Systems
Lifepath
A cosmetic choice that tells other players where your character stands. It changes nothing about how the game treats you, and everything about how the people in it read you.
Pick where you stand
Choose the group your character belongs to from the options that world offers, with what each one is and what it means laid out in front of you.
Purely cosmetic
No spawn point, no stats, no gear, no locked areas. Your allegiance does not hand you anything the person next to you does not have, and nobody is ever behind for choosing differently.
Read on sight
Other players can tell roughly where you stand without asking, which is the entire point. Walking into a room already means something, and a conversation has somewhere to begin.
Yours to change
It describes your character rather than committing them. Change it when the story takes you somewhere else, or set it differently on a different character.