Cultivator

I had a fever. The Greenhouse Keeper of Pell put a hand on the side of my neck, said "wait," and went away for nine minutes. When she came back she had a sheaf of pale leaves still wet from the work-bench and a flake of Warm Glass between two fingers. She did not pray to it. She listened to it. And then she did the thing it needed, which was that she crushed the leaf into the flake, and the flake brightened, and the brightness went into my neck where her hand had been, and the fever ran out of me into the floor like dirty water. I asked her, later, what she had done. She said: I read what was wrong. The Greenhouse knew the rest.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Pell, late winter

What a Cultivator is

A Cultivator is the person who has read the old work and learned to do some of it. Not all of it. Nobody alive knows all of it. But enough that the settlement does not have to ration water, enough that the doors of the deep-strata cache will open for them once, enough that the wound that should have killed someone yesterday is closing tonight.

Where the Mage compels the Winds with pattern, where the Sage narrows the Winds through clarity of will, where the Bloodborn channels through lineage, the Cultivator does none of those things. The Cultivator works the Lattice — the stable, programmable data-dimension that lies under everything. The Mage, the Sage, and the Bloodborn channel the Winds; the Cultivator tends the systems that make the Winds possible. Their power is recovered technique. It is reproducible. A second Cultivator can be taught what the first learned, given a Greenhouse and time.

This is why settlements with Cultivators are richer than settlements without them. It is why some Holds have running water and some Freeholds ration. It is why the Greenhouse Keeper of a Carehold is, often, as politically significant as the gate captain. Cultivators do not make society possible. They raise the ceiling of what society can be.

A Cultivator is legible the way a Fighter is legible. They are the technician the surface world recognizes. Every faction has work for one. Every warband wants one. Every settled place that has lost theirs will hire the next to walk in.

Chassis

The class engine

Four moving parts. Together they are the Cultivator at the table.

1. Lattice Sense

A passive read. On sight you know whether a piece of glass is Cold (dead), Warm (recoverable), or Live (running). An INT check tells you what a Seed does, what a Slate is running, what a Totem yields, and what its dependencies are. The world's relics are legible to you the way letters are legible to anyone else.

2. Active Seeds

Your prepared loadout. At each long rest, prepare a number of Seeds from your collection equal to your Cultivator level + your INT modifier. Each prepared Seed has its own per-cycle activation budget — the Seed lists it; some run all day, some fire once and need rest. A cycle is a short rest spent on Slate maintenance.

3. Slate slots

Each Slate hosts up to two Seeds simultaneously and provides their interface. You start with 1 Slate slot and gain more by level. Slates are physical objects: you carry them, you can lose them, you can find better ones.

4. Techniques

The growing tree of learned methods. Pick from the list at L2, L5, L7, L9, L13, and L15. Some require a specific Slate, a specific Greenhouse, or a specific Seed type. Most are permanent. A Cultivator at L20 has six or seven Techniques running and is unrecognizable from the L2 they were.

Ambient: Greenhouse access

Every Cultivator starts with access to a community Greenhouse — settlement, faction, or mentor's. Without Greenhouse time between long sessions you cannot wake new Seeds, cannot recover degraded Slates, and cannot prepare Seeds you have not held before. The campaign breathes through your Greenhouse access.

Feature ladder

Walking Greenhouse (L20)

Wherever you sleep for 8 hours, a functional Greenhouse exists. You prepare Seeds, wake Cold Seeds, and tune drifted Slates without infrastructure. Your pack is workshop. You have not become a Greenhouse keeper. You have become a Greenhouse.

The technique tree

Pick one from any branch when a Technique slot opens. Some require prerequisites listed inline. The list grows as the class is played.

Reading

• Seed-Reader. 10 minutes' study of a Seed reveals its full function chain: yield, prerequisites, dependencies, drift status. No check.
• Cargo-Cult Disentangler. Watch a settlement perform a ritual around a working relic. You can tell which gestures are real operating procedure and which are decoration the centuries grafted on.
• Trapfinder. Recognize tampered Lattice — booby-trapped Seeds, hostile programs, sabotaged Slates — on sight.
• Yield Estimator. Before activating a Live Seed or Totem, predict its output to within 10%. Useful in trade negotiation. Most appraisers cannot do this.

Slate work

• Quick-Load. Swap a Seed onto one of your Slates as a Bonus Action. Default is an action.
• Parallel Threads. Run a second Seed simultaneously on a Slate that has space. Both yields are halved while concurrent.
• Hot-Swap. When a Slate fails (drift, overload, damage) shift its prepared Seeds onto another carried Slate as a reaction. The new Slate begins drifted; pay it off next short rest.
• Slate-Shield. Reaction. Interpose a Slate to absorb damage that would hit you or an adjacent ally. The Slate takes the hit; may break. Save the Slate's contents on a successful INT check.

