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bforbackupteam2017-09-16 09:54 pm
coccinea) wrote in bforbackupteam2017-09-16 09:54 pm
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WORLD INFORMATION: SPECIES CATALOGUE
Many species populate the world of Formina; these are some of the most major ones.
HUMANS
The kitbash species. Lacking many of the special adaptations other peoples had, humans are known for their creativity in finding solutions to problems other species never thought of and their unsettling propensity to keep throwing bodies at it until things work out.
ELVES
High Elves - Plantlike elves in tune with the forest and nature. Keepers* of woodlands and other wild, untamed places, they operate on a philosophy that none of their number are ever irreplaceable. Their society's strength comes from a hivemind that all elves are bonded to; being cut from the hivemind is being separated from the forests and high elf society, and is a fate for traitors and exiles.
*self-proclaimed
Desert Elves - Nomadic wanderers who live on the desert continent, Tensere. Most active during the night, but they scout for those who might be lost during the day. Fascinated with old ruins and technology.
Wild Elves - Cousins to the high elves. Strictly nocturnal, they are lethargic during the day and bloodthirsty predators during the night. Unlike their stiffer and more traditionalist cousins, wild elves are happy to be hospitable to outsiders, and often adopt abandoned children outside their own species.
Lovers of music and other fine arts, they spend sunlight hours on various hobbies.
Drow - A species of elf that lives in the Underdark and has developed psychic powers as a result. Though they lived aboveground once, they found fighting for territory tiresome and retreated into the hollow network of roots that formed the tunnel systems of the Underdark. Cannibalistic, ambitious and cunning. The more spiderlike you are, the higher you are in rank.
DWARVES
Insatiably determined and curious engineers. Possess a magical ability known only as 'dwarfspeak', that allows them to bend materials to their will and coax it to take on a different shape and purpose.
Known for their stubbornness, dwarves refuse to back down from any challenge given to them. Entire families of dwarves may spend their lives learning how to craft one exceptionally difficult material so that they might take the secrets back to their people.
Those that accept their limits and back down from a challenge they find too monumental are honored as heroes.
ORCS
A people of raw action and energy. Powerful and charismatic, they're often worshipped as minor deities in their own right. They throw themselves into battle in any arena they choose, and though they may not always be the best, their raw determination makes them fearsome opponents.
They can appear as almost-elementals of force, muscled and blazing with an inner fire, or anything in between. No matter what form they have, they're incredibly magnetic.
HALFLINGS
An entire race of passive aggressive PTA soccer moms, but with country hospitality instead.
DRAGONS
Singular existences or small families who faced the decline of their era and chose to adapt to - or embrace - the new age. These are only a few of their forms.
Grand Dragons - Dragons who refused to compromise their forms. The few grand dragons that still remain in this world sleep restlessly in hidden places, waiting for a time to unfurl their true glory once again.
Titans - Dragons who shed the trappings of their rule over sky, land and flame for the cold embrace of the sea. Called "Titans" for their terrifying size and their choice to live in the depths, it's a rare situation indeed that would call a Titan to the surface.
Solarians - Dragons who took to the sky permanently, giving up the ability to navigate on land for the embrace of the heavens. Called Solarians for their feared ability to absorb sunlight and weaponise it, they can often be seen following the sun's arc across the sky.
KOBOLDS
The descendants of grand dragons who, facing their end, decided to become vastly smaller and weaker, trading their raw power for a lineage that would never die out.
Unfortunately viewed mostly as pests until very recently. More than half the total kobold population is enslaved by the drow, who keep them as slaves, unwilling soldiers, and handy meals.
GOBLINS
A species who were viewed similarly to kobolds, more like obstacles than people. Their culture is diverse and based on the necessities of being able to travel at any moment; they make excellent caravan masters and guides. Intelligent and resourceful, despite common opinion saying otherwise.
Due to the inability to establish a capital city until recently, goblin communities form a mutual, symbiotic relationship with much larger herds of creatures, and build interconnected cities on their backs. They provide unspecified services for such creatures, citing it as "a goblin secret".
