sanctum
The Clipped Professional
Had faction standing. Lost it. Built something from the pieces.
You were inside a faction — genuinely inside, with standing and access and a role that mattered. Then something happened. A disagreement you couldn't back down from. A discovery you weren't supposed to make. A moral line you crossed or refused to cross at exactly the wrong moment. You were clipped. Your skills didn't go anywhere. Your access mostly did.
Typical work:Depends on faction — former Blesser, Archivist, Warden, Collector, or Brotherhood foreman
Born in Sanctum
The Inheritor
Born marked. Built identity from what the debt left behind.
Your debt was old before you were born. Your family has been carrying for the same God for two or three generations. The nature of that debt — who holds it, what it was originally for — is something you may or may not have investigated. You know community in a way people who moved through the city alone never do. You are perhaps angrier about the system than you let most people see.
Typical work:Community labor, local trade, neighborhood support, whatever your family's faction arrangement required
Born in Sanctum
The Underlip Native
Grew up below. Knows Sanctum's foundations better than most Gods know their Cathedrals.
You grew up in the Underlip — in the Root Tunnels, in the Collapse Quarter, in the spaces between the city's official story and what it actually sits on. You know routes that don't appear on any map. You know what comes up from the Delve's edges in the early hours and where it tends to go. The surface city's factions have always been something you navigated around rather than inside.
Typical work:Salvage, Underlip guiding, informal trade, knowledge brokering about routes below the city
🌍 Image — The Outsiders Arrive A group of travellers approaching Sanctum's walls at dusk — cloaks, packs, the city glowing beyond its gates. ~1800×1000px landscape.
— Or —

You came from
somewhere else.

Beyond the walls is the kingdom of Altair — one queen in Gilder, one goddess in every chapel, farm towns a week's walk away, a desert in the south and pirate water in the east. Most people in Sanctum came from it. Pick somewhere real, and know what you owed to get through the Gate of Tithes.

From Outside Sanctum
The Seeker
Came specifically because of the promise. Knows it might be a lie. Came anyway.
You heard the rumour — that in Sanctum, a nobody with enough ambition, enough witnessed deeds, enough Renown, can become a God. Not metaphorically. Literally. And you came from Altair, where that is not how any of it works: the crown passes by blood, titles pass by blood, and the Church has been in place longer than Sanctum has existed. You were never going to be anything at home. So you chose the one city on the continent where a name can be earned, took the entry sponsorship debt because there was no other way through the gate, and stayed. You understand what you signed now. The promise still holds more weight than the cost.
Why you came:The Renown system. The Delve. The specific, intoxicating possibility that who you are now does not have to be who you end up.
Where from:Anywhere with no ladder — a Hickory Hollow farm, a Gilder workshop, a Sandgrave caravan, a Luton mountain town. The further from the capital, the more the rumour was worth believing.
From Outside Sanctum
The Refugee
Arrived because the alternative was worse. Has since decided to make something of it.
You didn't come to Sanctum for the promise of Godhood. You came because of what was happening at home, and because Sanctum is the one place in Altair that does not ask the crown's questions at the gate. You signed the sponsorship debt. You have been here long enough to understand the system now. What changed is that somewhere in the grinding process of surviving it, you found something worth staying for — or something worth fighting against. Either way, you are here now, and here is where the story is.
What you carry:The knowledge that it doesn't have to be this way, because you've seen something else. Most Sanctum-born residents have never had that.
What you left:A pirate raid that took the harbour at Saltwake. A Somist inquiry that named your family. The west, where being from Arkukari is treated as a confession. A lord's household you were property of. Something you did in Gilder that the Queen's law has a penalty for.
From Outside Sanctum
The Petitioner
Came with a body. Got what you asked for. Are still paying for it.
Someone died, and you could not accept it. Across every acre of Altair that is the end of the conversation — the Edict of the River makes resurrection a capital crime, because a death is a soul returning to the River Styx on schedule and taking it back is theft from the world. Crown and Church agree on very little else. So you did what the desperate have done for three hundred years: you packed the body in salt and Delve-ice, spent everything you owned getting it here before it was too late, and sat in the Vigil under the Mending House waiting your turn.
The Crimson Pact was kind to you. They explained the terms in full, and they were honest, and you said yes anyway. Five to ten years of indentured service. You would say yes again.
What you owe:Half of a Paired Ledger. The other half belongs to the person you brought back — decide with your DM who they are, where they are now, and whether you still speak.
The thing you think about:Whether they thanked you. Whether they were supposed to.
From Outside Sanctum
The Raised
You are the debt. Legally, you are also still dead.
You did not walk in. You were carried in, and you do not remember the journey. Someone who loved you spent everything they had to bring you to the one address in the world that would do it, and a senior Blesser of the Crimson Pact took you back out of the River.
The kingdom's law does not recognise you as a living person. You are recorded dead in whatever town you came from, and being found alive is itself the evidence of the crime that made you — so the only legal existence available to you anywhere in Altair is the Sanctum ledger the Pact issued you on the table. You were born owing, at the age you died. Step past the Gate of Tithes and you are not a fugitive debtor; you are a hanging offence walking down a royal road.
What you owe:The other half of a Paired Ledger. Somewhere in this city is the person who paid for you, carrying the matching contract.
What nobody will tell you:What it was like. Somists teach that everything returns to the River and comes back without memory — and you came back without memory of the interval, which proves nothing either way. Decide with your DM whether you believe you are the same person.
Part Three

