Running Andrus
AX.GAN.14.01 - GM Guide
This guide provides Andrus-specific guidance for GMs. It does not repeat the core rules for adjudication, NPC construction, adventure design, or campaign structure; those frameworks apply without modification. What follows is everything that is different about running a game set in Andrus: the social texture of a world built from three arrival waves, how to manage a party with multiple power traditions, and how to structure the campaign arcs that Andrus's specific tensions generate.
The Three Lineage Families
Andrus's central social fact is that its three lineage families arrived at different times and built three different frameworks for authority, obligation, and resolution. These frameworks are not incompatible, but they are not the same, and the friction between them is not the result of bad faith. It is the result of three cultures using different operating systems to negotiate the same world.
Anima authority is territorial and biological. It derives from time spent in relationship with a specific place, from accumulated knowledge of that place's systems, and from demonstrated capability to manage and defend it. An Anima culture does not recognize claims that come from documentation; they recognize claims that come from presence. You are who you are in relation to where you have been. A community that has maintained a territory across generations has a form of authority that a newcomer with a signed agreement cannot simply purchase.
Kin authority is traditional and earned. It derives from demonstrated mastery of the elemental forces that define a lineage's relationship with the world, from the accumulated practical knowledge of how to work with those forces responsibly, and from recognized standing within a tradition's practitioner community. A Kin Elder's authority is neither territorial nor documentary; it is the authority of someone who has earned the right to speak for a tradition by decades of responsible practice. A young Kin practitioner with a powerful forge or a strong water-working may be technically skilled but does not have the standing that comes from a lifetime of managed tradition-work.
Human authority is institutional and documentary. The Ekhari introduced legal record-keeping as the primary mechanism for formalizing claims; the Ustara developed chronicle authority as the standard for verifiable history; the Compact extended the documentary model into inter-lineage treaty frameworks. Human institutions recognize what is written, witnessed, and filed. They are, by design, less dependent on the memory of specific individuals and more durable across generations than either Anima or Kin frameworks. They are also, by design, more susceptible to being manipulated by anyone who knows how documentation works.
The friction in practice: When an Anima territorial dispute encounters Ekhari legal frameworks, neither party is wrong within their own framework. The Anima community has genuine authority by every principle their culture recognizes. The Ekhari House has genuine authority by every principle their culture recognizes. The Compact exists specifically to navigate this, but the Compact is itself operating within a framework that not all cultures have fully accepted.
Running inter-lineage encounters: Before designing any inter-lineage encounter, identify which framework each party is operating in, and what resolution would look like from each framework's perspective. An Anima culture asking for territorial acknowledgment wants something different from an Ekhari House asking for signed documentation, even if the underlying dispute is about the same land. Characters who understand more than one framework are more valuable as negotiators than characters who understand one framework deeply.
Running Politics Without Factions
The temptation when running inter-lineage politics is to reduce it to faction allegiance: the party sides with Faction A, which means Faction B is the enemy, which produces a series of encounters serving that alignment. Andrus's faction landscape resists this because none of its factions are wrong.
The Compact is genuinely trying to enable coexistence in a world that makes coexistence difficult. The Merchant Council is genuinely trying to build a functional economy in a world that came together through catastrophe. The Kyne Daas are genuinely holding information that, if shared prematurely, could cause the wrong response. The Ustara are genuinely uncertain whether what they know helps more than it harms. These are not faction spin; these are real tensions that real institutions face.
The useful question is not "whose side is the party on?" It is "what does this faction need right now, and what does having it cost someone else?" Each faction interaction should produce something tangible, information, access, relationship capital, or a changed institutional position, and cost something equally tangible. The party is not navigating between good and evil factions. They are navigating between competing legitimate interests with no clean resolution.
What makes Andrus political encounters distinct:
-
Stakes are institutional. Defeating a Compact Warden in combat does not resolve the mandate; it creates an interference citation and a replacement Warden. Winning an argument with a House Advocate does not make the claim disappear; it creates a procedural dispute that the House will pursue through different channels later. Every institutional interaction leaves a record.
-
Information asymmetry is the actual conflict. Most of the Third Era's significant conflicts exist because different parties are working with different pieces of an incomplete picture. The Kyne Daas know things the Ustara don't. The Ustara know things the Compact doesn't. The Daza may hold the oldest piece of all. Characters who can bridge these information gaps, through relationships, through access, through willingness to ask questions no one else is asking, are more valuable to the campaign's central problem than characters who can win fights.