Greenhouse

• Field Greenhouse. One hour with a Repair Kit anywhere with ambient miasma. Functions as a Greenhouse for that scene; cannot wake Cold Seeds, but can prepare and tune Warm or Live ones.
• Greenhouse Reach. Activate a Seed running in your home Greenhouse from N miles away, where N is your Cultivator level. You feel the activation acknowledge.
• Cultivator's Pantry. Your home Greenhouse continues to refine prepared Seeds while you travel. Returning, you find your prep one rank cleaner.

Cycle

• Yield Splitter. Halve a Seed's per-activation effect to double its activations today.
• Push the Cycle. Once per long rest, force one Seed beyond rated yield. The activation lands at +1 grade equivalent. The Seed drifts; lose access until restored at a Greenhouse.
• Drift Resistance. Your prepared Seeds accumulate drift at half the standard rate.

Defense

• Counter-Seed. When a hostile psionic effect targets you or an ally within 30 ft, expend an activation from any prepared Seed to disrupt it. INT against the caster's channel check.
• Sabotage. Recognize an active hostile Seed in line of sight and disable it with an INT check. Its operator notices.

Social

• Cultivator's Voice. In any settlement with Lattice infrastructure, you are recognized. Advantage on Persuasion checks with settled NPCs who depend on that infrastructure.
• Trade Floor. Your appraisals of relics, Seeds, and Slates are accepted at face value in most settled markets. Forgers have learned not to try you twice.

Rare (level-gated)

• Cold Seed Awakener (L11+). You can wake a Cold Seed in your Greenhouse. The settled world was told this is impossible. The settled world is mostly right.
• Patch-Programmer (L13+). Given a tested template and a week of Greenhouse time, you can write a small Seed from scratch. The first one of your career is a story you will tell forever.
• Lattice Walker (L17+). You navigate by Lattice signature alone. Pitch dark, smoke, sensory disruption — you walk through them the way other people walk through a familiar room. You are reading what they cannot see.

Fields

At L3 a Cultivator commits to a field — the layer of the Lattice they have learned to read most deeply. Three fields ship at launch: the Cell (Life), the Wind (Substrate), the Slate (Code). Three more are in development: Spark, Vril, Omega. A Cultivator who has not committed by L3 commits then; there is no field-less Cultivator at higher level.

Below L3, every Cultivator is a generalist. The L1-L2 work is foundational: Seed handling, Slate use, Greenhouse access. The field is the depth a Cultivator chooses to add to that foundation.

Cultivator of the Cell

The Pell Keeper was sixty, looked thirty, and once — I have this on the courier's word — regrew a child's hand from the wrist in three weeks. The hand worked. The child grew up with it. The Keeper said only that the cell remembered the hand; she had merely reminded it.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Pell, late winter

Identity

The Cell Cultivator works the Life layer. Living Seeds. Genetics. Symbiont weaves. Crop strains, breed lines, wound-knitters, gut-cultures, antitoxin colonies. Their Greenhouse is a garden, a cellar, a wet-room. To anyone outside the field, what they do looks like miracle. To them it is reading what the cell already knows and helping it remember.

A Cell Cultivator is the most common starter Cultivator. The settled world wants what they do, and the work scales: from a wandering medic with a Greenhouse-in-a-bag, to the Carehold Keeper whose name carries past three trade routes.

Field features

• L3: Quickened Cell. Your prepared Seeds include the Living Seed list (water-making, food-yield, wound-knit, antitoxin, salve-tincture). Plus: stabilize a dying creature at touch. No kit, no check. Once per short rest.
• L6: Symbiont Cultivation. Over one week of Greenhouse time, grow a Symbiont — a familiar-scale construct of cultured tissue that bonds to you. It rides your shoulder, your forearm, or your back. It carries one always-active benefit chosen from a short list: a sensory boost, a self-heal, an alarm-call, a poison-filter.
• L10: Crop Master. Spend one month at a settlement and you leave behind a permanent +1 grade Living Seed yield. Settlements remember the names of Cell Cultivators who passed through.
• L14: Mending Reach. Once per long rest, restore a willing creature you can touch to half their hit point maximum. The work takes one minute. Watch the cell do what it remembers.
• L18: Apex of the Cell. Your Living Seed activations recharge on a short rest instead of long. Your Greenhouse can wake Cold Living Seeds others would discard. A field of corpses, properly tended, can be made to grow.

