1. Organizations

Condors

Companies

The Condors are one of the oldest and most influential merchant organizations in recorded history, with roots stretching back roughly 2,500 years. Their power has risen and fallen across eras: Sometimes operating as little more than wandering traders and other times rivaling the authority of kings. The Condors have endured through adaptability, secrecy, and an unmatched talent for embedding themselves into the foundations of civilization.

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Condor Strinklan and the Scholar-Caravan

The organization traces its founding to Condor Strinklan, a legendary scholar-traveler remembered as much for his curiosity as for his quiet ambition. Strinklan journeyed across nearly all known lands, compiling detailed travel records that are still referenced by historians, cartographers, and explorers. Many modern trade routes were first documented in his writings, and several “lost” settlements were rediscovered centuries later using fragments of his journals - Some of the most widely distributed books on the continent.


During these travels, Strinklan created two innovations that permanently shaped the world:
  • A unified calendar, designed to simplify long-distance trade and recordkeeping.
  • Inklan, a constructed language built to be learned quickly by almost anyone, regardless of native tongue. Inklan became the trade language of the world, and even now remains the most common shared speech in ports, markets, and diplomatic halls.

Originally, Strinklan traveled with a small band of scribes, translators, and teachers who sold basic goods, maps, and educational materials to fund their expeditions. This group became the first Condors: half scholars, half merchants, and fully devoted to the belief that knowledge was the most valuable currency of all.
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The Condor's Evolution

Over the centuries, the Condors shifted from a traveling scholarly caravan into a sprawling organization woven into nearly every major settlement. Their operations expanded far beyond simple trade. At various points in history, the Condors have acted as:
    •    Bankers and moneylenders, offering secure vaulting, loans, and promissory notes accepted across continents.
    •    Information brokers, trading rumors, secrets, political intelligence, and blackmail-worthy knowledge.
    •    Cartographers and navigators, often controlling the most accurate maps in existence.
    •    Trade mediators, negotiating treaties between hostile cities when no ruler trusted the other.
    •    Artifact dealers, quietly moving relics from ruins into private hands.
    •    Courier networks, delivering messages faster than most governments could manage.
    •    Neutral suppliers in wartime, selling to both sides while claiming strict impartiality.
    •    Cultural archivists, collecting songs, folklore, religious texts, and genealogies for their hidden libraries.

In some eras, Condor vaults served as the closest thing the world had to a stable financial system. In others, they were persecuted as spies and manipulators, blamed for plagues, assassinations, or economic collapse whenever nations needed a scapegoat.

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Recruitment Tradition

The Condors are infamous not only for their longevity, but for their unsettling methods of survival.

To maintain their numbers and ensure a steady supply of trained members, the Condors practiced an unusual and controversial tradition: in desperate regions, they would sometimes offer struggling families the choice to trade away an unborn child in exchange for supplies, coin, or protection. These children were taken and raised within Condor enclaves, educated in Inklan, mathematics, negotiation, and recordkeeping.

A grim saying persists in rural villages:
“If the Condors feed you through winter, they’ll own your spring.”
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Influence on Society

In modern times, Condor enclaves are rarely flashy, but they are almost always found in trade districts, harbor cities, and crossroads towns. They often operate as a shadow infrastructure behind everyday life, maintaining:
    •    standardized weights and measures
    •    currency exchange services
    •    emergency grain reserves
    •    travel documentation
    •    maritime insurance
    •    market arbitration courts
    •    safehouses for merchants and diplomats
    •    Condor Seals used to certify authentic goods

Their neutrality is their greatest weapon. Kings may hate them, priests may condemn them, and revolutionaries may threaten them, but everyone eventually needs their networks.
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Offshoot Organizations

Unknown

Among the Condors’ most famous branches are the Canaries, an offshoot faction specializing in dungeoneering and ruin-delving. Where Condors trade in civilization, Canaries trade in the forgotten places beneath it.

The Canaries are known for retrieving:
    •    ancient coins and artifacts
    •    lost texts and forbidden spellcraft
    •    rare minerals and monster components
    •    relic-weapons from collapsed empires
    •    maps of sealed ruins and undercities

They are called Canaries because they were the first sent into the dark like the birds miners use to detect poisoned air. Most Canaries do not survive long, but those who do become frighteningly capable.
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Scattered Historical Bits and Legends

Over the centuries, countless small stories have attached themselves to the Condors. Here are a few:
  • During the Bronze Coast Collapse, Condor bankers allegedly prevented total economic ruin by issuing emergency promissory currency backed by grain stores.
  • The Treaty of Nine Lanterns, which ended a century-long war, was negotiated entirely inside a Condor vault because no king trusted another enough to meet anywhere else.
  • A persistent myth claims that Strinklan’s original travel journals were written in a third language, older than Inklan, which no one can translate.
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Condors in the Current Era

In the current era, the Condors remain a recognizable presence across the known world, but they are no longer the polished, continents-spanning institution of legend. As civilization has withered into something closer to a new dark age, the Condors have become leaner, hungrier, and far more desperate. Their caravans still arrive, their ledgers still circulate, and their seal is still respected in many places… but the organization now feels less like a pillar of society and more like a scavenger bird circling a dying empire.


Where once the Condors thrived in stable cities and thriving ports, they now cling to fractured trade routes, ruined roads, and half-starved settlements. They are still everywhere, but they are everywhere in the way rats are everywhere: surviving.

The Condors no longer possess the near-mythic unity they once did. Their central authority has fractured, and many Condor houses operate as independent “wings,” loosely aligned under the old name. Some remain honorable traders and archivists. Others have become ruthless opportunists who hide behind tradition.

In modern society, the Condors now commonly serve as:
    •    caravan masters running guarded supply trains through bandit lands
    •    grain-hoarders and ration brokers, controlling food access during harsh winters
    •    debt collectors, enforcing loans with muscle rather than contracts
    •    black-market traders, dealing in relics, contraband, and stolen heirlooms
    •    fence networks, quietly laundering goods taken from ruins or battlefields
    •    mercenary financiers, funding militias in exchange for future “rights” to land or mines
    •    refugee recruiters, offering “work contracts” that resemble indenture
    •    salvage brokers, buying scrap, metal, and old-world artifacts from scavengers

Their old reputation as neutral scholars has decayed. In many regions, they are now viewed as necessary parasites - useful in the same way a leech is useful: unpleasant, but sometimes the only thing that keeps the sickness from spreading.


Despite all this, the Condors endure.



Their caravans still roll through ruined roads. Their traders still set up stalls in half-burned market squares. Their scribes still tally debts in neat Inklan script while wolves howl outside city walls.



They are weaker than they were.

But they are also more desperate.



And desperate Condors are often at their most dangerous - because in a world that is starving, the Condors are no longer merely merchants.



They are predators of opportunity, living off the dying remnants of civilization, and waiting for the day the world becomes stable enough for them to rebuild their empire of ink, coin, and contracts.
April 10th, 2026

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