GORGONS
Caretakers of the last celestial tree. Their immigration policy is 'don't'. In gorgon culture, the practice of lucha libre is a venerated martial art, and it forms the basis of the warrior caste. They rarely leave their nation, but some do in the pursuit of a worthy cause. The laws of their homeland dictate that they leave everything of their old self behind and take on a persona to protect their homeland's secrets from outsiders.
DEMONS
Inhabitants of the flying continent Arkluna. Demons come in several sizes and varying degrees of strength. Possessing strange powers and stranger appearances - they are not limited to humanoid forms, and often only take them for the convenience of outsiders - they often frighten the unprepared. Demons once visited Formina's surface in much larger quantities, but due to a combination of factors now mostly keep to themselves. Demon culture tends to value strong will and moral fibre; powerful are those who are resolute in the face of adversity.
Demons come in several classifications, based entirely on size. A demon can take many centuries to build up to a bigger size, but is able to shed and drop down to smaller sizes quickly.
Messengers: The smallest class of demon. Generally the size of goblins and kobolds, but can be even smaller than that.
Knights: Humanoid-species sized. They generally tend to range from five to six feet in height.
Counts: Demons that are seven feet taller and higher. The agreed upon upper limit is generally ten feet. The general size of larger races.
Powers: A demon class that tends to be around eleven or twelve feet at minimum. A Power in the ten foot height range is considered to be a very small one. Medium sized Powers tend to be about house-sized. Large Powers are often as big - or slightly bigger - than the average guild hall.
Thrones: Demons the size of small islands, and only increasing from there. They can carry small towns and even cities on their backs without effort; a Throne is said to have done just that, assuming life as an innocuous floating island somewhere in the sea.
Monarchs: Demons the size of countries. The biggest class, and often the most powerful.
All demons have a domain that they reside over; it is the source of their magical power and contains their major weakpoint. A domain can be a place, contained in an object, or simply contained in the demon themselves, but as long as what it protects is in place, they are overwhelmingly strong.
The more powerful a demon's domain is, the more they are beholden to the 'law' of the world it serves, as if they had made a pact with the embodiment of their power. They can never reverse the effects of their domain's powers; to do so would be anathema to their natures. Demons always look forward, enacting their wills on the world.
Demons can shapeshift, and so can choose to intermarry and have half-demonic children with other races. Half-demonic children tend to grow into their demonic parent's traits later in life if they are born from the non-demonic parent; demons are able to control how much of their initial structure goes into their offspring, and will use this ability to give their partner an easy birth.
AASIMAR
A strange, birdlike race that live on the very top of the last celestial tree, closest to the stars.
(Aasimar draw their power from the stars, and need to be close to space. Pureblooded Aasimar are unable to live close to the ground for this reason and are rarely seen there; too much time away makes them weak, and unable to make the flight back up the great height of the last celestial tree back to their homeland.)
Able to pass on their powers to chosen mortals through bloodline or transference. Very little is known about them; their rare appearances on Formina are usually passed down in folklore as divine visitation.
EMPURIANS
Plant people who originate from the Blessed Land, diverse as their non-sentient 'cousins'. Through various means of travel, they've spread across most continents.
* Greek empurios, from en- ‘in’ + pur ‘fire’. Based off 'empyrean', an old word for the highest part of the sky. A reference to how their homeland is called the 'Celestial Continent'.
CONSTRUCTS
The results of other species' tinkering or the result of wars that created constructs to fight for them.
Imperial Automatons - Natives to Arterra. Imperial Automatons are made by the Empire, and are the only ones to contain the distinctive power source known as an Arcanomatrix Battery. Usually clockwork.
The Entomos* - Natives to Ossea. The Overlord who made them was eventually overthrown by them. Their most distinctive feature is the ability to split their limbs and bodies to a certain range, depending on where they were 'cut' during their construction.
