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Dracovate
Introduction
The Dracovates are incarnations of the will, the voice, the hand, and the breath of the Primordial Dragons made flesh. In a world broken by the Sundering, where elemental chaos bleeds through every rift and tear, the Dracovates walk as living judgments. Chosen through the brutal Rite of Ascension, they are reforged into power, their essence consumed and remade by the breath of the Dragon they serve.
To witness a Dracovate in battle is to behold purpose weaponized. Their elemental strikes are divine expressions of necessity. Each smite they deliver cracks the ground, calls the storm, drowns the defiant, or sears the corrupt with radiant fire. Behind every blow is the will of a Dragon whose elemental dominion has shaped the world since time’s unraveling.
Each Dracovate is bound to a single Primordial Dragon, a cosmic force given sentient form:
Geonid, the stone beneath all life
Cyclonix, the storm that cannot be caged
Nepturon, the deep and drowning abyss
Solinarus, the burning light of rebirth
Umbraxis, the shadow between heartbeats
Emberon, the flame of destruction and creation
Cryonax, the chaos that tests all things.
Their connection is sealed with the Oathscar — a mark etched into flesh and soul that pulses in time with their Dragon’s will. It is both a source of immense power and a constant reminder that their life is no longer their own.
But this bond is not without peril. Those who falter — who defy their Dragon’s will or are consumed by the power they were meant to wield — become Ronin. These fallen Heralds are hunted mercilessly, yet feared more than any loyalist, for the severed bond shatters their elemental alignment, birthing chaotic surges and instability wherever they go. They are a living threat to the already fragile fabric of Aetheria — and a tragic warning of what happens when purpose is lost.
Dracovates are defined by two unbreakable pillars: Constitution, the flesh that must survive the Dragon’s fury within; and Wisdom, the soul that must navigate divine purpose without losing itself. To lack one is to burn out. To lack the other is to become a weapon without aim. Only those who can balance both can rise to the full potential of their calling — and become true Heralds of the Enduring Flame.
Their path is shaped not by choice, but by necessity. They do not choose missions — they are summoned by visions, by instinct, by the breath of their Dragon whispering through the Aether. Their presence on the battlefield is never idle; every strike they make, every judgment they pass, is a correction — a reassertion of the order that the Sundering fractured.
Yet even amidst such overwhelming power, a Dracovate is never truly alone. From their first days as initiates, they form a sacred bond with a Wyvern — a creature who sees their soul before their rise. This bond, forged through the Rite of First Sight, is a deeper loyalty than any dragon’s decree, unbreakable even in disgrace. The Wyvern does not serve the Dragon. It serves the Herald.
To the people of Aetheria, the Dracovates are both beacon and terror — revered as saviors, feared as executioners. Their Oathscars glow like branded truth upon the field of battle, a signal to allies to stand firm, and to enemies to run while they still can. Their tales are told in hushed awe and desperate prayers, but the reality is far starker than myth: to be a Dracovate is to be claimed by eternity — to become the storm, the flame, the abyss, and the light.
To walk the path of the Dracovate is to become power. It is to rise as the Dragon’s Will, and to carry that burden until death… or defiance.
“To call them knights is a grave mistake. Knights kneel. Priests pray. Mages study. A Dracovate does not kneel. They do not pray. They do not study.
They are chosen. They burn, drown, shatter, and rise again — not by hope, but by necessity.
— Nilander Amig, Chronicler of Aetheria

Overview & History
Overview & History
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Dracovates: The Breath That Walks
The Rite of Ascension removes the parts of a person that cannot survive proximity to truth. Belief, ideology, ambition—burned away. What remains is breath and intention. The Dracovate is refined, not chosen. Those who survive the process emerge with a brand of function etched in Dragon-will; The Oathscar. It will forever burn brightly whenever their Dragons will needs enforcing.
The Oathscar does not flare for display. It flares in proximity to divine corruption, instability, or power left unclaimed. It is not a mark of pride. It is a trigger, not symbolic.
Smite as Function
Dracovates do not ask permission to act. Their authority is environmental not verbal. Their most defining weapon is not a sword, a vow, or a tradition. It is their Smite. A direct emission of draconic pressure made manifest—condensed elemental verdict carried into the body and released into the world. Not divine. Not arcane. Not borrowed; a surge of heat, a crash of thunder, a vacuum of silence drawn from the elements themselves.
The Elemental Directives
Each subclass expresses an operational parameter more than a philosophy, an active condition the world must now conform to:
Emberon: defines transformation through fire.
Geonid: enforces resistance until collapse.
Cyclonix: displaces control through velocity.
Nepturon: overwhelms resistance through pattern.
Solinarus: reveals weakness through exposure.
Umbraxis: isolates failure through precision.
Cryonax: tests certainty through chaos.
These are the living frameworks through which Dracovates interface with the world. When a subclass is chosen, a correction process begins.
Wyverns: The Bond Beyond Rank
A Dracovate is claimed by a wyvern, they do not summon one. The bond begins before flight. Young wyverns are grounded—wingless, they do not serve. Instead. they observe they track the Dracovate and match them, not in obedience, but in resonance. Those who fail the bond are left behind. Some are torn apart. Some are simply ignored.
At seventh level, the wyvern transforms. Wings tear through its back like a memory remembered too late. Only then does it fly—and only then does it carry its Dracovate. Even when the Order falls, even when the Oathscar breaks, the wyvern remains. It does not forget. It does not abandon. It honors the bond.
Cultural Position
Dracovates are not typically integrated into society or part of its structure. They are what the structure calls when it fails. They do not enter a city to protect it. They arrive because something there is wrong. They do not explain themselves. They do not negotiate. They do not command armies. They do not inspire followers. They do not lecture or instruct. They descend, they correct and then they leave.
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In many worlds, dragons are apex predators — beings of ancient knowledge, immense power, and boundless ego.
The Primordial Dragons are not creatures in the traditional sense. They have become the laws that keep this world together — the embodied forces of Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Light, Darkness, and Chaos. You do not slay them. You do not bargain with them. You exist because they prevent the world from ceasing to exist.
Some believe that when the mortals cast the spell that caused the sundering, the Dragon of Law was destroyed. Whether that is true or not, these Dragons are the law that now remains.
They do not walk Aetheria in full form. Their Avatars, immense reflections of their power — move across the world if correction is required. These are extremely rare occasions and something magnificent is typically needed to call them from in their massive lairs. Instead they rely on their will being carried out by their enforcers.
Dragons Who Devour the Divine
When the Loom of Reality shattered during the sundering, the world collapsed inward. Mortal hands cast the spell that cracked the sky; the divine, fueled their arrogance by aiding them in their pursuit. It was the Dragons who stepped forward, not to rule… but to hold the broken world together.
They did not survive it. At least not in their current forms.
The act of stabilizing Aetheria’s fragments shattered their bodies across the world. What remained of them helped bind the broken islands. The Aetherstreams act like magical veins, containing the essence of the Dragons blood, as it flows between the shattered islands holding everything together.
But even as their bones were lost to magic, their hunger endured. To remain conscious, to remain present, the Dragons fed. The only thing powerful enough to sustain beings that had bound an apocalypse: Thegods.
The Dragons Eat Prayer
The Primordial Dragons do not destroy the gods out of vengeance. They consumed them because they have to. What remains, requires fuel — and in a dying world, the only source potent enough to feed a dragon without a body… was divinity.
The Surviving Sparks
Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, remains — fractured but unbroken. She walks Veilrift under many names, cloaked in prophecy, shielded by stories too tangled to consume. Wherever strategies still hold, she is near.
Loki, the shadow-smile, never stopped moving. Too unpredictable to pin, too clever to swallow whole. Some say he guided the Sundering. Others say he's still playing the long game.
Mystra, goddess of magic, was torn apart when the Weave fractured — but fragments of her still whisper through unstable Aetherstreams. Some say the dragons spat her out, unable to fully digest what she had become.
Corellon, once a shaper of elvenkind, vanished during the Sundering — not slain, but dissolved into art, language, and motion. Many believe he lives in every act of defiance that creates something beautiful.
Kelemvor, god of death, was among the last of the old gods to fall. His temples now rot beneath wyvern nests, but there are whispers that he made a bargain — and that bargain has not yet come due.
Bane, god of conquest, was devoured — but the echo of his dominion lingers in warlords across the isles. Sometimes, dragons cough smoke that smells like chains.
The Heretic’s Brand
Clerics, Paladins, and Oracles who do not serve a Primordial Dragon are labeled Heretic-Flame by many Orders. Some still draw power — divine remnants, whispered spirits, fractured god-motes too small to be noticed by the Avatars. But Dracovates can feel it. The Oathscar burns when hollow miracles pass nearby.
And when it does, the law is simple:
No god may rise again.
No pantheon shall reform.
Faith in a world that eats faith is to walk against the grain of the world’s hunger. Every divine spell cast echoes through the Aetherstreams. Remnants of a hiding or devoured god can be sensed unless carefully cloaked. Every miracle you channel may be the pulse that helps the Dragons locate your god. Every time you close your eyes to pray somewhere; a wyvern might turn its head, an Oathscar might flare, or a Dragon might remember the taste of hope.
To many divine casters, Dracovates are feared; not because they’re cruel, but because they are inevitable. They chase sinners through divine signals.

Artwork & Illustrations
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Origins & Adaptations
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Origins & Adaptations
The Will of the Dragons
Breath as Doctrine
Each Dracovate walks with breath in place of belief. They do not carry sacred texts, they breathe the will of their dragon. They need no doctrine, because they are the outcome of it and that certainty creates friction.
Among Aetherial Scholars, they are seen as fixed points—useful, but unchanging. Among Sentinels, they are viewed as variables best accounted for from a distance. Among divine casters, they are regarded as extinction events waiting for excuse, and yet, the Dracovate continues to operate. Not because they are welcome. But because they are necessary.
Dracovates are not interpreters of will or instruments of arbitration or even envoys. The Oathscar does not ask what should be done. It activates in response to what demands correcting. Like ants in a swarm, there is only action.
Not all divine magic is reckless. Not all heretics are destabilizing. But most Dracovates are created to measure imbalance, not shaped to weigh intent. Where that imbalance grows, intervention follows. This is not cruelty, it is mandate, but even mandates accrue consequences.
The Silence After
The aftermath of a Dracovate’s intervention is not marked by celebrations or monuments. It is felt in altered currents, muted altars, and prayers that now fail to rise. The Oathscar corrects, but it does not repair. In places where temples once stood, nothing grows evenly. The air tilts. Stones lean. People speak more softly. Over time, locals learn to avoid drawing attention from powers they do not understand—especially those that no longer reply.
The Ronin Divide
Not all who reject the Oathscar fall. Some fracture. Ronin do not lose their bond entirely. They redirect it. Through practice, secrecy, and subtle realignment with the Aetherstreams, they learn to cast without consequence. Their magic slips beneath Dracovate awareness, fragmented enough to evade detection but functional enough to survive.
Most do not fight the Dracovates directly. They relocate. They form networks. They teach others—especially Shardbinders and Shardbreakers—how to hide what they are. This is not betrayal. It is adaptation.
Where the Oathscar imposes shape, the Ronin dissolve into space unclaimed. They represent the margin of error the Dragons did not account for.
Legacy Written in Absence
Where a Dracovate has passed, certain things no longer occur. Pilgrimages fade. Holy sites lose influence. Factions that depended on divine authority begin to splinter or reorient. The correction leaves no message, no artifact, and no alternative. It is an event without inscription. Over generations, people forget the names of those involved. They forget the cause. But they remember the year nothing answered them. They remember when the sky was silent.
What Remains
Dracovates endure not because they are invulnerable, but because their purpose excludes refusal. Even Ronin, even fractured Oathscars, carry the weight of what they were made to do. In this way, the Dracovate is not just a servant of balance. They are a pressure that persists even when disowned. A Ronin still flares when divine magic gets too close. A wyvern still circles when instability returns. The breath does not leave. It waits to be used.
What survives is not certainty. It is direction—without apology, and without pause.

