Racial Deep Dive: Humans

My understanding of history, prehistory and archaeology is intimately tied up with my understanding of linguistics and archaeogenetics, all topics that interest me greatly. Because of this, I've defaulted to a structure of human populations in Old Night that are also closely tied to ancient genetics and linguistics. Let me, therefore, go back to a post from several months ago about languages, and reiterate and slightly rewrite or edit it, and from that base, let me talk about the various populations of humans that you could find in the Old Night setting, as well as ones that you could potentially pick from if creating a character that's human in the RPG.

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Common. I like the use of the word Common, because it's understood by all and is used by both D&D and Tolkien both. For all intents and purposes, Common is the language of the Hill Country or Humberland, and is also called Humbrian. For our purposes, it is equivalent to English. Because of the presence of Humbrian colonists, traders and more throughout the region, Humbrian has become... well, Common. There have been significant inroads of the language as the native language (albeit with different accents, perhaps) throughout much of the region. While clearly not everyone speaks Common fluently, or in some remote places at all, throughout the entirety of the Three Realms+, you can usually get by pretty good if it's the only language you speak.

Anstal Tane, a classic Humbrian

Humbrian is closely associated with the Humbrians, of course, and their country, the Hill Country or Humberland. For purposes of comparison, the Humbrians should be like British Americans; essentially the same as the British, but in a newly settled frontier territory. Unlike in the real world, the Humbrians don't have access to return home, however; Humberland is their new home and there's no going back even if they wanted to, nor can they be supplemented by new arrivals or settlers from the old homeland of Culmerland (et al.) Except more Medieval rather than Colonial in dress and manners, etc.

Old Culmerian. The original language of the majority of the hillmen settlers, and the direct ancestor of Common. Hasn't been spoken in many centuries, but old texts are still around, and there's a vigorous academic interest in old Humbrian languages and languages from the Old Country before the Colonists came to the Three Realms+. Real world analog: Old English.

Normaund. While not directly closely related to Old Culmerian, a strata of Normaundish aristocrats ruled Culmer for a time. While they were eventually assimilated and integrated (mostly) their language was distinct for many years, and many old texts in this language still exist too. It also added greatly to the vocabulary and structure of Common, and the dividing line between Old Culmerian and Common is somewhat arbitrarily pinned to the start of the Normaundish influence. Real world analog: Norman French.

Brynach. A language that existed alongside Old Culmerian, and predates it in what was later called Culmer. In spite of its age and lower prestige, this stubbornly didn't die for a long time; there are still a few older people in rural parts of the Hill Country who speak or read this language, although there's not nearly enough of them to maintain a viable speaking base, and nobody speaks this as their every day language. Real world analog: Gaelic and other British Celtic languages. 

Skellish. Distantly related to Culmer, but from a neighboring Old Country kingdom called Skelldale, some of the Colonists spoke this language. While all have assimilated linguistically to Common, literature in this language is important because it maintains elements of history and myth that were analogous to what the Old Culmers would have believed, but which they themselves lost. Real world analog: Old Norse.

Timischer. The native language of the aristocracy of Timischburg. Most of them still learn it, but for various social reasons, their Tarushan subjects have resisted using it natively, and the utility of the language has faded. As more and more trade with the Hill Country has penetrated the region the last several hundred years, most people in Timischburg have learned Common, and because the Tarushans and Timischers have largely resisted using each others languages to a large degree, Common (with a German accent) has largely emerged as the consensus language that both groups already knew and were willing to use to speak to each other. Timischer is on its way to becoming a dead language; well known by the scholarly, but spoken very infrequently, even in the homes of the native Timischer nobles as of the last few generations. However, it retains prestige legal status in Timischburg; signs are written in it, and many documents, especially older ones, are written in Timischer. Timischer nobles also use it to speak with each other when they want to separate themselves by language from those around them. Many Timischers of lower social class use it as well as a kind of insider language; Timischer mercenary companies push it as the official language of their companies (although most speak it as a second language) and some Timischer criminal groups outside of Timischburg have cultivated it as a way to keep their communications more secret.

Similarly, Old Timischer, as it sounds, the language of the Timischers, but archaic. As Old Culmerian is to Common, Old Timischer is to modern Timischer. Real world analog: continental early Medieval Germanic languages, such as Low Franconian (Old Dutch) and High Franconian (Old German) which makes sense given the analog of the Timischer Old Country homeland of Carlovingia with the early Medieval Frankish kingdoms of the Carolingian dynasty.

Alpon von Lechfeld, a famous Timischer scholar, enjoying retirement in his private library.

Tarushan. Tarushan is the native language of the "aboriginal" people of Timischburg, which largely corresponds geographically with the old kingdom of Tarush Noptii. As noted above, it has no official status, but the Tarushan people still cling to it stubbornly, and many of the old Tarushan people refuse to learn or speak or read Timischer. Tarushan has less official status, but more actual use, and there are people in the rural areas, or among the Tarushan Gypsies who only speak Tarushan, with at best a smattering of Common. There are a number of older documents in a slightly archaic version of Tarushan that predate the arrival of the Timischers as well. Tarushan is clearly related to some of the other older languages in the region, although distantly, and has cultural, linguistic and presumably also genetic ties to the ancient kingdom of Kinzassal, which we'll cover later.

Claud Lupescu, a Tarushan young man

Tazittan. This is a minority language, distantly related to Tarushan but not mutually intelligible, of a number of primitive, rustic and hostile peoples deep in the wildernesses of Humberland, like the Haunted Forest, especially on the eastern slopes of the Sabertooth Mountains, and the Tazitta Badlands, of course. Although it descends from a literate society, there is no written Tazittan that anyone really uses today. For a social analog, you could consider Tazitta to be not unlike the Sioux language spoken in the 1860s or 1870s—except that there is less open conflict between the Hill-men and the Tazitta, mostly due to no resources in Tazitta territory tempting Hillmen settlement at the moment. The geographical and social limitations of this language make it one that's unlikely to be of much use for PCs, except in a campaign that features this isolated population of Tazittans, however. Although much more primitive in their dress and equipment, as befits a xenophobic and isolated population living in a hazardous and forsaken place like the Haunted Forest, physically and genetically, the Tazittans more or less resemble the Tarushans in their build and coloration; the original phenotype of the Kinzassal people who were ancestral to both.