* "entomos, cut in two (from its segmented body)"
The Dragonforged - the construct children of a pair of dragons who decided their legacy would be in another race entirely. They created the first Dragonforged, taught them great knowledge and how to make one another, and then passed on their power so that their children would always endure. Content in their legacy, they went into deep, unwakeable slumber.
Often nicknamed the Walking Treasures, a Dragonforged's key trait is that its core - and often its entire body - is composed of items that hold value. Value can be emotional as well as monetary; a Dragonforged made of beloved children's toys is just as much a Dragonforged as one made out of gold and jewels. A Dragonforged is able to increase their size by adding more of the items that make them up.
No matter what they are made of, the Dragonforged share the same blessings of endurance and strength, the gift of their creators. However, they may have unique weaknesses - and powers - depending on the manner and material used in their creation.
They make pilgrimages to the caves where their creators sleep every few decades. They celebrate and share what they've learned about the world through stories as gifts to the dragons who brought their race into being.
UNDEAD
Though undead can be found on every continent due to some mishap or another, the only place where they truly exist as established cultures and sentient people in their own right is the Broken Land, Ossea.
Liches - Skeletal spellcasters attuned to and held together by magic. Of all the undead that exist on Ossea, liches feel the strongest connection to the lifeblood and energy of their homeland; their magic and spheres of influence reflect those traits. Some concern themselves entirely with death and burial; others represent the hope of rebirth and growth; still others pour their substantial skill into healing and the rejuvenation of the body.
Blazing with magical energy, even the youngest Ossean lich possesses an aura of power several times stronger than sorcerers, wizards and other spellcasters have to build up to over time. Though most liches learn to control this outpouring of power as they grow older, for the sake of everything around them, it's not uncommon for lands less accustomed to such energy to react in unprecedented (and often excited) ways to a lich's arrival, like a dog eager to greet a long lost friend.
Though the way they 'reproduce' and are born is different for each country, it usually involves ceremonies to honor the previous owner of the bones to be used, and a ritual to ask the land to produce a new existence.
Wraiths - Restless, incorporeal spirits who were made out of whatever spare life force was floating around. The least common type of 'true' undead on Ossea (due to the majority of ghosts being angry spirits who were previously living people), wraiths are beings of smoke and shadow. True wraiths contain a 'heart' inside them composed of pure energy; this heart contains the wraith's memories and personality, and keeps them together. If the heart is separated from the wraith's 'body', the body rampages without the controlling influence of its soul and becomes a destructive maelstrom of magical force.
Curious and keen-eyed, wraiths have the most synergy with the construct civilisations of Ossea, and the puppet bodies they use in dealing with the corporeal are usually of construct manufacture. Able to fill objects and structures with their own essence to check for cracks and dangerous flaws, they make for excellent inspectors. They tend to be obsessive perfectionists, and have a strong compulsion to clean up messes and fix even tiny flaws.
If liches are the representation of Ossea's blood, wraiths are the race closest to Ossea's spirit and tumultuous conditions. Sensitive to the radiance of all living things and possessing a natural talent for reading air pressure and ambient magic, they make excellent pilots, navigators and trackers. A wraith's innate magic often takes the form of weather and wind control; powerful wraiths can unleash nature's wrath on the unsuspecting.
Wights/Cadavers - More conventional animated skeletons and the patchwork corpses of those intended for use as soldiers. Having shed the memories of their former lives, wights and cadavers are effectively newborn existences when they 'wake', having been granted a soul by Ossea (or having been granted one through ritual and waking surrounded by friendly faces, as is more common in the present day).
Tenacious and hard working, the innate magic of wights and cadavers lie close to their bones. Able to manipulate the earth itself and what lies within it, they can use it as defense, attack or even as a way of crude construction. A powerful wight or cadaver often glitters with veins of metal, as they become more attuned to the land that granted them life.
Wights and cadavers are the people of Ossea most sensitive to changes in the earth itself and any vibrations that result; they're apt at detecting earthquakes and seismic activity, as well as being able to read the approach of others (provided they've learned to tell the difference between a shake and something larger, or to look for the smaller and more constant impacts of footsteps).
