Nasrin
Etymology: Nasrin is Persian for "wild rose." Fully mortal people descended from a single ancestor's pact with a Jinn — not a bloodline curse, not a hybrid species, not half-anything. Touched by something other, not made of it.
Population: Uncommon, not rare. Roughly 3–4% of Dar Ilm al-Zakir's population — enough to be an unremarkable sight in any Scholar Nation city, not enough to be a demographic anyone takes for granted. Nasrin are citizens of other nations too, exactly as any Scholar Nation-descended family might emigrate or settle elsewhere; they're simply much thinner on the ground away from Dar Ilm al-Zakir, under 1% of the population anywhere else. Seeing a Nasrin outside the Scholar Nation is notable in a way seeing one inside it isn't.
Homeland — Scholar Nation adjacent: Emerged from within Dar Ilm al-Zakir's Compact-summoning tradition and remain concentrated there. Nasrin are Scholar Nation citizens, not a walled-off enclave — but see Origin, below: the lineage-level pact renewal implies at least some standing practice or institution that keeps the bargain alive, which is more organization than "just another Compact-adjacent family" suggests. How visible or formal that institution is hasn't been decided.
Body¶
Eyes: Catch light oddly — not glowing, not colored unnaturally, just faintly wrong in a way that's hard to place until you've seen a few.
Hair: Moves without wind. Constant, low, involuntary — a tell as recognizable as the eyes once you know to look for it.
Touch: Faint warmth beyond normal body heat.
In darkness: Slight luminescence at the edges — skin, hair, the rim of the eyes. Subtle enough to miss in daylight, unmistakable in a dark room.
None of this is magic in the spell-effect sense. It doesn't turn off, it isn't cast, and a Nasrin can't suppress it any more than a human can stop having a pulse. It's just what a bloodline carries forward from one ancestor's pact with a Jinn — kept alive, generation after generation, by the line's periodic renewal of it. See Origin, below.
Origin — the founding pact¶
The entire race traces back to one ancestor who struck a single personal pact with a Jinn. Not a diffuse cultural drift, not "a family that does a lot of Compact work" — one specific bargain, one specific ancestor, one specific Jinn, generations back, and every Nasrin alive today descends from that founding line. Everything downstream — the eyes, the hair, the warmth, the glow, the Tempest Sigil itself — is what that original pact left on the bloodline.
The pact doesn't just sit there. It's periodically renewed at the family or lineage level — not by every individual Nasrin personally, but by whoever is currently acting as their branch's bargainer, the same way a Sigil house's leadership might renegotiate standing terms rather than leaving every member to fend for themselves. A Nasrin PC typically becomes their own branch's bargainer in their turn: see The Renewal Rite, below. Generations of intermarriage and spread mean the original line has long since branched into many families renewing independently rather than one central authority acting for the whole race — and not every branch still deals with the same kind of Jinn the founder did. See Patron Drift, below.
Jinn, for clarity: genie-analog spirits in the Arabian Nights sense — bound to elements or places, capable of real power, the kind of entity whose favor is worth generations of careful bargaining to keep. This is a baseline definition for the setting generally, not just for Nasrin origins; no dedicated Jinn write-up exists elsewhere yet, so this page is currently the closest thing to one. The founder bargained with a Jann — folklore's most human-friendly jinn-kind, the one type actually described as open-minded toward mortals rather than too proud, too unruly, or too hostile to hold a bargain across generations. That's the in-fiction reason this particular pact took root when (as far as anyone knows) no comparable Ifrit, Marid, or Ghoul bargain ever has. See Jinn Domains, below, for the full taxonomy and what each kind means for a branch that bargains with one.
The Scholar Nation's Compact tradition — academic, negotiated, never summon what you haven't researched — is the wider context this all sits inside, and it's why Jinn treat Nasrin as distant cousins rather than marks: a Nasrin practitioner is bargaining from inside a relationship that's already generations deep, not opening cold.
Family & Bloodline¶
Breeds true — not a random expression. A Nasrin isn't a chance mutation that might turn up anywhere in a Scholar Nation bloodline; it's an inherited trait carried by identifiable families with identifiable relatives, traceable the way any real ancestry is. Anyone writing or playing a Nasrin should think in terms of actual parents, siblings, cousins, and a family tree — not "occasionally a Compact-adjacent family produces one."
