Spit-Born

Your home is a spit, a port-colony built up around a ruin of the old world. You’ve lived a life of struggle and trade, suspicion and tenacity - strangers bringing both opportunity and danger.

Spits rarely last a lifetime, and a healthy knowledge that their entire home could be swallowed by the waves at any point encourages most spit-born to live without many possessions and to travel light.

Hubs of Corruption

The cramped conditions and lack of renewable resources that typify most spits mean their residents grow up with few illusions about what a struggle life can be. Street gangs are common among the youth, and those that don’t find something prodcutive to move onto often graduate to low-level mob activity and black-marketeering. The most successful of these groups often gain a healthy level of fear from a spit’s other inhabitants, but some win their respect too - a cut-throat attitude can do wonders when it comes to securing important trade deals and smuggling opportunities.

Time to Move On

There are many signs that a spit might be on the verge of being reclaimed by the sea’s deeper layers, ranging from changes in local animal behaviour to sudden cracks in architecture. When a spit is on the verge of collapse each of the residents has a choice to make - reinforce and prolong the fall or trade for passage on a ship to get out as fast as possible. Both have their benefits, but the first is almost always the safer option.

Questions to Consider

When you incorporate elements of the spit-born into your character, consider the following questions…

• What was the main material that made up your spit? Temple-stone, ancient architecture, ship-wreckage or something else entirely?
• How was your youth on the streets of a spit? Were you part of a gang and, if so, did your inevitable rowdiness progress to genuine criminal activity?
• Does your home spit still stand above the waves? Do you even know?

Alternate Presentations

’Spit’ is a broad term on the wildsea, which can cover anything from a shard of stone to a raised ruin or a levithan’s skull. The spit-born presented here are assumed to have a reasonably dirty, cramped and urban life, representing the general overcrowding most spits face, but this needn’t be the case - consider a more monastic or aesthetic existence as a possibility, or dive deeper into grit, gutters and gang warfare.