Wights and cadavers complete the trio - in them, Ossea's earth and 'flesh' finds its representation. Their innate magic grants them a significant degree of physical strength and reinforcement - unlike the lesser minions of necromancers, constrained by their rotting or fragile forms - making them foes to be reckoned with if they're treated badly.
Wights and cadavers have a physical representation of their soul embedded into them; a fist-sized, rough lump of ore called a mineral heart. It throbs as a mortal being's heart does, but can survive being parted from its owner much longer; as long as it sustains no significant damage, it can reanimate the body it belongs to when finally reunited.
The prospect of prying a large lump of precious metal or gemstone from a wight or cadaver is often an alluring one, but Ossea is unkind to those who would steal its gifts. Those who stole or tore a heart from its owner suffer terrible nightmares, and often fall ill quickly unless the heart is returned.
BEASTFOLK
Animal people. They come in all shapes and sizes, and different cultures can trace their roots to ancestors distributed all across the world. They call no one continent their original homeland; many beastfolk don't consider such things to be important, as they prefer to look forward to the future.
CHITINEANS
Bug people. Hailing from Chitinea, the Ancient Continent, they call themselves Chitineans after the hard shells common to many of their people and their homeland. They come in many shapes and sizes, though even the smallest tend to be around four feet.
MAREI
Merpeople. From those who look somewhat more humanoid to those who might as well be intelligent fish, those many and varied people known as the Marei have populated the seas since time immemorable. Marei is a blanket term for the many cultures that exist under the sea, including ones better left alone.
*"Marei" is an old Gothic word for 'sea'.
DENIZENS OF THE UNDERDARK
"The pressure and darkness of Formina's underground have produced a peculiar type of sorcery. Native inhabitants of the Underdark are generally born with an extrasensory organ that is designed to aid with navigation and survival in a world without light, which forms the crux of their unusual magical powers.
Underdark sorcery takes the form of applying an invisible pressure of varying degrees, mental or physical, to obstacles and targets. It's poetically been referred to as the 'kiss of the underground', a magical representation of Formina's depth, and is more colloquially known as 'psychic power' to differentiate it from aboveground magic. Most find it unsettling."
Aboleths - Fishlike guardians of Formina's heart. Live in the Abyssal Sea, a light-filled place at the core of the world that harbors extreme pressures few can withstand.
Aboleths were made as guardian spirits to protect the world's core. Only the last few generations of aboleths have taken on flesh and expressed curiosity about the world beyond the abyssal sea. They have a shared pool of memory and knowledge inhabited by the souls of those who have already passed, but lose access to it once they breach the surface of the sea to leave it.
Beholders - Grumpy spherelike beings with tentacles. Usually possess only one eye. They form vast psychic labyrinths to live in, mostly to avoid being disturbed, and also to show off.
They gather at least once a year to complain about the state of the world. A meeting of beholders is called a grumble or a headache.
Illithids - Intelligent beings with tentacled faces. Strong psychics with a natural aptitude for seeing the structure of objects and living beings, they choose a particular discipline in order to refine and control their psychic powers as they mature. They build intricate cities in the Underdark, considering it an appropriate challenge for beings as powerful as themselves. All illithids' potential for psychic power is vast, but as they focus and narrow it into one segment of learning, they find it hard to do anything else outside that chosen field.
The most traditional job for an illithid is an architect or a builder. Adventurous illithids of this sort who choose to leave their subterranean homes for the surface world often find initial work in local tradesman's guilds, or fixing up abandoned structures for others' use.
Despite the perception of illithids eating brains, only a few hunt down living creatures for their brains and sustain themselves on that diet alone. In truth, illithids are omnivorous; the best food for an illithid is a balanced diet.
However, they breed their own version of livestock specifically for a fresh supply of brains to use for supplies on long journeys, as brains are mostly fat. Other races tend to find this unsettling.
Weakness: Hubris. Often too smart for their own good.
NATURE SPIRITS
ELEMENTALS
Composites of raw energy that developed a will to hold themselves together. Blank slates when they come into the world, they are extremely powerful, but intensely amoral. Unless influenced by others, they adhere to their nature - to embody whatever their element is, as much as possible.
