Surface Humanity
Humanoid -- Small or Medium -- Settlements, trade routes, ruins, borderlands
She came down off the wall when we called out and told us the water rate without asking where we were from. Three silver-weights for the barrel, take it or go thirsty at the next post, which she did not recommend in this season. She had a crossbow on her back and a scar on her jaw and did not seem interested in either of our opinions about the price.
-- accounts ledger, transit factor operating the eastern corridor, spring season
Ecology
Surface Humanity is the broadest category of sapient people in the Lethean Age: the omnivorous, tool-using, faction-organized descendants of the pre-Forgetting population who did not diverge into the deep substrate adaptations that produced the Eloi, the Morlock, or the Beastfolk lineages. They are not a unified people and have no single culture, language family, or physiology beyond the baseline human frame. What they share is a tendency toward settlement, toward trade, and toward the rapid formation of social structures that are immediately at risk of internal collapse.
Most surface communities are small -- a defended post, a transit waystation, a ruin cluster organized around a reliable water source. Larger settlements exist but carry the instabilities that come with scale: resource competition, succession disputes, the slow accumulation of grievances that eventually produces a splinter group or a purge. The people who thrive in these conditions are not the strongest or the most aggressive; they are the most legible. A person who can be read quickly -- whose loyalties, skills, and limits are apparent on inspection -- is a person who can be trusted with a task, assigned a post, and left to it. This is the practical logic behind the culture of visible competence that most surface settlements develop independently.
The Settler is the background condition of surface life: a person with one skilled trade and the physical capability to defend a perimeter when called. Not a soldier, not an idler. The training is real -- most settlements run regular practice, and the community cannot afford members who cannot pull a watch shift -- but it is not the person's primary function. Most Settlers spend their working hours on the task that earns their water allotment, and their watch hours doing exactly what they were trained to do: observe and report.
The Waykeeper is what a Settler becomes after enough time in the field has burned away the assumptions. Long-range scouts, corridor wardens, and surviving members of failed expeditions who came back knowing things: Waykeepers are not a formal rank but a recognized category. They carry their own gear, read their own routes, and do not require supervision. A settlement that has three Waykeepers considers itself defended. One that has none is looking for any.
Settler
| AC | HP | Speed | Initiative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 4 (1d8) | 30 ft. | +0 (10) |
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) | 10 (+0) |
Gear Club
Senses Passive Perception 10
Languages Common
CR 0 (XP 10; PB +2)
The Settler has proficiency in one skill of the GM's choice and has Advantage whenever it makes an ability check using that skill.
Melee Attack Roll: +2, reach 5 ft. Hit: 2 (1d4) Bludgeoning damage.
Training
Club
Waykeeper
| AC | HP | Speed | Initiative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | 65 (10d8 + 20) | 30 ft. | +3 (13) |
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 (+3) | 13 (+1) | 14 (+2) | 10 (+0) | 11 (+0) | 10 (+0) |
Skills Athletics +5, Perception +2
Gear Greatsword, Heavy Crossbow, Splint Armor
Senses Passive Perception 12
Languages Common plus one other language
CR 3 (XP 700; PB +2)
The Waykeeper makes two Greatsword or Heavy Crossbow attacks.
Melee Attack Roll: +5, reach 5 ft. Hit: 10 (2d6 + 3) Slashing damage.
Ranged Attack Roll: +3, range 100/400 ft. Hit: 12 (2d10 + 1) Piercing damage.
Trigger: The Waykeeper is hit by a melee attack roll while holding a weapon. Response: The Waykeeper adds 2 to its AC against that attack, possibly causing it to miss.
Multiattack
Greatsword
Heavy Crossbow
Parry
Encounter use
Settlers appear wherever surface life exists: at waystations, inside settlement walls, on work gangs in the field. Individually they are no threat; in numbers at a defensible position, they can slow a party considerably, particularly if a Waykeeper is directing the watch rotation. Waykeepers work best as named characters with specific knowledge the party needs -- they are not random encounter fodder but the kind of person a settlement deploys when it has a problem it cannot solve any other way. A Waykeeper who has agreed to guide a party through dangerous territory is a resource, not a combatant; one who has been given reason to view the party as a threat is a different matter entirely.