THE COMPENDIUM

Concepts

7 entries · filtered to race — clear ✕

Humankind

The latecomers — settlers, sellswords, and ledger-clerks drawn to the Vale by the dead Imperium's silver, plus the hard river-folk of the Northern Reach. Rootless, adaptable, and quietly lucky.

The Asheni

The grey-skinned, ember-eyed old blood of the Vale and the ash — kin to the fallen Vallen Imperium and to the wandering Bonesung clans. The Sundering is written into them: ash in the skin, the Note in the marrow.

The Hessk

Scaled, cold-blooded folk of the drowned valley who breathe the green water of the Mirrenmere as easily as air. The Silt Hands and the Divers are mostly Hessk crews; the drowned shrines hold no terror for a people who can sit on the bottom and wait.

The Korl

The big folk of the high passes — a head and shoulders over any settled man, slab-muscled and frost-skinned, older stock than the Imperium that tried to wall them out. Cold doesn't touch them; fine spellwork mostly defeats them.

The Reshi

Tawny-furred, night-eyed caravan folk who came up the southern roads with the salt and the silk and never quite left. They keep the long roads and the quiet trade, and see in the dark by birth.

The Stoneborn

Short, broad, deep-voiced folk of the Northern Rampart who quarry the bones of the dead Imperium and the deep stone the Karth swallowed. They trust worked metal over any spell — the Note slides off granite, and off them.

The Vyr

Tall, pale echo-kin born hearing the Note plainly — the people closest to the gods, and so the proudest. The eldest blood withdrew to the sky-seat at Aelvyrenn after the Sundering they caused; the Vyr of the Vale are their faded, earthbound descendants. Brilliant, frail, certain they are right, and carrying a guilt the lower world has never been told.