Path of the Earthforged
Path of the Earthforged:
Bastions of the Primordial Stone
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Bastions of the Primordial Stone
Those marked by Geonid, the Titan of Stone, do not rush into war. They are the line that cannot be crossed. The spine of their companions. The shield against the storm. The still point in a world that never stops breaking.
Earthforged Heralds are not fast. They are not flashy. They do not dance with chaos. They outlast it. They are the final line between collapse and survival, standing tall as empires tremble and the sky forgets how to hold itself together.
Pillars of Unbreakable Resolve
Earthforged Heralds embody the longevity of the oldest mountains. Their bond with Geonid grants them the essence of permanence, empowering them to reshape terrain, disrupt enemy movement, and absorb devastating blows without retreat.
They do not charge into battle, they claim it. They do not strike quickly, they strike with weight. Their presence alone shifts momentum, slows destruction, and reminds both allies and enemies that some things do not fall.
Their armor often fuses with stone or crystal over time, veins of molten tectonic light running from their Oathscar across shoulder and spine. Some move with crushing mass, like a collapsing ridge. Others walk with eerie balance, like statues come to life, carved in the image of the land they refuse to surrender.
Shaping the Battlefield Through Endurance
The Earthforged do not view the battlefield as chaos. They view it as sacred ground. While others rush, leap, or weave, the Earthforged becomes the terrain. Their role is control. Their purpose is obstruction. Their gift is the space they give others to thrive. Their breath does not explode. It settles. It anchors. Their gaze is not fast, but it is the one thing you cannot look away from.
To Walk the Path of the Earthforged
To follow this path is to become a symbol of resilience, a wall that does not retreat, and a voice that speaks not in words, but in presence. The Earthforged rarely act first. They act last. Their power is not in how they attack, but in what they survive. Their message is simple: “I will be here when you are gone.”
The Wyvern That Waits Like Stone
Earthforged wyverns are broad-winged titans, slow in the sky, armored like collapsed cliffs. They do not dive or dart. They descend. When they land, the ground answers. Their roars are not loud, they are low, seismic, filled with pressure and permanence. Their breath is not flame, but crushing density, a blast of gravel, heat, and concussive force that turns soil into shrapnel and air into a wall.
From the moment of bonding, these wyverns remain grounded, wingless and hulking. Like their Heralds, they are heavy presences, not swift predators. They fight alongside their partners, not above them, relying on instinct, mass, and anchoring proximity.
At level 7, as the wyvern grows into its young adulthood, it gains its wings, and with them, the Earthforged takes to the air, not in pursuit, but as a declaration.
When the wyvern rises, it is like a monument lifting from the earth. Flight, for the Earthforged, is not speed. It is weight borne skyward, and that weight never falls lightly.
Background Inspirations: Earthforged Characters
A former soldier who once fled — now bound by oath never to step backward again.
A stoic guardian who speaks rarely, but when they do, their words feel carved from granite.
A wandering protector who plants stones at every village they save — marking where they stood.
They etch vows into armor, carry stones from lands they protect, or inscribe fault lines into their weapons. Every strike feels earned. Every breath feels measured. .
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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Heralds of Geonid, the Titan of Stone, do not wage war in haste.
They become the battlefield.Where other Dracovates chase chaos, the Earthforged greets it with quiet certainty and an unmoving stance. They do not react, but they absorb. They do not retaliate — they endure until the world itself bends to them.
To walk this path is to reject spectacle in favor of substance. The Earthforged do not seek glory in the storm, they become the ground the storm breaks against.
Among the Orders, Earthforged Heralds are revered as anchors of purpose. Their role is to endure so others may act, to hold the line until the tide turns — or breaks on them. In moments of collapse, it is the Earthforged who remains. Not because they are the strongest, but because they refuse to fall.
This subclass rewards players who love calculated defense, battlefield shaping, and clutch survivability. Earthforged Heralds are not passive — they are inevitable.
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Earthforged Heralds do not unleash chaos — they absorb it. Their strength is not explosive, but inevitable. Each technique they employ reshapes the battlefield into something immovable, forcing enemies to fight on their terms — or not at all.
Stoneheart Aegis
A wall is not built in haste — and neither is the Earthforged. With a wordless command, they summon a bulwark of elemental stone from the ground beneath them. This barrier deflects force, muffles explosions, and interrupts spellwork not through cleverness, but through sheer, deliberate pressure.
Whether formed as a standing shield, a crescent wall, or jagged earth rising around their boots, the Aegis is not merely defense — it is the ground refusing to yield.
Quakebound Smite
When the Earthforged strikes, the land remembers. Their Smite does not flash — it shudders. Earth ripples outward, sending shockwaves that trip formation and split certainty. It is not the blow that breaks you — it’s the reminder that something older and heavier just woke up underneath your feet.
Even those who see it coming find their balance redefined.
Terrabind Mantle
To move the Earthforged is to misunderstand them.
By rooting their breath into the terrain, the Herald fuses body and stone. Arrows curve wide. Magic wavers in the air. Those who rush to shove or pull find themselves caught — not by limbs, but by presence.In this stance, the battlefield becomes a room with one door — and the Earthforged is standing in it.
Fault Pulse
When patience ends, the land speaks. With a sudden flex of will, the Earthforged releases a pulse from their feet outward — cracking terrain, throwing bodies from their positions, and erasing whatever formations thought they’d last the round.
This is not a technique of anger.
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The Earthforged is a character of principle — one who finds strength not in ambition, but in conviction. They stand because someone must. They endure not because they seek recognition, but because the world is too fragile to allow collapse.
Were you once a failed defender, now rising to never falter again?
A former builder turned battlefield architect, shaping terrain as others shaped steel?
A quiet philosopher who realized that stillness is its own form of dominance?Your Oathscar might run down your back like a mountain’s spine, or fracture across your chest like tectonic plates. Your armor may carry soil from the land you swore to protect. Your shield may bear the names of the fallen — not forgotten, but remembered in stone.
DM Hook
Let the Earthforged change the pace of your encounters. Introduce collapsing terrain, magical storms, or timed defenses that require someone to hold position or die trying. Earthforged Heralds thrive in layered conflict, where control and timing are more valuable than sheer output.
In social scenes, allow moments of still power — when their silence becomes a threat, or their refusal to move makes nobles sweat.
A well-placed pause from an Earthforged should feel heavier than ten shouted demands.The Earthforged does not stop time.
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The Earthforged excels in frontline anchoring, environmental manipulation, and mid-fight stabilization. Ideal for:
Holding chokes or protecting casters
Turning terrain to their advantage
Absorbing burst damage or forcing aggro
Pair with:
Mobile allies who can reposition around them
Glass-cannon spellcasters who need breathing room
Chaos-heavy companions who need someone solid behind them
The Earthforged's value increases the longer they stand. Their impact is exponential: every round they remain unbroken increases the party’s chance to recover, push forward, or win by attrition.
DM Note: Give Earthforged moments where the only option is to hold. Let the battlefield shift around them. Their greatest enemy is not power — it’s collapse. And their greatest story is always the last one standing.

Path of the Stormrider
Path of the Stormrider:
Guardians of Primal Balance
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To be chosen by Cyclonix, the Tempest Wyrm, is to be stripped of hesitation. Cyclonix selects not the disciplined or the loyal, but the one who moves first. The one who adapts faster than command. The one who responds to instability not with caution, but with pressure.
Stormriders are not engines of control or guardians of order. They are catalysts. They arrive mid-movement, severing intention before it completes. Their breath does not linger. Their presence is not sustained. They do not hold ground. They change it.
Their Smite is an aftershock in motion—reverberating through armor, spellwork, and strategy. It strikes not once, but in a chain of ruptures that rewrites the encounter. Where others react, Stormriders restructure. Where others set position, they collapse it.
Stormriders do not hold formation. They become the reason it never held to begin with.
Shaping the Battlefield Through Disruption
Stormriders function where precision fails. In terrain designed for verticality, fluid movement, and rapid engagement, they are unmatched. Their approach to combat rewards kinetic interpretation of space—ascending ruins, leaping from structure to structure, redirecting force rather than absorbing it.
Where other Dracovates impose boundaries, the Stormrider unmarks the map. Their Oathscar does not protect. It pulses in anticipation of speed, heating the air around them and charging the ground beneath their feet. Every action is an experiment in pressure. Every engagement is an interruption.
They do not navigate the battlefield. They fragment it.
To Walk the Path of the Stormrider
A Stormrider erases the concept of closed instead of creating openings. To walk this path is to accept that ground is only temporary. Stormriders do not entrench. They do not form shield-walls or collapse into defense. They take threat patterns and dismantle them through velocity.
Their Oathscars often trail luminous filaments of arc energy—unpredictable currents that flicker through armor joints and pulse across the skin. These signatures intensify with each breath spent in motion, creating spiraling residual effects that leave foes off-balance and allies unsure where the Dracovate was a moment ago.
Some inscribe the path of storms onto their own flesh—deliberate, spiraling sigils that shimmer when viewed from the corners of the eye, suggesting movement even in stillness.
The Wyvern That Rides the Sky with You
Stormrider wyverns are not companions in the traditional sense. They are manifestations of momentum—long-bodied, narrow-winged, and coiled with unresolved motion. Their breath, a ferocious chain lightening attack ensures that any groups of entrenched enemies don’t stay so for long.
Their bond with the Dracovate is forged not through ritual or command, but through shared trajectory. They disappear when expected. They return before they are called.
At level 7, as the wyvern grows into its young adulthood, it gains its wings, and with them, they rise together not as rider and mount, but as two outcomes of the same elemental truth—that nothing anchored survives the storm.
Background Inspirations: Stormrider Characters
A former fugitive turned freedom-fighter, who now weaponizes the wind that once carried them to safety.
A thrill-seeker who sees combat as choreography — every strike a step, every dodge a beat.
A quiet revolutionary who infiltrates, disrupts, and vanishes before consequences catch up.
A survivor of the Sundering’s great skyfalls, who learned to fly by never standing still.
Stormriders often name their wyverns in unpronounceable wind-tones through unique whistles, mark their armor with jagged talon-glyphs, or carry relics that once flew with them through fire and storm.
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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Chosen by Cyclonix, the Tempest Wyrm, Stormrider Dracovates embody the spirit of rebellion, velocity, and unrelenting motion. They are not the shield that blocks or the wall that holds. They are the dissonant beat that unmakes formations, the sudden strike that reshapes plans, the blur that cannot be predicted.
Their philosophy is simple: the moment belongs to those who move first—and last. To hesitate is to be caught. To pause is to be seen. Stormriders live in the gap between awareness and reaction, and they never let the enemy catch up.
Among the Orders, Stormriders are often deployed to disorient, sabotage, or assassinate. They strike where the front lines are weakest—or when speed is the only answer. Not every Herald can be everywhere. Stormriders can.
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Stormrider techniques revolve around momentum, lightning-infused strikes, and spatial manipulation. Their powers reward decisive movement and creative positioning. Players who think like skirmishers or dancers will feel right at home.
Boltstep Smite
A flash of lightning propels you as your weapon lands, teleporting you up to a short distance in any direction after the strike. This movement bypasses terrain and enemy engagement, allowing you to strike, reposition, or vanish.
Windlash Rebound
When hit in melee, you release a gust of repulsive force, knocking the attacker back and gaining instant reactive movement. It does not just prevent follow-ups—it creates distance to strike again on your terms.
Tempest Drift
You enter a state of airbound flow, allowing you to leap across the battlefield, ignore rough terrain, and descend from heights without penalty. While active, your movement crackles with static energy, and enemies in your wake may suffer disruptive aftershocks.
These abilities emphasize control through velocity—trading raw defense for battlefield chaos your enemies cannot prepare for.
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Your character might have once been chained—physically, emotionally, ideologically—and now embodies total liberation. Or they were always wild, born for a life above the clouds, with no tether strong enough to hold them.
Ask yourself:
· What does your Stormrider run toward?
· What storm did they survive to earn Cyclonix’s attention?
· Do they bring freedom—or chaos?
Some Stormriders treat their Wyvern as a reflection of their own pulse—never grounded, always circling. Others soar alone but leave signs in their wake: feathers scorched by lightning, songs that speak of sudden wind, or etchings carved on mountaintops as proof they were there.
DM Hook: Stormriders deserve encounters that move.
Design scenes with verticality, shifting terrain, or countdowns. Let them navigate collapsing bridges, scale city walls mid-battle, or cut through blinding storms. Give them opportunities to split the battlefield—to isolate leaders, disrupt rituals, or reach switches, beacons, or allies others cannot.
In roleplay, Stormriders should be the ones who arrive early and leave late. Let their entrances steal the breath from a room. Let NPCs wonder where they are—right until thunder crashes and they are already gone.
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The Stormrider excels in:
· Flank-breaking and infiltration.
· Hit-and-run harassment
· Repositioning allies or intercepting threats
· Punishing enemies who rely on formation, charging, or terrain denial.
They synergize with:
· Controllers who benefit from broken ranks
· Glass cannons who need space and time
· Defenders who appreciate a blurred enemy frontline
· They are at their best when the field is in motion—and they are the ones causing it.

