Every promise in Cinderfall is collateral of some kind. Yours just happens to swing a warhammer, and something is always watching to see if you default.
A Sworn's whole chassis is built on one idea: a promise that costs something real to keep, and costs more to break. These are the words the setting uses for it.
Choose one at 1st level. This choice sets your Ward, your Answer's trigger, your Conviction's name and flavor, and the shape of your Vows. It is not just a reskin of the others — each Oath plays differently at the table.
You signed with a megacorp — and the ink was ensouled. A sliver of your own soul is written into the contract as collateral, which is why the corp trusts you with power armor and live ordnance instead of a pension. Your Ward is whoever or whatever the current contract names: a VIP, a convoy, an asset, an objective. Command can reassign your Ward between engagements as terms are renegotiated above your head.
Triggers when your named Ward is struck, or when you witness a contract, truce, or binding word broken within your reach. You close distance and strike the offender, and if the trigger was a broken contract rather than a blow to your Ward, the strike carries a bonus for punishing bad faith specifically.
You believe, as the Choir of Ash believes, that Uriel's Turning was corruption-forced tragedy rather than evil intent — and that it was also unfinished mercy the world still owes itself. Your Ward is not usually a person: it is the Kindling, a specific act of hastening-the-end that the Choir has entrusted to you — a wildfire left to burn, a dying reactor left uncapped, a soul marked for release rather than salvage. You protect the ending from being stopped.
Triggers when someone tries to extinguish, salvage, or "mercifully" interrupt your Kindling — including, uncomfortably, an ally trying to save someone you've marked. You intervene against the interloper, not the fire. This is meant to create real friction at the table; use it deliberately.
No corporation, no cult — you swore this one to yourself, out loud, to no god or ledger that's listening. At character creation, name your Ward: one person, place, or ideal. It's yours to define and, at 7th and 15th level, yours to expand. You get no institutional gear, no relic cache, no repossession clause to hide behind — only the fact that nobody can rewrite these terms but you.
Triggers whenever your named Ward is directly threatened, anywhere you can reasonably reach it — broader and less specialized than the other two Oaths, but with no bonus rider. What it lacks in sharpness it makes up in never having fine print you didn't write.
A Sworn's core loop isn't about deciding how hard to push your luck — it's about how much strain your word can bear before something gives. The Trial track below is not player-chosen risk; it fires on fixed, GM-adjudicated conditions tied to your specific Oath, and it escalates the longer it goes unresolved, not randomly.
Trigger conditions (Trial events) — a Trial event fires when any of the following actually happens in play, judged by the fiction, not rolled for:
| Stage | Reached by | Steadfast Benefit | Mounting Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — Untested | Baseline | — | — |
| I — Tested | 1st Trial event | +1 circumstance bonus on The Answer's damage; +1 circumstance bonus on saves vs. fear/morale effects | −1 status penalty on Perception and skill checks unrelated to the Oath (tunnel vision) |
| II — Strained | 2nd Trial event, Strain still active | +2 to The Answer; +2 on saves vs. fear/morale | Each hit taken while protecting the Ward costs 1 additional HP, or you must attempt The Answer whenever it's possible, tactics be damned (GM/player agrees which, per Oath) |
| III — Fraying (9th) | 3rd Trial event | +3 to The Answer; immune to fear | You take lingering mental strain (frightened 1 that won't fully clear on its own) until Renewed |
| IV — Breaking Point (13th) | 4th+ Trial event | +4 to The Answer; treat all Vows as one degree more effective | Failing to Answer when you are able triggers Forsworn immediately, no further warning |
Renewal — Strain resets to Stage 0 only through a defined act of the Oath actually being kept at real cost: holding the line through a genuinely dangerous encounter for the Ward, publicly and irrevocably reaffirming the vow, or sacrificing something the character cares about to prove it. A Renewal also grants a short-lived boon (GM's call, scaled to how costly the act was). Waiting it out does nothing — Strain does not decay with time.
Forsworn — deliberately and knowingly violating your Oath's core tenet (abandoning the Ward when you could act, breaking the letter of a contract, showing forbidden mercy against Choir doctrine, going back on your own sworn word), or failing an Answer at Stage IV, makes you Forsworn. While Forsworn: no Conviction, no Vows, and your Oath's specific institution notices (see §07). Recovery requires either a hard, GM-defined atonement matched to what broke, or a full, deliberate renunciation that swaps you to a new Oath via retraining — your old one's consequences do not evaporate just because you've moved on.
