The Augustine Trading Company focuses on expanding resources to maximize its profits. It pursues its goals by ruthlessly opening new markets, developing new technologies, and removing the competition. As a soulless organization, it has no moral direction but profit, and it has the resources to hide the lengths it will go to achieve its goals. Profit by Any Means The Company pursues profit by any means available. This includes opening trade in all major, and not-so-major, cities, or sending explorers to find new resources to exploit. The Company uses less savory methods as well. Using economic manipulation, the Company buys up essential industries to fix prices; sabotages rival businesses through bribery, blackmail, or “accidents;” and uses predatory high interest loans to seize assets when the borrower defaults. They have been known to trap whole towns or cities in generational debt, creating de facto serfdom. The Company militarizes commerce with programs like Project Warbreed, creating enhanced monstrous troops to be sold or rented. They hire adventurers to remove indigenous populations unwilling to cooperate and supernatural protectors of desired resources. The Company “redeems wayward souls,” capturing and trafficking magical beings and cursed individuals for research projects. Protect the Company The members of the Augustine Trading Company value the Company over any individual. Those who put the company first are rewarded, until they are no longer useful. People are disposable. Institutions endure. To protect the Company, it employs hordes of lawyers and bankers. It wears contracts like armor and wields its wealth like a bludgeon. It maintains dossiers on everyone who has ever worked with or crossed them, saving these secrets for the future leverage. Whistleblowers are permanently silenced, and problematic adventurers sent on “suicide missions.” Governments and churches are incentivized to aid the Company through bribes, favorable deals, and financial support. Laws are rewritten to criminalize competition or make it illegal to buy from them. Corrupt religious leaders issue holy edicts encouraging the faithful to buy from the Company. Those who refuse the Company’s gold can always be blackmailed or disappeared. Secure the Future The Augustine Trading Company strongly believes in education and growing talent. It funds colleges and granting scholarships to their Augustine Centers found throughout Etharis, training the next generation of innovators. Applicants are carefully screened for flexibility, prizing accomplishment over morality or dignity. The accepted are given lavish scholarships, contingent on service and success, creating indentured servants afraid to lose their position. Students and their instructors delve into all sorts of research that might become profitable: new spells to increase production, magizoology to develop new sources of magic or super soldiers, or even black powder and steam engines for weapons or locomotion.

To say that the Thaumaturge’s goals are obscure is an understatement. To say that any such goals are entirely united is ludicrous. Different powers within the organization pursue their own objectives, often competing and occasionally conflicting with one another. Despite the difference, they generally fall into one of three categories. Power is Knowledge If nothing else, the Thaumaturge believe that understanding the cosmos is key to progress and survival. To this end, members of the Order are collectors and procurers. They seek out knowledge in the form of tomes, scrolls, and objects and places of power. They create arcane laboratories and experiments—sometimes on a grand scale. The Order also seeks people who can further their ends. Talented mages, those born to strange powers, and those in touch with greater beings are of most use and recruited, knowingly or not, into the ranks. Because each member of the Thaumaturge often serves their own interests, their pursuits and methods vary. At the same time, such individuality may hint at the seeker’s areas of interest or expertise. A Hand Upon the Cosmic Wheel If the order had a gilded hall, etched into its entry gate would be the saying, “When the hands of fate align, the hand guiding them remain unseen.” The Thaumaturge understand that whatever the grand schemes of the powerful are, the common people need to believe their lives are their own. In order to guide things, events must be allowed to proceed. The Thaumaturge believe in subtle and invisible manipulation. Their schemes and goals can span decades, centuries, and if one is to believe the transcendent nature of some of their members, millennia. One thing of paramount importance to understanding the Thaumaturge is they believe non-action can be as powerful as interference. Sometimes, the greatest influence is in letting things proceed just as they are. Every Life a Candle The Thaumaturge tend to hold that every life is its own flickering candle, precious but ultimately doomed to be snuffed. All lives can be meaningful, yet none matter more than the tapestry of the cosmos. The Thaumaturge’s methods and conspiracies can appear heartlessly cruel in their treatment of human life, but they often serve to avoid an even greater calamity. It is never clear in the moment if they are trying to save lives, sacrifice lives, or both. How many must die before the way forward is found? The trouble with planning on a cosmic scale is that common human lives don’t last long enough to see the result.

The greatest constant is change, and the Ebon Syndicate’s goals are not only ever-changing but vary drastically by location and time. On any given day, the Syndicate could have spies undermining a government, assassins killing the government’s rival, and thieves stealing from both victims. If anything remains constant, it’s that at the highest level the Syndicate seeks money, power, and deniability. How these balance out in any specific time and place is the most tangled of webs. Everybody has a Price Coin is a great motivation for the Syndicate, but more so as a tool than it is for the other factions. While the Augustine Trading Company and the Free Swords may be primarily concerned with how much they can get, the Syndicate’s monetary motivations are much more practical: it’s about what—or who—coin can buy. The Syndicate has no political offices or aspirations, so what influence they have is influence they’ve bought with coin or leverage. While a petty thief goes into the life dreaming of riches, it is not long until that dream turns into the realization that what they really want is a way out, and the cost of that is often more than gold. Control from the Shadows The Syndicate’s lack of open political involvement should not be confused with a lack of influence. While most obvious in the political spectrum, the Syndicate’s preference to pull strings from the shadows is evident across all their dealings. Unless they’re sending a message, the Ebon Syndicate remains unseen. They don’t hesitate to use proxies, patsies, and mercenaries in tasks that require deniability. It’s not uncommon for a freelancer to not realize who their true employer is. The lack of a public presence lets the Syndicate freely operate in more illicit industries than their reputable competitors, such as the Augustine Company. While secrecy can be their greatest weapon, the Syndicate does not hesitate to play the boogieman when it suits their ends. The sheer size and scope of their operations is so great that it’s impossible for them to go unnoticed. An occasional display of their mark can act as much to cover their tracks as to reveal. We Are the Hand Upon the Scales The Ebon Syndicate ensures that no authority grows too large to threaten their operations. They expertly manipulate to keep allies in power and undermine enemies. It’s not uncommon for the Syndicate’s operations to receive public approval. When the Syndicate saves the kidnapped prince, assassinates a stalking vampire, or publicizes a Burgermeister’s corruption, there arethose who take them for heroes. In a way, the Syndicate’s lack of allegiance and willingness to take payment as a debt make them the most accessible force for righting a wrong. However, it pays to remember that just because the Syndicate’s goals aren’t visible doesn’t mean they aren’t being served. A hand that can easily right a wrong can also wrong a right.

The Company enables its swords to live grand, action-filled lives, and it does so by embracing its core goals. For the Highest Coin Nothing’s free. The mercenaries are well aware that their exciting lives are often destined to end in painful and inglorious deaths far from home. They’re equally aware that the mitigating factor to this is coin. Gold. Treasure. Payment. The Free Swords take their money seriously—nothing gets done without it, and woe be to any client that can’t pay up. However, coin does not trump loyalty or integrity—at least not for the Free Swords. The Company firmly believes that trustworthiness, and knowing that your ally won’t turn on you mid-battle, is worth a premium. Honor is good for business. With varied independent chapters, there have been instances of a unit not honoring a contract or switching sides. One of the most prominent of these took place during the Ostoyan civil war. A company of Free Swords was hired by Raevans to reinforce the Order of Dawn at a key skirmish. When the Somans brought out the Swords, several members refused to break their oath, resulting in a bloodbath that that saw the Free Swords slaughter each other. The battle caused philosophical debate to ripple across the organization, with members torn between the ideals of duty to their brothers versus the need to honor contracts. There are rumors (which the company tries to suppress) of a secret group who call themselves “The Red Swords,” who take the highest coin regardless of moral implications. Never Leave a Debt Unsettled The Free Swords will take payment one way or another. They consider it acceptable to pillage lands if they feel their work hasn’t been justly compensated. They’re not brigands, however, and will first pursue the lord who disrespected them rather than the land’s peasants. Life Well Fought; Life Well Lived In addition to the code he set in place, Darion Harkin’s own work ethic and disciplined approach to the mercenary life became an example to the rest of the company. When on the job, Free Swords were known to live free of excess, stay loyal, and focus on the work. Only once the job was done, their coin collected, and the company’s reputation upheld did they celebrate. And celebrate they did! Harkin encouraged a gregarious nature in his people, telling them to spend widely, and pay generously for things, not only out of fairness, but because success begets success. This mindset remains in place today. When people speak of the two faces of the Free Swords, they speak not of duplicity, but of the difference between the colorful, well-natured big spenders at the tavern and the stone-faced soldiers on the job.

Mend the Broken The Morbus Doctore are a sinister faction with questionable methods. Publicly, they claim they only seek to cure illness and injury, but they often appear more interested in experimentation and witnessing the effects of a disease. With so much death in their vicinity, accusations of evildoing are inevitable, and may be well founded. After all, discovery through experimentation is the basis of learning. In the search for knowledge, it is easy to lose sight of the humanoid cost of that knowledge. Uncovering a new cure cannot be accomplished without understanding the limits of a patient’s strength and the full dangers of diseases like the Weeping Pox. The Morbus Doctore want to understand the basis of health and life. Some join the faction after witnessing the ravages of the Weeping Pox with a genuine desire to help, while others seek knowledge at any cost. The faction’s leadership leans towards the latter group. A future of perfect health where no one gets sick, where life can be made endless, where anything biological can be repaired, modified, and controlled…this is the true goal of the Morbus Doctore, even if not all of its members know it.

Keep the Wyrm Slumbering The druids of the Prismatic Circle earnestly believe that only continued war and bloodshed can keep the world safe from the reawakening of Gormadraug, the Prismatic Wyrm that birthed the Primordials. Only through the cycles of raiding and ritual murder can the all-powerful primordial be appeased to keep slumbering beneath the earth. Failure to do so will rouse the Great Wyrm’s fury, which, if unleashed, would mean the end of the world.