Path of the Abyssborn
Path of the Abyssborn
Harbingers of Drowning Silence
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Claimed by Nepturon, the Abyssal Leviathan
To be chosen by Nepturon, the Abyssal Leviathan, is to accept a truth older than war and deeper than memory: nothing withstands pressure forever. These Dracovates do not strike like lightning or flame. They do not burst or cleave. They press. Their will rises like the tide—slow, patient, final. They do not warn. They do not rage. They advance.
Their Oathscar pulses with bioluminescent calm, a rhythm echoing the heartbeat of drowned cities. Their armor shows the cost of service—waterlogged plating crusted in salt, barnacles, and tidal fronds. Some still carry sediment from the sunken reliquaries of Shyvaran’s Folly, or wear rusted sigils dredged from the Choral Deep, where echoes of pre-Sundering hymns are said to still drift on the current. To face an Abyssborn is not to witness fury, it is to understand that even gods drown.
Shaping the Battlefield Through Suppression
Their presence destabilizes everything structured. Movement slows. Reactions desynchronize. Initiative becomes fogged. Their Smite is not delivered to overwhelm, but to submerge—to pull, bind, drown. It reshapes the encounter space as if the battlefield were sinking by inches.
Enemies within their range find:
Escape options narrowing as footing turns unreliable.
Spells disrupted by shifting environmental pressure.
Aggression faltering, as the mind forgets what urgency felt like.
They are not the vanguard. They are the undertow that undoes the plan two rounds in.
To Walk the Path of the Abyssborn
Their power bends time around them. Abyssborn are not slow—they are unhurried. They do not issue challenges. They arrive, and patterns fail.
Their Oathscar glows with depth—a gravity that marks the end of surface thinking. Each pulse draws the eyes down. Each word lands like a weight on the chest. Where Stormriders fracture formation and Earthforged hold ground, Abyssborn remove the concept of tempo.
Some wear ritual armor inscribed with the sigils of the Breathless Courts, or whisper lullabies written in the dialect of sunken library island, Gnost, swallowed whole during the sundering. They do not raise morale. They strip away illusions.
The Wyvern That Waits Below
Their bodies stretch long and serpentine, coiled and powerful like tidal undertow given mass. Fins rake back along their jaws and flanks, suggesting oceanic ancestry more than draconic heritage. Their limbs are vestigial, tucked close to the body—meant for stabilization, not grasping. They do not land. They drift into place.
Their form is a contradiction—boneless in movement, weightless in stillness. They have no claws for rending, only the certainty of encroachment. Fins and ridged plates hint at their subaquatic origins, as though sculpted from the same substance as the Choral Deep’s abyssal plates.
Fog spills from their mouths in long, steady currents that alter perception itself; Sounds dull, motion lags, nerves misfire. The world slows, and everything within their reach begins to feel submerged. They rise from the atmosphere, circling as if the clouds themselves were lifting them. Their breath is not an exhalation—it is an environment.
At level 7, their wings unfurl—not for lift, but for shaping pressure gradients. Together, the Dracovate and wyvern float upward as a consequence of inevitability, not momentum.
Background Inspirations: Abyssborn Characters
A salvager who descended alone into the remains of a submerged god-temple—and surfaced bearing silence instead of answers.
A former naval tactician whose fleet vanished in still waters, now tracing the pattern of that quiet as a means of command.
A healer who stayed behind during a flood to ease final breaths—and was chosen by Nepturon when none of them needed air anymore.
Some Abyssborn etch their armor with the names of ships that never returned. Others wear beads carved from drowned wood, barnacle-threaded chains, or tideworn rings they can no longer remember removing.
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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Heralds of Nepturon, the Abyssal Leviathan, do not burn with righteous fury or strike with radiant vengeance. They drown. They pull. They erase. Where others flash and thunder, the Abyssborn silence. They are the weight at the bottom of the ocean — and the pressure that crushes those who dive too deep.
To walk this path is to accept that power does not need to shout. The sea does not roar to end a city — it simply rises. The Abyssborn sees the battlefield as a chamber filling with inevitability. Their job is not to fight harder — it is to make sure the enemy can no longer breathe.
Among the Dracovates, Abyssborn Heralds are seen as ominous but necessary. They are dispatched when mercy is weakness when silence speaks louder than flame. Even the bold hesitate to summon them — not out of fear, but reverence. The Abyssborn does not win battles. They end them.
This subclass thrives on denial, disruption, and erosion. It does not strike first — but it strikes last, and leaves nothing standing.
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Tidebind Grasp
Your Smite manifests as tendrils of abyssal water that entangle and slow your enemies, dragging them back toward their fate. The deeper the fight goes, the tighter the grip becomes — until movement itself becomes an illusion.
Drowning Aura
You radiate oppressive stillness, dampening enemy strength and unraveling their ability to resist movement or sound. It is not magic — its pressure incarnate. The kind that squeezes air from lungs, words from tongues, and hope from hearts.
Waters of Inevitability
You mark a portion of the battlefield with abyssal pull. Those who linger find their footing unsure, their choices fewer. They are pulled inward — toward something darker, older, and inescapable.
Crushing Stillness
You invoke silence not as punishment, but as truth. Your presence robs enemies of voice and spell, forcing stillness on those who speak too often and say too little. What cannot be shouted, must be faced.
Each of these abilities enforces a singular rule: Nothing escapes the deep. Not lies. Not curses. Not even gods, if they sink far enough.
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The Abyssborn is not theatrical. They are not loud. They are the absence that leaves others hollow. Their power is mistaken for cruelty — but in truth, it is restraint weaponized. They do not argue with villains. They simply make sure the villain is the first thing that drowns.
What did your Abyssborn surrender to the sea before they were chosen? A voice? A memory? A dream that could not hold its breath. Many Abyssborn mark their armor with the names of things lost — people, islands, and promises. Others carry relics from places no longer found on maps. And some carry nothing, because the deep took even that.
Ask yourself:
• What will you not let slip beneath the waves?
• What have you already drowned in becoming this?
• And what, if anything, still floats within you? -
The Abyssborn excels in slow suffocation tactics — denying movement, unraveling formations, and strangling spells at their source. They are best deployed against enemies who rely on:
· Speed and momentum.
· Coordination and flanking
· Spellcasting and summons
· Crowd density and positioning.
· They enable their allies by:
· Choking off retreat and reinforcement
· Forcing enemies into kill zones
· Unraveling high-threat targets over time
· Creating zones that punish indecision.
They shine in:
· Attrition fights
· Fog-of-war scenarios
· Aether stream combat
· High-stakes boss encounters with area control layers
DM Note: Let the Abyssborn control emotional rhythm. Give them silence to weaponize — catacombs, ruins, flooded tunnels. Let enemies realize too late that nothing they do will matter — because the pull has already begun. Even villains should pause when they arrive. Not from fear. But because they understand what comes next.

Path of the Dawnflame
Path of the Dawnflame
Heralds of Rebirth
Background Inspirations: Dawnflame Characters
A former cleric of a fallen god, now marked by light unbound by scripture.
A paladin who broke their own oath when they realized the church protected power, not people.
A scholar who uncovered a conspiracy too large to contain — and now bears its names on burned linen.
Many Dawnflames inscribe confessions — not just their own — into their armor. Others wear silver chains of melted holy symbols or carry scrolls of burnt doctrine, to remind the world that what was once sacred must still answer to truth
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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To be chosen by Solinarus is to become unbearable clarity given form. The Dawnflame does not burn to comfort or cleanse — they blaze to reveal, to cauterize, to force a reckoning. They do not ask the world to change. They shine on it until change becomes necessary. They are not heat. They are exposure. They do not warm the faithful. They ignite the lies that shelter the corrupt.
Their Oathscar pulses like a celestial core — radiant, searing, impossible to look away from. Their armor bears the marks of this purpose: mirror-etched platework scorched along its edges, layered fabrics bleached bone-white, adorned with prayers burned into silk that no longer clings to dogma.
To face a Dawnflame is to face truth without mercy.
Shaping the Battlefield Through Revelation
Dawnflames do not control through force — they control by removing illusion. When a Dawnflame enters battle:
Disguises unravel.
Hidden enchantments flare to life.
False forms decay beneath light that will not be denied.
Their Smite is not an explosion — it is a narrowed beam of elemental recognition. Undead turn to ash, cursed ones falter, illusions crumble. Allies caught within the halo of their power often feel pain, not from the light, but from the truths it brings to the surface — a clarity that heals only after it cuts.
They specialize in:
Countering illusion and mind-affecting effects.
Burning through magical veils and glamours.
Exposing corrupt sources of divine or arcane power.
Causing enemies to turn on each other through suppressed lies and revelations.
To Walk the Path of the Dawnflame
Some are broken priests, once devoted to flawed gods. Some are ex-paladins stripped of title and temple, but not conviction. Others are survivors — of betrayal, of propaganda, of silence — now wielding the very light that once seared them.
They do not seek vengeance. They do not seek approval. They seek the moment when a false belief crumbles. The silence after denial. The scream that follows the first real admission of guilt.
To walk the Dawnflame path is to become unbearable to liars — and indispensable to those ready to change.
The Wyvern That Burns with Truth
Dawnflame wyverns blaze like sculpted revelation. Their bodies channel radiant energy not in chaotic bursts, but through defined, circuit-like lines of molten light. Their eyes burn like stars glimpsed too closely. Their breath is not fire — it is radiant annihilation that unmakes lies and memory in equal measure.
Their wings glow with the sigils of Solinarus, casting shadows that shrink and retreat on their own.
Their presence does not alert enemies. It accuses them.
Their breath strips illusion, disrupts invisibility, and silences false enchantments.
At level 7, the wyvern unfolds wings not just to lift, but to declare. The Dracovate is no longer just a seeker — they are the verdict. And the battlefield will remember what was exposed beneath their flight.
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Heralds of Solinarus, the Radiant Dragon, are not warriors of glory or warmth. They are sentences spoken in flame. They arrive where rot has taken root, where hope has been distorted, where the veil of civility hides festering wounds. And when they leave, nothing false remains.
The Dawnflame does not waver, and it does not flinch. It does not wait for justice to be requested — it delivers it, molten and merciless. They are feared by tyrants and adored by those who still believe in light that does more than shimmer. They are not the spark. They are the correction.
Among Dracovates, they are seen as both miracle and warning. You summon a Dawnflame when the lie has grown too large to ignore. This subclass thrives on radiant resilience, field-cleansing auras, and punishment mechanics that double as healing. They are frontline purifiers who thrive in the presence of affliction and ensure their allies do too.
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Dawnburst Smite
Your Smite erupts with searing brilliance, especially against cursed and undead foes. The explosion sheds healing light on allies, while leaving behind a ghostly glow that outlines illusions, cloaks, and shadowy forms.
Solace Ignition
A radiant detonation surrounds you in a purifying aura. Enemies inside falter — their accuracy dims, their spells weaken. Allies, meanwhile, find themselves steadied, slowly cleansed of minor afflictions and recharged with sacred resilience.
Blazing Reversal
When struck by malevolent magic, you ignite reflexively. The attacker is scorched by radiant backlash, and a nearby ally is relieved of a lingering effect — disease, blindness, magical fear, or shadow-borne drain.
Judgment Flare
Your presence alone becomes unbearable for the corrupt. Those who begin their turn near you while cursed, diseased, undead, or under false magical effects must choose retreat, or be consumed by solar fire.
These abilities do not simply heal or harm — they test. They force enemies to reveal what they are — and burn away what they should never have become.
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Their words carry weight, and their silence carries more. They are not cruel, but they are uncompromising — and many mistake that for cruelty. They burn things others hesitate to name. Because someone must.
What part of you was scorched to make room for Solinarus’s fire? Was it guilt? Grief? Pride? What did you let die so something else could live? Do you still believe in redemption?
Or are you simply making sure others do not fall where you once did?Many Dawnflames carry scars they refused to heal — reminders of what happens when darkness goes unchallenged. Some wear veils, not for modesty, but to spare others from the intensity of their gaze. Others walk barefaced into the storm — their expression not angry, not triumphant — just final.
Ask yourself:
• What lies have you sworn never to let pass unburned?
• What wound still smolders in your chest?
• Who taught you the difference between fire and fury?
• And when you finally burn out — what will you leave behind? -
Tactical Applications
The Dawnflame turns affliction into advantage. They do not mitigate conditions — they punish their existence. They thrive in encounters where enemies rely on:
· Curses
· Necrotic effects
· Illusions or concealment
· Sustained magical attrition.
Their abilities allow them to:
· Radiate cleansing fields that stabilize allies
· Punish status effects and debilitation attempts.
· Illuminate hidden foes or cursed terrain.
· Convert radiant backlash into battlefield control.
Pair them with rogues, snipers, or illusionists — they make sure the lights stay on, and the lies do not last. The Dawnflame is the frontline truth bomb that makes enemies reconsider every trick they were planning to play.
They shine in:
· Siege-breaking standoffs
· Undead-heavy zones
· Corruption-drenched dungeons
· Final boss fights against liars in crowns
DM Note: Give Dawnflames moments of moral tension.
Let them burn a lie before a war starts. Let them challenge a cursed king before the blade is drawn. Let their presence shift the moral tone of a room, not just the battle map. Let the fire mean something.

