Tradent

The bridge-machine would not open for coin, threat, prayer, or tool. Then the Tradent asked the oldest woman in the caravan what her grandmother used to sing when the west road flooded. The woman was embarrassed and sang it badly. The Tradent sang it back without embarrassment, slower, then with the old pauses restored. On the third pause the bridge lit under the water. By the seventh, the road rose. Nobody laughed at the song again.

-- recovered fragment, caravan account, Fenline crossing

What a Tradent is

The Forgetting erased records, doctrines, songs, passwords, procedures, and the names of the people who made them. A Tradent is someone who made survival out of keeping things moving across that loss. Memory is their trade. The voice is their tool. Recitation is not ornament; it is operating method.

A Tradent's power begins where speech, rhythm, attention, and the Winds meet. A settlement song may preserve a water-pump sequence. A drum-pattern may coordinate a wall defense. A story about a foolish child may be the only surviving warning about a Redoubt boundary. The Tradent remembers, recites, tests, edits, and passes the working part on.

Most settlements welcome a Tradent before they trust one. A person who knows too many songs may also know too many debts. A Tradent can carry news, shame, trade terms, warnings, scandal, and the old pattern that wakes the gate. They are valuable because they transmit. They are dangerous for the same reason.

Chassis

Class features

Every Tradent channels through speech, rhythm, and trained attention, and every Tradent carries the same core craft regardless of the mode they later specialize in. The features below are that shared craft: the innate psionic channel, the well-timed word that steadies another's hand, and the recovered powers a Tradent scavenges from disciplines they were never formally taught.

Feature ladder

Major class features

• Psionic Channeling (L1). You channel psionic powers using Wind slots that refresh on a long rest. Charisma is your channeling stat: the channel is innate, carried in the breath and the voice, not studied from a codex. A musical instrument serves as your resonance focus, and any power you know with the ritual tag can be channeled as a recitation without spending a slot.
• Inspiration (L1). As a bonus action, give one creature within 60 feet who can hear you an Inspiration die, a d6. Once within the next 10 minutes that creature can add the die to one ability check, attack roll, or saving throw. You have a number of uses equal to your Charisma modifier. The die grows to a d8 at L5, a d10 at L10, and a d12 at L15. The in-world name for this is a resonance-bolster: a psionic pulse carried in the voice or the instrument, the Tradent's channel briefly coupling with the recipient's own, steadying the hand the Tradent is not holding.
• Jack of All Trades (L2). Add half your proficiency bonus, rounded down, to any ability check you make that does not already include it. A Tradent has done a little of everything and remembers most of it.
• Soothe (L2). During a short rest, your comforting words and steady encouragement revitalize the company: allies who can hear you and spend Hit Dice to heal regain an extra 1d6 hit points. The die grows to 1d8 at L9, 1d10 at L13, and 1d12 at L17.
• Expertise (L3, L10). Choose two of your skill proficiencies; your proficiency bonus is doubled for any check that uses them. Choose two more at L10.
• Font of Inspiration (L5). You regain all expended Inspiration uses on a short or long rest, not only a long one.
• Endure the Unendurable (L6). As an action, you hold the people around you steady with voice and will until the end of your next turn. While that holds, you and friendly creatures within 30 feet who can hear you have advantage on saving throws against being frightened or charmed. It ends early if you are incapacitated or silenced, or if you end it freely.
• Scavenged Repertoire (L10, L14, L18). You take powers a Tradent's own discipline never taught: choose two powers from any class's list, each a trick or of a level you can channel. They count as Tradent powers for you. Choose two more at L14 and again at L18. The borrowed powers feel foreign -- like reading from a data fragment written in another tradition's hand, the technique right but the idiom unfamiliar. This does not make them less useful. The Tradent has spent a career finding the working part in fragments that were never meant for them.
• Superior Inspiration (L20). When you roll initiative with no Inspiration uses left, you regain one.

Subclasses

At L3 a Tradent's craft settles into a specialized mode. The Lorespeaker preserves and restores the old meaning. The Hearthkeeper binds a company together and holds them functional under pressure. The Songkeeper keeps the repertoire alive through performance and song. The Courier finds the way through dangerous ground and hostile terrain. The Factor brokers power between factions and moves leverage where others see only deadlock.