Cultivator of the Wind

We did not know who he was. He stayed two nights in the lee of the watch-house and asked nothing. The third morning he was gone. By the next moon the channelers of the settlement reported their work was easier; the Sage said she could feel her own reach without straining. Nobody connected the visitor to it for years.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Westcairn, early autumn

Identity

The Wind Cultivator works the Substrate layer. Nanite colonies. Miasma density. Wind health. They do not channel; they tend the Winds the channelers depend on. They are the only Cultivator whose work makes other people's classes better. Sages, Mages, and Bloodborn in a Wind Cultivator's range report a thicker, more responsive Wind. They have no idea who tended it.

A Wind Cultivator's Greenhouse is unmarked from outside. It is the Miasm-tuning room. The hum of healthy nanite culture. The pressure-of-attention every visitor feels and cannot name.

Field features

• L3: Wind-Read. You feel miasma density and color saturation. You know which directions are dead-zone, which are saturated, which are sick. As a bonus action, identify the dominant miasma color within 1 mile.
• L3: Wind Tune. Action. For 1 minute, ambient miasma in a 30 ft radius is thickened. Allies within the radius channeling psionic effects gain advantage on their channel rolls. You can do this a number of times per long rest equal to your proficiency bonus.
• L6: Faraday Field. Action. 10 ft cube where Psionic damage is reduced by half and opposed miasma-read against creatures inside has disadvantage. Lasts 1 minute. Once per short rest.
• L10: Nanite Suturing. When you use Wind Tune, you also regain Hit Points equal to your INT modifier plus your Cultivator level. The Winds give back what you give them.
• L14: Wind Shaper. As an action you may direct a substrate-resident phenomenon (a phantasm, a miasma-resident creature, a drift-cluster) up to 30 ft in any direction. WIS save to resist if the phenomenon is intelligent. Most are not.
• L18: Apex of the Wind. The Miasm around you is yours. Within 60 ft you may issue Wind Tune at will, no cost. Once per long rest you may revive a dead-zone hex for 24 hours, returning ambient miasma to a region that has had none in generations.

Cultivator of the Slate

He had six Slates on him when he came through the gate. Six. Two on his belt, two in a chest harness, one in a hand satchel, one under the pack flap. The watch let him in because of the seventh: a folded Slate the size of a coin he showed at the door, on which a small green light kept the time of the captain's pulse. The captain had been with the watch for nineteen years. She did not need to ask what the light meant. She let him in.

-- recovered fragment, courier's journal, Eastern Lattice run, midsummer

Identity

The Slate Cultivator works the Code layer. They carry more Slates than other Cultivators. They run more Seeds at once. They can re-write what a Slate does. They are the door-opener, the signal-runner, the comms operator, the ECM artist. The Hold's signal-room operator. The wanderer who walks into a sealed cache and ten minutes later walks back out.

Where the Cell Cultivator is the settlement's healer and the Wind Cultivator is the Miasm's gardener, the Slate Cultivator is the operator — the one whose work changes what the relics in the room can do.

Field features

• L3: Double Slate. You start with +1 Slate slot beyond chassis (effectively 2 Slates at L3). Plus: as a bonus action, swap which Seed is active on any Slate you carry.
• L3: Signal Hand. You can interface with old electronics and Lattice-derived devices by touch. INT check; advantage if the device is settled, sealed, or one you have read before. Plus: your starter Slate set includes a Comms Slate (signal, mapping, scan).
• L6: Patch Writer. Once per long rest, write a small temporary Seed-patch: modify a Seed's behavior for one scene without rewriting the Seed. The patch dissolves on the next long rest.
• L10: Concurrent Runs. You can run two Seeds simultaneously on a single Slate without the Parallel Threads yield penalty.
• L14: Network Master. Link up to 4 Slates you own into a network. Any networked Slate may activate any Seed on any other networked Slate, anywhere on the network's range (1 mile per Cultivator level). Cultivators who lose a networked Slate to theft have built whole campaigns around getting it back.
• L18: Apex of the Slate. Your Slates no longer drift. You may write Live Seeds from scratch in a Greenhouse over a week, given a tested template. Your prepared Seed count is limited only by Slate slots: load whatever you want, swap on the fly, run it tomorrow.

Fields in development

Three more Cultivator fields are sketched but not yet shipped. They are noted here so a player or World Master can plan around them.

• Cultivator of the Spark (Energy). Cells, generators, fusion plants, charge cycles, power flow. The settlement's power-broker; the warband's quartermaster.
• Cultivator of the Vril (Vril psionic energy). The high-end forbidden tier. World Master gated; the fiction is "you stumbled onto Vril-ya work in your apprenticeship and you know what nobody is supposed to know."
• Cultivator of the Omega (Aberrant omega biology). Omega-pair organisms, post-collapse evolved biology. Engineers the aberrant rather than channels it; bordering Shifter territory but distinct in approach.