Cross-breeding exists, but never produces a half-anything. Nasrin can have children with humans, elves, changelings, and catfolk (at minimum — other pairings are a GM call). Whatever the pairing, the child resolves fully one way or the other: either the Nasrin traits take, and the child is Nasrin — eyes, hair, warmth, glow, the full bloodline inheritance — or they don't take, and the child is fully whatever the other parent's race is, with nothing left over. A Nasrin-Catfolk child can look Catfolk — fur, ears, tail — and still be Nasrin outright, if the bloodline expresses; the Catfolk shape is cosmetic layering on top of a Nasrin who gets treated, mechanically and socially, as Nasrin. Conversely, a child the bloodline skips is just Catfolk, full stop — not a quiet carrier. It doesn't skip generations either: if a line doesn't express Nasrin once, none of its descendants suddenly will later. Once it's gone from a branch, it's gone.
This means the population isn't static. Because the trait breeds true rather than diluting, and because it can take root through four other lineages' worth of intermarriage, Dar Ilm al-Zakir's Nasrin share of the population should drift slowly upward over generations rather than holding at a flat 3–4% forever, all else being equal. That's worth remembering as a background fact of the setting's slow demographic drift, not something that needs to show up in any given session.
A hook worth keeping in your back pocket, not confirming outright: a bloodline that only ever expands and never dilutes, seeded from a single founding pact, is exactly the shape a patient Jinn's long game would take if the point was never one bargain but a slow claim on every corner of mortal ancestry it could reach. Nothing here says that's actually the founder Jann's intent — it's the kind of theory a paranoid Scholar Nation academic might publish and get laughed out of a symposium for, right up until it turns out to be true. Left deliberately unresolved; a good thing to let a player or NPC voice as suspicion rather than settle as lore.
A live wire with the Blood cult, more than for any other Scholar Nation citizen. The Blood cult's central claim — that true divinity is latent within every mortal's bloodline, not something that has to come from a god — is abstract theology for most people and uncomfortably literal for a Nasrin: here is a bloodline that visibly, undeniably carries real power, generation after generation, with the evidence written into the eyes and the hair and the dark-edge glow. The Religion document already lists "Sigil-bearing individuals questioning why their bloodline carries power that surviving gods can no longer fully explain" among who the cult attracts — a Nasrin fits that description before a cult recruiter even opens their mouth. The Compact tradition's own answer is different in kind — a Jinn isn't a god, and the power is negotiated, not innate — but that's a distinction a cult theologian has an easy rebuttal for, and it's exactly the kind of pressure that makes an individual Nasrin's relationship to their own bloodline a live question rather than a settled one. Worth playing as a real pull on some Nasrin NPCs and PCs, not just background color: the cult has an unusually strong pitch to make here, and doesn't have to reach far to make it.
Social standing: envied outsiders, not a caste. Nasrin aren't a nobility and shouldn't read as one — there's no formal rank tied to the bloodline. What they do have is a visible, undeniable connection to real power, and that reads differently depending on who's looking. Someone with wealth and standing of their own tends to treat a Nasrin as an oddity — a curiosity, a colleague with an unusual family history. Someone with little of either is more likely to see a family that has something worth wanting: protection, luck, a hedge against the world that they don't have. That envy is quiet more often than it's hostile, but it's there, and it's the more interesting reaction to play at the table than blanket suspicion or blanket reverence.
Jinn Domains¶
Five jinn-kinds, drawn from real folklore rather than invented from scratch, each naming a distinct patron a branch's bargain can run through. Named after the jinn-kind rather than the raw element on purpose — "my blood answers to a Marid" is a claim about a relationship, not a claim to be wielding water the way a Primal caster does. See Patron Drift, below, for how a branch ends up bonded to one over another.