Drylander. Spoken mostly on the Baal Hamazi peninsula, this is the native language of the area, and while not related to Tarushan and Tazittan, etc. it does seem to have borrowed from it, and some of the Drylanders have genetics that appear similar to those of Old Kinzassal. Today, as Baal Hamazi is a broken, Balkanized land of tribes and city-states, the language's status is questionable. Still spoken in many remote tribes as the only language, and the official language of some city-states such as Baal Hishutash—one of the most conservative of the city-states, or Baal Ngirsu, one of the most isolated. Otherwise, as traders and travelers from beyond have come to the land, their lingua franca, i.e., Common, has largely replaced Drylander in most of the more cosmopolitan or connected city-states, and even among many of the more nomadic Drylander tribes. 

Their language also seems to be unique, although with some odd similarities with some of the very old Humbrian Old Country languages, like Old Culmer and Skellish—some have posited that there's a link. That said, this idea is sketchy and not widely accepted. The Drylanders are usually seen as their own people, and if there is some distant connection with any other people, it's distant enough to not matter. The Drylanders are usually tall, and have pale eyes, with extremely pale gray being more common than elsewhere, although blue, hazel and lighter brown are not unusual. Their hair is usually dark, but often with a reddish tint, and their skin is ruddy, even for those who don't spend most of their time outside like the nomadic ones to.

Pretty typical nomadic Drylander

Kurushan. The language of the Kurushans and their Northlander cousins. Like Timischer or Drylander, it is more associated with past glories than the current situation; Lower Kurushat is more and more disconnected from "regular" Kurushat to the north, and the Kurushans are left to their own devices in a land where they are not the majority population. While still spoken in some northern cities, especially in old Kurushan noble houses, few indeed could function if this is the only language you speak. It still remains an important administrative language in Lower Kurushan cities, but most people on the street will be speaking Common instead. The Elementalists came out of the Kurushan population, and before they manifest their elemental natures as young teenagers, they tend to look like Kurushans; who are very similar in many ways to the Drylanders physically, although with slightly flatter faces, higher cheekbones and often epicanthic folds.

Pallaran. The final language related to old Kinzassal is Pallaran, the language of the Corsair Coast. Unlike most other regions in which a Tarushan-related language exists, Pallaran is still a pretty active language, and many people along the Corsair Coast speak it as a first and only language. That said, Common has made inroads here as well, as many traders and adventurers have come to this area, or the corsairs—and legitimate traders—from this region have sailed northwards. It is also the most divergent of the various "Tarushan" languages, as the people themselves are heavily admixed with some other population that is now anonymous other than the linguistic and genetic trace that they once existed.

A Pallaran man off of the Corsair Coast

Kinzassal. The language that stands at the heart of the Tarushan language family. While it only briefly belonged to a single political entity, and always had a variety of dialects, its importance in the romance of the Kin Twilight, and the semi-imagined legendary Golden Age of all of the splintered kin that later broke off from this brief period of near unity is hard to describe; even the Humbrians, who are not themselves descended from the Kin, are drawn to this romance. That said, although it would seem to be like Latin, and it's various descendants variously like Spanish, Romanian, Italian, French, etc. in reality there's not nearly as much textual evidence for this language as there is for Latin, and Kinzassal was a much more savage and primitive place than Rome anyway—more like the Bronze Age society; further removed and very foreign to the inhabitants of the Three Realms+ today. Most of the "texts" of this language come from weathered carvings on standing stones and other ruined places rather than from actual texts. That said, because of the various things that happened in this time, there's intense academic interest in the period of Kinzassal and its artifacts.

Nizrekh. The language of the island chain off the west coast that is the remainder of Atlantis; although Nizrekh is an unrelated language spoken by people who arrived after the fall of Atlantis. It is not related to any other language, and since the Nizrekhi are isolationist and remote, few others speak their language either.

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This next batch is made up of languages that native to demihuman populations, but since this is both a deep dive into the various human populations but also into the languages of the Three Realms+, they have to at least be noted.

Grendling. The language of the Grendlings, or Wendaks, the actual descendants of Atlanteans who were on the mainland when Atlantis fell. Because the Grendlings are themselves a debased and rapidly devolving population, super xenophobic and isolationist, few speak this language other than them, and they teach it to no one. It is—presumably—a distant descendant itself of the language of high Atlantean civilization, but even that is not for sure, and certainly they don't resemble each other much now. The Atlanteans relationship to humanity is dubious. The Grendlings are not exactly human anymore, and the Atlanteans, their direct ancestors, probably were, but were very different than any human population around today.

Thurse. The bestial language of the thurses, at least of Thursewood. Because the anatomy of thurses is very different than that of humans and demihumans, it is widely considered impossible to learn to speak this language, although it is possible to learn to understand it... assuming you can do so without being killed and eaten. 

Orcling. The language of the orcs and goblins from Gunaakt. Still widely spoken amongst that race, especially the most recent arrivals in the area, but not by much of anyone else. There are few written texts in this language, and many orclings who have been in the Three Realms+ for more than a couple of generations have lost this language and only speak it haltingly if at all. While obviously not a human language, it needs to be mentioned because it's not an insignificant one, and some scholars are taking an interest in it as the Orcling population becomes more important.

Nyxian. The language of the minority population in Hyperborean Lomar. The majority Zobnans who founded the city no longer speak their original language, and only speak Common, or whatever other trade language they've learned. The Zobnans mostly speak Common, and have no records of their former language, but it was probably a dialect of Nyxian.

Infernal. This is the primary language spoken by those from the Realms Outside such as daemons and elemental-like creatures like ifrit, although myriad other tongues exist amongst this diverse breed as well. In addition, this is the language of magic, so a smattering of it, at least, is known by any practitioner of the arcane arts. Perfect fluency in this language, on the other hand, is almost impossible for any mortal to achieve. Despite that, it was very fashionable in old Baal Hamazi, where the demonic taint of their bloodline was a source of pride to the ruling caste, to speak Infernal natively, and many noble houses took great pains to ensure that their children didn't hear any other language until they were five years of age. Some households still speak Infernal in the home, and it is still a pseudo-living language in some of the successor states to Baal Hamazi, but native speakers are few, and fewer every day.