Class feats every even level; standard ability boosts, general feats, and skill increases fall where PF2e's baseline chassis expects them. Compact form below.
| Lvl | Proficiency Notes | Class Feature |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trained: Perception, Fort/Will/Ref, class DC, simple & martial weapons, all armor & shields | Oath (choose Binding Clause / Cinder Vow / Unwritten Oath), Ward, Conviction pool, The Answer, 1st Vow, Strain track online |
| 2 | — | Class feat, skill feat |
| 3 | Expert: class DC | General feat |
| 4 | — | Class feat |
| 5 | Expert: Reflex; ability boosts | 2nd Vow, Stage II (Strained) unlocked |
| 6 | — | Class feat |
| 7 | Expert: Perception | Oath feature II (subclass upgrade), skill increase |
| 8 | — | Class feat |
| 9 | Master: Fortitude & Will | Stage III (Fraying) unlocked, cheaper/faster Renewal, general feat |
| 10 | Ability boosts | Class feat |
| 11 | Master: light & medium armor | Greater Answer (extended range, added rider effect), skill increase |
| 12 | — | Class feat |
| 13 | Master: class DC; Legendary: Perception | Stage IV (Breaking Point) unlocked, general feat |
| 14 | — | Class feat |
| 15 | Master: heavy armor; Legendary: Reflex; ability boosts | Oath capstone feature (subclass-specific), skill increase |
| 16 | — | Class feat |
| 17 | Legendary: Fortitude & Will | The Answer Absolute (legendary reaction upgrade), general feat |
| 18 | — | Class feat |
| 19 | Legendary: class DC, all armor | Unbreakable Vow (capstone I) |
| 20 | Ability boosts | Ascend the Oath / Break the Oath (capstone II), skill increase |
A representative slice, not the full list. Feats marked open are available regardless of Oath.
Choose one permanently, matching your Oath:
A single permanent fork, chosen once, at the absolute height of your Oath's power.
Your Oath becomes something the setting itself notices. The Answer now triggers for any ally acting as a Ward-analog within a wide radius, not just your named Ward, and while active you project an aura that measurably steadies everyone near you. You remain exactly what you swore to be — just more of it than any oath has managed before.
On your own terms, at your own chosen moment, you shatter the Oath yourself — becoming Forsworn deliberately rather than by failure. You become something new: the Oathless. Massive, permanent bonuses to attacks and defenses, immunity to fear and compulsion, and total immunity to the Trial track from now on — but no more Conviction, no more Vows, and the institution your Oath once answered to now hunts you for the rest of the campaign, permanently and without appeal.
Not a person, not a single unique monster — a model. Any megacorp with a large enough soul-infrastructure budget can build or lease one: a ghost-machine built for exactly one purpose, dispatched the moment a Binding Clause defaults. It does not negotiate, threaten, or arrest. It arrives, locates the soul-collateral written into the broken contract at signing, and physically repossesses it — extracting the collateralized fragment whether or not the body it's attached to survives the process. Corporate legal departments describe this, without irony, as "standard collections procedure." Free Havens consider a Foreclosure Engine sighting a settlement-wide emergency; nobody wants one that close deciding it has a second name on file.
A Cinder Vow Sworn is the Choir of Ash's field arm, not its contemplative wing — that role belongs to the Choir-sworn Vigil, whose whole discipline is patient faith banked slowly toward one enormous, campaign-defining act. The two paths share theology (Uriel's Turning as corruption-forced tragedy, not villainy) but split hard on doctrine of action. Where a Choir-sworn Vigil waits and prays for the day the Cage cracks on its own, a Cinder Vow Sworn does not wait: day to day, they escort relic-recovery teams into the Glasslands, hold ground against anyone trying to cap an unstable reactor the Choir has declared sacred, and stand sentinel over half-melted ghost-machine shrines they read as proof Uriel's will still moves in the world. Their operating belief is that small, controlled acts of destruction now are mercy that prevents a worse, uncontrolled Turning-repeat later — consistent with the Choir's core faith, but urgent where Vigil is patient. Not every Cinder Vow recruit holds the full theology sincerely; some are cynics bought with protection and power. Most, though, believe every word of it, which is what makes them dangerous to travel with.