| Jinn-kind | Folklore basis | What the bargain protects against |
|---|---|---|
| Jann | Desert whirlwinds, shapeshifters, notably open-minded toward mortals — the founder's own kind | Wind and lightning |
| Ifrit | Smokeless flame, proud, dwells in ruins and the underworld | Fire |
| Marid | The sea — folklore's most powerful and least biddable jinn-kind | Cold and pressure |
| Ghoul | Graveyards and deserts, flesh-eating, disease-ridden | Poison and disease |
| Sila | Shapeshifting, deceptive, usually depicted as female | Charm and compulsion |
On Marid, deliberately: folklore makes them the most powerful and hardest to bind, and it would be a mistake to let that translate into the strongest mechanical package — a player isn't the one doing the binding, an ancestor did, so a stronger kit would just make Marid the obvious pick with no in-fiction cost attached. Marid's protection is trimmed to cold and pressure only — no blanket "safe in water" clause — specifically so it sits at the same weight as the other four. "Hardest to bind" stays a fact about how dramatic that branch's founding story gets to be, not a mechanical edge.
Sila is structurally different from the other four — it protects against being magically overridden rather than being hurt, so its Tier 1/2 (below) work on saves and checks rather than damage rolls. Deliberately narrow to charm and compulsion, not mundane deception: in a setting built around cold-war-style intrigue, "always know when you're being lied to" would be too strong a power to hand a single ancestry, and it would flatten a lot of scenes that are supposed to run on the PCs' own judgment. Sila's protection is about not being magically bent to someone else's will — it says nothing about ordinary lies, cons, or bluffs.
Ghoul branches have a natural pull toward the Unbound. A patron rooted in graveyards, disease, and the flesh-eating dead sits close enough to the Unbound school's territory (necromancy, the dead, body-horror curses like Curse of Tumefaction — see Spells and Arts, Unbound) that a Ghoul-bonded family being more tolerant of, or occasionally producing, an Unbound practitioner reads as coherent rather than a strange mashup. Not automatic or required — plenty of Ghoul-bonded Nasrin never go near necromancy — but it's the one domain where a PC's patron and a forbidden-magic character concept can share a single, unforced justification instead of needing two unrelated backstories stapled together.
The Renewal Rite¶
Every Nasrin PC is expected to perform the renewal on their branch's behalf before reaching 5th level — the story beat where they stop being a bystander to their family's bargain and become the one who carries it. It reads as a coming-of-age rite as much as a magical obligation.
One renewal per Nasrin, full stop. A single performance of the rite covers the whole branch until that bargainer is no longer the one carrying it — it isn't repeated on a cycle, and it isn't split across a lifetime. Most Nasrin never do this at all; it's ordinary to live and die under a bargain someone else in the family renewed. What makes a PC different is that player characters are, by definition, exceptional — the kind of Nasrin a branch actually calls on to stand up and renew, rather than someone who quietly benefits from a renewal an elder handled decades ago.
Avoidance and lapses — the escalation ladder. This covers every flavor of the same underlying problem: two players splitting one sacrifice between sibling or cousin PCs, a PC who just keeps putting the rite off, or a branch that's gone a generation or more without anyone renewing at all. None of these are rules-as-written gaps — they're all a mortal (or a family) trying to get the bargain's benefit without paying the bargain's price, and a Jinn worth its salt notices. The GM's response is the same ladder regardless of which flavor of avoidance is in play:
- Fiction first. A Jinn bargaining with an "exceptional" mortal is bargaining with an individual claim to that exceptionalism, not a group discount, and a bargain left unrenewed doesn't just sit quietly — the branch's luck sours, small things go wrong, omens turn unfriendly. Start here: refuse a shared sacrifice's terms outright, or let a lapsing branch feel the bargain fraying at the edges. Nothing mechanical yet.
- Escalate in-fiction. If the avoidance continues, the consequences get harder to ignore — the kind of trouble that specifically targets what the family cares about, not random misfortune. The point is to make it unmistakable that the patron has noticed and is losing patience, without yet touching the character sheet.
- Mechanical loss, as backstop. If the table pushes past escalating in-fiction pressure and the avoidance still stands, this is where it's fair to actually pull Tier 1/2 (or a held Sigil) from whoever hasn't paid their real due. This should read as the bargain finally lapsing, not as a punishment sprung with no warning.
