Dust Background

The Dead


You are a member of the Dust. Your faction holds that this world is one great afterlife, that we are all truly dead and that only by accepting that death can we move on to whatever lays beyond.

Skill Proficiencies: History, Medicine
Tool Proficiency: Funerary Kit, Historian’s Tools
Equipment: Historian’s Tools, Funerary Kit, a flask of holy water, a set of common clothes including a faction badge sewn into them, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: One of the Dead

Your membership in the Dust grants you access to the Mortuary, in the Hive, where Sigil’s dead are processed. This includes access to the Dust’s dormitories, its armory, the records of the dead, the catacombs beneath Sigil, and to the faction library with its tomes on death, undead, burial practices, and similar topics. You may also earn a Poor living as a corpse-collector or mortuary aid there. You also know of a portal that leads to the Fortress of the Soul on the Negative Energy Plane, and have a key to that portal.

Inspiration: Dead Truce

If you gain a point of Inspiration for adhering to your faction philosophy, you may use it to turn an undead creature from Hostile to Indifferent. The creature may revert back to Hostile based on your subsequent actions, of course.

Activities that you might gain Inspiration for may include

  • Trying to parley with intelligent undead. Controlling or dominating undead automatons rather than destroying them.
  • Requesting a reason to get involved in a mission beyond the emotional.
  • Willingly failing a save against energy drain.

Suggested Characteristics

The Dust are dispassionate people, unconcerned with the vagaries of emotion, but they cling tightly to the ideals that they have. Their bonds tend to be the things they want to be rid of, in the end.

Dust Membership


The Dust attract the quiet and the introspective. The purging of emotion and attachment is an important part of the Dust philosophy, so it attracts classes that share the appreciation for logic over feeling. Popular classes include cold, calculating fighters, dispassionate, lonely rangers, quiet, cautious rogues, rutheless, effective warlocks, and academic, distant wizards. Of particular note are Dust monks, many of whom are dedicated to the Way of the Dead, which focuses on changing a mortal into an undead creature.

Unusual classes include barbarians (the rage trait is a use of emotions), bards (inspiration's emotional component is considered false), and clerics and paladins (devotion to a god or ideals requires powerful emotional dedication). Rare, but still possible, include druids and sorcerers, who tend to be too devoted to life, but who may purge that and gain acceptance.