Citizens of the Empire

"The Empire is not one people, but many. That, dear reader, is precisely the miracle of it."
— The Imperial Chronicle

Common Citizens

What people expect. Your character can break every expectation on this page if they want to. That's fine.

• Human (Lyridia, everywhere)
  • The majority, and the default assumption everywhere from the aristocracy down to the factory floor.
• Elf (Caelyth, the Aelwood)
  • Traditionalists who remember exactly what was lost when Caelyth joined the Empire, and still haven't agreed among themselves whether to forgive it.
• Dwarf (Baeldun, the Baelspine, Caldor)
  • Industrialists, gunsmiths, Aether refiners. If the Empire has an engine room, this is it.
• Halfling (Ceresia, the cities)
  • Grain merchants, mill owners, shopkeepers. Comfortable and prosperous, and politically invisible right up until they aren't.
• Half-Elf (Lyridia, everywhere)
  • The bridge between the two founding peoples. Worth remembering that the Eurid dynasty itself is half-elven. The whole Empire started as one half-elf's project.
• Gnome (Azurea, Eurydice)
  • Academics, inventors, journalists. The one hunched over a notebook full of equations at the café table next to you.
• Goblin (Factory districts, dock wards)
  • The underclass. Factory hands, newspaper urchins, the people the Aether-lamps somehow never quite reach.
• Orc (Foundries, dock wards, the military)
  • Soldiers, dockworkers, builders. They're the reason the Empire is still standing, and they don't get thanked for it.
• Kobold (Baelspine, the undercities)
  • Trapmakers and tunnel-dwellers who tend to know exactly what's buried under the city, and rarely say so for free.
• Leshy (Aelwood, rural fringes)
  • A nature-spirit given a walking, talking shape. The wilderness that decided to come into town.

Uncommon & Fringes of the Empire

Same deal. These are the broad strokes. Your hobgoblin could be a pacifist poet. Your catfolk might have never set foot in Alfheim. That's fine.

• Azarketi (Port cities, floating trade posts)
  • Children of the Sundered Sea. Traders and divers who know what's down there better than anyone with lungs alone.
• Catfolk (Alfheim, rare travelers in Imperial cities)
  • Eastern traders, exotic to Imperial eyes, though from where they stand, the feeling is entirely mutual.
• Fetchling (Veil-touched districts, spiritualist quarters)
  • Human once, before generations spent in the dark between planes changed that. Whatever brought them back, they don't discuss it.
• Hobgoblin (Skovos, military outposts)
  • Warband culture. Tarathion won them over with diplomacy rather than a war, but they haven't forgotten they used to be the threat he was worried about.
• Kitsune (Alfheim, rare travelers in Imperial cities)
  • Shapeshifters out of the far, far east, carrying old magic into a very new empire. Most Imperials have never actually met one.
• Lizardfolk (Southern islands, warm-water ports)
  • From the sunward isles, far enough from the capital, and close enough to the water, that the Empire mostly leaves them be.
• Ratfolk (Sewers, dock wards, undercities)
  • Run the information underground. They hear everything the Chronicle refuses to print, and they forget none of it.
• Tengu (Alfheim, port districts)
  • Eastern swordfolk and traders. Rare enough in Imperial ports that people still turn to look.

Ask First

Rare in the Empire. If one of these catches your eye, we'll make it work.

• Automaton — Built before the world broke, and woken up after. Their memories of the old world come in pieces, and no two automatons carry the same ones.
• Skeleton — Dead, and refused to stay that way. Something is holding them back from whatever comes next, often not even they know what.
• Dhampir — Born at the line between life and death, which the living tend to find unsettling in ways they can't quite explain.
• Changeling — Born from a bargain they never agreed to, carrying inherited power and inherited debt in equal measure. A few embrace it. Most would rather not have been asked.
• Duskwalker — Psychopomps wearing mortal shape, easing the dying through their last passage while carrying their own appointment with death somewhere down the line.
• Beastkin — Fur, feathers, fangs, worn openly by some and hidden by most. The Empire is still working out how it's supposed to react.
• Poppet — Brought to life by desperate love or an accident of magic, and now walking around asking the kind of questions nobody expects from a doll.
• Sprite — Fey from beyond the elven courts. They answer to no crown, and don't seem interested in starting.
• Drow — From somewhere beneath the forest the surface elves would rather not discuss, and chose to stay topside anyway.