Dagonic. This is a bizarre pre-human language, remnants of which float around on isolated and moldy standing stones and other areas. Intriguingly, it appears to have originally been a underwater language. Few people on the surface can even make an attempt to learn it, due to the challenges of speech that an underwater language had to have overcome, and the language itself is only known from very scanty and fragmentary remains, making fluency all but impossible for even the most dedicated scholar. For all intents and purposes, it is a written language only, not a spoken language, since there are no speakers that anyone knows of at all, and how to pronounce the language is anyone's guess.

Atlantean. Very little is known of this language, which was presumably the distant ancestor of the modern disappearing Grendling (Wendak) language. Because most documents, archives or carvings in this language disappeared under the sea, scholars are forced to try and interpret a very limited corpus of texts that remain, and their interpretations of what is represented is divisive and wildly divergent from each other. Really curious and foolhardy linguists could find living memory of spoken Atlantean from the Mind-wizards, like Gothan from the Heresiarchy... if they survive the experience.

Because I'm deliberately running a game that is sorta D&D-like mechanically, but which is meant to be played much more like Call of Cthulhu is played, these old languages can be very important when researching the blasphemous secret history of the Three Realms+, but unless the characters are Lovecraftian also in the sense that they are academics, sages, and professors, it's unlikely that they'd know any of those languages; it is more likely that they'd have to utilize the services of an academic contact, such as Drancent Hewe or even Professor Alpon von Lechfeld to help translate anything that they find. Or... in a really, really bad pinch, one of the ancient Heresiarchs.

Racial Deep Dive: Elementalists

This is my race deep dive on surturs. I need to expand it before I can make my YouTube video on them, which maybe I'll make in the next few days, since I changed surturs to actually be all four elements in one (sorta) race. The text below is meant to be a new, expanded and revised race deep dive that can be used as a de facto script for my YouTube video on them, to go along with my pre-existing videos on grislings and kemlings. 

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Before the collapse of the kemling empire of Baal Hamazi, they stretched considerably farther to the east than the region does now; their farthest eastward outpost was Chersky Island in the Darkling Sea, which still bears foreboding ruins of ancient kemling fortresses. But their presence east of the Rudmont Escarpment was never heavy nor did they really control that territory as much as they would have liked. When a new population of demihumans and their own associated human ethnicity approached from the North (the northlings, obviously) they came into conflict with the retreating and already weakened Baal Hamazi empire. Some of these wars were so apocalyptic that they are ultimately the source of the Boneyard; the bleached bones of soldiers who fought there linger still on the sands and among the sagebrush and juniper scrubland, but in reality, few if any people ever lived in the Boneyard, which was called the Indash Desert at the time. As the Indash Sea withdrew, becoming smaller and saltier and more xeric, boats, fleets, and even entire towns were left high and dry, now abandoned and ghostly echoes of Kurushat and Baal Hamazi's prior expansions into the region. Climate change is only part of what happened to Kurushat, however. As the Empire grew more powerful and more peaceful, its vigor slowly drained, and the concerns of faraway southern colonies surrounded by hostile nations, barbarians and harsh climate seemed much less important to the indolent jeds and jeddak of Kurushat. Ultimately, cities like Vuukrat and Simashki came under the control of Lower Kurushat for a time, and even now they have a syncretic relationship where populations of kemlings, drylanders, northlings and elementalists all live together—but their relationship to greater Kurushat is non-existant, and the jeds and jeddaks of the north barely even remember that they once (in theory) ruled here.

Lower Kurushat is a southern extension of lands to the north and west of the mapped out section of the Three Realms; the Empire of Kurushat. Originally founded on a volcanic island (reminiscent of real-life Iceland or Spitzbergen), it was settled by a couple of different northern peoples in small numbers who raised sheep and cattle on the green grass amid the dark volcanic rock, blasted by winds from the sea, and having little in the way of trees because of the subarctic climate, except in some sheltered valleys and gorges. Glaciers top the inactive volcanos and ice floes occasionally pass by near the harbors, but in this land of water and ice, there is also a strong element of fire because of the numerous active volcanos that are building the islands even now. It's not clear exactly how the first elementalists came out of this environment. Some legends say that they, or at least their more elemental ancestors, simply walked out of the volcanos themselves, which are gates to the fiery Otherworldly realm of Muspelheim, and that the original Surtur himself, the fire jotunn, is their ancestor. Others suggest that they were normal people cursed or transformed by the malign intent of one of the ancient Heresiarchs, perhaps Esmeraude, She Who Ushers In the Apocalypse, who is known to have an affinity and fascination with fire. Whichever is the truth, the elementalists arrived on the mainland, conquering and colonizing; settling and trading. While most legends are agreed that surturs were the original elementalists, it soon became clear that other elements besides fire resided in the bloodlines of the elementalists; water, air and earth, and the tritons, sylphs and dvergs were associated with the surturs as well. Nobody is born a surtur; or any other type of elementalist; they are born as humans of the northling race, but as they enter puberty, some of them undergo a transition into elementalists. Which element manifests also doesn't seem to be linked to bloodline, so any of the elementalist races can be born of any parents, even ones that are simply northling humans. Roughly 15-20% of the population of Kurushat is elementalist, which holds true for the Kurushans present in Lower Kurushat as well.

The northlings, which all elementalists experience as children at least, and most of them grow up in families of northlings, are a race with brown skin, brown hair, epicanthic folds on their eyes, which are usually gray or palest blue. But I'll cover human ethnicities another day and discuss them in more detail then.

The Kurushans weren't genocidal when they came to the mainland, so many of the people who were already there are integrated into their northern Empire, but given the harsher boreal climate, the population was always relatively light anyway. Most of the itinerant hunter-gatherers who lived there saw their standard of living increase tremendously upon the arrival of the elementalists, who had a fair bit of noblesse oblige for those who welcomed them—although tremendous belligerence to those who did not. 

Kurushat is largely a coastal empire, and the climate is similar to that of the Alaskan southern coast, or Scandinavia, but once you get inland, you have either tundra and mammoth steppe, or boreal forest (taiga) and wild mountains. Free northerners still live inland from Kurushat, and many have friendly trading relationships with the empire, although raiding, as is common in barbaric societies, is not unknown. Kurushat, at its peak a few generations ago, stretched down deep into the northern Three Realms, although the settlement of Kurushan citizens of any type, elementalist or human, was always relatively light. The territory around Dagan Bay and the Kindattu Mountain corridor was their foothold, and some cities that still stand, such as Sinjagat or Volek Szemenok on Palar Lake were founded by Kurushans. Both the Hamazin and Kurushans look at Glittering Simashki and claim to be responsible for it, and both races still make up notable pluralities in the population. 

