Auric

AX.GAT.06.10 - Auric

Supplemental

"My original documentation for this section of the station is more accurate than your current schematics. The Authority updated theirs twice since the expansion. They introduced errors both times. I have not updated mine because the original is still correct."

The Auric were here first. The archaeological record supports this claim, and the Auric do not make it with any particular pride, pride would imply that being here first confers something it has failed to confer. They built the original structure that became Astraeus Terminal. They know this because they remember building it, not from records but from the specific quality of institutional memory that the Auric carry as a biological characteristic: deep, precise, and impossible to fully separate from first-person experience even when the events predate any living individual's lifespan.

They are few. Whether this is a long-term decline, a stable low-population equilibrium, or the terminal phase of a civilization trend that began long before the Terminal existed is a question the Auric discuss among themselves with more nuance than they extend to other species' versions of the same question. What they share with interested outsiders is limited. They are not secretive in the way that implies withholding; they are secretive in the way that implies they've tried to explain things before and found the explanation created more confusion than the ignorance it replaced.

Physically, they are smaller than most other sapients aboard the Terminal, with a build that reads as fragile to species not paying attention. Their skin has a slight metallic quality, not chrome, not mirror, but something that catches light in ways that suggest they are made of material that light doesn't quite agree with. Their eyes are large and pale, adapted for low-light conditions that the Terminal's standard illumination sometimes makes uncomfortable. They sleep in short, frequent intervals rather than one long period, which aligns poorly with most shift schedules and has been the subject of more accommodation requests per capita than any other lineage characteristic.

In the World

Auric presence aboard the Terminal is small, fewer than a hundred individuals, spread across administrative, archival, and advisory roles. They are not a political bloc in the numerical sense. They are a political fact in the structural sense: the station's oldest inhabitants, the ones whose community memory predates every current faction's founding, and the ones who have been present for events that other factions' institutional records describe inaccurately.

This makes the Auric simultaneously important and inconvenient. Faction leadership that wants to appeal to historical precedent tends to want Auric confirmation of their version of history. Faction leadership that has built its legitimacy on a particular historical narrative tends to want the Auric to stay quiet. Both of these orientations produce complicated dynamics that individual Auric navigate with varying degrees of patience. The most senior Auric community members have generally landed on a position of deliberate strategic availability: they will answer direct questions with accurate answers, but they will not volunteer corrections that nobody asked for.

The question of the Terminal's original purpose, what the Auric built it for before other species arrived, is not something the Auric address publicly. Multiple factions have attempted to access Auric memory records about the station's origin. The community has not declined these requests directly; they have described the information as in context, meaning that sharing the original purpose without sharing the full context of what that purpose entailed would create a worse problem than the current ambiguity. Nobody has yet gotten the full context. Nobody is sure whether this is because the Auric are protecting something or because the full context genuinely takes longer than anyone has been willing to commit to.

Lineage Mechanics

Health Modifier: −1 (Applied at character creation and each time Fortitude is increased through XP advancement.)

Design Note: The only lineage in the catalog with a negative Health Modifier. This is correct and intentional, the Auric's value is in their knowledge perks and long-term mechanical ceiling, not physical durability. Players who choose Auric for frontline combat are making an informed tradeoff. The −1 is not punishing; it is accurate to the lineage's nature. An Auric who invests heavily in Body and Fortitude can compensate.

Cultural Talent: Lore 1D This die is free, it does not come from the Talent generation budget. Auric Lore is not researched, it is accessed. The distinction is experiential rather than mechanical, but it shapes how Auric characters relate to knowledge. Common Foci: Station History, Xenobiology, Faction Politics, Structural Engineering.

Inherited Perks

Deep Archive | Lineage Memory

The Auric biological memory architecture encodes institutional and historical knowledge at a depth that functions differently from learned knowledge. They do not recall information; they access it, with a quality of presence that can feel like remembering something that happened to them personally even when they know it predates them.

Effect: Once per scene, the Auric may declare knowledge of one specific fact about
        a location, organization, species, or historical event they are currently
        encountering. This fact must be genuine historical or institutional
        information, the GM provides a true piece of information that the
        character's lineage memory contains.

        The information must relate to something old enough for the Auric
        institutional memory to hold, current events, recent developments,
        and information from the last decade are outside the scope of this perk.
        Historical context, founding records, original design specifications,
        lineage histories, and the origins of factions older than approximately
        fifty years all qualify.

        The Auric gains +2D to all Lore rolls made to recall or research
        historical information (pre-dating fifty years before current session).
        For information about the Astraeus Terminal specifically, there is no
        time minimum, the Auric's lineage built it.

Activation: Primary Action (declaration, 1× per scene); Passive (+2D bonus on
            qualifying Lore rolls)
Scope: Self
Recovery: Per scene (declaration)
Genre Note: The declaration mechanic requires GM cooperation, the player
            says "I know something about this" and the GM provides accurate
            information consistent with the setting's established facts.
            GMs should treat this generously: if the Auric wants to know
            something about a faction's founding or a location's original
            purpose, give them something real and useful. The perk is most
            interesting when the historical information creates a present-tense
            complication, not when it simply resolves ambiguity cleanly.