Why You're a Freelancer

No faction holds your primary employment contract. You are early in that life — or just beginning it. This is not safe. It is not free. It is a specific choice, made for a specific reason.

Without a faction contract, you pay full market rate for everything. Healing is expensive. Maps are expensive. Legal protection is limited to what the Scales will enforce on behalf of someone with no faction standing — which is not much. If something goes wrong on a job, there is no institutional safety net.

Most freelancers run hot at some point. The margins are thin enough that one bad month matters. Which is why freelancers take jobs that sponsored workers won't, from clients who can't go through official channels, for pay that reflects the risk. You are early in this life, which means you have not yet had enough close calls to know which risks are acceptable and which ones will catch up with you.

Reason One
You Left a Faction
You were sponsored and you walked away, or you were pushed out. You learned something you couldn't unknow. The terms of your next contract were going to extend your debt. You simply could not keep working for a God you had stopped believing in. Walking away cost you everything membership provided. You did it anyway.
Reason Two
You Were Never Sponsored
Some people slip through the gaps — born in the Underlip, arrived through an unofficial route, worked only in the gray economy. You have never had a faction contract because you never had an entry point into the sponsored system. You know the unofficial networks extremely well. You have no official standing anywhere.
Reason Three
You're Saving for Something
Freelancing pays better per job than most faction employment when the jobs are good. You're banking toward a specific goal — paying off inherited debt, buying out a family member's contract, accumulating capital toward something larger. You're treating freelancing as a means, not an end. This makes you careful about which jobs you take.
Reason Four
You Can't Be Sponsored Right Now
Something in your past — a faction dispute, a default, an incident that ended badly — means any God who might sponsor you either won't or can't without complications. You are freelancing while the situation resolves, or while you find a way to resolve it. It has been longer than you planned.
Reason Five
You Just Arrived
Whether you came from outside Sanctum or simply crossed into the freelance economy for the first time, you are new to this. The entry sponsorship debt is recent. The city is still revealing itself. You are taking jobs because you need to — and because each one teaches you something about how Sanctum actually works.
Reason Six
You Have Something to Prove
Maybe to a faction that underestimated you. Maybe to a family that doubted you. Maybe to yourself. Freelancing is the path where your results speak without the mediation of a faction's politics. If you succeed, the Renown is yours. If you fail, it's also yours. You have decided you prefer that honesty.
🕯 Image — Writing by Candlelight A lone figure writing by candlelight in a dark room — the weight of decisions made and unmade. ~1800×800px landscape.
Part Four

The Questions That
Build a Character

You don't need to share all of these. You do need to know all of them.