Path of the Shadowwrought
Path of the Shadowwrought
Heralds of the shadowed Abyss
Background Ideas: Shadowwrought Characters
A disavowed agent who was ordered to disappear — and took the order too literally.
A former spy who learned truth was never what mattered — only control of the narrative.
A fallen hero who realized the war was won before it was declared, and now ensures it stays that way.
Shadowwroughts rarely speak of their past — if they speak at all. Some carry journals written in codes no one can decipher. Others keep masks from targets they have erased. Many bear no mementos — because nothing from before is useful now.
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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You do not train to become one. You do not survive the Rite. You are seen by Umbraxis — and then you are used. Where other Dracovates erupt in flame or drown in tide, the Shadowwrought simply vanishes — until the moment you realize you have already lost.
They are not light, nor shadow. They are the absence of witness. The breath you do not remember exhaling. The shape you only recall in hindsight.
The World as a Veil
Where the Dawnflame shines to expose, the Shadowwrought withholds. Where others bring reckoning, the Shadowwrought brings incompleteness — gaps in memory, edits in fate, footsteps no one recalls hearing.
Their Oathscar does not glow. It absorbs. It eats light. It smooths corners. It says nothing. They are not explosive. They are surgical. Their presence is not felt. It is subtracted. They do not control the battlefield. They control the information that defines it. The conversation. The timing. The options that never appeared. They are deployed before the war begins. And if they succeed, it never will.
The Vault of Night and the Threads of Power
Shadowwroughts are not raised in citadels or trained on parade grounds. They emerge from the places the world refused to light:
From the Corridor of Whispers, where echoes recite your secrets back to you until shame becomes discipline.
From the Pool of Tears, where pain becomes silence and sorrow is used as coin.
From beneath the Mirror of Night, where your reflection shows not your face, but your intentions — stripped and shivering.
These Heralds do not fight to be known. They fight to ensure no one else is. Their attacks are not declarations. They are redactions.
Signature Techniques Include:
Writ of Undoing
With a single strike, you unravel the target’s momentum, their memory, their very reason for acting. They are left blinking mid-motion, uncertain of what they meant to do before you intervened. You don’t inflict pain — you erase purpose.
Veilstep
The battlefield is not space — it is story. You disappear mid-swing, reappearing where a blade had not yet imagined. You move not with feet, but with will, threading through shadows that anticipate need before you act. To follow you is to be lost before the chase begins.
Obsidian Binding
You twist shade into strands of cause and consequence. These bindings punish certainty — the more tightly a foe commits to action, the more violently that action collapses. Spellcasters forget their incantation. Warriors lurch mid-strike. Even thoughts fray under your snare.
Echo of the Forgotten
You unravel memory itself, not only hiding from perception, but from history. For a breath, you were never there. Enemies lose track of formation. Allies forget their fear. Even the battlefield’s rhythm stutters, rewritten around your absence. You do not vanish — you un-happen.
To Walk the Path of the Shadowwrought
To walk this path is to surrender your name to necessity. The Shadowwrought is not a person. It is an operation. They wear masks because identity is inefficient. They do not speak unless speech creates precision. Their loyalty is not to morality or alliances. It is to truth through subterfuge. Order through erasure. Balance through removal. Other Dracovates may question their path. The Shadowwrought executes it.
They are feared. Mistrusted. But never unwelcome. Because even kings must know that someone is watching them from beneath their throne.
The Wyvern That Watches Without Sound
Its scales are obsidian mirrors — slick with shadows, absorbing reflections that never return. Its eyes are unblinking. It breathes no fire. Instead, it exhales a black mist of forgetting — a vapor that dulls sound, mutes’ movement, and silences memory itself.
These wyverns do not circle. They linger in rafters, behind clouds, inside smoke. At level 15, flight becomes a pact of precision. The wyvern does not carry the Shadowwrought into battle. It delivers them to conclusions — landing without sound, lifting them with nothing but intention. Together, they are not predators. They are unrecorded events.
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Heralds of Umbraxis, the Shadowed Abyss, are not frontline champions or righteous crusaders. They are the lie that collapses an empire. They are the unsent message that should have started a war. They are the last breath of a king who never saw the blade.
The Shadowwrought does not fight for glory — they fight to control narrative. They do not prevent chaos. They pre-arrange it. To serve this path is to give up recognition in exchange for results. You will not be thanked. You will not be remembered. But you will be obeyed — even by your enemies, even if they do not know it.
This subclass thrives on subtle control, momentum theft, and narrative tempo disruption. If a Shadowwrought is doing their job right, no one will notice them until it is already too late.
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Writ of Undoing
Your Smite carries with it a metaphysical interruption — not pain, but erasure. With a strike, you do not just wound. You revoke — position, memory, advantage, sometimes even purpose. The target is left blinking, unsure what they were doing before you arrived.
Veilstep
The battlefield is not a place — it is a medium. You vanish from the arc of a blade only to reappear behind the wielder's thoughts. Your movement is not bound by direction, but by intent. The shadow knows where you are needed before you do.
Obsidian Binding
You weave tendrils of living shade into enemy limbs and logic, snaring actions before they occur. The binding punishes certainty — the more they commit to a choice, the more violently it falls apart.
Echo of the Forgotten
You infect the memory of the battlefield itself. For a moment, you are not just unseen — you were never there at all. Allies forget their fear. Enemies forget their orders. You become a moment rewritten.
Each of these abilities does not just grant power — they steal it. Not through force — but through knowing exactly where it hides.
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The Shadowwrought is never the loudest voice in the room — but they are always listening.
They remember everything. They speak only when it changes something and when they do, it is already over.Who were you before Umbraxis saw you?
· A whisper broker from Shadowport, traded for silence?
· An agent burned by your own allies, now given a second name?
· Or a loyal soldier who finally realized the war was never won by those in uniform?
Most Shadowwroughts wear no insignia. Their loyalty is inked in shadows, spoken only in the Vault of Night. They do not ask for clarity. They simply move when clarity is required.
Ask yourself:
· What secret are you protecting so fiercely, it cost you your name?
· What memory did you erase from yourself to complete the mission?
· Who still believes you died years ago — and why haven’t you corrected them?
· And if the shadow is watching you now… what would it see?
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The Shadowwrought is a tempo tyrant — an expert in battlefield information control, denial, and subversion. They thrive in situations where others depend on:
· Linear combat flow
· Group coordination
· Predictable initiative or tactics
· Magic that relies on time, location, or focus
Their presence allows:
· Ambush manipulation and fake reveals
· Punishment of overcommitment (especially spellcasting and multi-phase attacks)
· Silent repositioning that changes threat geometry
· Interruption of decision trees (forcing enemies to “second-guess” even mechanically)
They shine in:
· Assassination encounters
· Arcane duels where precision matters
· Diplomatic standoffs with hidden stakes
· Boss fights with scripted mechanics or timed events.
DM Note: The Shadowwrought is not about “sneaking around” — they are about rewriting inevitability.
Give them moments to twist tension. Let them eavesdrop on thoughts. Let them erase the plan, not just the pawn. Their presence should destabilize any encounter — not by strength, but by knowing what should happen, and changing it.

