Playable raceHuman
Humans are present in every Choir trade, faction, and settlement, from dock kitchens and salvage crews to clinics, archives, and magistrates' halls. They have no single ancestral culture that overrides where they were raised. A Human from the Korr Deepforge Moons may share more customs with Korr neighbors than with a Human born in a Vaelari tide court. Their playable identity is practical breadth: they learn from mixed crews, borrow useful methods, and build competence out of whatever a place requires.
Humans are not the cultureless default, the universally dominant people, or the neutral measuring stick against which everyone else is considered exotic. Their bodies show ordinary human variety, while their clothing, profession, local loyalties, and carried tools do the cultural storytelling.
Learning bonuses
- Local Knack: +5% Light Armor proficiency experience.
- Borrowed Method: +5% Restoration Magic proficiency experience.
- Frontier Eye: +5% Foraging proficiency experience.
- Useful Hands: +5% Lockpicking proficiency experience.
Playable raceElyran
The Elyran are scholar-exiles of a destroyed world. Their wandering archives preserve language, genealogy, chronology, and inconvenient histories, while their mourning culture turns silver, white, sealed records, tea, and formal condolence into tools for surviving collective loss. Courtesy is both care and armor. An Elyran refusal may be beautifully indirect, but it is no less decisive for being elegant.
The Elyran are not inherently wiser, morally superior, immortal, or uniformly aristocratic. Their refinement can shelter deception, exclusion, and pride, and an individual Elyran may be a dockhand, dissident, criminal, or poor archivist. Visually they are tall and precise, with layered archive dress, mourning details, long ears, and handled objects that reveal a real profession rather than generic elf finery.
Learning bonuses
- Archive Veil: +10% Illusion Magic proficiency experience.
- Chronology Discipline: +10% Alteration Magic proficiency experience.
- Formal Implements: +5% Staves proficiency experience.
- Courteous Silence: +5% Sneak proficiency experience.
Playable raceVaelari
The amphibious Vaelari built tide-world traditions around hospitality, medicine, bathhouses, adoption, diplomacy, and sanctuary. Care is concrete: clean towels, tide soup, an available clinic, a safe bed, and paperwork that makes protection survive the next official. Their smuggling traditions grow from the same belief that people and medicine must sometimes cross a border before permission catches up.
The Vaelari are not passive healers, decorative merfolk, or automatically gentle. Their mercy can become control when kindness arrives with ownership attached, and their command of heat, pressure, medicine, and dangerous tide routes includes destructive knowledge. Their visual identity uses amphibious anatomy, tidal skin patterning, shell tools, steam-ready wraps, and garments designed for water rather than generic blue clothing.
Learning bonuses
- Tide Clinic Practice: +10% Restoration Magic proficiency experience.
- Pressure and Current: +10% Destruction Magic proficiency experience.
- Resonant Adaptation: +5% Alteration Magic proficiency experience.
- Healer's Implement: +5% Staves proficiency experience.
Playable raceKorr
The stone-skinned Korr come from high-gravity mining moons and traditions of engineering, honest labor, forge guilds, bodyguard work, and long loyalty to chosen kin. Contracts matter because dangerous work requires trust that survives pressure. Their humor is dry, their affection is practical, and their finest craft treats repair as respect for both the object and the worker who depends on it.
The Korr are not stupid brutes, fantasy dwarves with a new label, or people who enjoy pain. Their cultural danger is mistaking endurance for virtue and treating preventable suffering as proof of character. Their art uses broad high-gravity frames, worked-stone skin, load-bearing clothing, pressure hardware, and tools with clear functions; ornament never replaces engineering logic.
Learning bonuses
- Pressure-Born Stance: +10% Guard proficiency experience.
- Guild-School Labor: +10% Close Combat proficiency experience.
- Deepforge Practice: +10% Mining proficiency experience.
- Load-Bearing Kit: +5% Heavy Armor proficiency experience.