About Your Past

Where you came from shapes how you see everything that happens next.

Question 01
What is your relationship to the debt you carry?
Is it inherited or your own? Do you service it obediently, rage against it quietly, or have you made peace with being a lifer? Not a political position — a feeling. Specific and personal.
Question 02
What did you want to be before you understood what Sanctum was?
Before you understood the system well enough to know what was available to you. What did you think was possible? What happened to that version of you?
Question 03
What is the one thing you did that you would rather nobody in Sanctum knew?
Not necessarily illegal. Just the thing you keep quiet. What you did, why you did it, whether you'd do it again.
Question 04
What does home mean to you in this city?
A specific building, street, or person. Whether you have it, lost it, or are still trying to build it.

About Your Present

Who you are right now, on the night the campaign begins.

Question 05
What are you actually good at, and how did you get good at it?
Not your class skills — the thing you are genuinely capable of, the way it was built, and what it cost you to have it.
Question 06
What does your ledger look like right now?
Not the exact numbers — the shape. Current, running hot, underwater, carrying something specific. How long until the next major payment? What happens if tonight's job payment is late?
Question 07
Who in Sanctum do you actually trust?
Not trust to do a good job — trust with something real. Someone who knows something about you that could hurt you, and hasn't used it. What do they have on you, and why haven't they used it?
Question 08
Is there someone you are trying to protect?
A family member carrying inherited debt. A neighbor running hot. Someone whose situation you factor into your decisions whether you admit it or not.

Your Flaws

A flaw is not a personality quirk. It is not "grumpy sometimes" or "impatient." A real flaw is a crack in your decision-making — a place where something in your history overrides your better judgment and makes you act outside of logic.

The best flaws are specific, recognisable, and connected to something that happened to you. They are not weaknesses you're ashamed of — they are the parts of you that will make this story interesting. Choose one or two. Know them well. Let the campaign push on them.

Flaw Type
Loyalty Before Logic
When someone you trust asks something of you, you do it before you've fully thought it through. Not because you're naive — because you've learned that trust is rare in Sanctum and you protect it like a resource. The problem is that this makes you exploitable by anyone who has earned even a fraction of your loyalty.
When it surfaces: A trusted contact asks you to cover for something you know is wrong. A friend is on the losing side of a fight they started. The group wants to leave someone behind who trusted you to look out for them.
Flaw Type
Pride Over Survival
You will not accept help that comes with the implication that you needed it. You will not back down from a confrontation that makes you look weak in front of people whose opinion you've decided matters. In a city where showing vulnerability is an invitation, this started as self-preservation — and became a cage.
When it surfaces: Someone offers to carry your share of a burden and frames it as charity. A God offers you a way out of a situation that requires you to publicly acknowledge you can't handle it alone.
Flaw Type
The Debt of Guilt
Something happened — you did something, or you failed to do something — and the guilt from it is an unregistered debt you've been paying ever since. You overextend yourself for people who remind you of whoever you failed. You take risks to make up for something that can't actually be made up for. The campaign will eventually find the original wound.
When it surfaces: Someone vulnerable is in danger and the smart play is to walk away. Someone asks for help you're not equipped to give but you're the reason they need it.
Flaw Type
The Need to Be Believed
You have spent enough of your life being dismissed — by faction officials who see a debtor, by people who assumed you weren't capable, by a system that doesn't record you until it needs to collect from you — that being doubted now triggers something disproportionate. You will do more than is necessary to prove a point. You will take risks that aren't worth it to prove that you were right.
When it surfaces: Someone in a position of power dismisses your assessment. The group wants to take a safer approach that implies your first idea was wrong. A God treats you like a tool instead of a person.
Flaw Type
Control or Nothing
You grew up in a system that removed your agency at every turn — debt you didn't choose, rules you didn't write, a ceiling you didn't build. Your response has been to control what you can, relentlessly. You plan. You prepare. You struggle to delegate. And when a situation slips beyond your control, you make decisions fast and alone rather than trust the chaos to resolve itself with help from people who might see it differently.
When it surfaces: The plan has fallen apart and someone else has a better read on the situation. You'd rather fail on your own terms than succeed on someone else's.
Flaw Type
The Wound That Decides
Something specific happened to you — a specific betrayal, a specific injustice, a specific person who did something to you or someone you loved. You have a category of situation that bypasses your judgment entirely and activates something older and less rational. In most circumstances you are capable and measured. In this specific kind of situation, you are not.
When it surfaces: Define the trigger — a specific faction, a specific type of person, a specific kind of injustice. When the campaign finds it, you will not be fully in control of what your character does next.
Your Flaw — Two Questions to Answer
What specifically happened in your past that created this flaw? It doesn't need to be dramatic — it just needs to be real. The moment, or the accumulation of moments, that made this crack in your judgment feel like the only rational response at the time.
Is your character aware of this flaw? Do they recognise it as a problem, justify it as a strength, or simply not see it at all? The answer changes everything about how they grow — or fail to.