Today, the sections of colonial Kurushat that still remain on the map are independent city-states, abandoned by the Empire like post-Roman Britain. Some of the elementalists and northling humans who came during the expansion period remain—or rather, their posterity does. Although never the majority in any of their cities, the Kurushan culture, mostly driven by the elementalists themselves who were the carriers of it, are important components in the cities named above, as well as the surrounding areas, but all of them have also become syncretized and hybridized by exposure to the peoples who were already here, or who have arrived since (such as the area near Bucknerfeld, where Hillman have come right to the edges of the salt flats that ring the Indash Salt Sea.

The Kurushans of Lower Kurushat, as they still sometimes call the region, are not an overly proud people, seeing the retreat of their empire and the abandonment of their settlements with a mixture of peevishness, but also opportunity to chart their own course in a new land without the oversight of tyrannical jeds and other hetmen. Most have abandoned any notion of attempting to recreate or maintain Kurushan culture, becoming rather fond of the more cosmopolitan syncretic cultures that they live in. 

From a meta perspective, it's easy to see the elementalists as a kind of northern race, with some similarities to the Vikings, some to more eastern northern peoples such as the Slavs, Finns, or other Siberian peoples, but also a prominent nod toward the red men of Barsoom, which informs many of their names and titles, as well as their fiery yet usually honorable personalities. At least their culture which demands such, even if individuals may not be as honorable as their culture expects of them. Their supernatural origin, and their ancient clashes with the kemlings make them different than any human culture, real or imagined, however, and those who remain south of the boreal forest barrier that separates Lower Kurushat from Kurushat proper are more likely to be traders, adventurers, mercenaries, occasionally bandits, and a somewhat arrogant overcaste; confident in their superiority, yet mostly imbued with a noblesse oblige to the peoples who live in their cosmopolitan communities. Many of them still act as if the Imperial weight of Kurushat gives them authority, but the reality is that all of the Lower Kurushat area is now essentially independent city-states who must rule themselves with very little if any contact with Kurushat to the north anymore, which is why the various other peoples who live there have risen in prominence socially as the Kurushat Imperial structure retreated to the north. In some, this disconnection with their homeland drives a sense of melancholy, as they believe that they will inevitably give way to entropy and the greater numbers of their neighbors, to eventually be diluted beyond recognition and emerge as some new society altogether with little of old Kurushat to show for their efforts.

In terms of terminology, Kurushans and elementalists are often used interchangeably, but technically a surtur, triton, dverg or sylph is a member of that specific fantasy race, regardless of cultural or political affiliation, whereas Kurushans are members of the culture of Kurushat, regardless of race. However, in practical terms, that distinction often doesn't mean too much. 

Surturs are notable for their bright (sometimes unnaturally so) reddish or blond hair, brick red skin that sometimes tends towards sooty in the darkest of them, and red, orange or golden eyes. As the mechanics of the race suggest, the fire strike ability represents their connection to Muspelheim and their ability to call on the fiery elemental heritage that makes them different than humans.

Tritons are also tall, but with a teal colored skin, and bluish or greenish eyes and hair. Many of them have relocated; although they are climate tolerant of the cold waters (and air) of their origin, the Corsair Coast farther to the south now has a large (relatively speaking) population of triton expats who really enjoy the more subtropical waters of the coast and even the humid jungles and swamps farther inland more than the drier areas of the north. In spite of the fact that they can live underwater as easily as above it, most of them do not, because it would limit them to interactions with only other tritons. Many are fairly social and gregarious.

Sylphs are also tall, with icy blue or even grayish skin and blue or white hair, with silver chrome or topaz blue bright eyes. They tend to be taller, even, than the other elementalist variants, and thinner; and their hair is often breezy and wild. They prefer the colder lands, and further in the south, they enjoy spending time in the mountains where the weather is often colder, although that's just a preference not a necessity, and they do fine in warmer and drier climates when they find themselves there. They often come across as the most aloof and insular in personality and outlook of the elementalists.

Finally, dvergs are a little less tall; a bit more robust and stockily built. They often have metallic colored skin; a kind of dull iron or steel or a reddish copper color being the most common, with eyes that sometimes glow like magma. They tend to be the most individualistic of the elementalist races by personality, as well as the least common. It's hard to tell how many there are, however, as they often seek solitude, or otherwise leave their communities to go see more of the world, finding that they prefer life on the road and being in control of their own destinies without societal expectations to hinder their whims.

All four of the elementalists tend to be mildly arrogant, bordering on self-important, but mostly good-natured; their arrogance doesn't tend to make them megalomaniacal or narcissistic; rather they have a strong cultural tendency to see a need to express noblesse oblige. But they do so because there's usually a small hint of condescension towards other races. Of course this is a cultural and maybe even genetic behavioral tendency, not an absolute, and if you're playing an elementalist, you don't have to characterize them as such. And there are certainly plenty of violent bandits, pirates or otherwise non-good-natured arrogant elementalists out there.

A few additional details of Kurushan society. Young warriors often organize themselves into companies or bands; many of them hire themselves out as mercenaries across the Three Realms, which also gives them an opportunity to see more of the area. Reasonably well-trained and capable swordmaidens often serve as a kind of figurehead or inspiration for these bands. In some cases, these are little more than camp whores for the entire company, but in other cases, they are seen as extremely noble and a kind of foreign chivalric tradition of courtly loyalty and love has sprung up around them from the men in their companies. Be careful making assumptions about them; if you assume the former and the position is more like the latter, the entire band will take your assumption as a mortal offense, and you can find yourself facing one duel challenge after another until you're dead.

