The Peoples of Barsaive

Few settlements in Barsaive belonged to only one people. In the last open years that became truer everywhere: when the Horrors drew near, villages did not have the luxury of choosing who they sheltered with. Whoever was close enough, whoever had hands enough, whoever could help dig the walls of a kaer deep enough to outlast the Scourge, became family whether they meant to or not. Illumar was built that way. Walk its lower tiers and you would find dwarfs minding a forge two doors down from a t'skrang trading house, an elf's garden backing onto a human farrier's yard, a troll ducking through a doorway built for someone half her size.

That doesn't mean the old distinctions vanished. It means the friction ran along different lines than it once had: cultural, not tribal, a matter of manners and values clashing more than blood. What follows is not the last word on any of these peoples, only a starting point. Every dwarf, elf, or windling you actually meet will complicate it.

Dwarfs

"Dwarfs make good neighbors, since we know that many pairs of hands make work easier."

Short, broad-chested, and built low to the ground, dwarfs stand barely over four feet but carry themselves like they own whatever room they've walked into — which, in Throal, they largely do. Their beards, worn long and often braided into patterns that mean something to the wearer even when no one else can read them, are as much a part of a dwarf's identity as their name. Skin tone runs the full range from pale pink to deep ebony, split more along family line than geography.

There is something in a dwarf that needs to make things, and to make them well. Ask one about their craft and be prepared to stay a while; dwarfs take genuine, unembarrassed pride in good work, theirs or anyone else's, and have little patience for anything done halfway. That same stubbornness that makes a dwarf finish a job properly also makes them slow to abandon a plan once it's set, for better or worse. Loyalty runs first to family and tribe, but transfers easily to a hometown, a guild, a kingdom — which is exactly how so many dwarfs ended up, generations ago, administering half of Barsaive on behalf of an empire that barely knew their names.

Most people, when they picture a dwarf, picture Throal. It's not wrong, exactly — nearly half of all dwarfs live within the Kingdom's halls — but it misses the other half, scattered through every city and hill town in the province, holding opinions about their own Kingdom that ranged from fierce pride to open distrust, since it was Throal that ran the province's business in Thera's name.

Elves

"A life without beauty is unworthy of living."

Tall, slender, and unnervingly symmetrical even by the standards of a world with plenty of striking faces in it, elves move with a natural grace that makes even simple gestures look rehearsed. Their coloring ranges as wide as any race's — pale white through deep black, with rarer shades of pale green or a shimmering mother-of-pearl called cetharel turning heads wherever they're found. Long ears, fine sparse body hair, and a lifespan stretching close to three centuries all mark an elf as something built on a slower clock than most of the people around them.

That long view shapes how elves see everything else. Beauty and nature aren't separate interests to an elf — they're close to the same thing, and an elf who's spent decades perfecting a single art or a single garden considers that time well spent rather than wasted. Loyalty runs to blood family first and deepest; nations and courts matter less, which made the last years hard. The Elven Court at Wyrm Wood stood as the acknowledged heart of elven culture, a place every elf felt some pull toward whether they'd ever visited or not. As the Scourge drew near, Queen Alachia raised a kaer of living wood and many families left her Court, and elves who were not behind those walls were left wondering where their center had gone.

Humans

"What we lack in strength or numbers, we make up for in adaptability. We're the grease that keeps the wheel of civilization turning."

Nothing distinguishes a human at a glance the way a troll's horns or an elf's ears do — average height, ordinary strength, a spread of skin tones as wide as the province itself, and a lifespan of maybe seventy-five years that makes them neither the longest- nor shortest-lived people in the room. What actually defines humans is how thoroughly they refuse to specialize. Find a role that needs filling — merchant, soldier, farmer, scholar, thief — and there's likely a human already doing it, competently if not always distinguished, in nearly every settlement of any size.

That flexibility comes with a cost: humans rarely build the kind of large, cohesive nations dwarfs or orks manage, because their loyalty transfers easily and their organizing instinct runs shallow compared to some of their neighbors. A human's devotion to family is genuine, but it stretches thin across whatever city or kingdom they've decided to call home, rather than concentrating the way it does for other peoples. It's an old joke, not entirely unkind, that a human community is really just whichever humans happened to be standing nearby when someone needed something done. Some humans dreamed of a kingdom of their own, in the shadow of Thera's province, though the talk was quiet and not universally welcomed.

Obsidimen

"You other Namegivers are a flame that burns brightly and is gone. We must watch and remember, so that the other children of the earth are not forgotten."

Nothing about an obsidiman moves quickly, and nothing about meeting one for the first time quite prepares a person for it. Standing near seven feet and built like a walking outcropping, their craggy, stone-toned skin genuinely incorporates minerals from whatever ground they were born from — obsidimen aren't people who resemble stone, they are, in some real sense, stone that learned to walk. They are born sexless, whole, and fully grown from vast formations called Liferocks, and spend the first hundred years of their lives fused to that rock in a shared communion called the Dreaming before emerging with a Name and the freedom to travel.