-
Time moves. The Murin incursion does not wait for the party to be ready. The community near the Reach that was withdrawing from Compact agreements last session is further gone this session. The information the Kyne Daas are waiting to verify will not wait for verification forever. Apply light but consistent pressure to players who treat faction interactions as optional content.
The Three Eras as Campaign Anchors
The three eras of Andrus history are not historical background. They are the structural reasons that the Third Era's conflicts exist, and they are available as distinct campaign modes.
First Era, The Anima World
A campaign anchored in the First Era aesthetic is a campaign about territory, memory, and ecological consequence. The threats are real but ecological: predators displaced from disrupted hunting grounds, territorial agreements fraying under demographic pressure, the slow erosion of practices that kept a landscape stable across generations. The solutions are relational: finding the damaged link in a web of agreements, restoring a practice that was abandoned, making a territorial acknowledgment that opens a blocked relationship.
The Murin threat's First Era dimension is the oldest Daza records, the accounts of something that approached Andrus before formal memory, described in language that wasn't formalized yet. First Era campaigns layer historical weight onto present-moment conflict. The party may not know what they're looking at is relevant until they find the Daza elder who remembers the shape of it.
Adventure anchors: Territorial disputes with deep cultural stakes, ecological disturbances with ecological causes, Anima cultural ceremonies where the conflict is about who is present and why, Yusk archives that contain more than anyone expected.
Second Era, The Kin Arrival
A campaign anchored in the Second Era aesthetic is a campaign about what happens when a new kind of power enters an established landscape. The Kin arrived through elemental breaches, bringing traditions that had been developed on other planes and had to be re-calibrated for Andrus's specific conditions. The Grove Loss was not malicious; it was the result of Kin fire-work performed at a scale appropriate to their origin plane, in an ecosystem that could not absorb it.
Second Era campaigns are about consequence and adaptation. The question is not who was right but how to repair what was damaged, and whether repair is possible after enough time has passed. The Ashari-Kasia Grove Loss renegotiation is the defining ongoing Second Era conflict, an accountability question that the Compact cannot resolve because accountability frameworks are not designed to outlast the generation that experienced the original harm.
Adventure anchors: Tradition overreach and its ecological aftermath, inter-Kin disputes about tradition boundaries, deep-history artifacts from before the Kin arrived that are now interfering with Kin tradition-work, elemental imbalance caused by accumulated tradition use in a single territory.
Third Era, The World Gate Aftermath
A campaign anchored in the Third Era aesthetic is a campaign about a catastrophic event that has not finished happening. The Blasted Reach is still expanding. The Murin incursion is still proceeding. The accountability questions from the Gate's opening are still unresolved. The human cultures are still in the early generations of negotiating their presence on a world that was not waiting for them.
This is Andrus's primary campaign mode. The Third Era aesthetic is the pressure of ongoing consequence: every session, the world is slightly further along its current trajectory, and whether that trajectory reaches a threshold that cannot be reversed is partly determined by what the party does.
Adventure anchors: The full faction structure from AX.GAN.15.02, Reach margin encounters with Murin incursion evidence, the information-gathering arc that eventually produces the coordinated response the incursion requires, the Ustara's undisclosed astronomical record, the Kyne Daas's final verification.
Managing Power Traditions at the Table
Seven player-accessible power traditions in one catalog is a significant GM management challenge. In practice, most parties will have two to four traditions represented, a mixed party on the 9D generation package typically includes two or three lineages with Power Access alongside one or two Anima or Sereindal characters with none. The guidance below addresses the situations that most commonly arise.
Traditions Are Culture, Not Just Mechanics
Elemental Fire is not a generic fire-power system that happens to be flavored Ashari. It is an Ashari practice, with Ashari relationships to it, Ashari limits on how it should be used, and Ashari cultural weight behind moments of tradition failure. A character who uses Elemental Fire tradition outside their home territory, in conditions their tradition was not calibrated for, is doing something that carries meaning beyond the mechanical result.
When traditions appear at the table, engage their cultural context. An Ashari Hearthspeaker using Elemental Fire near a Reach fissure where the energy is wrong is experiencing something their tradition registered as alarming before they consciously noticed it. A Durakai Stoneholder whose Stone Surge interacts with Scar-corrupted ground feels the wrongness in the material itself. These are not extra mechanical conditions to track; they are narrative signals that the GM can deliver through first-person description.
Pattern Fatigue as Pacing
All seven traditions use Pattern Fatigue as their primary limit: the first use of a tradition in a scene is Clear (normal dice pool), and subsequent uses in the same scene are Fatigued (Disadvantage). Clearing Pattern Fatigue requires a Short Rest (10 minutes) or a Primary Action + Governing Attribute + Resolve vs Threshold 3.