HUMANS
The kitbash species. Lacking many of the special adaptations other peoples had, humans are known for their creativity in finding solutions to problems other species never thought of and their unsettling propensity to keep throwing bodies at it until things work out.
ELVES
High Elves - Plantlike elves in tune with the forest and nature. Keepers* of woodlands and other wild, untamed places, they operate on a philosophy that none of their number are ever irreplaceable. Their society's strength comes from a hivemind that all elves are bonded to; being cut from the hivemind is being separated from the forests and high elf society, and is a fate for traitors and exiles.
*self-proclaimed
Desert Elves - Nomadic wanderers who live on the desert continent, Tensere. Most active during the night, but they scout for those who might be lost during the day. Fascinated with old ruins and technology.
Wild Elves - Cousins to the high elves. Strictly nocturnal, they are lethargic during the day and bloodthirsty predators during the night. Unlike their stiffer and more traditionalist cousins, wild elves are happy to be hospitable to outsiders, and often adopt abandoned children outside their own species.
Lovers of music and other fine arts, they spend sunlight hours on various hobbies.
Drow - A species of elf that lives in the Underdark and has developed psychic powers as a result. Though they lived aboveground once, they found fighting for territory tiresome and retreated into the hollow network of roots that formed the tunnel systems of the Underdark. Cannibalistic, ambitious and cunning. The more spiderlike you are, the higher you are in rank.
DWARVES
Insatiably determined and curious engineers. Possess a magical ability known only as 'dwarfspeak', that allows them to bend materials to their will and coax it to take on a different shape and purpose.
Known for their stubbornness, dwarves refuse to back down from any challenge given to them. Entire families of dwarves may spend their lives learning how to craft one exceptionally difficult material so that they might take the secrets back to their people.
Those that accept their limits and back down from a challenge they find too monumental are honored as heroes.
ORCS
A people of raw action and energy. Powerful and charismatic, they're often worshipped as minor deities in their own right. They throw themselves into battle in any arena they choose, and though they may not always be the best, their raw determination makes them fearsome opponents.
They can appear as almost-elementals of force, muscled and blazing with an inner fire, or anything in between. No matter what form they have, they're incredibly magnetic.
HALFLINGS
An entire race of passive aggressive PTA soccer moms, but with country hospitality instead.
DRAGONS
Singular existences or small families who faced the decline of their era and chose to adapt to - or embrace - the new age. These are only a few of their forms.
Grand Dragons - Dragons who refused to compromise their forms. The few grand dragons that still remain in this world sleep restlessly in hidden places, waiting for a time to unfurl their true glory once again.
Titans - Dragons who shed the trappings of their rule over sky, land and flame for the cold embrace of the sea. Called "Titans" for their terrifying size and their choice to live in the depths, it's a rare situation indeed that would call a Titan to the surface.
Solarians - Dragons who took to the sky permanently, giving up the ability to navigate on land for the embrace of the heavens. Called Solarians for their feared ability to absorb sunlight and weaponise it, they can often be seen following the sun's arc across the sky.
KOBOLDS
The descendants of grand dragons who, facing their end, decided to become vastly smaller and weaker, trading their raw power for a lineage that would never die out.
Unfortunately viewed mostly as pests until very recently. More than half the total kobold population is enslaved by the drow, who keep them as slaves, unwilling soldiers, and handy meals.
GOBLINS
A species who were viewed similarly to kobolds, more like obstacles than people. Their culture is diverse and based on the necessities of being able to travel at any moment; they make excellent caravan masters and guides. Intelligent and resourceful, despite common opinion saying otherwise.
Due to the inability to establish a capital city until recently, goblin communities form a mutual, symbiotic relationship with much larger herds of creatures, and build interconnected cities on their backs. They provide unspecified services for such creatures, citing it as "a goblin secret".
