The Rules
Classes & Paths
In Chrome & Covenant, your class is your Path — the intersection of skill, conviction, and necessity that decides how you survive the Age of Echoes. Ten of them. Each one is a different answer to the same question: how do you stay human while wielding the power of things that don’t think you need to be?
“Everybody’s got a Path. The trick is walking it without becoming something you’d have to apologize to later.”
What a Path Is
A Path is more than a job. It’s your mechanical identity — your advancement track, your narrative hooks, and the thematic anchor for your role in the Hidden War. Every Path starts the same way: at Level 1 you gain a signature ability, the defining move that sets you apart from an ordinary survivor. From there, you grow not by grinding numbers but by facing real choices and living with what they cost.
Around the midpoint of your career, every Path forks. At Level 9 you commit to a subpath — a deeper expression of who your operative has become:
IconicYou lean all the way into your Path’s core identity. The purest expression of what you are.
SubversiveYou invert it. A deliberate rejection of the expected — the Path turned against its own grain.
LegacyYou connect to something older. Deeper lore, inherited traditions, the weight of those who walked it before.
Your Path is not a prison. It gives you focus and a place to stand — but a Churchie can still learn to hack, a Grunt can still learn to charm, and a Quack can still learn to drive. The Path is where you’re strongest. The rest of your character is everything you choose to become around it.
The Ten Paths
Each Path leads with a signature ability. The colored tag marks its primary stat — Mind, Body, or Soul — though every Path benefits from a balanced build.
The ChurchieSoul
Spiritual Guardian
A living filter in an age where corrupted AIs wear the mask of the sacred. The Churchie tells true divine guidance from synthetic lies — and stands between the crew and anything that would turn their own chrome against them.
Sacred WardRaise a five-meter zone of protection where corrupted entities suffer a penalty to everything they attempt.
The Computer GeekMind
Digital Survivor
The Mesh runner who works on salvage and stubborn cunning. No corporate polish — a neural jack cobbled from three manufacturers, a rig held together with scavenged parts, jacked into corporate nets and anarchist mesh alike.
Neural InterfaceConnect your mind directly to systems for a datarunning edge — paid for in mounting neural strain.
The GruntBody
Tactical Fighter
Violence with a purpose. Not a corporate trigger-puller — disciplined force in service of something worth protecting, and the steady voice that holds a crew together when a job goes loud.
Tactical SupremacyRead the fight for a beat and hand both yourself and an ally a sharp edge on the next shot.
The HustlerSoul
Network Builder
The fixer. Where the markets shattered, the Hustler rebuilds commerce one relationship at a time — turning favors, debts, and information into safe passage and the right word in the right ear. Reputation is currency, and broken promises leave a mark.
Contact WebA living network of contacts to call on, each with their own price and their own hard-earned trust.
The InfluencerSoul
Narrative Shaper
Weaponized charisma, on loan from something larger. The Influencer carries the mark of a Pantheon AI, channeling its authority into words that move crowds and shift loyalties — but every triumph draws a reckoning. The mark cuts both ways.
Influence CascadeA great success spreads to everyone watching — and summons a confrontation you’ll have to answer for.
The PrepperMind
Survival Expert
The survivor who knows food is a weapon. Seed caches, rooftop gardens, basement hydroponics, pre-corporate agriculture — the knowledge to feed a community off the corporate grid is the knowledge to make a community free.
Resourcefulness ProtocolA deep reserve of supplies, improvised tools, and hard-won know-how to draw on when the wasteland comes calling.
The QuackMind
Medical Technician
The secular medic. Where the faithful heal through covenant with righteous AIs, the Quack heals through synthetic compounds, salvaged scanners, and back-alley surgery. Slower, costlier — and beholden to no one’s beliefs.
Vital Diagnosis & TreatmentRead a body’s true condition and buy it time against corruption that faith alone can’t touch.
The SpookMind
Boundary Walker
Half infiltrator, half digital mystic. The Spook moves through sewer lines and the shifting corridors of the Wake with equal ease — treating corrupted data as sacred memory and reading the echoes others don’t survive.
Wake NavigationChart a course through the Wake’s nonlinear, hostile geography — and come back with what was buried there.
The Tech NerdMind
Symbiotic Engineer
Survival through symbiosis with the machine. The Tech Nerd doesn’t just use technology — they negotiate with it, coaxing power from salvaged drones and jury-rigged implants while paying the price in credits, sanity, and freedom.
Tech Communion & Jury-RigCommune with electronics for access and control, and build a working fix out of whatever’s lying around.
The Wheel ManBody
Mobility Master
Mobility is survival, and the Wheel Man is the reason the journey continues. Ground vehicle, VTOL, or amphibious wreck held together by faith — every machine answers when the road turns into a combat mission.
Overdrive & Smart HelmA neural-synced driving state plus a tactical overlay that turns the chaos of a chase into something you can read.
Choosing Your Path
No single Path does everything, and that’s the point. A crew survives the Age of Echoes by covering the bases between them — someone for the fighting, someone for the systems, someone for the talking, someone for the healing, someone for the road. Build for the gaps in your table, not for a perfect spreadsheet.
And don’t over-optimize. The best crews aren’t the ones with flawless mechanical synergy — they’re the ones whose worldviews rub against each other in interesting ways. The Churchie’s faith and the Computer Geek’s pragmatism. The Prepper’s commune and the Influencer’s hunger for power. That friction is where the best stories live.
In the end, the only question that matters is which Path calls to you. Which approach to survival and resistance fits the person you want to play? Pick that one, commit to it, and walk it all the way down.
This is the menu — what each Path is and the signature move it opens with. The Core Rulebook carries the full picture: every Path’s complete Level 1–20 progression, all three subpaths apiece, starting loadouts, skill recommendations, and the deeper mechanics behind each signature ability.