Who Do You Want to Become?

The most important question. Not a power level or a title — a person.

Question 09
What kind of person do you want to become over the course of this campaign?
Not stronger or richer. A person. What growth, what hardening, what revelation would make this story feel like it meant something? What version of you — on the other side of what's coming — would make the journey worth it?
Part Five

The Job That Starts Everything

You did not meet the other players before tonight. You all accepted the same contract, independently. This is the first time you are in the same place.

Off-Ledger Delivery
Discretion Required · No Inspection Clause · Time Sensitive
Client
A broker operating through the Ladder's runner network. Name given as Tomas Vey. Unverified. Contact made through a mutual connection. He found each of you separately.
Pickup
A storage room in the Underlip's Root Tunnels, reached through a specific entry in the Unmarked Quarter. A contact named Sera will hand over the package and confirm identities. She will not answer questions about its contents.
Delivery
A private residence in the upper Covenant Ring, near the border of the Spire District. The recipient will be expecting the delivery and will provide a passphrase to confirm receipt. No names will be exchanged.
The Package
Sealed. Roughly the size of a document case. Lighter than expected. The contract includes a no-inspection clause — standard for sensitive goods. You do not open it. You do not describe it to anyone. You deliver it.
Timing
Pickup before midnight. Delivery before dawn. The timing is specified and non-negotiable. You have been told why this matters. The explanation was not convincing.
Payment
Forty gold coin per person. Half now, half on confirmed receipt. For a single night's work, this is very good money. That is the thing about this job that each of you noticed when you read the terms.

That is the job as it was presented to you. You accepted it. The reasons you accepted it are your own — the money, a connection to the broker, a favor owed, or the simple calculation that forty gold for moving a package across three districts in the dark is a reasonable night's work.

You are meeting the rest of the group for the first time tonight, in the Underlip, before midnight, waiting for a contact who has not yet arrived.

Before Session One — Answer These
Who brought you to this job specifically, and why did you say yes to them?
Have you done off-ledger work before? What happened the last time?
What exactly does this forty gold do for your situation? What does it change?
What is the one detail about this job that feels wrong — not wrong enough to walk away, but wrong enough that you noticed?

You Are Ready

You have a history, a debt, a flaw, a reason for being here, and a version of yourself you're working toward. That's a character. Everything else is discovered in play.

Read the World Meet the Gods
"You are standing in a tunnel below the city.
The contact is late.
The package is worth more than you were told.
You have not yet decided what kind of person you are going to be about that."