- Drastic action against the family, as last resort. Reserved for a PC who shrugs off both story consequences and the loss of their own abilities — at that point the patron stops negotiating with the individual and acts against the branch directly. This is a serious plot beat, not a rules trigger to reach for casually, and it should only land after steps 1–3 have visibly failed to get through.
The throughline: story consequences come first and do most of the work; losing the ability is an acceptable, expected backstop, not a first move; and the patron going after the family is the last rung on the ladder, used only once it's clear nothing softer will land.
Who oversees it. Not the bargainer alone in a room — every branch has someone who knows how to guide a renewal, and that role is itself hereditary, passed down inside the family rather than held by any outside institution. Call it a family officiant: the one relative who was taught the specifics of how the rite is actually run, the way a trade or a family business gets handed down rather than taught in a classroom. The officiant and the bargainer aren't automatically the same person — most of the time the officiant is an elder guiding a younger relative through their first (and only) renewal — but the two roles can land on the same person: the relative being groomed to inherit the officiant's knowledge is sometimes exactly the one the family recognizes as its next "exceptional" Nasrin, the one who'll eventually need to renew in their own right. For a PC, assume the officiant role is someone else's job. Learning to run the rite is a specialist competency in its own right, and it's not the kind of thing a player is likely to spend build resources on when the character only ever needs to be renewed once, personally — so absent a player specifically wanting to build toward it, the family officiant is an NPC relative, and the PC is simply the one making the sacrifice. This is a mentor relationship, not an authority a PC has to get past — there's no reason to make the officiant an obstacle or a source of conflict; the drama of the rite comes from the sacrifice itself, not from someone standing between the PC and permission to perform it.
It costs something real. No renewal goes through on a token gesture — a lock of hair or a drop of blood doesn't satisfy a Jinn twice over. The baseline, required sacrifice is a genuine personal cost: a treasured possession, a standing debt taken on, a vow that binds the character to something going forward. There's no fixed sp price on the minimum — it's a GM judgment call keyed to what the sacrifice actually costs that character, not a shopping-list line item. What satisfying the bare minimum grants:
Tier 1 — Resistance. Against your branch's bonded domain (see Jinn Domains, above), roll twice and take whichever result favors you — the lower roll on damage, the higher roll on a save. For Sila specifically, this means rolling twice on any save or check made to resist being charmed or magically compelled — mundane lies and cons aren't covered; see the note under Jinn Domains. Always on, no action required, doesn't expire.
Going further — the exceptional sacrifice. A player can offer something well beyond the minimum: a magic item of real power, surrendered outright. Working number — 10,000 sp. Checked against the WWN deluxe magic-item-creation cost table: the figure holds up, if anything landing slightly on the low side for what it's meant to represent, so it's staying as the working number rather than moving. Treat it as confirmed, not gospel — still fine to nudge up in play if it turns out too easy to hit.
Tier 2 — Command. Once per day, fully negate a single instance of your branch's bonded domain outright — one hit of the resisted damage, or one charm/compulsion effect for Sila — in addition to keeping Tier 1's reroll for anything that isn't fully negated. Capped at once per day on purpose — an always-on immunity is the kind of thing that quietly breaks whatever adventure happens to lean on that domain, and "sometimes it just doesn't touch you" reads as more uncanny than "it never can."
This sits alongside the Tempest Sigil below rather than replacing it — a Nasrin who never takes the Tempest Ancestry Sigil at all still goes through the Renewal Rite, and a Sigil-bearing Nasrin gets both.
Patron Drift¶
Not every branch still deals with a Jann. Over enough generations, some families have let the founder's bargain lapse and struck new ones — with a different jinn-kind, for reasons that make for good campaign material on their own: the original Jann grew distant, a marriage brought a family into someone else's standing bargain, a branch fled disgrace and needed new patronage, or a better deal was simply on the table. This is deliberately not too messy to run:
- The Renewal Rite's bonded domain is a branch-level fact, set by whichever jinn-kind that branch currently answers to (see Jinn Domains, above). It changes what Tier 1 and Tier 2 protect against, nothing else.