GORGONS
Caretakers of the last celestial tree. Their immigration policy is 'don't'. In gorgon culture, the practice of lucha libre is a venerated martial art, and it forms the basis of the warrior caste. They rarely leave their nation, but some do in the pursuit of a worthy cause. The laws of their homeland dictate that they leave everything of their old self behind and take on a persona to protect their homeland's secrets from outsiders.
DEMONS
Inhabitants of the flying continent Arkluna. Demons come in several sizes and varying degrees of strength. Possessing strange powers and stranger appearances - they are not limited to humanoid forms, and often only take them for the convenience of outsiders - they often frighten the unprepared. Demons once visited Formina's surface in much larger quantities, but due to a combination of factors now mostly keep to themselves. Demon culture tends to value strong will and moral fibre; powerful are those who are resolute in the face of adversity.
Demons come in several classifications, based entirely on size. A demon can take many centuries to build up to a bigger size, but is able to shed and drop down to smaller sizes quickly.
Messengers: The smallest class of demon. Generally the size of goblins and kobolds, but can be even smaller than that.
Knights: Humanoid-species sized. They generally tend to range from five to six feet in height.
Counts: Demons that are seven feet taller and higher. The agreed upon upper limit is generally ten feet. The general size of larger races.
Powers: A demon class that tends to be around eleven or twelve feet at minimum. A Power in the ten foot height range is considered to be a very small one. Medium sized Powers tend to be about house-sized. Large Powers are often as big - or slightly bigger - than the average guild hall.
Thrones: Demons the size of small islands, and only increasing from there. They can carry small towns and even cities on their backs without effort; a Throne is said to have done just that, assuming life as an innocuous floating island somewhere in the sea.
Monarchs: Demons the size of countries. The biggest class, and often the most powerful.
All demons have a domain that they reside over; it is the source of their magical power and contains their major weakpoint. A domain can be a place, contained in an object, or simply contained in the demon themselves, but as long as what it protects is in place, they are overwhelmingly strong.
The more powerful a demon's domain is, the more they are beholden to the 'law' of the world it serves, as if they had made a pact with the embodiment of their power. They can never reverse the effects of their domain's powers; to do so would be anathema to their natures. Demons always look forward, enacting their wills on the world.
Demons can shapeshift, and so can choose to intermarry and have half-demonic children with other races. Half-demonic children tend to grow into their demonic parent's traits later in life if they are born from the non-demonic parent; demons are able to control how much of their initial structure goes into their offspring, and will use this ability to give their partner an easy birth.
AASIMAR
A strange, birdlike race that live on the very top of the last celestial tree, closest to the stars.
(Aasimar draw their power from the stars, and need to be close to space. Pureblooded Aasimar are unable to live close to the ground for this reason and are rarely seen there; too much time away makes them weak, and unable to make the flight back up the great height of the last celestial tree back to their homeland.)
Able to pass on their powers to chosen mortals through bloodline or transference. Very little is known about them; their rare appearances on Formina are usually passed down in folklore as divine visitation.
EMPURIANS
Plant people who originate from the Blessed Land, diverse as their non-sentient 'cousins'. Through various means of travel, they've spread across most continents.
* Greek empurios, from en- ‘in’ + pur ‘fire’. Based off 'empyrean', an old word for the highest part of the sky. A reference to how their homeland is called the 'Celestial Continent'.
CONSTRUCTS
The results of other species' tinkering or the result of wars that created constructs to fight for them.
Imperial Automatons - Natives to Arterra. Imperial Automatons are made by the Empire, and are the only ones to contain the distinctive power source known as an Arcanomatrix Battery. Usually clockwork.
The Entomos* - Natives to Ossea. The Overlord who made them was eventually overthrown by them. Their most distinctive feature is the ability to split their limbs and bodies to a certain range, depending on where they were 'cut' during their construction.
* "entomos, cut in two (from its segmented body)"
The Dragonforged - the construct children of a pair of dragons who decided their legacy would be in another race entirely. They created the first Dragonforged, taught them great knowledge and how to make one another, and then passed on their power so that their children would always endure. Content in their legacy, they went into deep, unwakeable slumber.
