Wildward

A Wildward is a trained frontier warden tasked with maintaining the fragile boundary between civilization and the untamed world. Unlike rangers or druids, Wildwards do not serve nature itself. Their duty is to prevent the wild from becoming a threat to settled lands, trade routes, and population centers.
Wildwards operate where ecosystems have become unstable, corrupted, or dangerously altered by magic, planar influence, or divine remnants. Their work is preventative, destructive when necessary, and often thankless. Where druids cultivate balance, Wildwards enforce limits.

Career

Qualifications

Becoming a Wildward requires more than martial skill or wilderness experience. Candidates are selected based on psychological resilience, practical judgment, and their ability to act decisively without hesitation or cruelty. Many who attempt the path fail not from lack of strength, but from an inability to accept irreversible outcomes.
Most Wildwards begin as rangers, soldiers, hunters, druids who broke with their circles, or survivors of frontier disasters. Formal training is conducted through regional warden orders or state-sanctioned frontier authorities, though standards vary by kingdom.
All candidates must demonstrate advanced survival skills across multiple biomes, proficiency with at least one melee weapon and one ranged tool, and the ability to track, assess, and neutralize non-humanoid threats. Basic literacy is mandatory, as Wildwards are required to document sites deemed unstable or condemned.
Psychological evaluation is a critical component of qualification. Candidates are tested for attachment bias, hesitation under moral stress, and susceptibility to magical influence. Those unable to act against corrupted animals, once-sacred groves, or former settlements are dismissed.
Final qualification is granted only after a sanctioned field purge under supervision. Survival alone is not sufficient. The candidate must demonstrate sound judgment in determining what is destroyed, what is sealed, and what is spared.
Those who pass are formally marked as Wildwards and assigned a frontier jurisdiction. Many do not serve longer than a decade. Few retire unchanged.

Career Progression

A Wildward’s career is not defined by promotion alone, but by endurance. Advancement reflects trust, survival, and the scale of responsibility one is permitted to bear. Many never progress beyond their first posting, either by death, injury, dismissal, or voluntary departure.

Initiate Wildward

Newly sanctioned Wildwards serve under supervision, assigned to low-risk frontier zones or support roles within active cells. Initiates are expected to observe containment procedures, assist in purges, and maintain records rather than make final judgments. Most failures occur at this stage, when ideals collide with reality.

Field Wildward

After surviving multiple sanctioned operations, a Wildward is granted independent authority within a designated frontier region. Field Wildwards assess threats, authorize controlled burns or culls, and negotiate with local authorities when evacuations or land condemnations are required. This is the most common rank and the point at which many serve out the remainder of their careers.

Senior Wildward

Senior Wildwards are veterans trusted with volatile regions, overlapping threats, or areas of contested jurisdiction. They may oversee multiple Field Wildwards, coordinate large-scale containment efforts, or act as arbiters when disputes arise between Wildwards and druidic circles, temples, or state officials. Their word carries significant weight, though it rarely earns gratitude.

Ashwarden

Ashwardens are specialists called only when containment has failed or cannot be achieved. Their mandate is final resolution. Regions under Ashwarden sanction are often erased from maps, sealed indefinitely, or rendered uninhabitable by design. Few Ashwardens remain in service long. Those who do are regarded with a mix of fear and reverence, even among their own.

Retirement or Disappearance

Formal retirement is rare but possible, typically due to age or grievous injury. Retired Wildwards are often offered isolated watchposts, advisory roles, or quiet exile from populated regions. Others vanish without record, their final actions known only through abandoned reports or scorched landmarks.
Among Wildwards, it is said that the profession has only two true endings: You leave the wild behind, or it leaves nothing of you to return.

Payment & Reimbursement

Wildwards are compensated through a mixture of fixed stipend, hazard pay, and sanctioned reimbursements. Payment structures vary by kingdom, but all recognize that the profession cannot function on patronage or bounties alone. A Wildward who must negotiate payment is already operating too late.

Base Stipend

Active Wildwards receive a steady wage sufficient to cover food, lodging, equipment upkeep, and modest personal needs. The stipend is intentionally conservative. Wildwards are not meant to accumulate wealth, nor remain financially tied to any one settlement.

Hazard Compensation

Operations classified as high-risk or irreversible qualify for hazard compensation. This includes engagements involving magical corruption, fae influence, divine residue, or mass culling events. Compensation increases with assessed threat level, not body count or destruction achieved.

Operational Reimbursement

All sanctioned equipment used in the line of duty may be reimbursed or replaced upon submission of proper documentation. This includes alchemical agents, burn-stones, cold iron tools, warding materials, and pack animals lost during approved operations. Personal indulgences, experimental methods, or unauthorized tools are not covered.

Travel and Jurisdiction Costs

Travel between assigned zones is fully reimbursed. Wildwards are granted legal right of passage through most regions, though delays and resistance are common in practice. Lodging is reimbursed only when no watchpost or field shelter is available.

Condemnation Grants

When land is permanently sealed or rendered uninhabitable under Wildward sanction, affected authorities may issue a one-time condemnation grant. These funds are allocated for relocation assistance, site marking, and long-term containment measures, not for personal profit.

Penalties and Withholding

Compensation may be reduced or withheld if a Wildward acts outside mandate, fails to document actions, or causes unnecessary loss of life or arable land. Repeat violations result in dismissal or reassignment to supervised duty.
Wildwards are paid to prevent disasters, not to be celebrated for them. Most leave the profession with scars, not savings.

