[The World Below] The Farsighter and Silhouette Callings

Matthew here once again! Last week, our The World Below blog addressed the mystery of the World Above and our poll for this week was split between Peoples and Callings, with Callings just inching a win!

Every character has a Calling. They may not know it until they reach adulthood, or it might be thrust upon them through ancestral tradition, but ultimately, every Calling is a choice. Some find their Calling through prophecies or interactions with the Casters of Fortuna, while others decide to take up the blade, the potion, or the Kaos rock. Every playable character in The World Below has a Calling, and once you take up this Path it becomes an intrinsic part of your motivation to press ever onward.

Callings are the professions, roles, and ways in which characters display their power. They’re the means by which a character conducts themselves on an exploration, hunt, or in defense of their people. Callings are how a character develops a reputation. Unlike the Dawn, a Calling isn’t determined by your people or place. Unlike the Synthesis, a Calling isn’t defined by a biological or geomorphic adaptation. Instead, a Calling is, as the name implies, the journey they’ve decided to walk in the Vast Underneath.

Below we’ll detail a couple of those Callings in brief. As the title above tells you, we’ll be looking at the Farsighter and the Silhouette. The accompanying art shows you one of the spirits a Farsighter may well commune with.

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Farsighter

“Our World Below speaks to us, but it also listens. And if we communicate with it, it will provide.”

—    Ridley Ordzhon, Farsighter of the Temple of the Benevolent Earth

Sobriquets: Diviners (formal), Empaths (common), Paladins (respectful, though sometimes inaccurate), World-Talkers (common, sometimes derogatory)

No Calling is more in tune with the World Below than the Farsighter. Held up as settlement chiefs, champions of their people, and the strongest diplomats in the World Below, the crown rests heavy on the heads of the many diviners littered throughout the Vast Underneath. While many undertake their Calling with vigor and sincerity, others become fearful and paranoid about the secrets their visions and empathic abilities might convey. More than one Farsighter has lost their mind to truths they weren’t ready to witness, and the expectation of clear prophecies, profitable guidance, and a permanently honest line is often too much for Farsighters to take.

Nevertheless, to be a Farsighter is to be honored and honorable with it, and in the eyes of many, the last connection to sunlit illumination. Farsighters play several roles in communities throughout the World Below, but perhaps more than any other, they’re the spiritual beacon and source of morale for many. Farsighters can see the past and the future, and with such powers, comes the obligation of leadership.

Listening to the Walls

Farsighters interpret the word “Calling” literally. When young, a Farsighter hears something calling to them, and before long someone will witness the teenage Farsighter with her ear pressed to a craggy wall, or body laid flat in an abandoned cave, taking in the ambient noises from their surroundings. What can they hear? According to most Farsighters, the World Below speaks to them. Most of the time it’s a whisper, but sometimes it’s an emphatic statement, and more rarely a terrifying shriek. Whether Farsighters are speaking to the Vast Underneath or if they’re somehow able to pick up the words of people speaking many strata away, the voices of spirits and other denizens of the World Below, or perhaps memories of the World Above, is open to debate.

The Sins of Deception

Farsighters are unparalleled in their ability to discern lies, tells, and secrets just from watching someone’s body language, listening to the timbre of a speaker’s voice, or when more powerful, breaking into their skulls and reading their thoughts. Most of this comes through trained skill, but the Power of Heliogy allows them to further these abilities to analyze a person’s relational bonds or even gauge a monster’s motivations. Farsighters call it “burning lies away from truths.” They can likewise manipulate an individual’s emotional state, making them more subservient or fearful, through to completely eroding a foe’s confidence. To cross a Farsighter is to find yourself at risk of being stripped down to your emotional core. No interrogators are better than these.

Leading the Others

It’s said that “the Farsighter whispers the weak spot, the Silhouette marks it, the Hunter strikes it.” While this combination of actions isn’t always guaranteed, the different Callings do complement each other in this way. Farsighters fit in naturally as the first line of defense, analysis, and politics, as their talents naturally lend themselves to leading in most spheres. Though conflict is common in the World Below, people from most other Callings still defer to Farsighter judgment simply because it’s reliable and people of this Calling have a reputation for truth. That’s not to say there aren’t dishonest Farsighters out there, but empaths tend to purge such peers if they’re bringing the Calling into disrepute.

The World Below Speaks

To be a Farsighter requires self-confidence and a belief in the world around you. You don’t need to believe that world is always benevolent — though Farsighter Templars certainly do, and always work in concert with Holy Templars — but do need to believe it will give you the answers you need if you can only figure out how to interpret them. This Calling draws the scientific and analytical as well as the superstitious and fatuous, because each of them hears the call, but each interprets it in a different way. What’s similar, is the outcome for each Farsighter: their prophecies, analyses, and simple guesses draw worshipers, followers, and companions from all quarters, as it’s without question that the Farsighter is a necessary role in the hostile subterranean world.  

Who Hears the Whispers?

Farsighters may be naturally inclined to lead and receive wisdom, but they’re a varied group.