Signal Reading | Residual Sense

The Auric's connection to their accumulated institutional memory includes a sensitivity to the electromagnetic and structural residue of past events in physical spaces. They can read a location's history through what it has retained.

Effect: At Touch range, the Auric may attempt to read the residual electromagnetic
        and material signature of a location or object to gain impressions of
        significant events that occurred there. This requires a Wit + Attunement
        roll (Threshold 2) and a full minute of contact and concentration.

        On a success, the GM provides one impression from the location's history,
        a sensory fragment rather than a recording: the emotional tenor of a
        significant event, a sound or image component, the sense of how many
        people were present. Multiple successes provide additional fragments
        (one per success beyond the first). Failures provide nothing; critical
        failures provide a fragment that is real but ambiguous enough to
        potentially mislead.

        Signal Reading is most effective in locations with Auric history; it
        will always find something useful in areas of the Terminal that date
        from original construction. In recently built or heavily modified areas,
        the historical signal is weaker.

Activation: Primary Action (roll + full-minute contact)
Scope: Touch
Recovery: N/A (may be attempted multiple times, but each attempt requires
          a full minute of contact)
Genre Note: Signal Reading is an investigation tool, not a complete historical
            record. The impressions are real but fragmentary; they create
            questions as often as they answer them. GMs should use them to
            seed investigation threads rather than resolve them. A clear
            impression from a significant event is most interesting when
            it raises a new question alongside the fact it provides.

Power Access

Auric have no built-in Power Access at character creation. Their lineage memory and signal sensitivity are biological rather than tradition-based. However, as the Auric's full perceptual capacity develops, a process that, in biological terms, continues throughout their lifespan, dormant faculties sometimes surface. Progression Track Stages can unlock access to Psionics or Void Attunement as the Auric's sensitivity deepens with experience.

Progression Track unlocks (available at Stage 2 or Stage 3, based on Profession):
 , Psionics (Resonance) at 1D: The Auric's deep perceptual access expands
    from historical residue into present-state awareness.
 , Void Attunement (Resonance) at 1D: The Auric's connection to the Terminal's
    original relationship to the nebula provides an existing channel.

These are mutually exclusive, an Auric may unlock one tradition via this
mechanism, not both. Standard multiple-tradition restrictions apply thereafter.

Attribute and Talent Caps

Standard caps apply. No cap increases at lineage level.

Context	Maximum Value
Attributes	5D
Talents	5D
Foci	3D

Design Note: The Auric's ceiling is in their knowledge perks and Progression Track unlocks, not stat caps. An Auric at 5D Wit with Deep Archive, Signal Reading, and a developed Lore tree is an extraordinary information character, expensive to build, distinctively capable at its peak.

Roleplaying the Auric

The Weight of Accumulated Time

The Auric's lineage memory is both a resource and a burden. They carry more history than any current individual has lived through, and the experience of knowing what was here before, what the Terminal was supposed to be, and watching it become something different is not neutral. Players should think about how their character processes this, whether they're philosophical about it, quietly grieving, strategically patient, or something they haven't fully resolved.

What They Know and What They Say

Auric characters have a complicated relationship to information disclosure. They know things that matter and have learned, often through experience, that sharing those things without the full context creates problems. Players should think about when their character shares information freely, when they share carefully, and when they decline, and what the character's reasoning is in each case.

Being Small and Fragile in a Dangerous Place

The −1 Health Modifier is real. Auric players should plan for survivability, through positioning, through cover, through allies, through knowing when not to fight. An Auric who enters melee with a Gorrathi is making a bad decision. An Auric who doesn't need to because they've already resolved the situation through information is playing their lineage correctly.

GM Notes

Deep Archive in play: Work with players before and during the campaign to establish what the Auric's lineage memory holds about your specific setting. The Terminal's history is the richest source, but the perk applies more broadly. Set clear expectations: the memory holds what was, not what is. Recent events aren't in the archive. The Auric's knowledge of a faction's current leadership is inference based on historical pattern; their knowledge of the faction's founding is direct.

Signal Reading in investigation: This is the Auric's investigative signature. Use it to give them information in scenes where no one else gets information, the moment after a battle in an Auric-built corridor where the character touches the wall and gets a sense of who else has been here and what they felt. Keep the impressions real but fragmentary; the perk should generate leads, not close cases.

The original purpose question: The Terminal's original purpose is deliberate GM territory, defined by you for your campaign, not by this file. The Auric community's strategic ambiguity about it is designed to give GMs flexibility. When and whether the original purpose becomes a campaign element, what it was, and what the Auric community knows about it are all yours to determine. The perk supports discovery; you control what is discovered.

Quick Reference

Lineage Element	Value / Details
Health Modifier	−1
Cultural Talent	Lore 1D (free; common Foci: Station History, Xenobiology, Faction Politics, Structural Engineering)
Inherited Perk 1	Deep Archive, one true historical fact declaration 1×/scene; +2D Lore on pre-50-year historical info (no minimum for Terminal history)
Inherited Perk 2	Signal Reading, Wit + Attunement Th2, Touch, 1 min; impressions of past events from physical contact; most effective in original-construction areas
Power Access	None at creation; Psionics OR Void Attunement unlockable at Stage 2 or 3 via Progression Track
Cap Increases	None, standard caps apply