Often nicknamed the Walking Treasures, a Dragonforged's key trait is that its core - and often its entire body - is composed of items that hold value. Value can be emotional as well as monetary; a Dragonforged made of beloved children's toys is just as much a Dragonforged as one made out of gold and jewels. A Dragonforged is able to increase their size by adding more of the items that make them up.
No matter what they are made of, the Dragonforged share the same blessings of endurance and strength, the gift of their creators. However, they may have unique weaknesses - and powers - depending on the manner and material used in their creation.
They make pilgrimages to the caves where their creators sleep every few decades. They celebrate and share what they've learned about the world through stories as gifts to the dragons who brought their race into being.
UNDEAD
Though undead can be found on every continent due to some mishap or another, the only place where they truly exist as established cultures and sentient people in their own right is the Broken Land, Ossea.
Liches - Skeletal spellcasters attuned to and held together by magic. Of all the undead that exist on Ossea, liches feel the strongest connection to the lifeblood and energy of their homeland; their magic and spheres of influence reflect those traits. Some concern themselves entirely with death and burial; others represent the hope of rebirth and growth; still others pour their substantial skill into healing and the rejuvenation of the body.
Blazing with magical energy, even the youngest Ossean lich possesses an aura of power several times stronger than sorcerers, wizards and other spellcasters have to build up to over time. Though most liches learn to control this outpouring of power as they grow older, for the sake of everything around them, it's not uncommon for lands less accustomed to such energy to react in unprecedented (and often excited) ways to a lich's arrival, like a dog eager to greet a long lost friend.
Though the way they 'reproduce' and are born is different for each country, it usually involves ceremonies to honor the previous owner of the bones to be used, and a ritual to ask the land to produce a new existence.
Wraiths - Restless, incorporeal spirits who were made out of whatever spare life force was floating around. The least common type of 'true' undead on Ossea (due to the majority of ghosts being angry spirits who were previously living people), wraiths are beings of smoke and shadow. True wraiths contain a 'heart' inside them composed of pure energy; this heart contains the wraith's memories and personality, and keeps them together. If the heart is separated from the wraith's 'body', the body rampages without the controlling influence of its soul and becomes a destructive maelstrom of magical force.
Curious and keen-eyed, wraiths have the most synergy with the construct civilisations of Ossea, and the puppet bodies they use in dealing with the corporeal are usually of construct manufacture. Able to fill objects and structures with their own essence to check for cracks and dangerous flaws, they make for excellent inspectors. They tend to be obsessive perfectionists, and have a strong compulsion to clean up messes and fix even tiny flaws.
If liches are the representation of Ossea's blood, wraiths are the race closest to Ossea's spirit and tumultuous conditions. Sensitive to the radiance of all living things and possessing a natural talent for reading air pressure and ambient magic, they make excellent pilots, navigators and trackers. A wraith's innate magic often takes the form of weather and wind control; powerful wraiths can unleash nature's wrath on the unsuspecting.
Wights/Cadavers - More conventional animated skeletons and the patchwork corpses of those intended for use as soldiers. Having shed the memories of their former lives, wights and cadavers are effectively newborn existences when they 'wake', having been granted a soul by Ossea (or having been granted one through ritual and waking surrounded by friendly faces, as is more common in the present day).
Tenacious and hard working, the innate magic of wights and cadavers lie close to their bones. Able to manipulate the earth itself and what lies within it, they can use it as defense, attack or even as a way of crude construction. A powerful wight or cadaver often glitters with veins of metal, as they become more attuned to the land that granted them life.
Wights and cadavers are the people of Ossea most sensitive to changes in the earth itself and any vibrations that result; they're apt at detecting earthquakes and seismic activity, as well as being able to read the approach of others (provided they've learned to tell the difference between a shake and something larger, or to look for the smaller and more constant impacts of footsteps).
Wights and cadavers complete the trio - in them, Ossea's earth and 'flesh' finds its representation. Their innate magic grants them a significant degree of physical strength and reinforcement - unlike the lesser minions of necromancers, constrained by their rotting or fragile forms - making them foes to be reckoned with if they're treated badly.