Path of the Riftstorm
Path of the Riftstorm
The Firstborn of Chaos
Background Ideas: Riftstorm Characters
A survivor of a Riftquake who returned changed — laughing through blue-frosted lips and half-remembered lifetimes.
A former chronomancer who stopped believing in time — and now manipulates sequence instead of outcome.
A quiet heretic from the Arcanum, whose predictions never come true yet are always relevant.
Many Riftstorms speak in fragments or forget the start of their own sentences. They mark armor with mirrored glyphs. Some carry ice that does not melt. Others walk barefoot because the ground tends to follow them anyway.
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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Where other Dragons speak through fire, earth, or wind, Cryonax speaks through absence — of heat, of sound, of certainty. He is the breath between stars. The entropy that follows pattern. The final exhale of a dying reality.
Those who walk the Path of the Riftstorm are not chosen for discipline. They are chosen because they survived something that did not make sense — and rose anyway. Riftstorm Dracovates are not agents of destruction. They are the permission chaos needed to arrive.
The Touch of Cryonax
Born in the frost-choked halls of the Crystal Spire, Riftstorm Dracovates carry a signature of elemental instability. Their Oathscars form ever-shifting fractals of frozen light across their skin — too structured to be chaos, too broken to be order. They do not shine. They fracture. Magic fails near them. Probability stutters. Fate reroutes. They are not wild. They are what happens when reality gets tired of holding itself together.
Fractured Myths and the Memory of Ice
There are no Orders. No consistent techniques. No rituals that survive two generations intact. Only fragments, scattered like frost across shattered glass:
Oaths spoken backwards beneath a collapsed moon.
The names of the first Riftstorms, etched into glacial walls that no longer touch time.
Scrolls that vanish from memory after being read.
Some say Cryonax is a paradox that replaced a Dragon who was erased from history. Others say he is the last gasp of the multiverse, drifting backward toward its origin. Ask too loudly and the ice cracks.
How the World Sees Them
To the world of Veilrift, Riftstorms are anomalies with limbs. In the Frostspeak Archipelago, villagers leave offerings in snowdrifts — not for favor, but in case a Riftstorm is watching. In Shadowport, it is illegal to let one board an airship — after a Herald disrupted a trade route’s temporal routing by existing in the wrong moment. The Aetherial Arcanum refuses to archive Riftstorm artifacts. “They don’t stay archived,” say the scribes. “The data… decides it doesn’t want to exist.”
To Walk the Path of the Riftstorm
The Rite of Ascension under Cryonax offers no path. No test. No conclusion. It is not survived. It is noticed, and you are left standing in a place where something else did not. Those who emerge are not trained. They are glitches made consistent by sheer will. Their Oathscar does not channel power. It asks a question reality does not have time to answer. They do not follow orders. They follow an internal gravity no one else can feel. And when they arrive, the rules begin to glitch.
The Wyvern That Unmakes Pattern
These are not beasts are tears in atmospheric continuity — creatures whose bodies appear partially refracted, whose wings shimmer like broken glass mid-shatter, and whose forms bend space like heat over ice. Their breath is not frost or wind. It is conditional force — sometimes a vacuum, sometimes time slippage, sometimes raw entropy. When they move, light delays. When they land, ground decides to become somewhere else.
At level 15, flight becomes possible. The wyvern does not lift you. You fall upward together. The world forgets to resist you. And for the first time, you are where you were always meant to be — outside the system.
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Heralds of Cryonax, the Firstborn of Chaos, are not paragons or revolutionaries. They are what happens when stability loses its grip — and something else stands in its place. They are the frost that kills false growth, the misfire that saves a life, the cold shrug of reality rewriting itself. The Path of the Riftstorm is survived through anomaly and sustained through entropy. It reminds the world that order was an illusion all along.
To serve this path is to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused — and to embrace that. You will not be celebrated. You might not even be trusted. But you will be present when the fabric of certainty tears — and you will decide what survives on the other side.
This subclass thrives on pattern disruption, magical instability, and inevitability collapse. A Riftstorm does not control the battlefield. They unmake it.
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Fractal Smite
Your Smite fractures space and thought simultaneously. On impact, it destabilizes nearby magic, intentions, or elemental structures. Sometimes it inflicts cold. Sometimes force. Sometimes something no one can define. What it always does — is change the rules.
Entropy Surge
You let go — and something breaks. Reality slips, causing a ripple of unpredictable shifts: teleporting you across the field, collapsing terrain, silencing magic in a small radius, or causing all initiative orders to reroll. You are not casting chaos — you are inviting it in.
Crystalfall Mantle
You erupt into a cloak of razor-shard frost. Melee attackers take backlash. Ranged spells twist in flight. Allies adjacent to you are shielded… or refracted, appearing three feet left of where they stood. You do not defend space. You redefine it.
Rite of Unmaking
You invoke a piece of Cryonax’s will. A single enemy effect — a barrier, a buff, a ritual, a spell, a summoned entity — is annulled without saving throw. Not countered. Not dispelled. Undone. Reality forgets it existed. These abilities do not just distort the battlefield. They force the game to adapt — or crash.
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The Riftstorm is not dramatic. They do not shout. They simply act, and the world fails to account for it. Who were you before entropy chose you?
· A failed prodigy who watched their perfect plan fail, again and again?
· A prophet whose visions never came true — until you stopped believing in time?
· Or a silent survivor of a Riftquake who emerged days later, laughing with frostbitten lips and eyes that never quite re-synced?
Riftstorm Dracovates rarely boast. They do not need to. Their presence is its own foreshadowing. Many of them collect paradoxes — blades that should not exist, names that shift in records, scars they cannot explain.
Ask yourself:
· What belief did you once hold sacred, that now feels laughable?
· What was taken from you in the cold — and what did you leave there willingly?
· What do you hope to become, if anything survives?
· And if Cryonax is watching… do you still believe in being whole?
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The Riftstorm is not about damage — it is about disruption, so complete that damage becomes inevitable. They specialize in:
· Destabilizing key spells or battlefield effects
· Repositioning themselves or others in unpredictable ways
· Forcing opponents to abandon plans mid-action
· Creating “unreliable zones” where normal tactics fail
They are especially effective against:
· Tightly coordinated groups
· Enemy spellcasters or ritualists
· Bosses with phase-based or scripted abilities
· Environmental objectives or static defenses
Their toolkit includes:
· Battlefield randomization
· Initiative reshuffling
· Spell-breaking
· Terrain-bending
They shine in:
· Anomaly-infested zones
· Encounters with rigid mechanical expectations
· Reality-warped boss lairs
· Anywhere the “rules” are supposed to matter.
DM Note: Let the Riftstorm be the player who does not just break the game — they force it to evolve. Use wild magic zones, unstable timelines, and glitched environments to support them narratively. Let them roll on entropy surge tables or flavor their abilities with visual bugs in reality — duplicated shadows, delayed sound, unseasonal snow. Let Cryonax speak in failures and let the world remember that silence is still sound — when it comes from a Riftstorm.

Path of the Ronin
Path of the Ronin
The Flame Without a Master
Background Ideas: Riftstorm Characters
A disillusioned Herald who burned their own name off their armor and now fights only when it matters.
A survivor who saw the price of obedience — and paid it too many times.
A wanderer whose wyvern speaks only in broken breath but has never left their side.
Ronin often carry relics of what they once were — a broken sigil, a half-scorched prayer, a letter they never sent. Some refuse to name their wyvern, believing names come with rules. Others carve their new purpose into their weapons — or their skin.
Dracovates are able to communicate with members of their path telepathically through their Oathscars. This communication can only happen when both Dracovates are within sight of each other.
The Draocvate can communicate with 1 additional Dracovate of the same path at a time, per proficiency point modifier they have.
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The Ronin does not fall. They are cut loose — or carve themselves free. When a Dracovate walks away from their Dragon, they do not return to what they were. They do not return at all.
There is no forgiveness. No atonement. No quiet exile. There is only the wound left behind — and the silence it screams into.
They are declared lost. And the Accord hunts them. Not to punish. But to prevent the lie from spreading:
When a Dracovate walks away from their Dragon, they do not return to what they were. They do not return at all. There is no forgiveness. No atonement. No quiet exile. There is only the wound left behind — and the silence it screams into. They are declared lost. And the Accord hunts them. Not to punish. But to prevent the lie from spreading:
That the Oathscar can shatter.
That Dragon-will is not unbreakable.
That something else might survive the breach.
The Flame That Refused to Bow.
Ronin carry no element. They carry what is left after the breath is gone. Their Oathscars do not glow with purpose. They flicker, like dying embers that still remember the blaze they once were. Their Smite is raw — untuned, unstable, surging with meaning that only barely holds together. It is not aligned to an element, a Dragon, or a divine source.
It burns with memory, with defiance, with the unwillingness to be done. Some Ronin Smite with sorrow. Some with rage. And some — the most terrifying — Smite with clarity: I know what I walked away from. I still chose this. They do not channel a Dragon. They channel choice — and what remains when all choices are gone.
The Godless, the Dragonless, the Unrepentant
Ronin are not hunted for treason. They are hunted because their existence unravels the story. They prove that Dragons can be defied. That power can survive without structure. That Oathscarred does not mean owned. And yet — they do not turn to gods. They do not beg for alternative purpose. They simply walk forward, carrying nothing but what the world tried to take.
To paladins, they are corrupted. To the Orders, they are broken. To the Dragons, they are a scar that does not fade. But to the people who have seen both sides burn… They are the only truth left breathing.
What Remains When All Else Is Taken
There are no Ronin Orders. No code. No sanctified training grounds.
Only stories:
Of the Herald who burned their own Oathshard and still fought to save a city.
Of the survivor who cast out both Dragon and God and still stood against a Riftspawn.
Of the Ronin who killed a warlord, then disappeared — not for glory, but because justice did not need applause.
They bear no crests. They speak no mantras. But when they fight, they do not ask permission. And every strike whispers the same truth: I still matter.
The Wyvern That Chose You Anyway
When the bond to the Dragon breaks — when the Oathscar fractures and the world declares the Herald lost — the wyvern does not vanish. It remains. Its breath may still look like fire, or ice, or storm. Its scales may still reflect the Dragon it once served. But inside, the bond has changed. It is no longer a creature of order. It is a chaos echo — bound to you, not by elemental law, but by choice.
Every Ronin begins with a wyvern. Any element. Any lineage. But from the moment of severance — from the moment you take this path — that Wyvern begins to twist. Its breath still burns, but now its damage glitches. Its presence disrupts magic, structure, movement — not by will, but by broken expectation.
Before level 15, it fights with you erratically. At level 15, it flies with you — not because it obeys you, but because you are the last one it trusts to carry it forward. Your flight is not ascension. It is refusal given wings. You are not a Herald anymore. You are a Ronin and this wyvern — once something pure — now breathes your scarred defiance into the sky.
To Walk the Path of the Ronin
To walk this path is to step where few have before. There is no rite. No banner. No prophecy. Only the breaking point — and the decision to rise from it. Some Ronin were once loyal. Some never accepted the Rite. Some shattered under the weight. Some shattered the system on purpose. But all of them have one thing in common: They are still standing, and that is rebellion.
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Heralds who walk this path have lost — or rejected — the binding voice of a Dragon. Some broke their pact in shame. Others did it in protest. And a few simply walked away, because the fire in their soul no longer recognized the shape of its cage.
The Ronin does not serve a Dragon’s will. They serve what remains:
· Conviction.
· Consequence.
· Choice.
To wield power without an expert is a heavier blade. There is no external morality to cling to — only your own, reforged repeatedly in the crucible of every decision you cannot take back.
Among the Orders, Ronin are whispered of in contradiction — traitors or martyrs, depending on who tells the story. Among the people, they are ghosts, blades-for-hire, or the last line of defense when Orders falter and Dragons fall silent.
This subclass thrives on independence, adaptability, and hard-won purpose. They are not without power — but their greatest strength is that it is truly their own.
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Shattered Smite
Your Smite is no longer filtered through elemental alignment — it burns with raw force, surging unpredictably. On impact, you choose what it means:
· Overwhelm with raw kinetic momentum
· Inflict spiritual backlash
· Strip defenses
· Or, in rare moments… ignite something forgotten within yourself.
The Smite is not tied to a theme — it is the truth of your will.
Echobrand
Your broken Oathscar radiates unstable memory. When struck or targeted by magic, you may project an echo of your former path: a flicker of flame, a shadow step, a surge of storm, a shimmer of light. You are not whole — but you remember how to be many things.
Trial by Embers
Once per rest, declare a battlefield as sacred to your struggle. In this space, enemies cannot gain advantage. Allies who fight beside you cannot be charmed or frightened. The moment becomes yours — forged in exile, claimed in blood.
And when the dust clears, win or lose, you remain.Vow of Becoming
At the end of a long rest, you may choose a temporary archetype — a Dragonless vow carved in fire. For the day, you channel a fragment of what once was:
• The silence of Umbraxis
• The fury of Emberon
• The weight of Cryonax
• Or the wind-call of Cyclonix
Each grants a thematic boon — and a cost. Because nothing comes without a price when you stand alone. These abilities are not about evolution. They are about earning every inch of ground you dare to walk on.
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The Ronin does not speak in titles. They do not correct those who misname them. They carry no banner. No symbol. No song. Only scars — and forward motion.
Who were you before the fall?
· A promising Herald who asked the wrong questions?
· An executioner who refused to obey one final order?
· A would-be champion who watched your Dragon’s eyes go cold?
Or did you never kneel at all — born with fire in your chest and no interest in putting it on a leash?
Many Ronin carry tokens of what was lost — a shard of armor from their first sparring partner, a piece of chain from their Oathshard, a cloak once worn during rites now burned at the edges and every Ronin lives with one unspoken truth:
· Redemption is possible.
· But only through sacrifice.
· Only through unrelenting, earned return.
· Ask yourself:
What did you break to become this?· Do you still hear the Dragon’s voice — in memory, in guilt, in rage?
· What would you do if offered a second chance… and would you take it?
· What makes you worthy, now that no one is telling you that you are?
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The Ronin excels in resilience, versatility, and moral tension. Their strength is rooted in freedom — and their edge comes from having nothing left to lose but the fight itself.
They specialize in:
· Reactive play — shifting strategy turn by turn
· Tactical redirection — adapting mid-round
· Self-empowerment when isolated
· Recovery and rebound from magical or strategic disadvantage
Their toolkit includes:
· Customizable Smite types or elemental echoes
· Mid-battle oathflashes that grant short bursts of dragon-like effect
· Battlefield anchoring through Trial of Embers-style mechanics
· Post-rest choice trees that reflect evolving philosophy
They shine in:
· Morally layered story arcs
· Wilderness or solo missions
· Battles where failure is thematic
· Campaigns with dragon faction politics or broken oath themes
DM Note: The Ronin is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about the cost of freedom — and what kind of strength emerges in its wake. Give your Ronin moments to reflect, to sacrifice, to prove that their path is not easier — just more honest.
Let them be hunted by Orders. Let their former Dragon appear in visions. Let the world wonder if they are traitor, savior… or something new and let them decide that for themselves.

