The Surviving Kin

The elves are an ancient and fracturing kindred, split since the civil wars that scarred their forests. The Fey Spirit cling to tradition and wither slowly, their lifespans shortening with every generation of hatred; the Heartwood let their grudges go and thrive; and the Underworld branch fled beneath the earth long ago, never to return. Once they drove dwarves and rivals from their lands - now they are a people in quiet, mysterious decline.

Humans rule the Western Peninsula through three rival crowns, each raised on the bones of conquered elven land. Tania bickers and grows rich; Baratea drills for war and sells arms to every side; Heydr keeps the most functional throne of all while embracing the shadow magic the others fear. Bound by a strained, two-century treaty, they prosper and scheme in equal measure.

The stoutling kindreds are the short, stubborn folk of Scalea, sharing the famed Stoutling Spirit that lets them wrest fortune back from fate once a day. The dwarves came up from the Underworld in ages past and split over a buried catastrophe - one mainland crown chasing an idealized past, the other building upon it, while the Island Dwarves of the Dravish states turned outward to the sea long ago. Alongside them dwell the halflings of two distant chiefdoms, who always carry food, just in case.

The beastmen are Scalea's part-animal peoples, scattered across mountains, islands, and forgotten shores. The goat-folk Ibexi answer the call of the Herd; the bird-kin Corvec mourn a sky they can no longer reach; and the Dragonkin, children of seven departed dragons, sit as the world's scholars and arbiters. They rarely rule one another - they endure, adapt, and remember.

The greenskins of the eastern plains are bound in a loose Confederation of self-ruling tribes, numbering perhaps a quarter-million souls no census has ever counted. A rotating High Chief is raised at the bi-annual gatherings, and a long, quiet pact holds the peace with the Centauros to their west. They are not the menace of human propaganda - that reputation belongs to the criminal Green Fist, which the Confederation neither sanctions nor has the authority to stop.