We plant our dead so that their stories may bloom again.

Core Concept

The Loam-Kindred are the traditionalist, spiritualist faction of the Thanati people. They are the guardians of their species’ ancestral ways, a culture that has been pushed to the brink by a heresy born from within its own ranks. They reject the cold calculus of the Thanatechs, clinging to their ancient Faith that the dead are not a resource to be consumed, but a seed to be nurtured. Their craft is Necro-botany, and their power comes not from machines, but from the sacred, symbiotic cycle of life and death.

Species

• Primary: Thanati
• Adherent: They are deeply suspicious of most outsiders, but may find kinship with factions who share their reverence for the natural world and cyclical existence, such as the Arborians.

Ideology (Faith / Fiction)

• Core Faith: “Life from Death.” They believe that a soul’s journey does not end at death. The Eidos of the deceased is a sacred nutrient, meant to be returned to the soil to become the foundation for new life. To trap a spirit in a machine is, to them, the ultimate blasphemy—an act of eternal imprisonment.
• Core Fiction: “The Myth of the Ghost-Bloom.” Their founding myth tells of the first Loam-Kindred shaman who, grieving for her lost partner, buried their most cherished possession in a simple grave. From that grave grew a unique, bioluminescent flower. When she consumed its petals, she was granted a perfect, final vision of her partner’s happiest memory. This story is the bedrock of their entire culture: memory is not a thing to be stored, but a life to be experienced anew.

Goals & Motivations

• To find and sanctify sites of death, consecrating them as “Soulwood Groves.”
• To protect these sacred sites from the Thanatechs’ “desecration engines.”
• To cultivate new and rarer species of “ghost-flora” by finding unique souls to plant.
• To live in harmony with the great cycle, acting as its caretakers.

Relations with Other Factions

• Thanatechs (Grief-smiths): They are viewed with a mixture of horror and righteous fury. The Loam-Kindred see them as grave-robbing heretics who have traded their souls for cold, dead machines. Their conflict is a holy war for the very definition of their people’s identity.
• Arborians: Deep kinship. They see the Arborians as brothers and sisters of the same faith, even if the Arborians focus only on the “life” half of the sacred cycle.
• The Unbroken: They are seen as the ultimate embodiment of the Thanatech heresy: a people so terrified of the natural cycle that they have encased themselves in tombs of metal and logic. An abomination.

Player Interaction

• Joining the Loam-Kindred is to choose a path of spiritualism, nature, and fierce guardianship. Your gameplay will revolve around ritual, cultivation, and a unique form of bio-alchemy. Your quests will be to perform purification rites on sites “poisoned” by Thanatech machinery, to defend your sacred groves, and to guide the “ghosts” of the dead to their final resting place in your gardens.
• As an Enemy, they are a mysterious and resilient foe, their power subtle, organic, and deeply tied to the very land you fight upon.