The player character is a freelance mercenary placed into the Colchian Zone in September 2015 through a contract brokerage. Brokerages are among the many middlemen the Interregnum produced: small firms that recruit loose soldiers, vet them lightly, and sell their services to PMCs, fixers and private clients that need bodies without a payroll. The player arrives with a provisional Board licence, a modest advance, a Codec and a standing instruction to make a name. Beyond that nothing is guaranteed. The player may be a newly created character or one of the established figures of the setting, and the role is the same either way.
The provisional licence is issued by the Licensing Board and permits lawful work in the Zone for a limited term. It is renewed through completed contracts, which gives the Board a modest hold over the player and gives the player a reason to stay in the market. The Board enforces it inconsistently, and most factions ignore it.
Every faction in the Zone keeps its own opinion of the player, and the record of those opinions is Renown. Each completed contract adjusts Renown with the faction that benefits and with the factions that lose by it.
Renown is local and uneven: a name that opens every door in Old Town may mean nothing in the Tusks. Over a campaign it determines who offers work, what they pay, who will meet the player in person, and who sends someone to settle the account.
Most early work arrives through the brokerage. The handler presents a contract, states the pay and the deadline, and the brokerage keeps a fixed share of the fee, roughly a fifth. Work also comes directly from factions, fixers and individual contacts. The player may accept it outside the brokerage and keep the full fee, at the cost of the brokerage's support. A player who takes too much work off the books finds the handler less available and the brokerage's contracts less generous.
The handler is the brokerage's single point of contact with the player, a voice on the Codec and nothing more. The handler has no name in the record, no known face and no history relevant to play. Brokerages assign handlers by role rather than by person, and the player refers to the voice by the title alone. The function is administrative: to read out contracts, state terms, give a short threat assessment, relay updates during a job and close the line when the work is done. Conversation beyond that is limited to what the contract requires.
The handler also serves as a narrative device. They deliver information the player could not otherwise obtain, direct the player toward new employers and, when the story requires, change the terms of a job in progress. The handler's conduct is not fixed in advance. It is shaped by the player's choices and by the needs of the story.