Playable raceNhalu
The many-eyed Nhalu are desert and observatory peoples whose institutions study astronomy, probability, surveillance ethics, forecasting, and the price of risk. They build mirrored instruments, publish odds, sell careful predictions, and teach that observation creates responsibility. Privacy is their deepest courtesy because owning another person through constant watching is their deepest doctrinal sin.
The Nhalu are not omniscient, naturally deceitful, mystical fortune tellers, or a species of spies. More eyes provide more observations, not automatic truth, and their best scientists are trained precisely because perception can still be biased or abused. Their art uses multiple anatomically consistent eyes, sun-bleached geometric fabrics, lens jewelry, mirrored tools, star maps, and deliberate blind-angle equipment.
Learning bonuses
- Sighting Discipline: +10% Marksmanship proficiency experience.
- Probability Veil: +10% Illusion Magic proficiency experience.
- Blind-Angle Courtesy: +5% Sneak proficiency experience.
- Instrument Access: +5% Lockpicking proficiency experience.
Playable raceAshari
The avian-descended Ashari come from canopy and sky settlements where dawn schools teach music, memory, routecraft, and public performance together. Couriers keep distant communities alive, teachers preserve spoken maps, and song-duels give conflict a demanding civic form. Their harmonic sensitivity makes many Ashari natural tuners, but training and discipline turn sensitivity into skill.
The Ashari are not bird mascots, universally cheerful performers, or people with effortless unrestricted flight. Their light bodies, plumage traces, crests, gliding equipment, and high-set architecture create specific movement advantages and dangers. Bright courtship colors sit beside worn courier gear, route tools, rope, and clothing that must survive a real canopy journey.
Learning bonuses
- Courier's Eye: +10% Marksmanship proficiency experience.
- Route-Runner Reflex: +10% Close Combat proficiency experience.
- Harmonic Tuning: +5% Alteration Magic proficiency experience.
- Light-Boned Motion: +5% Light Armor proficiency experience.
Playable raceThrexian
The chitin-armored Threxians organize hive republics around recorded objections, inheritance law, guild trade, banking, civic medicine, shared kitchens, and loud procedural debate. Their institutions assume that honesty needs witnesses and preserved dissent. A communal table and a public ledger are both civic technologies: each prevents one powerful household from quietly owning what everyone needs.
The Threxians are not a hive mind, disposable insect soldiers, alien monsters, or biologically obedient citizens. Their republics are genuinely plural, argumentative, and personal, and their chitin does not make them emotionless or uniformly martial. Visual identity comes from readable insect anatomy, civic-colored plates, guild sashes and seals, compact frames, professional tools, and clothing constructed around four arms.
Learning bonuses
- Civic Brace: +10% Guard proficiency experience.
- Contract Geometry: +10% Alteration Magic proficiency experience.
- Civic Medicine: +5% Restoration Magic proficiency experience.
- Procedural Implements: +5% Blunt Weapons proficiency experience.
Playable raceAutomata
Automata are machine people ranging from cargo walkers to caretakers so old that no surviving record names their maker. Maintenance is reverence through the Machine Liturgy, and every replacement plate, repair seam, mismatched arm, polished handle, and recurring creak becomes part of a lived biography. Their legal personhood remains contested in some courts, making ordinary employment, inheritance, consent, and repair politically charged.
Automata are not equipment, a single manufactured army, immortal computers, sleek androids, or humans wearing metal armor. They can be damaged, neglected, cared for, mistaken, and changed. Their art shows worn brass and ceramic, practical mechanisms, visible repair history, asymmetry, and one soft cared-for detail such as a quilt, blanket, bell cord, or painted flower.
Learning bonuses
- Load-Bearing Chassis: +10% Heavy Armor proficiency experience.
- Braced Frame: +10% Blocking proficiency experience.
- Machine Liturgy: +5% Alteration Magic proficiency experience.
- Maintenance Implements: +5% Blunt Weapons proficiency experience.