Equipment & Iconography
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Equipment & Iconography
Breathbound Plate: Oathscar Armor Integration
Dracovates wear plate — but not as others do. Where a knight dons their armor and a smith reforges it, the Dracovate absorbs it. Once attuned, the armor becomes part of them — a second skin shaped not by blacksmiths, but by the will of their Oathscar. Dracovates do not wear armor. They become it.
The Armor Infusion Process
Any plate armor — mundane or magical — can be absorbed by a Dracovate. This process, known to the Orders as Mantling, requires a full long rest during which the Dracovate sleeps in the armor.
During that night, they suffer all normal penalties for sleeping in heavy armor (as per standard D&D rules).
At the end of the long rest, the armor is no longer worn. It is infused, reconfigured, and made permanent — not functionally, but metaphysically. It adapts to their form, breath, and essence.
The armor cannot be removed by anyone except the Dracovate themself. It cannot be stolen, dropped, disarmed, or unequipped. Even magical effects that normally strip armor fail — unless the Dracovate chooses to release the bond.
Thematic Advantage (Out-of-Game Note)
While mechanically treated as armor worn for game purposes (including AC bonuses, attunement slots if needed, etc.), a Dracovates armor is always on.
No time wasted donning or doffing.
Cannot be removed while unconscious.
Cannot be looted, swapped, or stripped by enemies, NPCs, or even environmental effects unless the Dracovate consents.
This makes legendary and rare magical armor significantly more secure when wielded by a Dracovate — a thematic and practical benefit over other heavy armor users.
Removing or Replacing Infused Armor
To unbound or replace armor, the Dracovate must undergo another full long rest, intentionally focusing on detachment. Again, they suffer normal penalties for sleeping in armor. At the end of the long rest, the armor infuses, becoming removable and functioning as a normal armor set once more. The process can then be repeated with another set of plate — mundane or magical.
Visual Notes
Infused armor shifts to match the Dracovates elemental theme:
Stormriders spark with coiled energy under the seams
Abyssborn appear covered in damp, pressure-warped plating.
Dawnflames burn with internal glow patterns under the chest and joints.
Magical armor (e.g., +3 Plate) maintains mechanical properties, but its appearance adapts to match the Dracovates identity. A +2 suit of radiant Celestial Plate worn by a Shadowwrought may darken to obsidian sheen — but still function as radiant.
"The Forge Is Within" — A Creed of the Breathbound
“The knight draws strength from what he wears. The Dracovate draws strength from what he becomes.”

Abilities & Playstyles
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Abilities & Playstyle
Combat Style
Where Sentinels hold the line, Dracovates redefine the battlefield itself. They are elemental incarnates — wielding fire, storm, shadow, light, abyss, stone, or entropy not as tools, but as truths. Their presence on the field is not ornamental. It is directive. It shifts tactics. It forces choices.
Each subclass expresses its nature through radically different rhythms — from the searing, purifying aggression of a Dawnflame to the suppressive inevitability of an Abyssborn or the disruption-born misfires of a Riftstorm. But all share one thing in common:They are not playing the game. They are rewriting its rules.
Where others ready weapons, the Dracovate awakens the Oathscar — and the battlefield remembers that the Dragons still walk.
Signature Talents
Oathscar Infusion
Every Dracovate is marked by a permanent metaphysical scar — the Oathscar — which binds them to their Dragon’s breath. This mark empowers their Smite, fuels their subclass abilities, and pulses in times of danger, sometimes reshaping the terrain or reacting to elemental proximity.
Elemental Smitecraft
A Dracovate’s Smite is not divine. It is not cast. It is breath made muscle. Each strike is elementally charged and subclass-reflective: radiant bursts, binding tides, disruptive fractals, silencing shadows. This ability defines their presence: even a single hit carries ideological weight.
Armor Fusion (Mantling)
Dracovates can infuse plate armor directly into their being through long-rest Mantling. Once bonded, the armor becomes a permanent part of them, no longer removable or restricting. This not only enhances durability but grants them the unparalleled advantage of always being ready, even in ambush or sleep.
Wyvern Bond
At level 1, a Dracovate begins forming a spiritual tether to a wyvern — a creature born of the same breath that remade them. While the wyvern does not become a mount until level 15, its presence influences battle, synchronizing with the Herald’s attacks and becoming a mirror of their evolution.
Exploration & Utility
Dracovates are not simply elemental warriors — they are mobile environmental influence engines. In exploration, their Oathscar and subclass themes provide both practical adaptations and narrative breakthroughs.
Elemental Presence
Each subclass manifests passive environmental control. A Riftstorm might glitch open hidden paths via spatial distortion. A Stormrider may clear fog and clouds. An Earthforged may stabilize a collapsing ruin with a footstep. These are not spells — they are expressions of identity.
Breath-Sync Navigation
The Dracovate’s wyvern can act as a living compass for hidden magic, danger, or lost Dragon relics. As their bond deepens, the wyvern may react to unseen energies or pulse toward areas of elemental instability, functioning as both guide and barometer.
Oathscar Instincts
A Dracovate’s Oathscar vibrates in response to buried elemental forces. This allows them to detect leylines, Rift anomalies, elemental nodes, or corrupted zones without formal spellcasting. In dungeons or wilderness, this intuition may reveal hidden threats or ancient remnants of Draconic power.
Ritual Resistance
The bonded nature of a Dracovate’s form gives them inherent resistance to magical interference. In puzzle chambers, arcane traps, or volatile Veilzones, they may anchor spells, absorb surges, or tank magical backlash without falling prey to it — or diverting it into action.
Class Role & Party Impact
Dracovates are adaptable power centers. Depending on subclass, they may function as:
Controllers (Abyssborn, Earthforged)
Burst Damage Dealers (Dawnflame, Stormrider)
Disruptors/Chaos Engines (Riftstorm, Ronin)
Stealth Manipulators (Shadowwrought)
But across all forms, they share a role that no other class fills: They are narrative weapons.
Every Dracovate encounter has thematic gravity. Their presence defines intent. A fight is no longer just a clash of steel — it is a conflict of ideals, embodied in flame, storm, silence, or collapse.
For a party, the Dracovate is more than a simple frontliner or damage dealer — they are a tide-turner, a battlefield mechanic, and a living reminder that this world is still shaped by forces older than time.
When the Dracovate Enters, the air shifts. The terrain begins to remember its truth. And somewhere above — or beside — a wyvern circles… waiting for the moment you forget how to hope.

Factions & Philosophies
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Factions & Philosophies
Internal Conflicts
The Dracovates are not an organized military. They are a convergence of absolute forces, walking the world in mortal shape. Though united by their elemental bonds and the authority of the Dragons, deep divisions exist between Orders — and even within them. These rifts are not based on politics or protocol, but on truth: whose version of necessity deserves to reshape Aetheria.
These internal conflicts define how Dracovates fight — and why they often refuse to fight alongside each other.
Purity vs. Flexibility: The Flame-Split
The Dawnflame Orders believe in moral precision, seeing their Smite as a scalpel that reveals and cauterizes. By contrast, Earthforged Orders claim morality is weightless, and that only endurance and presence determine righteousness.
This has led to open ideological conflict, especially when both factions are sent to judge corrupted settlements. To one, mercy is weakness. To the other, swift judgment risks becoming its own corruption.
Breath-Bound vs. Will-Born: The Wyvern Divide
Some Orders believe wyverns are sacred extensions of the Dragon’s Breath — to be revered, never commanded. Others treat them as military assets, evolving war machines whose presence is necessary but not transcendent.
The divide deepens around the Ronin, whose wyverns have shifted outside of defined elemental orders. Is the bond sacred if the source is gone? Or is this a perversion of the bond itself?
Umbraxis' Problem: Control vs. Utility
Shadowwroughts are simultaneously feared and needed — a problem that splits Orders along trust lines. The Abyssborn find them useful — a softening wave before the pressure crushes. Dawnflames despise them — seeing every omission as cowardice. Yet even the most vocal critics know: no campaign lasts long without a Shadowwrought in the dark behind it.
Major Dracovate Orders
Each Dracovate Order is tied to a particular interpretation of elemental purpose — not just a subclass, but a worldview.
The Bound Flame — Order of Solinarus
This Order holds to the belief that purification is a sacred duty. They do not wait for command — they arrive where rot is strongest and burn it out. Ritualistic, militant, and deeply feared even among allies, they believe that truth only hurts when it is real.
“We do not raise fires to be seen. We raise them to be remembered.”
The Silent Tithe — Nepturon’s Covenant
A secretive Order among the Abyssborn, the Silent Tithe believes that every life spared is a debt owed to the deep. They move slowly, act sparingly, and only strike when patience will no longer hold. They are deployed where wars are too loud to hear strategy — and end them in silence.
“The sea does not make noise. It makes consequences.”
The Skyclad Coil — Riders of Cyclonix
Stormrider loyalists who view freedom not as rebellion, but as necessity. They are often sent where diplomacy has failed, and where disruption is the only viable strategy. Fast, deadly, and wild — they disappear before the world has time to thank or blame them.
“You cannot punish the wind. You can only chase it.”
The Glass Refrain — Disciples of Cryonax
Riftstorm specialists who believe existence is a joke that does not land anymore. Often assigned to the most fractured terrain, these Heralds carry no symbols and answer only to collapse. They believe chaos is not a weapon — it is a diagnosis. “The world blinked. We just did not close our eyes fast enough.”
The Veil-Knotted Eye — Umbraxis’ Operatives
Shadowwrought Orders do not recruit. They erase and replace. The Eye trains through simulated failure, and only those who betray an objective for the right reason are considered worthy.
They have no temples. Only rooms with the lights off. “When done right, you won’t remember we were here.”
The Stonewound Bastion — Earthforged Stand holds.
This Order does not move. It waits. Built into the mountains, across shattered sky-bridges and half-flooded ruins, the Bastion exists as a living redoubt, absorbing attacks and never forgetting the lines it was built to hold.
“If the line breaks, we were already dead.”
The Black Sigil — The Ronin Circle
Not a true Order, but a secret brotherhood of Ronin who survived their severance. They help others who break their bond, teach how to adapt, and hunt Accord Inquisitors who go too far. They never act as a group. But their marks appear after certain enemies disappear.
“We are not the Oathscar’s mistake. We are its consequence.”
Philosophy of the Dracovates
Conviction Without Permission
Dracovates are not chosen for virtue. They are shaped by necessity — not because they deserve power, but because the world requires it. Their philosophy is simple: Power is truth. But only if you survive carrying it.
Faithless Faith
Though empowered by Dragons, Dracovates are not worshippers. They are not priests. They do not kneel. They act. Where clerics seek guidance and paladins recite oaths, Dracovates burn the altar and step into the flame. They are not bound by morality. They are bound by magnitude.
The Breath Is the Burden
The Oathscar is not a blessing. It is a reformation of the soul. The breath that brands you never leaves. It shapes your instincts, your reactions, your identity. To accept it is to accept that you are no longer mortal in the way others understand. You have become a vector for something older, louder, and more certain.
Unity in Isolation
Each Dracovate stands alone — because only they can carry their Dragon’s will. Yet they are never truly alone. Across Aetheria, their wyverns circle, their Oathscars thrum, and their causes carve lines into the world. When two Dracovates meet, it is not camaraderie. It is the moment before friction. But when they fight together — the world pays attention.
“I am the breath. I am the will. I do not need to explain myself.”