Wights and cadavers have a physical representation of their soul embedded into them; a fist-sized, rough lump of ore called a mineral heart. It throbs as a mortal being's heart does, but can survive being parted from its owner much longer; as long as it sustains no significant damage, it can reanimate the body it belongs to when finally reunited.
The prospect of prying a large lump of precious metal or gemstone from a wight or cadaver is often an alluring one, but Ossea is unkind to those who would steal its gifts. Those who stole or tore a heart from its owner suffer terrible nightmares, and often fall ill quickly unless the heart is returned.
BEASTFOLK
Animal people. They come in all shapes and sizes, and different cultures can trace their roots to ancestors distributed all across the world. They call no one continent their original homeland; many beastfolk don't consider such things to be important, as they prefer to look forward to the future.
CHITINEANS
Bug people. Hailing from Chitinea, the Ancient Continent, they call themselves Chitineans after the hard shells common to many of their people and their homeland. They come in many shapes and sizes, though even the smallest tend to be around four feet.
MAREI
Merpeople. From those who look somewhat more humanoid to those who might as well be intelligent fish, those many and varied people known as the Marei have populated the seas since time immemorable. Marei is a blanket term for the many cultures that exist under the sea, including ones better left alone.
*"Marei" is an old Gothic word for 'sea'.
DENIZENS OF THE UNDERDARK
"The pressure and darkness of Formina's underground have produced a peculiar type of sorcery. Native inhabitants of the Underdark are generally born with an extrasensory organ that is designed to aid with navigation and survival in a world without light, which forms the crux of their unusual magical powers.
Underdark sorcery takes the form of applying an invisible pressure of varying degrees, mental or physical, to obstacles and targets. It's poetically been referred to as the 'kiss of the underground', a magical representation of Formina's depth, and is more colloquially known as 'psychic power' to differentiate it from aboveground magic. Most find it unsettling."
Aboleths - Fishlike guardians of Formina's heart. Live in the Abyssal Sea, a light-filled place at the core of the world that harbors extreme pressures few can withstand.
Aboleths were made as guardian spirits to protect the world's core. Only the last few generations of aboleths have taken on flesh and expressed curiosity about the world beyond the abyssal sea. They have a shared pool of memory and knowledge inhabited by the souls of those who have already passed, but lose access to it once they breach the surface of the sea to leave it.
Beholders - Grumpy spherelike beings with tentacles. Usually possess only one eye. They form vast psychic labyrinths to live in, mostly to avoid being disturbed, and also to show off.
They gather at least once a year to complain about the state of the world. A meeting of beholders is called a grumble or a headache.
Illithids - Intelligent beings with tentacled faces. Strong psychics with a natural aptitude for seeing the structure of objects and living beings, they choose a particular discipline in order to refine and control their psychic powers as they mature. They build intricate cities in the Underdark, considering it an appropriate challenge for beings as powerful as themselves. All illithids' potential for psychic power is vast, but as they focus and narrow it into one segment of learning, they find it hard to do anything else outside that chosen field.
The most traditional job for an illithid is an architect or a builder. Adventurous illithids of this sort who choose to leave their subterranean homes for the surface world often find initial work in local tradesman's guilds, or fixing up abandoned structures for others' use.
Despite the perception of illithids eating brains, only a few hunt down living creatures for their brains and sustain themselves on that diet alone. In truth, illithids are omnivorous; the best food for an illithid is a balanced diet.
However, they breed their own version of livestock specifically for a fresh supply of brains to use for supplies on long journeys, as brains are mostly fat. Other races tend to find this unsettling.
Weakness: Hubris. Often too smart for their own good.
NATURE SPIRITS
ELEMENTALS
Composites of raw energy that developed a will to hold themselves together. Blank slates when they come into the world, they are extremely powerful, but intensely amoral. Unless influenced by others, they adhere to their nature - to embody whatever their element is, as much as possible.