In combat, this creates a natural rhythm: tradition practitioners are powerful in their first application and then either conserve their capability or push through Fatigue. In non-combat scenes, Pattern Fatigue means that sustained tradition use eventually produces diminishing returns, which is appropriate for the fiction, no practitioner can sustain high-intensity tradition work indefinitely.
Managing multiple traditions in the same scene: When two or three tradition practitioners are at the table, Pattern Fatigue applies independently to each tradition. One character burning their Clear window does not affect another character's Clear window. The interesting interactions occur when tradition effects stack, counter each other, or produce emergent results (Fire-Surge responding to Elemental Fire use nearby is an example from AX.GAN.14.04). Use the cross-tradition interaction notes in the power files when they're relevant, and invent plausible results when they're not yet defined.
Traditions Without Party Members
Players frequently encounter NPC tradition-users and non-playable tradition effects (the Blackened's Entropic Expression, unbound elementals, Scar Reading phenomena) regardless of whether their party includes practitioners of those traditions. When running tradition effects from NPCs or environmental sources, simplify: express the effect as a specific mechanical outcome (damage, condition, Threshold) without requiring players to understand the tradition's full mechanics. The texture comes from the fiction, not the mechanical details.
Traditions and the Murin Threat
The Murin-Blackened interactions with Kin traditions are intentionally disturbing. ShadeKin (corrupted Kin) use Entropic Expression, the inverse of their former tradition, operating on the same frequency but reversed. A Kin practitioner encountering their tradition's corrupted mirror experiences something that registers as wrong before it registers as dangerous. Build this recognition into ShadeKin encounters: the first hint of something wrong is that a practitioner's tradition feels like it is pulling in the wrong direction, seconds before the threat becomes visually apparent.
Campaign Arc Frameworks
The following arc frameworks are built from Andrus's specific tensions. Each is designed to run 3–6 sessions and produce a distinct dramatic question with a visible resolution threshold. All three arcs connect to the Murin incursion at their root, but from different angles, a GM can run any single arc as a standalone or layer all three as a campaign.
Arc 1, The Compact's Edge
Dramatic question: Can the inter-lineage frameworks that have held Andrus together survive contact with a threat that operates outside all of them?
Premise: A series of Compact agreements near the Blasted Reach margin are fraying. The Compact Wardens assigned to investigate are returning changed, or not returning at all. The party is entangled, through a commission, a faction relationship, or personal stakes, in the investigation.
Arc shape: - Sessions 1–2: Surface politics. Two or three inter-lineage disputes in the same territory that seem unrelated. The party establishes relationships with Compact Wardens, local community representatives, and at minimum one Kyne Daas contact who knows more than they're saying. - Sessions 3–4: The pattern. The party begins to see that the disputes are not independent; they have been exacerbated by something operating deliberately, seeding conflict to reduce Compact oversight. A Warden goes missing. A community that was a reliable compact partner stops responding. - Sessions 5–6 (climax): The source. A Ghoul infiltration network has been operating in this territory for a generation, specifically targeting the social infrastructure that would allow a coordinated response to Murin incursion. The climax is hybrid: combat (confronting the infiltration), institutional (preserving the Compact agreements that would otherwise collapse), and informational (the party now knows something no faction has yet formally shared). What do they do with it?
Faction threads: Compact (directly), Kyne Daas (information and reconnaissance), Calri (surveillance network that has noticed the same things), Ekhari (commercial interests in the affected territory that are being damaged by the disruption).
XP pacing: Designed to span Stage 1 advancement (~10 XP). Characters who enter as capable individuals exit as people with institutional relationships and a specific piece of knowledge about the Murin threat.
Arc 2, The Tradition's Limit
Dramatic question: What happens when a tradition is used at the edge of what it was built for, and what does that cost the practitioner and the world around them?
Premise: Elemental activity in a specific region has been escalating for months. An Unbound Fire-Surge or Scar Elemental manifestation is the immediate surface crisis. But the root cause is a tradition practitioner who has been using their power at the edge of sustainability, and the accumulated Pattern Fatigue backlash has been feeding the instability.
