Magistrate
- Races: Mostly human, plus a handful of salamanders who graduated from servitude
- Sex: Male only (occasional exceptions made for reasons of inheritance)
You have a seal. It is carved from jade, set in bronze, & it bears your name and office in the old Imperial script. Without it, you are nothing. With it, you are the law.
You are the machinery of Glass. You count the people, collect the taxes, adjudicate the disputes, and maintain the records that make civilization possible. The Lords rule — you merely make ruling work. Promoted from the Burghers, theoretically at the pleasure of whatever Lord holds your district, in practice you have outlasted every Lord you’ve served. Even as the civil war descends into rapine, the bureaucratic mythos you embody remains largely functional, and it is that very mythos that you may be able to ride to power.
If you start as part of this class, you hold (or recently held) an Imperial appointment, however minor, and are recognized as a member of Glass’s Governor class. You own your seal.
Class Features
Roll once on the table per Rank obtained. If you roll a Feature you already have, you may choose a Feature from above or below it on the list that you don’t have yet.
| 2d6 | Class Feature |
|---|---|
| 2–3 | Orator: Anyone willing to listen to you for a minute (a Persuasion Save if in doubt) can be made to listen to you for up to eight hours. |
| 4 | Audit: Given a day’s work and access to a Settlement or Faction’s affairs (through employment, legal authority, or physical investigation), you may ask the GM to compare that Faction’s public claims (alliances, wealth, territory, number of Followers) against their actual state. The GM tells you each discrepancy as a single factual “worse than/basically accurate/better than” statement. |
| 5 | Administrative Oversight: When a Retainer or Subfaction member takes action that contradicts their stated role, standing orders, or assigned duties, you know it happened. You know who deviated & when. You don’t learn why, or on whose behalf. This does not detect people who follow their orders to the letter while working against your interests. |
| 6 | Bureaucrat: You cannot be made to admit to having made any claim or statement, especially if it would violate dogma or authority. You may automatically know the immediate intent, hidden or otherwise, of any bureaucrat or fellow Magistrate you talk to. |
| 7 | Legal Precedent: When you need to uncover recorded history, if written records could reasonably exist, you find them automatically. The GM must tell you what they reveal. |
| 8 | Coded Language: You can write poems with encoded messages hidden in the subtext that only either a specific target you know well (as a friend or acquaintance) or another person with this power can interpret the true meaning of. |
| 9 | Document Forgery: You can instantaneously recognize forgeries of official Glassian documents, seals, contracts, or titles & with a day’s work & calligraphic tools create your own that nobody other than another Magistrate will recognize as a forgery. |
| 10 | Courtly Influence: You can automatically obtain invites to balls & other public, semi-public, or closed events through fame, guile, or familiarity. Lords are obligated to grant you a court appearance if they aren’t Hostile to you. |
| 11–12 | Delegitimize: With a day’s work & enough data to make a coherent (not necessarily true) argument, you can construct a formal case against a specific claim made by an individual or Faction; a bloodline, a title, a treaty, a property right, or a debt. This produces a document that exists as a game object. When you produce it, the GM tells you which of the Factions known to you would be most willing to act on it. Anyone who possesses the case may use it as a valid attack vector for a Sabotage Move against the target with a +2 bonus. You may freely distribute copies. A case built on genuine evidence (from Audit, Legal Precedent, or firsthand knowledge) is airtight; a case built on fabricated evidence (i.e. via Document Forgery) holds until a Magistrate examines it. |
Class Backgrounds
If this is your first Class at character creation, roll once & write a Fact that describe a true lesson of your choice you learned from the experience: “Because I [was (a)…], I learned [lesson].” You can play with the phrasing so long as the background & lesson are both included.
| 1d6 | I was (a)… |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tutor to a Lord’s children, paid to forget what I noticed |
| 2 | Passed the Imperial examinations on my third attempt by (1d6: 1–3 cheating / 4–6 blackmailing an examiner) |
| 3 | Inherited my father’s magistracy & every enemy he’d made in thirty years |
| 4 | Appointed to a remote village as punishment |
| 5 | Keeper of an archive someone was willing to kill for |
| 6 | Exiled by a Lord for insufficient compliance |