Six peoples share this country: humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, gnomes and giants. Your realm belongs to one of them. Today every charter written is a human one, and the other five are already out there — as a market, a memory, a surveyor, a neighbour and a landscape.
They did not split over territory. They split over one sentence, found in every Korian ruin ever opened, and over whether it is a warning or a dare. Four of them have had centuries to think about it. One of them arrived last spring.
Humans · playable now
The Holding
Charter-folk. Second sons, freed labourers, families who signed for land they had never seen. They build in timber, thatch and cut stone, they roof everything against weather, and they measure a year in harvests.
They are the youngest people on this map and the only one in a hurry, because they are the only one who has to be. Eighty years is a long human life. The Elder Kin would call that a season, and do.
How they play: deep economy, long production chains, patient expansion, competent war. They win by having built the thing that outlasts the raid.
Dwarves · in the world
The Deepwrights
Mountain smiths who never took a charter because they never needed one. They sell iron work of a quality you cannot make, at prices that hurt, and they buy ore by the cartload.
They are the only people who will discuss the Old Work plainly, and the reason is not courage. To a Deepwright it is not a mystery, it is a technique — one they have not worked out yet, which is a different and much less frightening kind of problem.
Elves · in the world
The Elder Kin
They were here for the Work, and they are still here. They are neither its guardians nor its enemies. They are simply not in a hurry.
A Kin settlement will be there in a hundred years whether or not yours is. They know this. They are kind about it in a way that is worse than contempt.
They watched the Work being built. They will not tell you what it was for — not out of secrecy, but because they have not finished deciding whether it matters, and they have the time to keep deciding.
Orcs · in the world
The Ashbound
The Work drove its roads straight through the mountains, and the mountains belonged to somebody. The Ashbound are what that people became: nine times moved, and still one people.
They hold the ash country downwind of furnaces nobody has lit in four hundred years, because the ground there is warm all winter and nothing else wanted it.
They are the finest hauliers and siege-engineers alive, and that is not a coincidence — a people who has moved everything it owns nine times learns how to move anything at all. They do not raid for plunder. They raid because a wall is a claim, and they have opinions about claims.
Gnomes · in the world
The Reckoners
Nobody in this country agrees what time it is. The Elder Kin do not care, the Holding measures in harvests, and the Ashbound date things by which move they were on. The Reckoners are the people who decided that was intolerable.
They keep the only numbers anyone trusts: distances, yields, the depth of a seam, the day a debt falls due. A Reckoner will walk four days to measure something twice, and the second measurement is the one they write down.
They sell certainty, which turns out to be the most expensive thing on the map. Every road with a distance on it was paced by one of them, and they are quietly furious that the Old Work is the one thing they have never been able to measure.
Giants · in the world
The Standing Folk
They are already on your map. You have walked past three of them.
A Standing Folk at rest is a hill with a considered opinion, and a chart that records one as a hill is not wrong — not for a century at a time. They move perhaps twice in a life, and a move is an event the whole region plans around.
They are why the far country has landmarks nobody built. Ask one a question and come back next season for the answer. It will be a good answer.
Your realm is human, for now
Every realm founded today is a Holding realm — human charter-folk, timber and cut stone, a year measured in harvests. That is the one people whose economy, buildings and units are built and playable, and it is where the work is going now.
The other five are not locked content and they are not a roadmap. They are in the world from your first day: the Deepwrights sell dwarven iron work you cannot match, the Elder Kin watched the Work being built and are still not in a hurry, the Ashbound have moved their whole country nine times and will move yours if you let them, the Reckoners know the distance between any two things and will tell you for a price, and the Standing Folk are the hills your surveyor drew before anyone noticed one of them had turned around.
More of them will open to play in time, one at a time, when each has an economy worth playing rather than a coat of paint. Which one comes next is not decided.
That asymmetry is what makes a very large world feel inhabited while there are still few players on it, which is the actual problem a new persistent world has. A country with five empty seats is a lobby. A country where somebody else already keeps the ruins is a place.
What each one is made of
Material, silhouette and light. You should be able to tell whose building you are looking at from across the map with the labels hidden.
| People | Material | Silhouette | Light |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Holding | Warm timber, cream plaster, cut stone | Roofed against weather, symmetric, settled | A fire always going somewhere |
| The Deepwrights | Dark iron, cut rock | Deep doors, low and wide, built into the hill | Heat visible from outside |
| The Elder Kin | Grown as much as built | Unhurried, unfinished-looking, and older than it should be | Cool, sparse, never for show |
| The Wildfolk | Hedge, thatch, hide, whatever was to hand | Low, scattered, no wall worth the name | Cooking fires, and nothing after dark |
| Korian | Stone with no seam or joint | Geometry that does not repeat | Emits nothing. Reflects what is not there. |
Holding stone
#DDD7C8
Cut stone holds every lit face. It separates from the ground by being brighter, not by being more colourful.
Holding timber
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Warm brown, and the frame of everything. A holding reads as timber first and stone second, which is what keeps it from looking like a fortress.
Deepwright iron
#6B6560
Dark, sooted, and cut into the rock rather than raised on it. Nothing the Deepwrights make looks decorative.
Deepwright heat
#D4682E
The only saturated thing they own, and it is visible from outside the door. Warm light means work, here as everywhere.
Elder Kin green
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Muted, and never used to attract you. The Kin do not signal, advertise or warn — they were here first and expect to be here after, and the colour is meant to read as patience rather than as a faction.
Korian
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A hue that appears nowhere else — not in a biome, not in a people, not in the interface. That is the whole reason it looks wrong.
How the Holding talks
Dry, precise, institutional. A combat report neither mourns nor celebrates: a number, a loss, a timestamp. The feeling is left to you, which is where it works.
Bread out of the north yard: forty. Carted four days. Two carts lost to the ford. The Wildfolk at Ashen Hollow consider the debt paid.
They name things by what those things do, without adjectives. A woodcutter cuts wood. A toolsmith makes tools. The nicknames come from the people who work there and never from the ledger.
The Deepwrights, when they become playable, will name things by what those things cost you.