Ragged Garment

Ragged Garment is a fragment of cloth that has learned to tell stories with every frayed edge: pale gray fabric, swollen with moth holes, the weave stubbornly resistant to time, and patches of old leather stitched along the seams like scars from a hundred small battles. It feels coarse to the touch, a mix of hemp and rough cotton, with a scent of oil, rain, and the dusty sheath of a long voyage. The edges curl upward as if listening to whispers from the markets where it has wandered; a stain, neither clean nor cursed, marks the back in a map-like blot that traders claim points toward somewhere that might have once mattered. Lorekeepers swear it was sewn from banners torn during a failed caravan crossing, a keepsake pressed into service by a courier who never quite found the road again. Others swear it was woven from the sleeves of a fallen guard’s tunic, repurposed to cover a survivor’s armorless frame. Either way, Ragged Garment carries a rumor of roads traveled and promises kept in the pocket of a traveler who refused to forget. In the game-world, its power is less about bravado and more about belonging: it is a cloth that can be worn as light armor, a canvas for color and identity, a blank space where a story can be dyed into the hide of a character. It does not shout strength; it whispers endurance. Players treasure it as a flexible starting piece for new outfits, a skin that can be dyed to echo a memory or a guild’s color, and as a practical salvage item that yields cloth scraps and threads to feed a tailor’s craft. More than that, its presence suggests a larger narrative—that the world’s gear is not merely equipment but evidence of journeys, of choices made in markets and on backroads, of the people who traded around a campfire while war drums faded in the distance. Markets remember Ragged Garment too, and the way it moves through them. At Saddlebag Exchange, a caravan-outpost tucked along a dusty trail, the ragged cloth can be spotted fluttering from a vendor’s lean pole. The price varies with mood and wear: three copper when it’s only a threadbare memory, a silver or more if a patchwork of leather has been added or if it bears some faint, almost-there dye. A buyer will often haggle, not over vanity but over the story it carries, as if the cloth itself negotiated a better place on a shelf or a character’s back. When a traveler pockets Ragged Garment, they’re not simply taking a piece of cloth—they’re taking a fragment of a road and the promise that somewhere out there, another caravan will pass by bearing a new rumor to stitch into its seams.