• The dogmatic knight who clads himself in alabaster to better commune with the World Below, before deciding on the target for his next quest.
• The brow-beaten Fortunate, who feels the only way to improve her luck is to listen to the World Below for guidance.
• The empathic counselor who cares for the weakest of their community and draws a following due to her use of sage wisdom.
• The bastard prince who was cast out from his settlement in favor of his brother, another, more popular Farsighter.
• The silent interrogator, who simply puts her tools and observational abilities to work when needing to extract an answer.

Silhouette

“To better understand the adversary, you must live among them, breathe their air, watch their every movement.”

—    Dregon, Smuggler of the Iron Stratum

Sobriquets: Crawlers (common), Thieves (derogatory, common), Assassins (respectful or derogatory), Umbrists (respectful)

The Kaosist may be a wielder of untamed energy, the Alchemist an experimenter in unknown sciences, and the Hunter a lethal killer no matter the weapon in hand, but it’s the Silhouette who inhabitants of the World Below learn to fear. The Silhouette goes unseen. They hear your every word. They strike from a distance and move on. They crawl into narrow cracks in your cave you didn’t even know were there, and they watch. They watch and they learn, and they plot against you. The Silhouette is the enemy you don’t realize is there, until you realize your valuables have vanished, that your habitat’s suddenly collapsing, or your life abruptly ends.

Such are the tales affixed to this Calling, and many of them are earned. While a strain of nobility exists within the ranks of Silhouettes, their victims cry foul far more often than people praise their existence. They’re a necessary evil, though, as there are no better scouts, spies, and athletes in the World Below. Just as they’re likely to disrupt an unsuspecting settlement, their abilities can be turned on the ranks of the haemexii, quaesitors, and other, weirder and more dangerous creatures.

Friends of the Dark

Silhouettes are just as likely to encounter terrible entities in the Dark as someone of any other Calling, but it can be said they possess a rare advantage in that disturbing environment. They wield the darkness like a weapon, they make it their cloak, and even if they can’t see beyond the hand in front of their face, they know the terrain and can feel quite as ease in its oppressive bleakness. Though it’s Syntheses such as the Plutonics and the Myceli who have natural inclinations toward shadows and darkness, Silhouettes are trained from a young age to grow accustomed to the gloom.

The Changing Form

Silhouettes allow the underground dusk to affect them on physical, mental, and spiritual levels. They’re more accustomed to darkness than any other Calling, and resultantly, they allow it to slowly change them. Many a story has been told of a Silhouette somehow contorting to escape through a painfully narrow crevasse, while another speaks of a Silhouette who allowed the darkness to drain the warmth and light from her body, with her ultimately becoming a thing of shadow and ice. Silhouettes are static when they need to be, and they can hold their form steady for a long time, but as time takes its toll they endlessly shift and morph, losing their identities to become things of the Dark. Or at least, that’s what the taleweavers claim.

The Baleful Eye

Silhouettes watch, they strike, and then they move on. Whether their target is a person, a beast, or a trove of hidden treasures, they master the arts of observation, subtlety, and speed to act without emotion or cruelty, finding the best ways to carry out their objectives for communities, settlements, and guilds. Many Silhouettes adhere to the Hades Tract and the idea that they’re already dead. This philosophy provides them with a sense of calm purpose and pragmatism when it comes to their umbral operations. Silhouettes aren’t all murderous bastards, but plenty of them are, at least when the price meets their tariff.

Who becomes a Silhouette?

It’s easy to dismiss a stalking thief or killer as only having loyalty to oneself, but Silhouettes learn early on that there are few causes more valuable than those of trusted companionship. Anyone with close bonds to a community but perhaps lives on society’s fringe, who doesn’t fear the dark, who can tread lightly in a crumbling tunnel, and isn’t afraid to take hostile, sometimes lethal action against an enemy, might become a Silhouette. Among the young, the Silhouette isn’t a much-admired Calling because of its lack of glory compared to the Farsighters and Hunters of the World Below, but this easily separates those who do admire the Silhouettes, making them easier to recruit. Young survivors of decimated communities often gravitate toward this Calling.

The Shadows Move, Each Wearing a Different Face

Silhouettes come in many forms, just like shadows on the wall.

• The darkly humored assassin who tries to dispatch enemies with a sense of poetic irony and justice.
• The fervent defender of an isolated settlement, using arrows, javelins, and slingshots to drive away beasts before they come close.
• The plucky sneakthief who seeks out the next big score: the settlement that succumbed to cave-ins 30 years ago, locking in 200 people and a trove of diamond artifacts.
• The creepy stalker who in service to the Hadeans seeks out those who have cheated death’s noose.
• The chuckling Crawler who knows every inch of every cave on her stratum, including the secret passages.

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In The World Below you’ll find a wide variety of Path combinations you can put together to create your characters, each with their place in the setting, and each complementing their component character building blocks.

Next week, we’re going to swerve into the field of Powers and Wisdoms! Every character in The World Below has some proficiency for the manipulation of Kaos, but how they manifest that Power is very much dependent on the Calling they’ve chosen.

As we’ve just addressed the Farsighters and Silhouettes, vote below whether you want to see more about the illuminating Farsighter Wisdom of Heliogy, which allows their senses to expand to godly levels and enables predictions of events to come, or the shifting Silhouette Wisdom of the Umbra, which enables them to manipulate darkness and twist their own forms to unnatural degrees in the safety of the darkness.