# 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.