A pseudo-religious cultural tradition among them are the Larch Grove dancers, talented women and girls who perform this ritual for young men setting out on adventure. Exploration of the wilderness is a passion of many elementalists, and with the mammoth steppe and boreal forest around them, as well as many craggy and dramatic mountain ranges, there are great opportunities for exploratory teams to find excitement. Their adventures are recounted to enthralled audiences when they return home, usually for the winter season. A kind of extreme adventurer tourism has sprung up among the wealthier Kurushans who don't need to work, to strike out and explore the remnants of distant Hyperborea to the east beyond the Wolfwood in the brief spring, summer and fall for that area. Although this is dangerous and many fail in this attempt, those who make it to Hyperborea and return with the tales of their journey almost become celebrities in Kurushat. Some of this still remains in Volek Szemenok, although it happens very infrequently there; one successful expedition a generation being about as good as it gets. That said, the Larch Grove dancers have loosened up the requirements of what counts, and now actively look for opportunities to encourage young men to go on some kind of adventure—any kind of adventure—and to kick it off in style, involving his whole community.

As the culture and organization of old Kurushat becomes more and more irrelevant over time in Lower Kurushat, where there are large numbers of non-Kurushan people surrounding them, the noble titles of old Kurushat are largely irrelevant today. That said, the scions of the old jed's houses still maintain a status not at all unlike nobility in their demesnes, and may insist on using the titles, even if the rest of the cultural expectations that once surrounded the titles no longer matter.

The Burnt Seers are a kind of weird roving cult of soothsayers and hedge magicians that are part of Kurushan society, notable for their spiraling black tattoos and often socially and politically disruptive actions. When one, or a small company of them, roll into town, the local authorities are reluctant for superstitious reasons to outright run them out, but they keep a very close eye on them and curtail their ability to make trouble as best as they can. As the label suggests, most of them are surturs, but any Kurushan, even non-elementalists, might belong to the organization.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Woodwoses

The woodwoses, or 'woses (or simply woses) as they are sometimes called, are an unusual demihuman race in the Dark Fantasy X setting that are the descendants of ancient werewolves. Today, the curse of lycanthropy is very diluted, and isn't really a "curse" per se to most of them; rather, they are simply a race of human-like people that have some unusual characteristics because of the ancestry that they have. This lycanthropic heritage makes them slightly more animalistic; they tend to be somewhat hairy, occasionally bordering on furry, walk with a stoop, but they are strong, have sharp teeth and eyes and ears, a keen sense of smell, and are very adept at the wilderness. In fact, most of them feel uncomfortable spending too much time in urban settings, and they often wander as part of that uncomfortableness.

Woodwoses have no real homelands of their own. By nature, they are unlikely to band together in organizations larger than a modest sized tribe or clan. Maybe of these clans live quiet lives far away from humans or other demihumans in the deep forests that stretch across the Three Realms; the Wolfwood in particular is fairly thick with them, but they also live in the Chokewater Forest, the Garenkarst Woods, and the Bitterwood. Not all of them live in the forests, though—there are tribes in the pinyon/juniper scrublands of the Boneyard. Of course, not all woodwoses live in tribes in the wilderness; the ones that you're actually most likely to encounter are the homesteaders who live in the rural areas, mingled with humanity. The Copper Hills and the Garen Hills in particular have many such woodwose homesteaders, and for the most part they reject the clan life, and are welcomed by their farmer and homesteader neighbors, who value their greater skill in the wilderness when it comes to hunting and providing.

Woodwose homesteader couple

The tribal woodwoses aren't necessarily as friendly, of course. They are rather insulated, by choice, and when they do interact with the outside world, they're often viewed with suspicion or even hostility because of their tendency towards banditry or other hostility towards anyone traveling through their territory. In addition to this, woodwoses are often associated with organized crime in urban areas; there is a long tradition of woodwoses being the "muscle" for cells or pockets of the Chersky Mafia.

This tendency towards wandering and crime means that unknown woodwoses are often looked at askance in communities where they are not known, sometimes most especially by any more settled woodwoses already in the community. They tend to feel that they have worked very hard to integrate themselves into their communities, in spite of being outsiders by race, and don't want anyone coming along and jeopardizing it with bad behavior. However, what many wandering woodwoses do is follow a pretty routine route, and while they may not stay in one place, they are well known by the various communities that they pass through, and their ability to bring news and reports of conditions outside of the community is valued, and their judgement is often trusted.

Deep in the Wolfwood and (allegedly) in the Bitterwood are tribes of woodwoses that have full-blown werewolves as their chiefs or shamans, and they practice strange cults to the Moon and to lycanthropy generally. These are the most feared woodwoses, and some believe that they will kidnap isolated farmers and homesteaders, and those that they don't kill may become infected with werewolfism themselves. Because of this, in Timischburg in particular, and farther to the north, woodwoses are much less likely to be seen positively than in the Hill Country.

Below is a selection of woodwose characters, just to give a better example of what their physical appearance is like

While of course there are many personality types among the woodwoses, there are three stereotypes, and the majority of woodwoses seem to belong to one of these three personalities:

— loners and introverts who have few friends, are quiet and stoic, and prefer to spend their time on isolated homesteads, or even in the wilderness.

— koryos packs, who model their behavior on wolf packs. Somewhat jingoistic and often hostile, these will be drawn to other woodwoses, and see most other people as marks or prey. Many of the urban thugs who work with the Mafia belong to this personality type.

— the final, and most likely to be encountered frequently by hillmen in particular are the loyal seconds; they don't crave leadership, but they crave integration into a community, where they are extraordinarily loyal to the community and strive to be seen as trusted and useful members.

Like all of the demihuman races, woodwoses have a curse that occasionally manifests. In this case, it is a lingering trace of their lycanthropy. During full or nearly full moons, their behavior can occasionally become erratic. They will be at -1 on all d20 checks, except for in combat where they will be a +1. They will also get sick and have further penalties if exposed to (or wounded by) silver. This isn't meant to be a penalty applied universally; in fact, it shouldn't be a factor at all unless you (as GM or player) decide that you want that to be a plot point or conflict to explore; it otherwise happens so infrequently as to not be something that would otherwise need to be defined.

