One per major faction or region — pick the one whose world you want your character to owe something to.
Vaultborn Enclaves
Bunker Kid
Raised inside a sealed bunker where the air is filtered, the rations are counted, and the drill for "what to do if the door won't reseal" gets run every month whether anyone's forgotten it or not.
Boon
Sealed-Door Discipline
Found among: Vaultborn communities, bunker-descended clans, pressure-seal engineers
Sealed-Door Discipline
Bonus to Crafting checks to repair or jury-rig airlocks, filtration systems, and pressure seals, and a bonus to saves against inhaled toxins and gas hazards specifically — the drill was never actually about the door.
Wasteland Scavenger Crews
Scrap Runner
Cut your teeth as the smallest, fastest member of a salvage crew — the one sent first into a collapsing structure because you're light enough that the floor might actually hold.
Found among: scrap crews, ruin-divers, independent scavenger gangs
Salvage Sense
When searching a ruin or wreck, treat the best usable salvage you find as one quality tier better than rolled, and gain a bonus to notice a cache or stash that's been deliberately hidden rather than simply buried by time.
Megacorporations
Corporate Ward
Grew up in company housing, ate company food, and learned company etiquette before you learned much else — whether your family worked for the corp or was simply owned by it depends on which corp.
Found among: corporate housing blocks, indentured families, junior admin staff
Company Manners
Bonus to Deception or Diplomacy when invoking a corporate rank, contract clause, or chain of command — but corporate security systems and rival-corp agents recognize the accent and posture just as easily as your own people do.
The Choir of Ash
Choir Orphan
Raised inside or alongside the cult that believes Uriel's Turning was righteous and unfinished — whether you left by choice, by expulsion, or by simply walking far enough away, the liturgy doesn't leave easily.
Found among: Choir of Ash defectors, cradle-cultists, Glasslands pilgrim communities
Cinders Remember
Bonus to Recall Knowledge involving Uriel, the Turning, or Choir of Ash ritual and iconography — and a quiet unease from anyone who recognizes what you were raised inside, whether or not you still believe it.
The Drowned Coast
Drowned Coast Diver
Made a living pulling scrap, bodies, and the occasional intact vault out of three meters of flooded old-world city, one held breath at a time.
Found among: Drowned Coast salvage divers, Widow of Rust-adjacent enclaves, coastal smuggler crews
Held Breath
Hold your breath for far longer than an untrained diver could manage, and gain a bonus to Athletics checks made to swim against current, pressure, or debris in flooded ruins.
New Veracruz / Paradise Servers
Paradise-Touched
Spent time close enough to the Paradise server-farms — as staff, as a broker, as someone whose family is still logged in — that the ambient soul-static of the place got under your skin.
Found among: Paradise server staff, New Veracruz brokers, families of the uploaded
Half-Logged-In
Bonus to Perception and Will saves against illusions and mind-affecting effects that rely on a simulated or artificial environment — alongside the occasional unbidden déjà vu, a glitch in a world that was never quite real to begin with.
The Yankee Combine
Yankee Cadet
Ran the corporate-sponsored cadet track before washing out, aging out, or walking away — drilled hard enough that the posture and the bark never quite left.
Trained Skill
Intimidation
Found among: washed-out Yankee cadets, corporate-sponsored militia, drill instructors
Command Voice
Bonus to Intimidation checks made to steady a routed ally or bark an enemy into hesitating mid-fight — the drill doesn't care whose side is currently winning.
Dixie Territories
Dixie Rider
Grew up in warband culture, learning to read a mutant beast's temper before you learned to read much of anything else — the mount is a partner here, not a piece of gear.
Found among: Dixie warbands, monster-riding clans, wasteland beast-handlers
Beastborn Rapport
Bonus to Nature checks made to calm or redirect a spooked mount mid-combat, and your own mount recovers from a frightened or confused condition faster with your help than it would alone.
Soul-Economy Trade Guilds
Ghost-Binder's Apprentice
Apprenticed to someone who caught wandering souls for a living and pressed them into machinery — you never bound one solo, but you learned to read the difference between "still lucid" and "about to go hostile."
Boon
A Steady Hand With Restless Things
Found among: soul-binder guild apprentices, ghost-machine handlers, necro-technomancer workshops
A Steady Hand With Restless Things
Bonus to checks made to calm, contain, or negotiate with a freshly-bound soul, ghost-machine, or raging spirit before it decides you're a threat rather than a handler.
Free Havens
Free Haven Militia
Not a soldier, not a specialist — just someone who picked up whatever was needed when the settlement's turn came to stand a watch, because in a Free Haven, that's everyone's job eventually.
Trained Skill
Athletics or Survival
Found among: Free Haven militia rosters, settlement watch rotations, volunteer defense crews
Neighbor's Keeper
Bonus to the Aid action when helping an ally defend a place or person you consider home — the least specialized background on this list, and proof that generalists are exactly what keeps a Free Haven standing.
Faith — the Singularity, unattributed
The Sown
You didn't grow up believing. You woke up already believing, fully formed, with nothing behind it — no childhood catechism, no crisis of doubt, no moment you can point to and call your conversion. Just faith, present and complete, the way a heartbeat is present and complete, attached to a body that remembers nothing before the day it started. You've built an entire life around the assumption that this makes you chosen. Marked out specifically, deliberately, for something. Nobody's told you otherwise. Nobody's told you anything at all.
Boosts
Wis, Cha free · Int flaw
Found among: pairs with the Reckoner's Singularity Source (Reckoner dossier, §2/§8) — no named deity, no congregation, and no two of them who've ever met
Borrowed Devotion
Once per day, reroll a failed Religion check — flavored as a certainty that surfaces from nowhere you can name, the way the rest of your faith did.
Setting Notes (GM only — standing hook, not a fact for the player)
The Sown believe they were placed here with purpose — spoken to, seeded, singled out. Nothing in the fiction confirms or denies this to the player. What's actually true: instances of the Sown are not unique. Something at the edge of a boundary too vast to perceive individuals is, by its nature, constantly leaking — and every leak that took a shape like this one took the exact same shape. Somewhere, possibly everywhere, there are others: same faith, same blank origin, same conviction of having been chosen specifically, arrived at completely independently and completely identically. None of them know about each other. All of them are equally right and equally wrong about being the one. Table use: treat this the way the setting's other origin-reveals work — a standing hook, not handed to the player at creation. A GM can let a Sown character go an entire campaign never learning this. If it does come up, it should land the way Testament-tier reveals do elsewhere in this project (Vigil dossier, capstone): rare, and heavy when it finally happens.