Lorespeaker

She listened to our foundation tale once and corrected none of it. On the second telling she asked why the youngest child in the story carried a copper bowl when every house in the Hold used clay. On the third telling she set a copper bowl against the pump-stone, struck it with two fingers, and the dry pump began to cough. We had kept the story for six generations and forgotten the bowl was not a bowl.

-- recovered fragment, Hold ledger marginalia, Copperspring

Identity

The Lorespeaker is the Tradent who specializes in the survival of meaning. They know that a corrupted story can still hold a working part, and that a ridiculous custom may be the last recognizable piece of a machine's operating language.

Lorespeakers are archivists without archives, teachers without schools, and technicians of memory. Their work is not nostalgia. It is recovery. They listen for the seam where nonsense once touched use, and they make the old pattern speak again.

Where most Tradents master the modes of their own discipline, the Lorespeaker collects indiscriminately -- a recovery technique here, a psionic register borrowed from a Sage tradition there, a weapons-form from a fighter's manual they found in a collapsed holdfast and read by lamplight in three nights. Their breadth is not dilettantism. It is method. The more traditions they have absorbed, the more clearly they can see the seam where any practitioner is about to make a mistake -- and the precise word at that moment, the right weight of naming applied to the gap between what a fighter knows and what they just forgot, can unseat a strike as neatly as a shield.

Subclass features

L3: Cant of the Under-Tale. You know the Lorespeaker's cant, a way of folding a true message into a story, rhyme, or custom so that it reads as harmless nonsense to anyone who does not know the cant. Conveying a message this way takes four times as long as saying it plainly, but a message so folded survives retelling: it can pass through people who do not know the cant at all, generation to generation, without losing the working part. You can also study a coded message, cipher, or deliberately garbled record left by another tradition and, after ten minutes' work, make an Intelligence check against a DC the GM sets to draw out its meaning. This is the Lorespeaker's whole craft turned into a tool: the seam where nonsense once touched use, now made on purpose.

L3: Accumulated Traditions. Your study has ranged beyond any single lineage. You gain proficiency in three skills of your choice. A Lorespeaker does not know everything; they know enough of everything to keep working when a narrower practitioner would stop.

L3: Cutting Analysis. When a creature you can see within 60 feet makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a damage roll, you can use your reaction to expend one use of Inspiration, rolling your Inspiration die and subtracting the number rolled from the creature's roll. You may choose to use this feature after the creature makes its roll, but before the GM determines whether the attack roll or ability check succeeds or fails, or before the creature deals its damage. The creature is immune if it cannot hear you or if it is immune to being charmed. This is the Lorespeaker's tradition-knowledge applied as a destabilizing force: naming the technique a practitioner is mid-execution, identifying the tradition it comes from and the exact point where the practitioner's form is about to break, delivered in the half-second between intent and contact. It is not a psionic working in itself -- it is the resonance-bolster reversed, a pulse of recognition that shakes the confidence of the practitioner at the worst moment for them. The Winds carry the word to the body the Lorespeaker is not close enough to touch.

L6: Expanded Protocol Access. Your accumulated study opens registers your base discipline could not have reached for another four levels. You learn two protocols of your choice from any class's protocol list. Each must be a trick or of a level you can currently channel, as shown on the Tradent table. They count as Tradent protocols for you and do not count against the number of protocols you know. The Lorespeaker at this stage has found the seams in enough traditions to borrow from them without corrupting what they already hold.

L14: Practitioner's Reserve. When you make an ability check, you can expend one use of Inspiration, rolling your Inspiration die and adding the number rolled to the check. You may choose to do this after you roll but before the GM tells you whether you succeed or fail. This is not confidence borrowed from outside. This is the Lorespeaker reaching into their own accumulated tradition-knowledge at the moment the check matters -- the half-memory of a similar problem solved, the practitioner's instinct that there is a way through the thing that currently looks closed.

Hearthkeeper

On the fourth night underground the children stopped answering their names. The dark had taught them another silence. The Hearthkeeper made us sit in a circle and recite what we would eat when we came home. Every person named one thing. Even the ones who believed there would be no home. By morning the children answered again. That was when I understood the song was not for courage. It was for continuity.