This is maybe a little bit shorter than most of the other Race Deep Dives. In reality, the woodwoses have always lacked the same kind of history as most other races. They aren't a discrete population group, except for some of the tribes deep in the wilderness, but have rather been always drawn out of regular human communities during their origin as werewolves, and even as their werewolf curse started fading, they tended to reintegrate, or remain integrated, as the case might have been, with other human communities. While not always trusted or welcomes, especially in the early days when their association with werewolves made them much more dangerous, they're never had their own homelands, or been completely disassociated with human communities, which means that in many ways there is less to say about them. Even now, their relationship, although maybe not quite as tight as they would like, with the human communities around them defines the woodwoses more than their connection to other woodwoses.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Surturs

To the north and west of the mapped out section of the Three Realms is the Empire of Kurushat. Originally founded on a volcanic island (reminiscent of real-life Iceland or Spitzbergen), it was settled by a couple of different northern peoples in small numbers who raised sheep and cattle on the green grass amid the dark volcanic rock, blasted by winds from the sea, and having little in the way of trees because of the subarctic climate, except in some sheltered valleys and gorges. Glaciers top the inactive volcanos and ice floes occasionally pass by near the harbors, but in this land of water and ice, there is also a strong element of fire because of the numerous active volcanos that are building the islands even now. It's not clear exactly how the first surturs came out of this environment. Some legends say that they, or at least their more elemental ancestors, simply walked out of the volcanos themselves, which are gates to the fiery Otherworldly realm of Muspelheim, and that the original Surtur himself, the fire jotunn, is their ancestor. Others suggest that they were normal people cursed or transformed by the malign intent of one of the ancient Heresiarchs, perhaps Esmeraude, She Who Ushers In the Apocalypse, who is known to have an affinity and fascination with fire. Whichever is the truth, the surturs arrived on the mainland, conquering and colonizing; settling and trading. They weren't genocidal, so many of the people who were already there are integrated into their northern Empire, but given the harsher boreal climate, the population was always relatively light anyway. Most of the itinerant hunter-gatherers who lived there saw their standard of living increase tremendously upon the arrival of the surturs, who had a fair bit of noblesse oblige for those who welcomed them—although tremendous belligerence to those who did not. 

Kurushat is largely a coastal empire, and the climate is similar to that of the Alaskan southern coast, or Scandinavia, but once you get inland, you have either tundra and mammoth steppe, or boreal forest (taiga) and wild mountains. Free northerners still live inland from Kurushat, and many have friendly trading relationships with the empire, although raiding, as is common in barbaric societies, is not unknown. Kurushat, at its peak a few generations ago, stretched down deep into the northern Three Realms, although the settlement of Kurushan citizens of any type, surtur or human, was always relatively light. The territory around Dagan Bay was their foothold, and some cities that still stand, such as Sinjagat, Vuukrat, or Volek Szemenok on Palar Lake were founded by Kurushans. Both the kemlings and the surturs look at Glittering Simashki and claim to be responsible for it, and both races still make up notable pluralities in the population. 

Kurushat expanded into the region as the Baal Hamazi empire was fading. The Boneyard gets its name because of the vast armies loyal to the two empires who clashed over the territory, leaving their bleached bones to linger on the sands and among the sagebrush and juniper scrubland, but in reality, few of any people ever lived in the Boneyard, which was called the Indash Desert at the time. As the Indash Sea withdrew, becoming smaller and saltier and more xeric, boats, fleets, and even entire towns were left high and dry, now abandoned and ghostly echoes of Kurushat's expansion into the region. Climate change is only part of what happened to Kurushat, however. As the Empire grew more powerful and more peaceful, its vigor slowly drained, and the concerns of faraway southern colonies surrounded by hostile nations, barbarians and harsh climate seemed much less important to the indolent jeds and jeddak of Kurushat.

Today, the sections of colonial Kurushat that still remain on the map are independent city-states, abandoned by the Empire for the most part, like post-Roman Britain. Some of the surturs and Northerner humans who came during the expansion period remain—or rather, their posterity does. Although never the majority in any of their cities, the Kurushan culture, mostly driven by the surturs themselves who were the carriers of it, are important elements in the cities named above, as well as the surrounding areas, but all of them have also become syncretized and hybridized by exposure to the peoples who were already here, or who have arrived since (such as the area near Bucknerfeld, where Hillman have come right to the edges of the salt flats that ring the Indash Salt Sea.

The surturs of Lower Kurushat, as they still sometimes call the region, are not an overly proud people, seeing the retreat of their empire and the abandonment of their settlements with a mixture of peevishness, but also opportunity to chart their own course in a new land without the oversight of tyrannical jeds and other hetmen. Most have abandoned any notion of attempting to recreate or maintain Kurushan culture, becoming rather fond of the more cosmopolitan syncretic cultures that they live in. Surturs are famously intense in their passions and quick-tempered, but also gregarious and social and more likely to be friendly by nature than most other races (naturally individual personality and situation can cause this to be quite variable.) For those with a darker tendency, this is still true, although their social gregariousness will sometimes manifest as narcissism, degeneracy, and other traits that make them extremely toxic, even if they aren't outright violent and belligerent (although the sharp tempers often make that likely too.) 

Like most demihumans in Dark Fantasy X, there is a curse associated with the surturs, which manifests just barely often enough to rise above the level of urban myth to something that is actually verified.  There is still a lingering connection of some sort between Muspelheim and the surturs.  Every once in a while, a burning flame will find its way from Muspelheim to a surtur person, who will spontaneously combust in a wild conflagration that can consume entire houses, or any nearby people.  Luckily, this is rare, but it has been known to happen, and the surturs themselves have a body of lore and old wives tales about spontaneous combustion, how to avoid it, how to cause it in your rivals, etc.

From a meta perspective, it's easy to see the surturs as a kind of northern race, with some similarities to the Vikings, some to more eastern northern peoples such as the Slavs, Finns, or other Siberian peoples, but also a prominent nod toward the red men of Barsoom, which informs many of their names and titles, as well as their fiery yet usually honorable personalities, or at least a culture which demands such, even if individuals may not be as honorable as their culture expects of them. Their supernatural origin, and their ancient clashes with the kemlings make them different than any human culture, real or imagined, however, and those who remain south of the boreal forest barrier that separates Lower Kurushat from Kurushat proper are more likely to be traders, adventurers, mercenaries, occasionally bandits, and a somewhat arrogant overcaste; confident in their superiority, yet mostly imbued with a noblesse oblige to the peoples who live in their cosmopolitan communities. Many of them still act as if the Imperial weight of Kurushat gives them authority, but the reality is that all of the Lower Kurushat area is now essentially independent city-states who must rule themselves with very little if any contact with Kurushat to the north anymore, which is why the various other peoples who live there have risen in prominence socially as the Kurushat Imperial structure retreated to the north. 