An obsidiman's true loyalty is to their brotherhood — the others born of the same Liferock, bound by something closer to a shared soul than a shared family — and they rarely form or join communities beyond that bond. Slow, patient, and difficult to rattle, an obsidiman roused to anger is remembered the way a landslide is remembered: not for its speed, but for the fact that nothing in its path had any real say in the matter. Living for centuries — nine hundred years is unremarkable among their kind — obsidimen watch the frantic, blooming lives of the shorter-lived peoples around them with something between affection and quiet sorrow, aware that most of what they witness will be gone again within a single obsidiman lifetime's opening chapter.

Orks

"An ork's fire burns hot and short. Be glad of it. It never smolders."

Tall, powerfully built, and marked by the two lower tusks that push up past their lips, orks carry themselves with an intensity that other peoples sometimes mistake for aggression before they've actually gotten to know one. That intensity has a name — gahad, a swift-burning fire of emotion that orks themselves consider less a flaw than a kind of honesty. An ork who's been wronged doesn't sit quietly with the insult; the ones who learn to master gahad rather than be mastered by it are respected precisely because the mastery is genuinely hard-won, not because the fire itself is shameful.

With a natural lifespan of only around forty years, orks tend to live with an urgency other, longer-lived peoples find exhausting to keep pace with — sprawling, loosely bounded families of half-siblings and cousins raised together, friendships formed and cemented fast, grudges settled rather than nursed for decades. Cara Fahd, the old ork nation, had fallen apart in its wars with Landis long before the Scourge, and orks lived on as proud, scattered tribes, still dreaming of the day those tribes might call themselves one people. It was a dream every bit as fierce and impatient as the orks who held it.

Trolls

"Honor is the blood and bone of our people. The other races use the word, but do not understand it as we do."

Standing eight and a half feet tall and weighing five hundred pounds or better, a troll fills a doorway built for anyone else and knows it — furniture, weapons, and whole shops built to human scale are a daily inconvenience trolls have simply learned to live around, which is part of why they tend to build their own spaces rather than squeeze into everyone else's. Their skin carries a rough, plated texture, and every troll grows horns of trolthelia — a material closer to horn or antler than bone — that lengthen slowly across a lifetime, often into asymmetrical shapes some clans deliberately shape or carve.

Honor, for a troll, isn't an abstraction — it's structured into three distinct layers: personal honor, clan honor, and the honor of the race entire, and a troll's sense of what's owed to each can run deep enough to genuinely baffle outsiders. Highland trolls, especially the raiding Crystal Raider moots of the mountain peaks, live by a harsher, more combative reading of that code than lowland trolls who've settled among other peoples — a difference the two branches of troll culture argue about more than they'd like to admit. What every troll shares, whichever code they follow, is a deep respect for the obsidimen, whom they call "rock brothers" — two peoples who understand, better than most, what it's like to live in a world built at someone else's scale.

T'skrang

"The story of my people changes with the river, flowing from the high springs down to the sea."

Reptilian, tall, and trailing a powerful tail that can add half again to their standing height, t'skrang are creatures of water before they are creatures of land — irritable and restless if kept too long from a proper submersion, at home equally in the rivers of Barsaive and the underwater domes many of their villages are built around. Their scaled skin ranges from yellow-green to deep aquamarine, with rarer blue and sunset-red variants prized as much for their rarity as their color, and their communities organize into tight-knit clan groups called nialls, several of which may band together into a great trading house, an aropagoi, under a shared matriarch.

Flair is practically a birthright among t'skrang — fearlessness, passion, and drama aren't performed so much as genuinely felt, which is exactly why other peoples sometimes mistake t'skrang confidence for empty bravado, and why t'skrang, in turn, find most other Namegivers a bit dull by comparison. Along the length of the Serpent River, t'skrang trading houses move the goods that keep half of Barsaive's economy afloat, their riverboats driven by a closely guarded magic no outside scholar has ever managed to unpick — a secret held, like most things important to a niall, close to the family and closer to the water.

Windlings

"Do not mistake size of body for size of heart. We may be small in stature, but we make up for it in spirit."

Standing barely a foot and a half tall and weighing little more than a good-sized bird, windlings are the smallest of Barsaive's peoples — winged, quick, and colored to match whatever environment they've called home for the last few months, their skin and hair shifting gradually to blend with snow, wildflower, or rooftop tile alike. Flight tires them quickly and isn't their primary way of getting around, but the ability shapes a windling's whole outlook regardless: a fierce, unshakeable love of freedom, and something close to genuine horror at any hint of slavery or captivity.

Windling communities are cheerfully inconsistent from one village to the next, since every clan tends to bring home whatever fads and practices caught their fancy on the road, and a windling's curiosity about the wider world rarely cools with age — their attitude reads as childlike to other peoples well into what would be, for anyone else, a dignified old age. That same restless curiosity makes windlings uncommonly attuned to magic itself; more than any other people, windlings seem to simply sense the world's astral undercurrent as a matter of course, the way another Namegiver might sense a change in the weather.

Living Together

None of this is destiny. A windling can be dour, a dwarf can be reckless, a troll can build a quiet life as a jeweler in a city that barely comes up to her shoulder. What these eight peoples share, more than any inherited trait, is the same four hundred years spent sealed underground with whoever happened to be nearby, and the slow, uneven work of learning to be neighbors.