- The Tempest Sigil is Jann-only. Only a branch currently bonded to a Jann is eligible to take it — the founder's own kind, and the only one the race-wide Sigil ever traced to. A branch that drifts to Ifrit, Marid, Ghoul, or Sila loses Tempest eligibility going forward; drifting back to a Jann restores it. This gives drift a real cost instead of being a pure sidegrade, and it's a clean answer to "why doesn't every Nasrin just pick whichever domain is best" — the Sigil itself is the reason most branches never leave Jann in the first place.
- This includes existing Sigil-bearers, retroactively. A PC who already took the Tempest Sigil and then chooses to drift their branch away from Jann loses it — the character keeps nothing on a technicality of timing. It's a real cost attached to a real choice: the player is the one deciding to drift, so the loss lands on them, and the GM should look for a way to make the fallout land in the story rather than just subtracting a line from the character sheet — a new patron's own gift, a scene that reckons with what was given up, something that makes the trade feel like a trade rather than a tax.
- A switch should be rare and dramatic, not a reflavor a player picks off a menu — breaking with one Jinn and being accepted by another is a plot-level event with real in-fiction cost and consequence, not a free character-build choice.
- The universal Body traits (the eyes, the hair, the warmth, the glow) don't change with a branch's domain — those come from being Jinn-touched at all, not from which jinn-kind currently holds the branch's pact. A GM who wants texture could let the flavor of those traits shift with the bonded domain (an Ifrit-bonded branch's warmth running hotter, a Marid-bonded branch's hair drifting like it's underwater) without changing the mechanics — a nice-to-have, not a requirement.
The Tempest Sigil¶
Race: Jinn-touched (Nasrin) Domain: Weather, lightning
Minor — Always know current weather conditions and predict weather accurately up to 24 hours ahead. +1 to saves against weather effects including wind, lightning, and temperature extremes.
Lesser — Gain electricity resistance equal to your level. Gain a level-appropriate bonus to saves against wind effects and to checks for enduring hot or cold weather environments.
Greater — Gain access to the Control Weather ritual. Can cast it in 2 hours at half character level effect, or spend the normal full day to cast at full character level. No additional components required beyond the Sigil itself.
House notes: Inherited rather than learned — passive awareness first, then resistance, then command, the same progression as the bloodline's other inherited traits. Pairs thematically with the Hearth Sigil: shelter versus storm, comfort versus fury. Formerly listed navigation as part of its domain; that's fully Tide's territory now — Tempest reads and endures the sky and sea from the outside, Tide is inside the hull. See Sigil Houses document for the full house-by-house context.
Eligibility: only a Jann-bonded branch can take this Sigil — see Patron Drift, above. It's the fixed inheritance from the founder's own Jann bargain, not a general racial birthright, which is why a branch that drifts to another jinn-kind forfeits it.
Culture & Daily Life¶
Deliberately not a distinct subculture. Nasrin are Scholar Nation people first — the pact is a family fact layered on top of an ordinary Dar Ilm al-Zakir life, not a separate society running in parallel to it. A Nasrin household looks like a Scholar Nation household; the difference shows up in a couple of specific places, not as a wall-to-wall different way of living.
Family matters more to a Nasrin than it does to most people, and the Renewal Rite is why. The whole bloodline's standing with its patron rides on whoever's currently carrying the bargain, which means a relative doing exceptionally well is genuinely good for everyone bearing the same traits, and a relative in serious trouble is a real liability to the family's own connection, not just a personal misfortune. That gives Nasrin families a concrete reason — not just sentiment — to prop each other up: keeping a struggling cousin out of real trouble, quietly covering for a relative's mistakes, throwing real resources behind whoever's about to do something that reflects on the whole branch. The one thing this doesn't turn into is holding anyone back — a family invested in its own standing wants its most capable members excelling, not staying small and safe, so the pressure runs toward supporting ambition rather than containing it.
That shows up as an unusually full calendar of family occasions. Big birthdays, weddings, funerals, and whatever excuse a family can find for a standing regular gathering — a weekly dinner, a monthly get-together — sit alongside a set of milestones that read as genuinely significant rather than just nice to have: a coming-of-age event in the young-teen years, then markers at 30 and 50, each treated with real weight. None of this is a rite with mechanical teeth the way the Renewal is — it's cultural, not magical — but a table should feel that a Nasrin family takes its gatherings seriously in a way that tracks with how seriously it takes its bargain.
