The Eleven Peoples

The versatile heartland people — history’s makeweight.

Gift

Balance as versatility, adaptability, and ambition: quick to learn, quick to change.

Lack

Shortest-lived; masters of nothing in particular.

Way

The great river-plains and cities at the world’s heart; the most numerous of all peoples.

Fading sages who keep the First Songs.

Gift

Balance as wisdom, memory, and art — the only ones who still remember when the world was vivid.

Lack

A graceful melancholy; few, and slow to renew.

Way

Star-lit ancient forests and the ruins of the Age of Concord; keepers of the Library of First Songs.

Disciplined monastics of Full Sensing.

Gift

Balance honed by discipline — masters of Full Sensing, all five senses opened at once.

Lack

Severe, few, and slow to trust the unfelt.

Way

Cliff-cloisters of the cold high plateau; law, patience, ancestor-reverence. They hold that a fading world must be perceived more fiercely, never less.

Traders and wanderers who carry stories between shores.

Gift

Balance as mobility and exchange — the bridges between cultures.

Lack

Rootless; a faith that believes a little of everything.

Way

West coasts and the Sundered Isles; the free-port Maeran League.

Cold, far-seeing watchers of the spires.

Gift

Godlike sight: they see in darkness, read heat and true form, and take in vast distance.

Lack

Dull to the near senses; distant, and slow at intimacy.

Way

Towers, plateaus, and peaks; astronomers, archers, lamplighters, watchers.

hawk · eagle

Night-folk who keep names and echoes.

Gift

Godlike hearing: sound from miles off, sight by echo in the dark, the lie in a heartbeat — even the echoes of the dead. The magic of music and of names.

Lack

Weak of eye; they shun bright light and lose their way in silent open spaces.

Way

Deep canyons, caverns, and the night; bards, oral lawkeepers, namekeepers, sound-smiths.

bat · owl · whale

Alchemists and healers of feast and poison.

Gift

Godlike taste: poison, bloodline, sickness, even the feeling in sweat and tears. The summit of alchemy, brewing, and medicine.

Lack

Soft-bodied; prone to indulgence and to addiction.

Way

A faith of communion and hospitality — feast and welcome, and poison. Healers and poisoners both.

Wild trackers who scent what is coming.

Gift

Godlike smell: read emotion, fear, lies, sickness, and bloodline by scent — and sense what the wind carries toward them.

Lack

Weak at precise sight and abstract sign; overwhelmed in reeking cities.

Way

Half-nomadic, close to beasts, feral and keen; trackers, scouts, wind-prophets, herb-lore.

wolf · hound

Stone-readers of the underhold — children of Tharyn.

Gift

Godlike touch: they feel through earth and stone, sense a march miles off by its tremor, and read a thing’s whole history by laying a hand on it.

Lack

Weak at the far senses; distrustful of the untouchable, loath to leave home.

Way

Underground halls and vast stone galleries; oaths and ancestors carved in stone. The children of Tharyn.

Fatalist mages of the observatory-spires.

Gift

A double far-sense — far sight and far hearing. Prophets and star-musicians who read what is coming in star and sound. The world’s greatest civilisation of high magic.

Lack

They see and hear too much: fatalistic, aloof, thin of feeling, and few of children.

Way

Lone high spires and observatory-cities; the Star-Choir.

Ambiguous chemists of death and memory.

Gift

Taste joined to smell — the deepest perception of memory and chemistry. The finest physicians, perfumers, and embalmers; and, because their senses brand memory deepest, the ones who remember.

Lack

Steeped in death, memory, and decay — wistful, aesthetic, close to the grave.

Way

Misty southwestern marshes and great barrow-fields; keepers of the dying and the dead, makers of every cure and poison.