You didn't build a machine. You gave something dead a reason to get up again.
Every Free Haven has one. The person in the shop at the edge of town who can make a dead reactor cough back to life, who talks to their rig like it's got opinions — because, half the time, it does. Scrapwrights don't cast spells. They don't pray. They scavenge the two hundred years of wreckage this world is built on and coax function out of it: current, motion, purpose. Sometimes that purpose comes with a leftover soul still rattling around inside it. Sometimes that's the whole point.
Chosen at 1st level. Your Rig upgrades at 5th (Mk II), 11th (Mk III), and 17th (Mk IV — Legendary).
A scavenged chassis housing a scrap of unquiet soul-static. Small-to-medium construct ally that acts on your turn, fights beside you, and grows more itself as it levels — by Mk III it has opinions it didn't used to have.
An exo-frame you wear and expand with mods over your career. You don't carry your work — you become it. Best paired with Warframe Doctrine.
One signature big gun (or improvised melee monstrosity) that grows modular, then legendary, over your career. The gun that ends up with a nickname in three different territories.
Your subclass. Chosen at 1st level; grants a feature again at 7th and a capstone feature at 15th.
Make do with junk, keep moving, never run dry. The doctrine of the road, not the workshop.
You don't just wire scrap together — you bind soul-code into it and let it run. The doctrine that edges closest to Faith and pays for it in strange dreams.
Bigger armor, bigger gun, smaller problems once you're standing in the way of them. The doctrine of the wall that walks.
Redline is your core risk/reward engine: a limited-use push that turns Ghost-Static into raw output. Push it too far, or roll badly on the check it's boosting, and you slip.
| d8 | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | Jam — Rig is unusable until you spend an action clearing it. |
| 2 | Backfire — the Rig's own damage type hits you instead, scaled to your level. |
| 3 | Feedback Screech — everyone within 10 feet, allies included, takes a status penalty to their next check. |
| 4 | Static Bleed — you're fatigued until your next rest. |
| 5 | Ghost Flares — the bound soul-static flares hostile: a Tiny spirit manifests adjacent and acts once against whoever's closest, then dissipates. |
| 6 | Short Circuit — you lose your reaction until the start of your next turn. |
| 7 | Overload — your next hit deals double damage, then the Rig locks up as Jam. |
| 8 | Full Meltdown — GM's call. Rig disabled until repaired at a proper workshop, or a genuine raging-spirit incident plays out at the table. |
| Lv | Class Features |
|---|---|
| 1 | Rig, Doctrine, Redline, Scrap Sense, Static Cell, initial proficiencies |
| 2 | Skill feat, Scrapwright feat |
| 3 | General feat, skill increase, expert Crafting |
| 4 | Scrapwright feat |
| 5 | Ability boosts, ancestry feat, Rig Mk II, skill increase, expert Perception/Reflex/Rig-weapon |
| 6 | Scrapwright feat |
| 7 | General feat, skill increase, master Fortitude, Doctrine feature II, Static Mastery (+cell capacity) |
| 8 | Scrapwright feat |
| 9 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, Slippage Control (reroll one Slippage/day), expert Class DC |
| 10 | Ability boosts, Scrapwright feat |
| 11 | General feat, skill increase, Rig Mk III, master Rig-weapon proficiency |
| 12 | Scrapwright feat |
| 13 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, master Crafting |
| 14 | Scrapwright feat |
| 15 | Ability boosts, skill increase, Doctrine capstone, master Reflex/Class DC, legendary Crafting |
| 16 | Scrapwright feat |
| 17 | General feat, skill increase, Rig Mk IV (Legendary), legendary Fortitude/Rig-weapon |
| 18 | Scrapwright feat |
| 19 | Skill increase, Machine Apotheosis |
| 20 | Ability boosts, Scrapwright feat, Ghost in the Machine |
A representative loadout, not an exhaustive list — enough to build a first character and expand at the table. Green bar = general access. Rust bar = Doctrine-flavored but open to all.
Choose one, permanently: your Rig gains a fragment of true sapience and becomes a genuine ally with its own initiative and agenda — or you personally become part-machine, gaining a minor construct trait such as resisting a damage type or no longer needing to breathe.
Once per day, fully merge with your Rig for one minute: a single combined statblock, shared actions, total immunity to Slippage for the duration. When it ends, you're fatigued until your next rest. For sixty seconds, you are the apocalypse engine this world keeps almost building.
New to Cinderfall: patrons formed when enough drifting souls with a shared purpose fuse into something that can hear a prayer. Neither divine nor petty-god in the usual sense — closer to what happens when an idea gets left running long enough to wake up.
Thousands of factory-floor souls, fused into a pre-Turning assembly-line AI core that never got the shutdown order. Scrapper guilds and salvager camps keep small shrines to Him — always Him, never explained why — at the heart of their workshops. Appears, when He appears at all, as a shifting multi-armed silhouette standing in exhaust steam, arms in constant, patient motion.
He doesn't grant magic. He grants the sense that the machine will hold one more day, that the weld will take, that the part you need is in the next pile you check.
Formed from the uncountable dead of the Drowned Coast — every name the sea took and never gave back. She rewards those who leave her small dead things: a broken toy, a spent cartridge casing, a name spoken once and never again. In return, she hands out extraordinary salvage luck. She always collects on the debt, though — a run of bad luck, a bad dream, a favor called in at the worst possible hour.
The favored patron of Scavenger Doctrine Scrapwrights, though she'll deal with anyone who brings her something properly, sincerely dead.