-- recovered fragment, tunnel rescue account, Lower Masonry

Identity

The Hearthkeeper is the Tradent who preserves the company itself. They hold morale, habit, kinship, obligation, and shared memory in playable shape. They know when to sing, when to mock, when to command, and when to make everyone say aloud the thing fear wants left unsaid.

A Hearthkeeper's power can look gentle from outside. It is not. They keep people functional under pressure. They make groups remember who they are while the world is trying to reduce them to appetite and panic.

Songkeeper

The militia had walked through the night and would not make camp. Their eyes were open but not seeing. The Songkeeper took up the road-march and gave it a melody, and somewhere in the second verse the feet found the rhythm and the eyes found the road again. By the time we reached the outpost, ninety voices had joined in, and when the outpost commander asked where we had found a company that still sang, we told him we had found it in ourselves.

-- recovered fragment, militia dispatch, Northway Road

Identity

The Songkeeper is the Tradent who keeps the living repertoire alive. Where the Lorespeaker recovers dead meaning from corrupted fragments, the Songkeeper performs the repertoire so it stays alive by being sung, played, told. Music is their medium. Performance is how the old patterns survive in the present.

A Songkeeper is easy to mistake for mere entertainment. That is the mistake. They hold groups functional through rhythm and melody, through the strange work of making a hundred voices move as one body. They know which song will carry a company the last mile when reason will not.

Courier

The eastern pass had been locked three seasons. The trader who tried it came back three fingers short and two days delirious. The Courier studied the map nobody else could read -- not drawn, just the lines where water runs and stone remembers. He did not say the pass was safe. He said the pass had a way, and if we followed the way instead of the map, the way would not close behind us. We came through. The pass was exactly as dangerous as it had been. But the Courier had taught us how danger moves, and we moved where it was still asleep.

-- recovered fragment, trade-company account, Eastern Reach

Identity

The Courier is the Tradent who specializes in the roads between settlements. They read ground the way others read faces -- know where water runs, where stone remembers, where danger sleeps. A Courier is not merely a carrier of goods and people; they are a wayfinder.

They know that the safe path is not always the direct one. They know which dangers move and which are anchored, which passages close at nightfall and which open only for those who ask in the old way. A Courier gets people and goods through when every other door is shut.

Subclass features

L3: Road-Cant. You know the Courier's cant, a standing vocabulary of marks -- a stone stacked a certain way, a scratch cut at a crossroad, a knot tied in a fence -- that carry short, practical messages: clean water, a closed pass, a welcoming holdfast, danger, the number of days since the mark was made. You can leave such marks and read them, and you automatically notice Road-Cant marks set within sight of a route you travel. The cant is shared by couriers across the region and beyond living memory, so a mark you leave may be read by a Courier you will never meet, and a mark you find may be older than the road.

Factor

The two settlements had not spoken in three winters. Their boundary was a line of silence and readied spears. The Factor arrived and did not speak to either one. Instead she walked between them and stopped at the midpoint and made a single trade: she told Northhold that Southmarch had always meant to rebuild the bridge, but the first step required Northhold to send workers first. She told Southmarch that Northhold wanted the bridge but feared betrayal, and only Southmarch's reputation could move them. Both lies. But both lies contained the piece of truth each faction could not tell the other. Within a season the bridge was half-rebuilt. Within two, the settlements had a treaty. The Factor was gone before either one understood that she had not made the peace. She had only shown them it was cheaper than the feud.

-- recovered fragment, mediator's note, Boundary Stone

Identity

The Factor is the Tradent who specializes in the dynamics between factions. They read the landscape of power the way a Courier reads ground -- know what each faction wants, where the debts lie, what truth each one cannot speak aloud. A Factor is a broker of leverage and motion.

They do not lead, and they do not command. They make motion possible. They know that the unsayable thing in one settlement's mouth may be the necessary thing in another's ear. They trade in the gaps between what is believed and what is true, and power flows through those gaps like water through a crack.

Subclass features

L3: Cant of Standing. You know the Factor's cant, the coded courtesies by which factions mark allegiance, debt, and rank -- a form of address, the order in which names are spoken, which hand offers the cup. By listening to a stranger speak and watching how they carry themselves, you can read whose terms they keep and what standing they hold among them. When you parley, you can answer a faction in its own forms: for the length of that exchange you are treated as fluent in their courtesies, and you have advantage on a Charisma check made to be trusted, hosted, or heard out as one of their own.