Two recurring observances, not a daily one. Nothing about being Nasrin is a ritual-of-the-day thing — the bloodline doesn't ask for upkeep, only for renewal once in a bargainer's life. What it does carry is a twice-yearly rhythm: - A personal observance tied to the branch's own bargain, falling near the current bargainer's birthday (the day before or after reads better than the day itself — a birthday that's also the pact-day risks flattening both). Family-scale, private, the kind of thing an outsider wouldn't necessarily know was happening. - Founder's Day — race-wide, public, the one day even Nasrin who've never met each other share, commemorating the original pact rather than any one branch's renewal of it. This is the better of the two to build a scene, a festival, or a plot hook around, since it's the one Nasrin custom that isn't branch-private.
Work that leans on the resistance. Not a caste system, just a tendency — branches drift toward the jobs where their protection is a genuine asset rather than incidental. A Jann-bonded family supplies caravan guards and ship's crew who don't flinch at a storm that grounds everyone else; Ifrit-bonded Nasrin turn up disproportionately at forges and glassworks; Marid-bonded ones as divers and deep-water sailors; Ghoul-bonded ones doing quarantine and gravedigging work nobody else wants; Sila-bonded ones as negotiators, interrogators, and court agents whose resistance to compulsion makes them hard to suborn. None of this is exclusive or mandatory — it's the kind of soft demographic lean an NPC merchant might mention offhandedly ("get a Marid-blooded diver, they don't panic down there").
Appearance — more defined than a first-pass tiefling, patron-flavored on top of the universal traits. The four universal Body traits (odd-catching eyes, wind-still-moving hair, faint warmth, dark-edge luminescence) mark someone as Nasrin at all; a second, patron-specific layer marks which branch they come from, the way the Patron Drift section already gestures at (an Ifrit branch running hotter, a Marid branch's hair drifting like it's underwater). Proposed baseline — adjust freely, this is a first draft:
| Patron | Eye cast | Hair | Signature tell |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jann | Storm-grey, pale blue | Restless even by Nasrin standards; ash-blond to slate-grey | Skin prickles faintly with static before storms |
| Ifrit | Ember-orange, deep red | Soot-black, sometimes ash-streaked | Warmth runs hot enough to notice through clothing; glow has an orange cast |
| Marid | Sea-glass green or blue | Moves like it's underwater even on land | Skin runs cool at the surface with warmth underneath; damp to the touch even when dry |
| Ghoul | Pale, almost colorless | Bone-white or ash-grey | Dark-edge glow reads sickly rather than warm — more will-o'-the-wisp than hearth-light |
| Sila | Shifts subtly with the angle of light | Has an unnatural sheen, almost too well-kept | Features read as faintly, uncannily symmetrical up close |
The goal is a silhouette a table can read at a glance — "that's a Marid-blooded Nasrin" the way "that's a tiefling" reads off horns and a tail — without needing new mechanics attached to any of it. Purely cosmetic; none of this changes the Jinn Domains table or the Renewal Rite mechanics.
Naming¶
Not yet established as its own convention. The Scholar Nation's naming list (Zafir, Rashida, Tariq, Suleiman, Khalvar, Mirathi, Solvash — see Dar Ilm al-Zakir document) has had "Nasreen" removed to avoid a standing near-homophone collision with the race name itself. Nasrin otherwise use Scholar Nation names — no separate naming convention of their own — since they are Scholar Nation culturally, not a walled-off ethnicity with its own tradition.
Open: the Blood cult dominates Dar Ilm al-Zakir generally and is therefore the Nasrin's default religion by extension (see Dar Ilm al-Zakir document) — settled at the nation level, though whether any individual Nasrin family practices it devoutly, treats it as background custom, or quietly resists the obvious parallel between its theology and their own bloodline (see Family & Bloodline, above) is still open at the level of any given family or character. Whether particular other races (as opposed to the general oddity-and-envy baseline set under Family & Bloodline, above) have a distinct reaction to Nasrin worth calling out. Broader Jinn cosmology beyond the genie-analog baseline set here (temperament, what they want out of these bargains, whether other jinn-kinds beyond these five exist) is being left alone on purpose, to answer in play rather than pre-write.