Book IV - Peoples of the Realms

The peoples of the Realms are not scattered at random. Most communities live where ecology, imperial policy, old homeland memory, trade necessity, and post-Shattering survival placed them. Ancestry shapes cuisine, architecture, obligation, law, family memory, and inherited fear as much as it shapes appearance.

Common Peoples#

The old empire sorted peoples by usefulness, suspicion, military value, craft, and geography. The Shattering did not erase those patterns; it hardened many of them into tradition. Modern homelands therefore often reflect ancient policy as much as ancient myth.

Foundational Peoples of the Former Empire#

Humans remain the broad demographic base of the Reach, Umbra Magni, Akesh, and Pashara, with immense variation between river republics, saintly marcher courts, tax cities, hill principalities, and desert contract states. Orks - the Iron-Bound - are native in greatest concentration to the Iron Heartland, but substantial ork populations now live across the Reach, the Bastion Teeth, and the old military belts of the east. Dwarves are strongest in the Spine of the Magni, the Bastion Teeth, and the Sunwall Cordillera, where their traditions of masonry, bridge law, tunnel craft, and citadel memory align with the geography. High elves are indigenous in civilizational terms to the Azure Isles, while other elven populations remain rooted in the Moonglass Heights, western forest principalities, observatory enclaves of the Spine, and assimilated legal houses of Umbra Magni.

Halfling communities flourish in orchard terraces, pass communes, convoy towns, fertile river leagues, and hidden shelf valleys, especially in the Reach and around the Spine of the Magni. Gnomes are common in leaked landscapes, lamp caverns, weather-scarred high valleys, and learned enclaves where curiosity survives because it is useful. Goblins, kobolds, and ratfolk appear wherever infrastructure decays without fully dying: drains, culverts, quarry belts, under-markets, old army depots, canal districts, and stacked trade cities. These peoples are woven into ordinary life across much of the world.

Southwestern and Frontier Peoples#

The southwestern Reach is home to catfolk, gnolls, tengu, lizardfolk, and mixed caravan cultures. Catfolk are common among cliff merchants, stair-road factors, caravan wards, and coastal hill polities. Gnolls belong to the Red Stair Marches, dry military belts, oath companies, and old escort confederacies rather than to crude caricatures of savagery. Tengu are strongest in messenger ports, sea cliffs, western islands, and contract courier networks. Lizardfolk belong in warm deltas, cistern marshes, tidal ruins, and flood-managed agricultural societies. Nagaji, vishkanya, vanara, and other less common peoples survive as mercantile minorities, shrine lineages, court retainers, and heirs of eastern imperial entanglements, especially in Pashara, Akesh, and the southern littoral.

Shadowed, Touched, and Rare Peoples#

Tieflings, nephilim, ifrits, oreads, sylphs, undines, and other touched peoples are most often found where the world shows old stress: the Ashen Ladder, sealed observatories, saint-blasted frontiers, Voided littorals, and cult cities that long ago normalized unusual blood. Fetchlings belong naturally to eclipse shrines, black-glass valleys, mortuary republics, and shadow disciplines near the Voided influence. Dhampirs, skeletons, and other death-adjacent peoples are easiest to find in corpse-law jurisdictions, plague marshes, reliquary courts, and necromantically practical states such as Ossam Bridge. Sprites, leshies, merfolk, and similar peoples are tied to precise ecological niches: thorn sanctuaries, old forest treaties, reef shrines, fungal ruins, drowned archives, and saint-protected groves.

Automatons, android-like relic peoples, poppets, and other construct or artifice peoples are rare and consequential. They are most often associated with lost imperial work, controlled rediscovery, or rumors of older history that public doctrine cannot comfortably explain. Even where they are legal persons, their existence changes the room around them.

Homeland Anchors#

Common associations appear as follows. Spine of the Magni: dwarves, halflings, gnomes, observatory elves, goblins, and kobolds. Sunwall Cordillera and Red Stair Marches: dwarves, catfolk, gnolls, tengu, lizardfolk, and kobolds. Moonglass Heights and western leaked forests: elves, half-elves, gnomes, sprites, and leshies. Bastion Teeth: dwarves, orks, hobgoblins, kobolds, and veteran humans. Ashen Ladder: tieflings, nephilim, fetchlings, elemental-touched lineages, and occult minorities. Shattered Isles and the inner sea: merfolk, tengu, mixed port peoples, relic cults, and displaced survivors of every kind.