The Bloods
The house deals you one of these. Your Calling you draft and your Kit you draft; your Blood arrives with the night, because Bloods are not scarce and there is nothing to fight over. Read them for the character you are handed, or take the lot to a table of your own.
There are no pointed ears in this game and no long-lived wise elders. A Blood is where you are from and therefore what you were taught to put up with: the folk of a high valley, a fen, a tide coast, a burnt valley, a charcoal stack. Two of these differ the way a hill farmer and a gravedigger differ, which is to say in what stopped bothering them years ago.
That is the trick worth borrowing. An origin that hands you a bonus to a stat is a number. An origin that tells you what the person no longer finds frightening is a character, and it survives being taken to a completely different game. Not one of the eight below adds anything to a roll. Each of them changes what a bad result costs, or who ends up paying for it, or what you knew before you agreed to go in.
High pasture and low cloud. They walk uphill for an hour before they call it a walk.
Nine months of the year the track to their village is a stream. They are not braver than anyone else, they have simply been wrong about their footing so many times that being wrong once more is not an event. A Hillfolk who slips gets up mid-sentence and finishes the sentence.
Drovers and message carriers, road dust to the knee, home about twice a year.
They carry other people's goods and other people's news along roads with nothing on them for a day at a stretch, and they are paid for arriving rather than for arriving well. So they read the ground ahead out of habit, the way you would check a purse. Ask one whether a door is trapped and they will tell you before they have finished looking at it.
Eel traps and duckboards. Nothing in a fen stays where you left it overnight.
A fen has no fixed geography. The channel that was there in spring is silt by autumn, the path is under a foot of water, and the only people who make a living out of it are the ones who never fully commit to a footing. A Fenborn will let you finish explaining the plan, and then move.
From a valley that burned in a single afternoon, and they still sift the ground for hinges.
The fire took the valley between noon and dusk, and the ones who walked out have a particular relationship with cost: it never went away, it only ever moved. An Ashkin will not carry something twice. They will find someone else's pocket for it, cheerfully, and they will not consider this a betrayal because in their view the cost was always going to be shared.
Two tides a day tell them when to work and when to sit down, and they have never argued with either.
Everything on that coast happens twice a day or not at all. Tideborn work in the gap the water leaves them, then stop dead when it comes back, and it makes them oddly generous with what they have because they know it returns. They spend early. It unnerves people who have been saving.
They wash and box the dead in a town that keeps its cemeteries inside the walls.
Their town buries inside the walls, so somebody has to wash the dead, box them and stand with the family. Gravewise learn young that the truth is usually not the kind thing to hand over, and that most things can be closed and carried out quietly if you keep your hands steady. They are very good company, and there is always something they have not mentioned.
Hedge-layers. You can read every hedge they have ever laid off the backs of their hands.
Laying a hedge means putting both arms into blackthorn for a whole winter, and the pay is that in thirty years it will still be standing where you put it. Thornborn show their hands to strangers as a matter of course. A wound they chose is not a wound to them, it is a receipt.
Charcoal burners who sleep in shifts, because a stack that goes out is a fortnight wasted.
A charcoal stack has to be watched for eight days without ever being allowed to catch properly alight, so Emberkin sleep in halves and wake at the wrong smell. They are the ones who notice the room going quiet. Whatever the rest of the party is doing at the edge of the light, an Emberkin has already put a hand out to it.
A table does not draft its Bloods. They are dealt out, and two players can share one, because the game already has one exclusive choice in it and a second would turn creation into two arguments in a row. It also keeps the Calling the loudest thing about you, which is what people mean when they say a character is mostly their class.
Being handed one rather than choosing it turns out to be the better half of the deal. You get somewhere to be from that you would not have picked, and then you have to make it true. That is closer to how a person ends up from anywhere.