Rituals & Practices
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Rituals & Practices
Their rituals are not ceremonies of passage. They are trials. They are not performed to honor the past. They are performed to survive the present. To become a Dracovate is not to join a fellowship. It is to be unmade and rebuilt in the image of a Primordial Dragon — and to carry that force in every breath, every oath, every silence.
Class-Specific Rituals
The Rite of Ascension
The defining ritual of all Dracovates, the Rite of Ascension is a metaphysical unbinding and remaking of the self — where the mortal soul is branded by the breath of a Dragon.
Each Dragon’s Rite is different:
Solinarus burns the impurities from your memory until only conviction remains.
Nepturon drowns your thoughts beneath pressure until only your resolve floats.
Cryonax shows you nothing and waits to see if you still stand.
The Rite is not a test of worthiness. It is a test of endurance without reason. Many do not survive. Those who do emerge with an Oathscar, a living tether between body and breath — the first and final mark of the Dracovate.
The Breathing Vigil
Before battle, most Dracovates participate in the Breathing Vigil — a personal, often silent ritual where they synchronize their pulse with their element’s rhythm.
A Stormrider listens for thunder, even when skies are clear.
An Earthforged sinks into the ground until the vibration steadies them.
A Dawnflame stares into a candle until the flame flickers with memory.
Ronin may burn old creeds, chant forgotten names, or simply press their forehead to their wyvern’s and whisper: "We are still here. That’s enough."
The Binding Spiral (Wyvern Bonding)
When a Dracovate reaches harmony with their wyvern (at level 15) they undergo the Binding Spiral, a ceremonial melding of presence and purpose. The ritual varies by subclass, but always involves three parts:
Elemental Marking: The wyvern places a breathbrand on the Dracovate’s armor or skin.
Flight of Stillness: The first true ride is made not in war, but in silence — the sky held as sacred ground.
Shared Pulse: Inhale together. Exhale together. No longer master and beast — only echoes of the same breath.
The Smite-Name
Dracovates do not name their Smite abilities lightly. Each Dracovate, after surviving three battles post-Rite, forges a Smite-Name — a whispered invocation or sigil etched into their gear, armor, or flesh.
This name is not shared casually. It is often:
A phrase from the moment they survived their Rite.
The name of someone they failed to save.
A word their Dragon showed them in a vision.
To speak it aloud is to commit to action — and many enemies never hear it twice.
Reverence for Their Role
Not Worship — Alignment Dracovates do not pray. They align. To revere the Dragon is not to offer thanks, but to breathe in rhythm with it — to act as its vessel. This is not faith. It is function.
Some Dracovates kneel at elemental nodes not to beg, but to calibrate. Others leave behind trail brands — small, carved sigils at battle sites or sacred places, marking where the Dragon’s will was carried out.
Trial by Presence
Where Sentinels form councils, Dracovates form judgments. There are no peer reviews. No performance records. Only results.
A common phrase: “If you are still breathing, the Dragon is not done with you.”
Cultural and Group Practices
The Forging Wake
When a Dracovate falls, their wyvern — if still alive — circles the body in silence. Then, with one final breath, the wyvern exhales upon their Herald, reducing armor, sigil, and body to scorched glass or frozen crystal. A Wake Stone is left behind, infused with residual breath — used to mark graves, empower weapons, or fuel new Rites.
Ashfasting
Dawnflames and some Earthforged practice Ashfasting, a ritual wherein they abstain from all warmth or light for three days following a major loss. They walk barefoot. They extinguish all fire. They do not speak.
At the end, they light a single flame — and breathe once more.
The Breathless Chain
Shadowwroughts sometimes return from mission with black chain-links hung on their armor. Each represents a name they were ordered to erase — or chose not to. These chains are never removed. They are not trophies. They are reminders of what silence costs.
Rite Echoes: Marking Survivors
A rare but potent practice: When a new Dracovate completes their Rite, they may be approached by a veteran bearing an old scar, weapon, or phrase. The veteran marks them — not with command, but with recognition.
“You carry what I carried. Let it scar differently this time.”
Philosophical Practices
Dracovates believe that power leaves a shape — not just in the world, but in the self. Their practices are shaped around preserving that shape even as it warps. They do not seek comfort. They seek integrity under fire. Some fast-during full elemental cycles. Others meditate in places where elemental balance is broken, to feel closer to their Dragon’s will.
“Ritual is not memory. It is pressure applied with purpose.
— Sayari, Stonewound Bastion, 3rd Wall Watcher

Hooks & Ideas
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Hooks & Ideas
Dracovate-Themed Adventure Hooks and Narrative Arcs
The Oathscar Cracked
A Dracovate in a nearby Order begins manifesting aberrant power—elemental surges from two Dragons at once. Their Oathscar pulses with contradiction, warping the land around them. The Accord demands their execution. But the wyvern stays loyal.
Themes: Elemental instability, identity fracture, forbidden resonance
Dracovate Role: Must decide whether to slay the aberration—or defend the proof that a second bond might be possible.
The Breath That Burns the Wrong Name
A village once judged and spared by a Dawnflame is now in flames—set by another Herald of the same Order. Survivors claim their attacker bore a matching crest, identical Smite, and called down fire in the name of justice. But the original Dawnflame still lives… and swears they never returned.
Themes: Doubled identity, justice corrupted, echo of truth
Dracovate Role: Hunt the imposter—or confront what it means if they are not an imposter at all.
The Ronin Pact
A Ronin Dracovate approaches the party and offers aid against a powerful Riftbeast… in exchange for one thing: they want the Dracovate PC to walk away from their Dragon. The Rite they offer is raw, broken, and real. If accepted, the transformation begins immediately.
Themes: Betrayal, free will, legacy severance
Dracovate Role: Must choose between being breathbound—or becoming the proof, that choice still exists.
The Island of Echoes
A battlefield once drowned by an Abyssborn now rings with whispers—faint memories rising from the flooded soil. But the dead refuse to rest. The water remembers their names… and one is the Dracovate’s.
Themes: Regret made real, weight of judgment, drowned truth
Dracovate Role: Must descend into the abyss and face the memory of a choice they have repressed.
The Sky Claws Closed
The wyverns of a Stormrider order stop responding to their Heralds. They begin circling the sky in tight, silent spirals—blocking sun and rain, wind, and breath. The Accord sends riders to re-establish control. None return.
Themes: Rebellion of instinct, bond severed by pride, skyborne siege
Dracovate Role: Must ascend to parley with the unbound wyverns—and decide whether they should ever be ridden again.
Ashes for the Accord
The Accord calls a conclave: a former Dawnflame has been captured for burning a Rift-stabilized city. The fire killed hundreds—but closed a dangerous Rift permanently. The Dragon of Light demands judgment. The Dragon of Flame demands loyalty.
Themes: Consequence vs. intention, conflicting Dragons, political retribution
Dracovate Role: Cast the vote that determines whether the war criminal is heretic—or hero.
The Frozen Flame
In the ruins of a Cryonax cult, the party discovers a Smite-frozen battlefield—Dracovate fire and entropy colliding so violently that time no longer flows there. One of the frozen soldiers is a future version of the Dracovate PC.
Themes: Temporal stasis, self as enemy, fate, and fracture
Dracovate Role: Step into a moment that has not happened yet—and change it before it does.
The Breathless Accord
A faction of wyverns begins dying mid-flight—no wounds, no blood, just stillness. Investigators discover that someone is removing their Oathscar anchor, severing them from their Heralds. The targets are always wyverns of young Dracovates… and the killer is always one step ahead.
Themes: Grief, weaponized silence, bond disruption
Dracovate Role: Protect your wyvern—or risk becoming Ronin unwillingly.
The Shard That Screams
A malformed Chronoshard pulsates with seven breath-signatures at once. It draws Heralds from across Aetheria, whispering visions of a new Dragon being born — not elemental, but synthetic. The Accord wants it sealed. The Riftweavers want to study it. The wyverns are already circling it in reverence.
Themes: Breath reborn, synthetic divinity, heresy
Dracovate Role: Decide if the world should be shaped by a Dragon that never breathed — only calculated.
The Wyvern That Should Not Be
A Ronin’s wyvern begins breathing two elements simultaneously. Its breath reshapes geography into impossible formations. The Dragon that once birthed the wyvern sends a message: destroy it. The Ronin says no. The party is caught in the middle.
Themes: Evolution, exile, instinct vs. control
Dracovate Role: Negotiate (or decide) the wyvern’s fate—and what it means when nature starts rewriting itself.
How to Use These Hooks
Each Dracovate-themed arc explores moral finality, elemental pressure, and identity under power. They force Dracovates to confront:
What does it mean to embody a truth?
What happens when your purpose turns on you?
Can the breath still serve when the will behind it is questioned?
Common Themes:
The Oathscar is not always right.
Power without reflection becomes collapse.
Your wyvern is watching — not just following.
Legacy is what breath leaves behind. The Anchor Fractured