Perception

Purpose

The purpose of the Wildward profession is not preservation, conquest, or balance, but containment. Wildwards exist to prevent the unchecked expansion of natural, magical, or planar forces into spaces where mortal life cannot endure them.
Nature in Tanaria is not inherently benevolent. Left unbounded, it consumes settlements, trade routes, arable land, and entire cultures. Wildwards serve as the final safeguard when coexistence fails and adaptation is no longer viable.
Their mandate is pragmatic rather than ideological. A Wildward is empowered to decide whether a region can be reclaimed, stabilized, sealed, or erased. This authority exists because delay, compromise, or sentimentality often results in greater loss.

Wildwards are deployed only after lesser measures have failed or proven insufficient. They are not healers of the land, though they may preserve what can still be saved. They are tasked with ending threats that cannot be reasoned with, negotiated, or allowed to persist.
In practice, Wildwards protect civilization from the wild, and the wild from exploitation. By enforcing boundaries, they ensure that expansion does not become annihilation on either side.
Their success is measured in absence. When the frontier holds, when cities remain standing, and when disasters are remembered only as near-misses, the Wildward has fulfilled their purpose.

Social Status

Wildwards occupy an uncomfortable position within society. They are neither celebrated heroes nor common laborers, but a necessary presence that most prefer not to acknowledge until they are needed.
Among frontier settlements, Wildwards are often treated with wary respect. Villagers understand that a Wildward’s arrival usually means a threat has already taken root. Hospitality is offered, but rarely warmth. People listen closely to a Wildward’s words, knowing that recommendations may include evacuation, culling, or permanent abandonment of land.
In urban centers, Wildwards are viewed as relics of a harsher world. City officials rely on their expertise while keeping them at arm’s length, uncomfortable with the implications of their authority. Their presence in cities is typically brief, limited to reports, hearings, or requisitions.
Druidic circles and nature-aligned faiths maintain strained relationships with Wildwards. While some acknowledge their necessity in extreme cases, many regard them as agents of destruction rather than stewardship. Open hostility is uncommon, but ideological conflict is persistent.
Within military and mercantile circles, Wildwards are respected for their reliability and lack of political ambition. They are seen as professionals who do unpleasant work without seeking power or recognition. This restraint earns them trust, though never popularity.
Socially, long-serving Wildwards tend toward isolation. Their experiences and decisions create distance between them and ordinary life. Few maintain lasting ties outside the profession, and many prefer anonymity when not on duty.

Demographics

Across Tanaria, Wildwards comprise approximately 0.002–0.005% of the total population.
In practical terms, that equates to roughly 1 Wildward per 20,000–50,000 people, depending on region, terrain, and magical volatility. In densely populated, well-controlled regions, the ratio skews lower. In frontier-heavy or magically unstable lands, it skews higher, but never comfortably so.

History

The Wildward profession did not originate as a formal order. Its earliest predecessors were ad hoc responses to ecological and magical disasters during the late Calamity Era, when unchecked magic, divine conflict, and planar instability reshaped vast tracts of land beyond recovery. In this period, frontier militias, druidic circles, and arcane scholars all attempted independent solutions, most of which failed catastrophically.
Early records describe these individuals as burners, warders, or boundary men, tasked with crude but necessary actions such as burning corrupted forests, sealing cave systems, or slaughtering warped wildlife. These actions were controversial even then, but regions that refused them often vanished entirely.
As the Calamity Era ended and the Harmonium Era began, the need for a standardized response became impossible to ignore. Scattered kingdoms independently began formalizing containment roles, drawing on veterans who had survived repeated frontier collapses. These early Wildwards operated with limited authority, heavily restricted by local rulers, temples, or druidic councils. This frequently resulted in delayed action and large-scale loss of life.
The profession changed decisively following several recorded containment failures where political hesitation proved deadlier than decisive destruction. Over time, Wildwards were granted broader autonomy, including the authority to condemn land, enforce evacuations, and act without prior approval in active threat zones. These powers were not given lightly and were often preceded by public outcry and political fallout.
During the middle Harmonium Era, Wildwards transitioned from reactive agents to preventative ones. Training expanded to include threat assessment, ecological forecasting, and magical contamination modeling. The goal shifted from ending disasters to preventing escalation. This period also saw the first formal distinction between standard Wildwards and Ashwardens, the latter created to handle threats deemed irreversible.
In recent centuries, the profession has continued to narrow rather than expand. Recruitment standards tightened, oversight increased, and the number of sanctioned Wildwards deliberately plateaued. Modern doctrine emphasizes restraint, documentation, and last-resort intervention. Wildwards are no longer expected to save the land at any cost, but to decide whether saving it is even possible.
Public perception has followed a similar trajectory. Early Wildwards were feared but tolerated. Later generations were resented as instruments of state control. In the present era, they are regarded with quiet unease, understood to be necessary but never welcomed.
Internally, Wildwards mark their history not by founding dates or charters, but by lost regions. Each generation is taught the names of lands that no longer exist, and why hesitation, compromise, or overconfidence allowed them to fall.

Alternative Names

Ashkeepers, Boundary Wardens, Greenbreakers, Blightcutters, Rootkillers

Type

Agricultural / Fishing / Forestry

Demand

Constant and increasing. As magical saturation, planar instability, and divine remnants continue to alter natural environments, more regions fall into partial or total ecological collapse.