Arc shape: - Sessions 1–2: The surface crisis. The party responds to the immediate threat, unbound elementals, disrupted communities, ecological damage. They establish the nature of the manifestation and begin searching for its source. - Sessions 3–4: The practitioner. The source is a specific person: a Durakai Earth-worker who has been attempting something at the edge of their tradition's capacity, for reasons they believe justify the risk. The party must engage with the practitioner as a person with legitimate motivations, not just as the cause of a problem. The question is whether the tradition-work can be safely concluded, redirected, or stopped. - Sessions 5–6 (climax): The consequence. Stopping the practitioner cold risks a catastrophic backlash that will damage more than continuing. Helping them complete the work means accepting the risk that they misjudged the outcome. The climax is a question about the limits of what tradition-work can accomplish and who bears the cost when those limits are exceeded.
Faction threads: Compact (territory damage and community disruption create formal obligation), Kin tradition community (the affected practitioner has standing and relationships the party will need to navigate), Kyne Daas (if the elemental disturbance is near the Reach, they know about it and are watching).
XP pacing: Designed for mid-campaign, around Stage 2 advancement (~25 XP). Characters enter understanding their own traditions; they exit having seen what happens when tradition capability outpaces tradition judgment.
Arc 3, The Murin Question
Dramatic question: Can six factions that have been operating with incomplete information be brought into a coordinated response before the incursion reaches a threshold it cannot be reversed from?
Premise: The party has accumulated enough context, from Arc 1, Arc 2, or through direct investigation, to understand that the community withdrawals, the cold affect in compromised individuals, and the expanding "consuming absence" in Reach fissures are all the same thing. They are the first people outside the Kyne Daas (and possibly the Ustara) to understand this. The arc is the problem of doing something useful with that understanding.
Arc shape: - Sessions 1–2: Verification. The party needs to confirm what they suspect. This means accessing the Kyne Daas observational record (and persuading a Reader to share it), cross-referencing with Ustara astronomical data (and persuading a Chronicler-Legate that the timing for disclosure is now), and possibly consulting Daza Memory Coil material on the previous cycle. Each faction is holding a piece. Each has reasons to be cautious about sharing. - Sessions 3–4: Coordination. Once the picture is assembled, someone has to deliver it. Each faction receives the information through their own framework, the Compact needs it framed as a mandate-level threat; the Merchant Council needs it framed as an existential commercial risk; the Calri need it framed as a network crisis. The party is the information-delivery mechanism. Each delivery costs something, and produces either a new ally or a new complication. - Sessions 5–6 (climax): The threshold. The arc climaxes not at the Sepulcher Throne, that is a final campaign climax, but at the first moment of genuine coordinated response. The party creates the conditions for something that did not exist before this arc: an inter-faction agreement that the incursion is real, that it is advancing, and that responding to it requires collective action. The Ghoul Lord's strategy of patient isolation has been partially countered. The arc ends with the coalition in motion and the party understanding that the Throne is the source.
Faction threads: All six major factions are active. The Ekhari's Formation magic is the only force on Andrus capable of addressing the Gate's residual breach. The Ustara's chronicle of the previous cycle is the only detailed account of what full Murin emergence looks like. The Daza's oldest records contain the verification that the Kyne Daas's Reader was trying to reach. These are not just flavor connections; they are the specific capabilities the coordinated response requires.
XP pacing: Late campaign, Stage 3 advancement range (~50 XP). Characters enter as people who have seen the problem; they exit as people who may be the reason Andrus survives it.
The Murin Threat
The Ghoul Lord's primary strategic advantage is that Andrus's institutional leadership does not know the incursion is happening. The Blackened do not announce themselves. Ghouls pass as their origin lineage in all but the most careful examination. The withdrawal of communities from compact and trade relationships reads as market contraction, local hardship, and regional isolation, not as systematic infiltration.
This creates an information arc that runs parallel to the party's action arcs: the party is gradually, through encounter and investigation, assembling a picture that no single institution has assembled yet. How fast they assemble it determines the campaign's stakes.
A party that moves quickly through the information arc encounters the Murin threat while the incursion is still containable, before communities in the margin territory have been fully converted, before the Compact's agreements in that region have fully dissolved, before the Ekhari's commercial network in the affected territory has been too disrupted to function as a rapid communication channel. A party that moves slowly encounters it later, when the incursion has progressed further and the coordination problem is harder.
Three running principles:
Show, then explain. The first sign of Murin infiltration in a community should be observable before it is explainable. Cold affect in people who were warm. Night activity where there was none before. An absence of normal community noise at midday. A fire that is the wrong temperature, noticed by an Ashari practitioner before they can name why it's wrong. Players who notice these signals and investigate them are rewarded; players who don't are not punished but will have more to reconstruct later.