Synergies & Relationships
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Synergies & Relationships
Wherever a Dracovate walks, tension sharpens—between destruction and discipline, between freedom and duty. Whether through the slow erosion of an Abyssborn’s pressure or the brilliance of a Dawnflame’s clarity, Dracovates bring not just power, but reckoning.
They are not always leaders. But they are always a pivot point—and every party member feels the tilt.
Synergies with Other Classes
With Aetherial Scholars:
Dracovates provide the pressure, the presence, and the living battlefield manipulation that allows Scholars to work without interruption. Whether standing in a Rune Circle or burning through corrupted knowledge, this pairing becomes a crucible of lore and flame.
Dynamic: Discipline meets judgment. Arcane insight pairs with elemental truth.
Narrative Hook: The Scholar seeks understanding. The Dracovate is understanding, personified by pain.
With Voidstalkers:
Shadowwroughts and Ronin pair exceptionally well with stealth classes. While the Dracovate warps attention, the Voidstalker carves into distraction. These duos are nightmares for strategists—one seen, one unseen, both unstoppable.
Dynamic: Visibility as weapon vs. invisibility as scalpel.
Narrative Hook: One believes in precision. The other in inevitability. Which gets the final kill?
With Riftweavers:
Riftweavers tear the rules apart. Dracovates rewrite them. Especially alongside a Riftstorm Herald, this duo turns combat into performance art. A Weave-slasher pulls; a Dracovate collapses.
Dynamic: Entropy-controlled vs. entropy-born.
Narrative Hook: The Riftweaver sees the Dracovate as a flaw. The Dracovate sees the Riftweaver as late to the lesson.
With Shardbinders:
Order meets fury. This relationship is often spiritual—and often violent. A Dawnflame may revere the Shardbinder’s divine echoes, while a Ronin sees only chains that have not broken yet.
Dynamic: Divine influence vs. elemental dominion.
Narrative Hook: Can faith coexist with fire that now consumes gods?
With Skybreakers:
Skybreakers are force untempered. A Stormrider or Riftstorm Dracovate gives that force tactical bite. They understand terrain, motion, and how to weaponize space. This is pure combat synergy.
Dynamic: Untamed power vs. controlled cataclysm.
Narrative Hook: One rides the storm. The other is the reason it strikes where it does.
Role in Party Composition
Dracovates are battlefield anchors, tactical disruptors, and narrative catalysts. They are best thought of not as roles, but as refractors: they bend the flow of combat and conversation around themselves, forcing everyone to adapt.
Elemental Vanguard
Whether Earthforged, Stormrider, or Dawnflame, Dracovates dominate the front line. Their presence shifts enemy focus, alters morale, and physically reshapes terrain.
Disruption Engine
Riftstorm, Shadowwrought, and Ronin subclasses destabilize enemy patterns, deny spellcasting plans, or collapse multi-round rituals before they begin.
Pressure Catalyst
Even outside of combat, their elemental bond becomes a narrative variable. In social situations, their presence can command awe—or fear. They force moral debates, challenge authority, and serve as an ever-present reminder that the Dragons are watching.
Moral Compass (or Warning Sign)
The Dracovate either becomes a source of emotional steadiness… or a mirror reflecting how far the party is willing to fall. Especially Ronin or Abyssborn characters hold immense potential for party-defining arcs.
Narrative Potential
The Dracovate creates tension, clarity, and consequence.
The Walking Judgment
When someone steps out of line, will the Dracovate call them back—or burn the path behind them?
The Catalyst for Change
Few characters evolve quietly when a Dracovate is watching. Their conviction—or lack of it—forces allies to examine their own.
The Unanswered Question
What are they becoming? And what happens if the Oathscar begins to ask for more?
The Reluctant Anchor
In a moment of chaos, even the loudest character may look to the Dracovate. Not because they are warm. But because they are inevitable.
Emotional Roles Within the Party
The Elemental Core: Every great party needs one unshakable truth. The Dracovate becomes it—whether in silence or fire.
The Counterweight: Against idealists, they are reality. Against cynics, they are hope.
The Reckoner: When choices must be made and lines crossed, the Dracovate is often the one holding the blade—and the weight of what comes next.
“I do not fight because I hate. I fight because something must and if I do not move, the world does.”— Oath of the Dracovate

Legends & Artifacts
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Legends & Artifacts
The Dracovates are not chronicled like heroes. They are remembered like natural disasters—etched into the land, feared in prophecy, and followed only by echoes of what they destroyed or changed.
Their names are spoken with awe, fear, or silence — and their relics are not museum pieces. They are still warm. Still breathing. And it is still dangerous for those who do not understand the weight of what they carry.
Famous Dracovates
Kael Rivenbrand, the Ember That Would Not Die
A Dawnflame whose conviction bordered on fanatical, Kael is remembered for burning out three corrupted Sky-Councils across the Eastern Isles before finally being excommunicated by the Accord. But his wyvern never left him—and neither did his fire.
When Kael returned from exile, it was with Ashtruth, a molten relic forged from the bones of a wyvern slain in divine conflict. With it, he seared the divine seal off a corrupted Riftgate—and disappeared into the flame beyond.
Some say his breath still lingers on the wind, burning the air around those who lie in high places.
Veisa the Hollowed Fang
A Shadowwrought who erased her own name in service to Umbraxis, Veisa is the ghost of a ghost — credited with ending three wars before they began, none of which she was officially part of.
She wore a mask known as The Whisper Crown and wielded no sword — only words no one remembered hearing. Her last mission involved the assassination of a corrupt Dragon cult leader who had never spoken his plans aloud. The cult collapsed within hours.
Veisa’s mask was later recovered by the Accord. It has since disappeared. Five times.
Thryrn of the Woundwake
A Riftstorm Dracovate, Thryrn was born in a riftquake zone and ascended without ever undergoing the Rite — instead, Cryonax is said to have noticed him. His wyvern never aged. Neither did Thryrn.
He carried no artifact — only a broken piece of reality suspended in a glass orb called the Shatterwake. It could unmake structure, language, or memory within its radius. He used it to undo a war—literally.
Thryrn vanished after claiming that “the future already failed once.” Some believe he now travels backward through time. Others say he never existed.
Ydrin Stoneseal, Bastion of Ninefold Graves
An Earthforged who stood alone at the gates of Hollowmark during the Erosion Siege. Ydrin’s wyvern was already dead. His Oathscar was cracking. Still, he planted his feet — and the ground refused to collapse beneath him.
He carried The Monument Blade, a weapon that could be plunged into earth and turn terrain into bastion-fortresses. After seven days of battle, the blade fused to the ground. Ydrin let it happen — and became the final wall.
Hollowmark is now a pilgrimage site. The blade is still there, humming beneath the stone.
Artifacts of the Dracovate
Each artifact below is an extension of a Dracovate’s essence, not just their element. These items are not passed down lightly — they remember who used them, and act accordingly.
Ashtruth, the Censuring Flame
Once a ceremonial Smite-forging blade, this weapon absorbed the condemnation of its wielder. When Kael Rivenbrand was disavowed, Ashtruth blackened — then reignited. Its flame is no longer tied to fire. It burns lies, cowardice, and the denial of necessary action.
Mechanically, it deals radiant, or fire damage based on emotional conviction. In roleplay, it may ignite simply from the presence of hidden guilt nearby.
The Whisper Crown
An obsidian mask worn by Shadowwrought assassins who wish to erase themselves more effectively. When worn, the user’s name is forgotten by all who knew it — including themself — unless re-carved onto the inside rim. Some wear it blank. Others with lies.
It grants immunity to mind-reading and scrying but slowly erodes memory until only function remains.
Shatterwake
A Rift-glass orb containing a fragment of unstructured reality. When released, it unravels local law—not just gravity or space, but narrative sequence. Doors may open to events instead of rooms. Weapons may misfire into alternate timelines. Thoughts may arrive before questions.
It was last seen embedded in the chest of a wyvern circling a dead zone where no calendars work.
The Monument Blade
A towering, rune-lined blade carried by Earthforged champions. When stabbed into terrain, it causes the land around it to lock into a defensive formation—fortifying cliffs, raising barricades, redirecting fault lines.
It has only been moved once in a century. It requires an Oathscar older than the land it stands in to awaken.
Veilborn Bridle
A blacksteel wyvern bridle rumored to have belonged to a Ronin who refused to let go of their beast. The bridle reshapes to match the wyvern’s breathform and allows for command even after a bond has been severed.
However, it cannot be removed without killing the rider or the wyvern. There is no known way to take it off peacefully. It is both gift and chain.
Impact on the World
While the Dracovates do not maintain statues or public halls, their legacies have physically shaped the world:
• Hollowmark’s Fortress Spine — Born from a Monument Blade strike.
• The Echo-Free Zone of Blackquartz Sound — Site of the last Shatterwake deployment.
• The Scorched Halls of Silvershrine — Still alight from the judgment of Ashtruth.
• Vault Zero — An Accord-block-listed chamber said to contain Veisa’s mask and forbidden copies of her techniques.
These are not just battlegrounds — they are reminders. That the Dragons still act. And sometimes… they regret nothing.
Legacy Through Fire and Scar
Dracovates do not leave behind comfortable stories. They leave behind burn lines in the ground, questions no one wants to answer, and weapons that still breathe.
To carry a Dracovate’s artifact is not to gain power. It is to inherit their unfinished consequences.
And to walk in their path… is to risk becoming the legend someone else tries to survive.

Slang & Lexicon
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Slang & Lexicon
Internal Slang
(Used among Dracovates, especially in Orders or during missions)
“Oathhot”
A Dracovate whose Oathscar is flaring beyond control—usually in response to betrayal, nearby corruption, or imminent battle.
“He’s gone Oathhot—either back off or back him up.”
“Falling Breath”
A phrase used to warn of incoming emotional or elemental collapse; used between bonded wyvern riders as a subtle alarm.
“That is a Falling Breath tone. We are too close to lose him now.”
“Scarglow”
The sudden flare of a Dracovate’s Oathscar when exposed to a trigger, ancestral site, or powerful Rift effect.
“Her Scarglow lit like a sunburst the second we stepped onto the plateau.”
“Melt the Bond”
A term meaning to abandon restraint, burn a connection, or sever control—used both emotionally and in battle.
“He melted the bond. There is no coming back from that.”
“Cored.”
A Dracovate who has had their elemental drive or wyvern connection severed. Can refer to death, Ronin status, or magical trauma.
“She is not dead—but she is cored. Breath’s gone quiet.”
“Feed the Scar”
To push past pain or inhibition by giving into the Oathscar’s drive. Often reckless, sometimes necessary.
“If we don’t break that ritual now, I’ll have to feed the scar.”
“Wyvern Low”
A cautionary phrase used to describe an emotionally strained or magically overtaxed wyvern.
“Tidebringer’s wyvern is flying low—give it room or risk a crash.”
“Dragon’s Blink”
The moment before action when everything goes still. Named after the instant just before a Dragon breathes.
“Wait for the Dragon’s Blink. Then hit them.”
External Slang
(Used by civilians, scholars, or non-Dracovate adventurers)
“Oathburner”
Term for a Ronin, usually used derogatorily.
“Keep an eye on that one. Looks like an Oathburner.”
“Breathbroken”
Said of Dracovates who lose their wyverns or suffer psychological collapse. Sometimes whispered in pity.
“He is breathbroken. Still swings, but there is nothing behind it.”
“Scarback”
General slang for any Dracovate; can be used respectfully or as a veiled insult depending on tone.
“Scarback cleared the whole ridge. Would not get in her way.”
“Flareknight”
Romanticized bardic term for Dawnflames or any Dracovate who manifests their Smite dramatically.
“Flareknight stories always end in ash and beauty.”
“Wyvernwake”
A place or trail left behind by a Dracovate and their bonded mount often carries lingering elemental effects.
“The village sits in a Wyvernwake—don’t touch the water.”
“The Second Fire”
Euphemism for the trauma left in a Dracovate’s wake—emotional, magical, or societal.
“They cleared the cult. Took the town with it. The second fire always burns longer.”
“The Dragon’s Will”
Used by civilians to describe anything impossible that still happens—usually when a Dracovate is involved.
“They say she stood in the storm and laughed. Dragon’s will, that one.”
“No Scar, No Breath”
A saying among aspiring warriors and street fighters. You are not real until something changes you.
“She is tough, but no scar, no breath. Just steel and swagger.”
“Burn Me Right”
A battlefield phrase meaning “if I fall, make it count.” Heard often when fighting beside Ronin or Abyssborn.
“This is where we hold. Burn me right.”
Symbolic Gestures and Phrases
• Touching two fingers to the chest over the Oathscar: A sign of respect between Dracovates.
• Rubbing the edge of one’s armor: Signaling nervous anticipation or the desire to act.
• “The breath still moves.”: A quiet affirmation of survival, often said after a battle.
• “I carry the flame.”: Final words. A vow. A promise. A threat.