In terms of terminology, Kurushans and surturs are often used interchangeably, but technically a surtur is a member of the race, regardless of cultural or political affiliation, whereas Kurushans are members of the culture of Kurushat, regardless of race. However, in practical terms, that distinction often doesn't mean too much. Physically the surturs are as tall and robust as a hillmen (or typical white guy, for a real life reference), but are notable for their bright (sometimes unnaturally so) reddish or blond hair, brick red skin that sometimes tends towards sooty in the darkest of them, and red, orange or golden eyes. As the Dark Fantasy X rules suggest, the fire strike ability represents their connection to Muspelheim and their ability to call on the fiery elemental heritage that makes them different than humans.

Bahram Khanwar, an anti-PC villain and iconic surtur

His perverse and degenerate twin sister Javaira, also an iconic anti-PC.

Reasonably well-trained and capable swordmaidens often serve as a kind of figurehead or inspiration for bands of surtur mercenaries and warbands, when they form them. In some cases, these are little more than camp whores for the entire company, but in other cases, they are seen as extremely noble and a kind of foreign chivalric tradition of courtly loyalty and love has sprung up around them from the men in their companies.

Notice the unusual hair that is common to many surturs, and which is often believed to imitate the fire which surrounded their more elemental ancestors.

A traditional Larch Grove dancer, a pseudo-religious and cultural tradition that goes back to the ancient island home of the Kurushans.

Exploration of the wilderness is a passion of many surturs, and with the mammoth steppe and boreal forest around them, as well as many craggy and dramatic mountain ranges, there are great opportunities for exploratory teams, outfitted much as this fellow here, to find excitement. Their adventures are recounted to enthralled audiences when they return home, usually for the winter season. A kind of extreme adventurer tourism has sprung up among the wealthier surturs who don't need to work, to strike out and explore the remnants of distant Hyperborea to the east in the brief spring, summer and fall for that area. Although this is dangerous and many fail in this attempt, those who make it to Hyperborea and return with the tales of their journey almost become celebrities in Kurushat. Some of this still remains in Volek Szemenok, although it happens very infrequently there; one expedition a generation being about as good as it gets.

This free trader probably runs back and forth on the Great Northern Road between Vuukrat, Volek Szemenok, Bucknerfeld and Lomar with caravans of goods. His dress and demeanor shows a lot of drylander inspiration, and that he's probably fairly successful and prosperous. 

Not to give the impression that all surturs are happy-go-lucky and friendly swashbucklers. This guy is no doubt a criminal or bandit, who would be extremely dangerous to encounter in a quiet stretch of road or dark alley.

Sometimes the fiery passion that is the inheritance of the surturs turns to a smoldering bitterness and anger. The three mercenaries shown here are frighteningly berserk physical combatants, with a hot rage always just under the surface.

Although the noble titles of old Kurushat are largely irrelevant in Lower Kurushat today, the scions of the old jed's houses still maintain a status not at all unlike nobility in their demesnes.

The Burnt Seers are a kind of weird roving cult of soothsayers and hedge magicians that are part of Kurushan society, notable for their spiraling black tattoos and often socially and politically disruptive actions. When one, or a small company of them, roll into town, the local authorities are reluctant for superstitious reasons to outright run them out, but they keep a very close eye on them and curtail their ability to make trouble as best as they can.

Two typical traveler/adventurer style surturs

I sometimes forget to focus on intrigue as a theme. Here's a surtur spy.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Seraphim

There's been a long and storied history of mythology about angelic beings mating with humans, giving rise to hybrids. Frankly, the stories of most of the Greek heroes aren't far removed from this paradigm either; Theseus is a semideus son of Poseidon, Herakles of Zeus, Perseus of Zeus, etc. Gilgamesh is also supposed to be a demigod, as is the Irish hero Cú Chulainn (or Cuhullin as he's sometimes known in older English texts) who was a son of Lugh.

In the famous yet disappointing RPG originally written and developed in the northern Midwest, but now under the ownership of terrible yet ridiculous people from Seattle, angel-blooded mortals are relatively common. Known as aasimars, they have appeared in many scenarios and settings as NPCs and are available as a player character race in many editions, including spin-off games like Pathfinder. Curiously, the idea of an unwed knocking up of a human by a mortal (or vice-versa, I suppose) is—in typical Seattle fashion—seen as a good thing, as is the actual marriage of a mortal and an immortal. I mean, even the Greeks didn't think Zeus' philandering was an admirable trait. I've never thought this made any sense; if angels are bangin' mortals, that is pretty much the default condition for being a fallen angel, and therefore hardly a creature of good.

Hebrew mythology, which has infected some weird apocryphal Christian beliefs, takes a similar tack, and refers to the Sons of Men, or The Watchers, in some cases, as angels who fell for some human girls and spawned a race of giants... although conveniently forgotten is that giant meaning "an extremely physically large person" is only one meaning of the word, and not necessarily the most likely or common one from the past, or necessarily the best interpretation of how the original word which was translated into English as giant should have been translated. Jotunn is also frequently translated as giant, and yet we see that many of them were normal sized peers of the Aesir, not gigantic monstrous creatures; although sometimes they were indeed monstrous, gigantic, fanged, many-headed, etc. But also, Odin himself is half jotunn, Loki is usually considered a jotunn, or at least half jotunn, depending on the source, Mimir, the advice-head of Odin is a normal-sized jotunn, etc. The same verse that calls the sons of children of the "Sons of God and the daughters of men" giants, refers to their great renown, which is almost certainly a better indicator of their being giant. I've even heard a description of the term meaning that they were like criminal warlords, who ruled as giants on the earth. I don't know that that's what was meant, but it sounds reasonable to me and I like it.

My own church takes a more conservative position than that of fallen angels, which is echoed by many other sects of Christianity to greater or lesser degree; that the Sons of God were actually the descendants of Seth who had made covenants with God and received his priesthood, thus becoming his sons. Their abandonment of their covenants to chase after those who were not of their faith (often considered to be mostly the offspring of Cain—but I don't believe that Adam and Eve's named children in Genesis were truly their only children; merely the ones that were mentioned because they were important enough to be mentioned for whatever reason) is their defining feature. In doing so, their progeny became the Nephilim, which is probably more accurately translated as "the fallen ones" than anything like giants. But they weren't fallen angels, they were fallen people who had the truth of the Gospel and authority passed down to them from God through Adam himself and his righteous descendants. 

