Hearth and Road

13,000 Experience. Requires the [Influence] advancement drawback, below.

Your Hearth is your home and your clinic.

This is an advancement package. It bolts onto any class and changes how you level.

Your Hearth. Name the traveling community you keep, with your GM — a hospital on the march, a pilgrim column, a wandering fair. Every rule below that says your Hearth means it. (Default: a caravan — wagons, stock, and the road between settlements.)

The toll

Advancement: Influence

To level, you must leave communities better able to hold themselves together. Whenever you help a community, faction, or kingdom in a way that outlasts the aid itself, you earn one count of [Influence] — founding a trade agreement, mentoring a leader, rebuilding what was broken, uniting rivals under one goal. Your GM sets how many counts each level demands alongside its normal requirements. (Suggested floor: one count per level. If an arc offers no opportunity to earn one — a dungeon, a wilderness crossing, a sea voyage — the debt banks: you level normally and owe the count, and cannot rise a further level until the ledger clears.)

You begin play with Accord and your Hearth. Three Accord Points are credited to your ledger and to your pool, so you begin at Tier 1 with 3 AP to spend.

Accord

Accord is the trust and cooperation you build in communities, factions, and regions. Accord Points (AP) are its currency.

The ledger and the pool. Accord Tiers key off the total AP you have ever earned. Spending draws from your current pool. Spending never lowers your tier.

The Hearth. You own it: what carries it, its stock, and 20 non-combatants plus 10 per Accord Tier — healers, teachers, crafters, and the people who move it. It travels 24 miles a day on a road and cannot enter a dungeon or any space it could not be brought through. Its market size is set by your Accord Tier, below. If it is destroyed, scattered, or seized, you lose Hearth-keyed benefits until you spend 3 AP and one week raising it again from the people of any settlement you have aided. The rebuild succeeds.

The books

Earning Accord Points

1 AP — healing or teaching a small group, resolving a minor dispute, aiding a single settlement in crisis.
3 AP — solving a regional issue, founding an infrastructure project, forging an alliance between factions.
5 AP — leading an effort that unites regions, resolves a long-standing conflict, or establishes a lasting peace.
1 AP — baseline. At the end of each adventure you gain 1 AP. This credits your pool only — it never credits your ledger and never advances your Accord Tier.

Spending Accord Points

1 AP — a message reaches anyone in a region you have aided within a day, and an answer comes back; a door opens that was closed to you, a guildhall, a war council, a sealed archive; or a hostile crowd stands down long enough to hear you out.
3 AP — raise a work in days instead of months (a bridge, a clinic, a palisade) through mobilized volunteers; broker a truce sitting between two feuding factions; move a threatened community out of harm's way along your routes.
5 AP — mobilize a region (an evacuation, a harvest, a muster); found an annex — a fixed branch of your Hearth whose infirmary and long-term care work as your Hearth's do in your absence.

Milestones

On milestones

A Major Milestone is any single act that changes the standing of a community, faction, or region in a way that outlasts the arc it happened in — the same standard as a count of [Influence]. Any 3 AP or 5 AP deed is one by default. At Tiers 2 and 3, a character who has earned twice the listed lifetime AP meets the narrative gate automatically. Tiers 4 and 5 require the deed itself.

The route

Accord Tiers

IFoundation1 AP IIInfluence5 AP IIILeadership15 AP IVDominion30 AP VLegacy50 AP

Lifetime AP · each gate is given in full at its own stage

I Stage one

Tier 1 — Foundation

(1 AP).

You begin by earning the trust of small communities.

+4 bonus on Heal checks, anywhere. You may treat deadly wounds as a standard action without a healer's kit, restoring 2 hit points per level of the creature treated. A given creature may be treated this way once per day, and twice per day at Accord Tier 3 or higher.
Treat 10 additional creatures at a time with long-term care, and your Hearth's infirmary works without you. Anyone who spends a full week under its care is cured of one disease or one poison, and at Tier 3 or higher may instead have one effect removed that remove blindness/deafness, remove curse, or lesser restoration would end — no check and no spell slot, but never more than one creature per week.
Your Hearth supplies 50 gp per level in mundane items each week.

II Stage two

Tier 2 — Influence

(5 AP, and a Major Milestone completed).

Your Hearth draws trade wherever it stops.

Your Hearth gains a permanent staff of trained aides: Heal, Craft, and Knowledge checks made with your Hearth receive +4 from aid, and the staff carry on any mundane Craft or Profession project you begin while you are away, at the normal rate and without consuming your downtime. Magic item creation still requires your own time and your own hands.
Many Hands. Once per encounter, in or within one mile of your Hearth, an annex, an institution you founded, or any settlement, camp, or work you have personally aided, 1d4+1 trained hands arrive and act as one unit on your initiative count under your free-action command. Each round they may aid another on one check you or an ally makes (+4, no check required), or interpose, granting one ally within 30 ft. of the unit cover (+4 AC) until your next turn. They have hit points equal to your character level and flee if reduced below half. At Accord Tier 4 or higher, the unit may both aid another and interpose in the same round.
+4 circumstance bonus on Diplomacy checks in any settlement you have aided.
Supplies rise to 100 gp per level each week, and your Hearth counts as a small town for what can be bought.

III Stage three

Tier 3 — Leadership

(15 AP, and a milestone affecting a region).

Factions begin to align with your ideals.

Once per adventure, call in an allied faction's help: an escort, a supply train, safe passage, an introduction, or a work crew.
They Carry You Home. A night's rest with your Hearth heals you as a full day of complete bed rest, removes fatigue, and reduces exhaustion to fatigue; allies with your Hearth gain +2 on saves against disease and poison. Once per adventure, if you would die, you may instead drop to −1 and stabilize. If your Hearth, an annex, an institution you founded, or a region you have aided can plausibly reach you, you are also removed from the encounter and wake a day later with your Hearth or in the nearest settlement you have aided. Otherwise you stabilize where you fall. This costs 3 AP; if your pool is empty the rescue still occurs, and your next level demands one additional count of [Influence].
Supplies rise to 200 gp per level each week, and your Hearth counts as a large town for what can be bought.

IV Stage four

Tier 4 — Dominion

(30 AP, and multiple factions unified or a region transformed).

Entire regions rely on your guidance.

Once per adventure, set a regional undertaking in motion — a road, a treaty, a militia, a granary network. It completes by the end of the following adventure, whether or not the party takes downtime; no more than one may be in progress at a time. A second may be started concurrently by spending 3 AP.
+4 competence bonus on Charisma-based checks with any community you have aided. Any settlement you have aided, and any settlement that has taken in people you aided, treats you as friendly without any interaction: shelter, information, and safe passage are freely given. One standing agent in each such settlement will act on your word in your absence.
Supplies rise to 400 gp per level each week, and your Hearth counts as a small city for what can be bought.

V Stage five

Tier 5 — Legacy

(50 AP, and the fate of a kingdom or nation changed).

Nations move when you ask.

Name an institution — a school, an order, a healers' circuit. It runs without you, grants your Tier 1 benefits anywhere it reaches, and continues after your death.
Once per campaign, call a nation-scale mobilization. Name one: an army of at least ten thousand halts for a full season and will not resume without new cause; every border in one nation opens to you and to anyone traveling under your name for one year; or a population of up to one hundred thousand relocates along your routes, arriving intact. The named effect occurs as stated; the GM adjudicates what follows.

The load

Conditions of carriageWhat the wagons hold

The weekly supply. The weekly supply may be taken as alchemical and consumable goods, as masterwork gear, or as ordinary provisions and materials; unspent supply banks for up to four weeks and no longer. No more than 100 gp per level each week may be taken as alchemical or consumable goods usable in a fight. It cannot be converted to coin or sold, and it cannot supply the material cost of magic item creation.