The infiltrators know they're exposed when scrutinized. A Ghoul Infiltrator under direct bright sun has Disadvantage on all rolls. A character with Draconic Essence (True Form, Threshold 1) can identify Stage 1 infection. A Medicine check (Threshold 2) during a careful examination reveals tell-tale physiological markers. The Blackened are not invulnerable to exposure; they are vulnerable to systematic examination, which is why their strategy is to prevent the social conditions under which systematic examination would happen.
The Ghoul Lord is a campaign endpoint, not a session encounter. The Sepulcher Throne in the Blasted Reach mountains is not discoverable in a single adventure. Getting there requires: understanding the incursion (Arc 3 information-gathering), coordinating the response factions (Arc 3 climax), defeating or bypassing the Blackened forces in the Reach approach, and arriving with a strategy for the Throne's destruction that the Lord's Fissure Tether makes a simple combat insufficient. Build toward this over the full campaign arc.
GM Toolkit
Culture Identification Signals
When playing NPCs from different cultures, use these quick behavioral markers to make them distinct without reducing them to stereotypes:
| Culture | Behavioral register | Authority signal |
|---|---|---|
| Aedyn | Evaluates from a distance before engaging; asks about altitude and context | Who can see the most from the best position |
| Calri | Mirrors your cadence and register slightly; asks what you're worth knowing | Who has the most useful information |
| Daza | Unhurried, specific, will wait out any urgency | Who holds the oldest record |
| Kasia | Still; the pause before they respond is a choice | Who can wait the longest without blinking |
| Kerroshi | Reads the room twice before speaking; wants to know who else is listening | Who has the most exits from this situation |
| Misa | Direct; comes from the front; wants you to know exactly where they stand | Who will hold their ground when it matters |
| Voren | Procedural; asks about the agreement framework before the specific dispute | Who maintains the most relationships |
| Yusk | Slow, absolute patience; in no hurry whatsoever | Who remembers the most |
| Ashari | Warm but bounded; wants to know if you're willing to be accountable | Who can be trusted with fire |
| Durakai | Blunt, then precise; establishes what is structurally true before anything else | Who is the most solid under pressure |
| Mirelen | Asks where you're coming from before what you want; reads currents | Who is connected to the most flows |
| Zephari | Gives you the full atmospheric read before any specific assessment | Who has the clearest picture of what's in motion |
| Ekhari | Identifies your documentation status immediately; categorizes by filing | Who has the best-constructed record |
| Kyne Daas | Minimal; answers questions with questions; reveals nothing by accident | Who has seen the most of the Reach |
| Sereindal | Blunt commercial efficiency; respects competence and directness | Who runs the tightest operation |
| Ustara | Chronicle-exact; gives you the full record before the conclusion | Who has the oldest verified account |
Tradition Use Quick Reference
| Tradition | First signal something is wrong | Murin interaction |
|---|---|---|
| Elemental Fire (Ashari) | Fire that "forgot its purpose"; wrong heat signature | Entropic Fire (ShadeKin) feels like a cold pull on Fire tradition |
| Elemental Earth (Durakai) | Ground that won't hold pattern; material that resists Form | Scar corruption in stone, wrongness felt as resistance |
| Elemental Water (Mirelen) | Current that runs counter to natural flow | Stagnant Flow (ShadeKin) reads as dead water in the Long Current |
| Elemental Air (Zephari) | Stillness where there should be movement | Void Breath (ShadeKin) perceived as absence rather than presence |
| Consortium Arcanism (Ekhari) | Force that dissipates before impact; Formation that won't cohere | Murin doesn't resonate with Arcanism; practitioners near heavy infiltration report formation "finding no purchase" |
| Scar Reading (Kyne Daas) | Fissures consuming rather than releasing; energy moving inward | Murin is directly readable for a Kyne Daas practitioner, this is their advantage and their burden |
| Draconic Essence (Ustara) | True Form that returns fragmented or incomplete | Dragon partners can read Murin infection in Stage 1; this is part of why the True Dragons have been watching |
Session Pacing Signals
- Party has too much information and not enough urgency: Introduce a concrete consequence of something they haven't addressed yet. A community that was recoverable is now past that threshold. A contact who was reachable has gone quiet.
- Party is overwhelmed and paralyzed: Give them a specific, actionable, achievable thing to do right now, even if it's only one piece of the larger problem. Forward motion creates momentum.
- Party is fighting instead of investigating: Have an NPC survive the combat with information the combat alone couldn't provide. The person they just fought knows something worth knowing.
- Party is investigating instead of committing: Have the situation demand a choice before they have complete information. The Kyne Daas Reader is at the threshold of speaking. The Warden's mandate expires tonight. The decision window is closing.