But still; while I consider the mortal offspring of fallen angels to be mythological rather than theological, fantasy borrows a ton of cool ideas from mythology. And it fits perfectly with my conception of demihumans. For a long time, I had nephilim as a playable character race, as a kind of darker mirror to D&D's rather facile and shallow concept of aasimar... but I didn't really love the name. I also envisioned them maybe as more mortal rather than really very angelic; like the highmen of Age of Wonders fame, or even the Numenoreans of the Lord of the Rings before they became corrupted and "degraded" to being "just regular men" status. I struggled with the idea of a society for them, but ultimately decided that they were too rare to have their own society; they showed up—sometimes generations after any such fallen angel union—among normal people and normal societies, and their nature wasn't necessarily recognized right away; they might just be considered extremely handsome children, although as their platinum blond hair and light gray eyes turned to pure silver chrome as they entered adolescence, the cat was usually out of the bag. 

I also changed the name to seraph (plural seraphs or seraphim) which, I know, is a type of angel in Hebrew angelology, because I think it's a better name than nephilim, which doesn't even have a real singular form. As an editorial comment (I'm both writer and editor in this case, of course) I'm actually not all that fond of the concept anymore, although I'm loth to remove it. That said, I'm in some ways equally not all that fond of any of the PC demihuman races, although I see a place for them. I would probably run a Dark Fantasy X game with the rule that you can only play human characters until your group at least meets another non-human or demihuman PC, at which point, you "unlock" access to that race in your game. Of course, because you already have a character, you're not likely to kill him off or bench him just to run off and play an orc or Hyperborean, or whatever, keeping the strong humano-centric theme of the game, while technically allowing deviations from it in a small way. I think the craziness of 3e-5e is in large part driven by the designers' fascination with the bizarre, which translates to a fascination among the player base because the designers have written their weirdo races with so much passion. Of course, 5e has gone so far off the reservation in that regard that animal-people furries are common, and the game feels more like a strange cosmic and deranged cartoon version of The Avengers or the Justice League in fantasy drag rather than an actual fantasy setting in any kind of traditional sense. And that's fine if that's what it wants to be, but let's acknowledge that that isn't what is used to be, and there's certainly a big place within the market for more traditional fantasy that's grounded in our shared Western civilization European Medievalist culture. 

Given that, seraphs may not be very likely to appear in many of my games, and I don't have an iconic character who's a seraph. I also have a pretty vague curse on them (there's a reason my setting used to be called Dark•Heritage, and all of the demi-human races have their dark side.) Given the fallen angel status of their angelic forebear, seraphs all struggle with very base emotions and urges, and many—if not most—of them are profoundly flawed individuals. This, of course, makes them even more difficult as player characters, but here's a list of flaws I found long ago that could serve as a point of inspiration on where to point our character. Many seraphs who are unable to conquer their fallen impulse are truly psychopathic, sociopathic, narcissistic, perverted, sadistic or otherwise truly disturbing individuals. (SJWs and other leftist hangers-on, if you will. The Kyle Brink of Dark Fantasy X.)

That said, seraphs do exist in the Dark Fantasy X setting, and they are playable, depending on the GM. (Let's be honest; I'm the only one who would ever GM this, and I'd be unlikely to have a seraph in any game of mine, unless some player down the line after the game was already running really got a hankering to play one.) They don't have a specific society, because they are born into human society—but they are always outsiders who don't quite fit in to the societies in which they live. Sometimes they are predators and parasites, using their Dark Triad traits to manipulate those around them, sometimes they are merely loners and outsiders, or they are life of the party, popular, but in a shallow sense that excludes much in the way of deep personal connections with the people around them.

Of course, everyone is fallen; that's a key point of Christian doctrine. For the seraphim, however, their struggle with their fallen nature should be a more crucial part of their character arc and one of the main themes for using the race at all.

Anyway, maybe this isn't the deepest of race deep dives, but that's likely because the seraphs aren't ever going to be a deep part of the setting anyway. Here, as is my wont, is my Hero Forge collection of seraphs—smaller than for some of the other races that I have a clearer idea of what to do with. Some of them advertise their fallen nature fairly well, but many of them just look like normal people with silver hair and eyes.

This seraph adventurer is more likely to represent a player character than most here.

This one, on the other hand, probably represents a notorious highwayman or outlaw

Another seraph who gives away little of his character other than his lineage

This guy was modeled (loosely) on a piece of art I saw somewhere, including the metal hand. I thought he looked more like a seraph than anything else

A seraph assassin

This seraph more closely resembles the semi-angelic Roman look of the highmen from Age of Wonders; probably because the Roman-like lorica segmentata gives off a vaguely angelic and classical vibe

Another seraph bad guy of some kind or another.

A seraph good guy for a change; one who works hard to conquer his fallen nature and works as a colleague alongside guys like the Clevengers in the Ranger Corps

As normal, let's finish off with the text from the game itself.

Seraphim: The seraphim, or seraphs, claim that their exotic ancestry is angelic, and they do look the part, with beautiful, well-proportioned bodies, pale skin, silver-white hair, chrome eyes and clear voices. However, if angels left progeny amongst mortals, then they must, by definition, be fallen angels… A seraph gains a +1 to MND and a +1 to Knowledge and Communication. They are rare enough that they don’t have any specific homelands or communities, but live among others.

These last few images have nothing whatsoever to do with the seraphs. But I like them, and want to include them. I'm working on how exactly to incorporate them into Dark Fantasy X somehow.

The King in Yellow. He was actually a figure of some consequence in Dark•Heritage, so maybe it's appropriate to port him over.

An ancient iron golem or other animated statue of some kind, covered in rust and vines. I actually only have flesh golem stats in the monster list. I always wanted to include stone and iron, but then again, maybe there's no point in having slightly different stats for them anyway when one set works just fine

Based on an illustration I found once long ago for a gnophkeh, one of the Lovecraftian races who were supposedly responsible for chasing the people of Zobna away from their homeland to Lomar. I've always said that the thurse stats could represent everything from ogres and bugbears to sasquatches, yeti and gnophkeh, so here's yet another interpretation of a thurse, I suppose.

Here's the art that I loosely based it on: