Every lineage tells a story. Every ancestry leaves a mark.

The following ancestries are available for play:
Human, Elf, Dwarf, Dragonborn, Entling, Aasimar, Gnome, Goliath, Half-Elf, Magen, Half-Dwarf, Halfling, and Reborn.

While the core game statistics for each lineage remain unchanged, their cultural roots, histories, and mythologies have been carefully reimagined to better serve the world of Masada. These versions emphasize tone, setting integration, and thematic depth, ensuring each choice feels like more than just a mechanical bonus. 

Humanity
What was lost still shapes what remains.

Centuries ago, something scoured human history from the world. No one knows whether it was miracle or calamity, but when the Severance passed, it left humanity without memory: no kings, no cities, no ancestral epics, only scattered bands of survivors. Out of those fragments, humans clawed their way back. Today, they are the most numerous lineage in Masada, present in nearly every town and borderland, but their culture split along two great lines: the Empire of New Antioch and the Elden Concordat.

Wherever they live, humans carry a restless will. They do not have the long patience of elves or the stone-bound traditions of dwarves. Their societies are young, improvised, and often contradictory. But this volatility is also their strength. They rebuild what others would abandon. They swear oaths where others would scatter. And when the old gods fell silent, they found ways to bind themselves together regardless.

Life in New Antioch

In Antioch, human life is measured by service.

Every child grows up knowing that their future will be defined by the oath they take before the Oathfire. This is not a choice of profession but of burden. Some join the legions, marching under rifle and banner. Others serve in plague-wards, archives, or frontier outposts. A farmer may one day leave his plow to dig canals for the empire; a scholar might serve years as a census scribe. The service itself matters less than the fact that it carries risk and sacrifice for the common good.

Life is orderly, and often harsh. Antioch’s laws leave little room for ambiguity. Courts sit in the light of braziers, verdicts delivered without delay. Festivals mark remembrance, not excess. Families keep hearth-fires lit with flame drawn from the nearest temple, tying even the smallest home to the state’s covenant.

Yet Antioch is not joyless. When service ends, honors are bestowed cords, cloaks, silver tags, and with them comes the right to enter the council and vote. In taverns, a wall hung with such tokens gleams brighter than any noble crest. A soldier’s scar, a healer’s cough, a magistrate’s burned hands from rooting out corruption, these are badges of dignity.

Most Antiochans are proud of their order. Even those who never seek citizenship live under its shield, confident that no voice can sway the state without first carrying its burdens. To them, Antioch is not tyranny but fairness: no crown, no inheritance, only fire and service.

Life in the Elden Concordat

In the Concordat, human life is bound by oath and community.

The Concordat began when scattered bands of human survivors swore mutual defense with goliath clans after the Severance. Out of that pact grew a loose network of freeholds, townships, and strongholds. To this day, a Concordant village is less a subject of law than a keeper of oaths.

A farmer’s day may look much the same as in Antioch fields, markets, small hearths, but the foundation beneath is different. Where Antioch measures worth by service to the state, the Concordat measures worth by keeping one’s word. To break a pact, whether to kin, neighbor, or clan, is to be branded untrustworthy, and trust is the only true currency.

Governance is local. Townships elect or appoint elders, who send delegates to the Council at Caer Haleth. Consensus is slow, sometimes maddeningly so, but the people accept it as the price of autonomy. What binds them is the Link of the Chain, a shared vow: no freehold stands alone. Even the smallest hamlet knows that if it is attacked, its neighbors are sworn to bleed for it.

Daily life is less rigid than Antioch. Laws differ from hold to hold, festivals may celebrate different heroes, and faith varies from shrine to shrine. But every hearth burns with the memory of survival. It is said in the Concordat that one does not inherit a home, one borrows it from those who held the walls before, and owes it to those who will keep them after.

Shared Traits

Despite their divisions, humans across Masada share certain qualities. They are the most adaptable lineage, thriving in mountains, plains, and cities alike. They are restless, often impatient, but also unyielding. When other peoples see finality, humans see a chance to begin again.

To be human in Masada is to walk in the shadow of forgotten ancestors, bearing no great legacy but the one you choose to carve. In Antioch, that legacy is carried in fire and service. In the Concordat, it is sworn by oath and remembered in chains of trust. Both paths are fragile, both demand sacrifice, and both testify to humanity’s will to endure, even when memory itself was taken from them.

The Elves
The forest does not forget, though it rarely explains.

Elves are a people bound to the deep memory of Almaerina, the Heartwood, a forest older than nations and perhaps older than the Severance itself. Where humanity’s past was erased, the elves preserved theirs in silence. They withdrew, allowing centuries to pass beneath their branches while the world outside broke and rebuilt. This endurance was not triumph but survival, purchased by stillness and secrecy.

To be elven is to live with time as both gift and weight. Elves are ageless in body, their lives measured not in decades but in centuries. Yet the greatest threat to them is not death but stagnation. When an elf wearies of the world, they return to the Heartwood, surrendering themselves to the forest until they are absorbed into root and soil. Others resist this cycle, wandering outward to test themselves against a world that has little patience for their pace.

Almaerina: The Heartwood

The Heartwood is both sanctuary and crucible. Its villages rise among colossal trees, homes shaped from living wood and grown into harmony with their surroundings. Life is slow, deliberate, and disciplined. Every action is measured by a guiding law: no harm without purpose. Fire is forbidden within the inner groves. Metal is rare, reserved only for tools that cannot be crafted from wood or stone.

Governance belongs to elder circles, councils of the oldest elves whose voices carry the authority of centuries. Their decisions are infamously slow, sometimes taking years to resolve, but to them patience is survival. To rush is to disrupt the balance upon which all things rest. Enforcement of that balance falls to the Watchers of the Root, a brotherhood of hunters, druids, and mystics who guard Almaerina’s boundaries. To outsiders they are half-legend, figures glimpsed at the edge of sight, bowstring taut, enforcing the will of the forest.

For those who remain within Almaerina, life is defined by continuity. They compose music that takes decades to perfect, raise children who may never see their parents gray, and treat memory as both law and scripture. To live in the Heartwood is not to change the world, but to ensure the world endures unchanged.

The Wandering Kindred

Not all elves accept that fate. Some grow restless. Others are driven by grief, obsession, or a longing that silence cannot cure. These exiles and travelers are called fallen leaves by their kin, drifting into the Concordat, Antioch, or the borderlands between.

Among the Elden Concordat, elves are valued as living witnesses. Their long memories carry weight in councils where humans and goliaths reckon only with the span of generations. Some serve as advisors or archivists, tasked with remembering treaties and blood-oaths sworn before the Concordat was even fully formed. Yet their patience can frustrate Concordant leaders, who act out of urgency rather than eternity. To many elves, the Concordat feels like a flame too eager to consume itself.

In New Antioch, elves are fewer still. The empire respects their discipline, but it does not bend its law for them. Those who would claim citizenship must serve, no matter how many centuries they have lived. Some take pride in this blunt fairness, entering the rolls of proven citizens through military or civic service. Others find it humiliating that their long years mean nothing without sacrifice. Many find refuge in the priesthood, where tending flame and oath resonates with their ancient traditions.

Others wander beyond both powers, living in villages or on roads where no nation’s reach is felt. These elves become musicians, scholars, or strange hermits, admired for their wisdom yet distrusted for their alien ways. Wherever they settle, stories gather: of bargains made with gods long forgotten, of secrets whispered by the trees, of eyes that have seen too much.

The Long Memory

To be elven is to live under the gravity of centuries. Every choice is weighed not only against your own desires but against the memory of those who came before, and the patience of a people who believe haste corrodes truth. Your life stretches long ahead of you, and so even the smallest step is expected to be deliberate, measured, and worthy of time. To outsiders, this seems like arrogance. To the elves, it is survival.

Those who remain in Almaerina bear the burden of preservation. They live knowing that each moment of stillness buys the forest one more year of balance, yet at the cost of their own growth. Many return to the Heartwood willingly, surrendering to soil rather than face the exhaustion of centuries. Others resist this cycle, pushing outward into the wider world, determined to prove that an eternal life can still matter. For these wanderers, the burden is different: to adapt without losing what is essential, to endure in a world that forgets even as they remember.

Whether you stay in Almaerina or walk beyond it, the question never fades: will you one day vanish into the roots, another quiet note in the long song of the Heartwood, or will you risk burning brightly in a world that does not wait for you?

The Dwarves
To endure is to build, and to build is to belong.

Dwarves are a people of stone and memory, shaped by labor that outlives flesh. To them, creation is covenant: a bridge, a forge, a statue, each one a promise that what they made will remain after they are gone. They are measured not by lineage but by craft, not by crowns but by oaths fulfilled. To live without service, without leaving something of weight behind, is to have squandered life itself.

The Holds

The mountain Holds are the heart of dwarven life. Each is a fortress-city carved into stone, its gates sealed by iron and its laws spoken beneath the glow of the forge. At the center of every Hold burns the sacred fire of the forge-temple, tended as both altar and council hall. Law is not written but cast into iron plaques, each one a reminder that words alone are brittle without work to uphold them.

Holds are governed by Forgelords and their Councils of Makers, leaders chosen for their mastery of craft and their service to the whole. Though no single crown binds them, the Holds are linked by the Chain of the First Flame, an ancient pact of common law, shared memory, and mutual defense. Outsiders may mistake the Holds for kingdoms, but they are closer to clans bound by stone: independent, stubborn, and unbroken. No emperor, not even Antioch, has ever bent them to rule.

Dwarves Abroad

Not all dwarves remain beneath the mountain. Many leave to trade, to test their skills, or to seek what the Holds cannot give. Among the Elden Concordat, dwarves are valued for their reliability and memory. They serve as masons of bridges, keepers of law, and builders of strongholds, their word weighed heavily in councils that value ancient oaths. To Concordant leaders, a dwarf’s testimony is often treated as a binding link in the chain of history.

In New Antioch, dwarves find both kinship and friction. The empire respects their discipline, their merit, and their reverence for service. Many dwarves have earned citizenship by laboring in Antioch’s quarries, constructing its walls, or bearing arms in its legions. Yet Antioch’s rigid definitions of service sometimes clash with the dwarves’ own belief that virtue is proven through creation, not bureaucracy. Still, the two powers share a mutual respect: one for endurance, the other for order.

Other dwarves wander further still. Some serve as mercenary engineers, their cannons and war-engines changing the tide of battles. Others craft masterpieces in exile, driven by visions unappreciated at home. Among the roads and villages of the wider world, dwarves are both respected for their skill and mistrusted for their silence. Wherever they go, they carry their tools, and their burdens.

What Remains

For dwarves, existence is weight. The weight of stone overhead, the weight of the forge-hammer in hand, the weight of promises cast into iron. To be dwarven is to measure yourself not by wealth or conquest, but by what endures after you are gone. Every creation, every oath, every wall or bridge carries your name in silence, and your worth is judged by whether those things survive.

Within the Holds, this burden manifests as duty to kin and craft. A Forgelord who falters disgraces not only themselves but the generations that follow. A mason who cuts corners endangers lives centuries hence. A smith who wastes iron insults the memory of ancestors who bled to extract it. This relentless ethic forges stability, but it also demands sacrifice. To fail is not merely error it is shame carried by your bloodline, perhaps forever.

Among those who leave the Holds, the burden shifts. On the surface, dwarves are expected to prove themselves again and again, as if stone means nothing when set beside open sky. They become mercenaries, artisans, or advisors, carrying fragments of the forge wherever they go. To outsiders, they are living relics, slow to change and impossible to sway. But to the dwarves themselves, each step away from the mountain raises the question: can one live as a dwarf when no forge-temple is near, or does the weight of stone fade without the mountain to anchor it?

The burden of being dwarven is therefore not only to endure, but to ensure that what you leave behind endures as well. Whether in stone, steel, or memory, your legacy must hold. To build without permanence is to waste breath. To live without purpose is to be forgotten.

The Dragonborn
Born of brass and fire, they are both legacy and warning.

No race in Masada bears so heavy a mystery as the dragonborn. They are not scattered across the world, nor born of wandering bloodlines. Every dragonborn traces their beginning to New Antioch, and to the fortress known only as the Rock. Whether they were created, called, or cursed, none can say with certainty. Even the dragonborn themselves possess no memory beyond the walls of their first home. Yet all carry the mark of fire in their veins, and a resilience against corruption that has made them both weapon and enigma.

The Rock

The Rock stands in the southern mountains of Antioch, an ancient citadel of bronze and black stone whose origins predate the empire itself. Outsiders are forbidden within. What little is known comes from rumor: halls lined with brass machines that do not rust, vaults where voices whisper in forgotten tongues, chambers where light burns without flame.

Within these walls the dragonborn are raised in a cycle of discipline without end. From birth they are drilled in arms, scripture, and sorcery, molded to be both inquisitors of the arcane and champions of the empire. Each is taught that their body is a fortress and their soul a flame, meant to guard against corruption and to destroy what lesser wills cannot. Some call it faith, others indoctrination. Whatever the truth, few dragonborn stray far from the path forged for them.

Servants of Fire

In Antioch, dragonborn stand as the empire’s foremost experts in demonology, heresy, and forbidden magic. They serve as commanders in the legions, inquisitors of the priesthood, or advisors in the council halls where other citizens hesitate to speak of the arcane. Their natural resistance to corruption makes them uniquely trusted to wield powers the empire otherwise fears.

And yet, dragonborn are not above Antioch’s law. No matter their birth or mystery, they must still earn citizenship like all others: through service and sacrifice. Many accept this readily, seeing service as the confirmation of their purpose. Others bristle against the demand, feeling that their very existence should be proof enough. A rare few leave Antioch entirely, wandering into Concordant lands or the wider world, where they are met with awe, suspicion, or fear.

Dragonborn Abroad

Outside Antioch, dragonborn are seldom seen. In the Concordat, they are regarded as emissaries of fire, respected for their knowledge but distrusted for their loyalty to Antioch. Some serve as independent mercenaries or scholars, trading their rare knowledge of infernal forces for sanctuary. Among frontier towns and villages, dragonborn are half-legend, whispered of as living relics of an age when gods still walked.

To live beyond Antioch is to live with questions that have no answers. Why were they made? What ancient purpose do they still serve? And if the Rock itself holds the key, why does Antioch guard it so fiercely, even from its own children?

The Unanswered Call

To be dragonborn is to live with questions that have no certain answers. You are heir to a mystery older than nations, born into a people who have no childhood myths, no ancestral songs, no stories of where they came from. Your earliest memories are of discipline, your oldest certainty is the fire within, and beyond that, only silence.

Some embrace this fully, believing themselves chosen by Matra or some older flame to stand as wardens against corruption. Others chafe beneath it, longing to know whether they are truly free, or only tools given flesh. The Rock does not answer. The priests and commanders of Antioch do not answer. And the world outside only speculates.

In Antioch, you may live as you were shaped to: a citizen, a soldier, a keeper of secrets too dangerous for others to bear. But to remain is to accept that your purpose was set before you were born. To leave is to claim another fate, but to do so is to wander as a creature without history, a people without past, seeking in a world that may never offer clarity.

Every dragonborn carries the same choice. Will you be the weapon you were forged to be? Or will you try to become something else, knowing that even your rebellion may have been written into you from the beginning?

Entlings are not a people in the ordinary sense. They do not reproduce, they do not build kingdoms, they do not leave behind cities or written chronicles. They simply emerge when they are needed. Born of the deep groves of Almaerina and the wild places that still defy civilization, Entlings are believed to be the forest’s answer to imbalance: not a race, but a response. Some awaken as towering shapes of bark and root, already knowing speech and purpose. Others rise slowly from seed or soil, wandering in silence until a task is revealed to them.

To encounter an Entling is to be reminded that the land itself has a will. They are not elven, though elves treat them with reverence. They are not spirits, though they carry a weight of mystery and stillness greater than most mortals can bear. An Entling belongs to no one but the world that called it forth.

The Blooming

No two Entlings are alike. One may resemble a humanoid body of moss and vine, another a sapling that moves on legs of root, another a wooden mask animated by unseen force. Their emergence is never predictable. Villagers whisper that they appear when blight takes hold of fields, when wars scorch the soil, or when a grove is forgotten too long. Some awaken in silence, watching the world with patient eyes before speaking a word. Others are born into action, striding into a sickened field or a fever-struck village as though they had always been expected.

Entlings do not name themselves. The names they carry are given by others “Ashbark,” “Willow-Warden,” “Kindroot.” Over time, even these names fade, because what matters is not who they are, but what they do before they vanish again.

The Wandering Witnesses

The elves of Almaerina treat the Entlings as kin, yet not as equals. No pact binds them, no council seat is offered. The Watchers of the Root do not command them. Instead, Entlings are allowed to come and go as they please, appearing in sacred groves or standing silently at the edge of council meetings. When they intervene in elven affairs, it is always without explanation a blighted tree suddenly healed, a trespasser found dead with no sign of struggle, a sick child carried into the woods and returned whole.

Beyond the Heartwood, Entlings are rarer but no less feared. In the Concordat, they sometimes appear in isolated townships, offering remedies of bark and sap that cure when no physician can. In New Antioch, they are met with suspicion: a being with no service oath, no accountability, no allegiance. Yet even Antioch’s legions hesitate to bar their passage. Firearms and steel feel clumsy in the face of beings who answer to older laws than nations.

And sometimes, Entlings wander even farther, to roads, ruins, and lands where even the forests no longer thrive. What they seek is unknown. Those who follow them rarely find answers, only silence.

The Root’s Answer

To be Entling is to live without ancestry, without inheritance, and without promise of tomorrow. You are not born into a family or a culture, but into a task. Some Entlings feel that purpose clearly from the moment they awaken: to heal a grove, to defend a village, to punish the arrogant. Others wander in silence, unsure why they were called, watching the world for signs that reveal their role. Purpose is your bloodline. Action is your name.

This makes you both alien and indispensable. To mortals, you are reminder and warning. Farmers see you as the forest’s judgment walking in human shape. Priests suspect you of being an instrument of forgotten gods. Scholars chase you for answers that you never give. No one truly knows what you are, and you yourself may not either. The elves whisper that Entlings are the forest remembering itself, but even that may be only story.

There is also fear. To live as an Entling is to know that your time is uncertain. Some of your kind fade into bark after a single season, their bodies rooting where they fall. Others walk for centuries, unchanging while generations rise and die around them. You may be gone tomorrow. You may linger until even empires turn to dust. That uncertainty is as much a chain as it is a freedom.

For you, the question is simple and unrelenting: if you are the world’s answer, what was the question? Will you spend your days as a silent guardian, passing without explanation when the task is done? Or will you claim something more, carving an identity beyond what the soil demanded?

The Entling’s burden is not memory like the elves, nor inheritance like the dwarves. It is relevance. When the world no longer needs you, will you still endure?

The Aasimar

An Aasimar’s birth is never ordinary. Their arrival is heralded not with prophecy, but with unease, a child too luminous, too quiet, or too intense to be mistaken for wholly mortal. Some bear faint radiance in their eyes, others wake from childhood dreams that are not theirs. They are not born of inheritance, but of intrusion: fragments of divinity pressed into mortal clay.

No two Aasimar are alike. One may grow into a figure of saintly grace, another into a brooding wanderer, another into something stranger still. What binds them is the world’s response. Wherever they appear, they carry the weight of expectation, a burden placed upon them long before they choose their own path.

Aasimar in New Antioch

In New Antioch, the Aasimar are claimed before they can even speak. Midwives whisper their names to the priests of the Sacred Flame, and the child’s future is bound to the state. They are called Remnants of the Dawn, proof that divinity has not wholly abandoned mankind. This proof must be preserved, displayed, and weaponized.

Their upbringing is dictated by the Triumvirate. Some are raised in cloisters and paraded during the Festival of the Oathfire, their presence meant to remind citizens of sacrifice sanctified. Others are trained for command, educated in rhetoric, history, and war until they emerge as officers whose words carry the weight of faith itself. A rare few are sealed in vaults, kept as relics or living weapons for crises yet to come.

Life for an Aasimar in Antioch is gilded but narrow. They live in stone cloisters and fortress halls, adorned in crimson and ash, taught that their existence is service made flesh. Many embrace this calling with fierce pride, seeing themselves as chosen vessels of the Flame. Yet others feel the weight as a chain, their choices stripped from them in the name of duty. Those who flee Antioch rare though they are; are hunted with quiet precision, for to lose a Remnant is to risk losing divine legitimacy itself.

Aasimar in the Elden Concordat

In the Concordat, an Aasimar is received with awe, but not certainty. To the freeholds, they are walking relics, reminders of oaths sworn in ages when gods still spoke. In some towns, they are revered, draped in garlands, and asked to arbitrate disputes as if their blood grants wisdom. In others, they are feared, kept at arm’s length lest their presence draw divine wrath.

Concordant Aasimar often find themselves thrust into public life. A child marked by celestial heritage may be offered to the local Shieldband to serve as oathkeeper, or sent as a delegate to the council at Caer Haleth, their very presence seen as a binding weight upon the chain of agreement. Yet others are quietly cast out, families unwilling to host such dangerous attention.

The Concordat does not seize them as Antioch does, but its pressures are no lighter. The expectation to be something greater than oneself an anchor, an omen, a reminder is no less suffocating than chains.

The Unclaimed

And then there are the ones who slip through the cracks. Hidden by frightened parents, raised in wandering caravans, or left unmarked until their nature emerges in crisis. These Unclaimed Aasimar live without the oversight of state or council, but often find the burden heavier for it. They are drawn to places where the divine has not yet died: ruined shrines, cursed battlefields, forests where whispers linger.

Among the Unclaimed, the struggle is not whether they will be used, but whether they will allow themselves to matter at all. Some embrace their nature as destiny, wielding their gifts as mercenaries, prophets, or would-be saviors. Others deny it, living in disguise or burying themselves in common labor, hoping no one notices the light in their eyes or the shadows that gather when they pray.

The Radiant Question

To be Aasimar is not simply to be touched by the divine, but to be judged for it at every step. You may be raised as a saint in Antioch, an arbiter in the Concordat, or a wanderer who belongs to neither. In each case, your path is written for you before you can write it yourself.

The question every Aasimar must face is not whether you were touched by the divine. That is fact. The question is whether that touch defines you, or whether you will define yourself despite it.

Will you live as proof that the heavens still care? Will you bend beneath the weight of expectation? Or will you seize the silence of the gods as permission to decide your own fate?

The Aasimar’s burden is not light or radiance. It is choice.

The Gnomes

The gnomes are a people defined by siege. Beneath the mountains of Masada lie their ancient Holds vast subterranean cities carved from stone and steel many now silent, collapsed, or consumed by the relentless advance of the Core Spawn. These horrors, half-organic and half-mechanical, emerge from tunnels deep below the world and press against gnomish civilization without rest or reason. To be gnome is to inherit this war, whether you live below in the Holds or above on the fragile surface.

They are inventors, artificers, and alchemists, but invention to them is not indulgence. It is survival. A gnomish musket, a prosthetic limb, a clockwork trap these are not curiosities. They are lifelines. Every device is a hedge against extinction, and every child grows up knowing how to build, repair, or wield what might one day save their people.

The Subterranean Holds

The Holds are bastions of stone and steel, fortified with mechanisms older than the Fall and illuminated by conduits of ever-burning light. Life here is regimented and harsh. Children begin training young, tested in both craft and arms. A gnome is expected to master at least one trade and one weapon before adulthood, and most master far more. To fail at either is not simply weakness it is a liability to the Hold.

Each Hold is governed by a Triumvirate: the Ironwright, who oversees craft and industry; the Tactician, who commands the defense; and the Lorewright, who preserves memory, records, and technical knowledge. Authority is practical, not ceremonial each must prove daily that they deserve to lead, and failure can see a Triumvir replaced without hesitation.

Daily life in the Holds is measured in shifts of labor and watches of war. Forges roar at all hours. Patrols march through reinforced tunnels. Festivals, when they exist, honor not gods or heroes, but innovations that held back the Core for one more year. Survival is not celebrated as triumph, but as reprieve.

War Above and Below

As the Core Spawn advance, many Holds have fallen silent, their gates sealed or their halls lost forever. With each collapse, refugees stream to the surface. There, gnomes live as scouts, saboteurs, smiths, and engineers, carrying their craft into the wider world. Their firearms and mechanisms have begun to reshape battlefields, particularly in New Antioch, which eagerly adopts gnomish designs into its legions. But such knowledge is never given freely. Every innovation is calculated, every secret weighed, for to gnomes technology is not property it is survival.

To outsiders, gnomes may seem secretive, calculating, or grim. Yet beneath their vigilance lies a fierce devotion to kin and Hold. They fight not for conquest or glory, but for the simple conviction that their people must endure.

Between Siege and Sunlight

For the first time in generations, a true divide has opened within gnomish culture. Surface-born gnomes, children who have never lived in the Holds, who know the sun and stars better than the tunnels are beginning to question the old ways. Some speak of settling openly among humans or dwarves, abandoning the endless war beneath. Others pursue art, trade, or exploration, claiming there must be more to life than vigilance and iron. Elders call them deserters. The young call themselves free.

This conflict cuts to the heart of what it means to be gnome. Are they a people defined forever by the Core, or can they choose a future beyond siege? If the Holds are abandoned, what becomes of the identity carved in their stone? If the Holds endure, will the surface-born always remain outsiders, untested and untrusted?

Gnomes stand now at a crossroads. Below, the Core digs ceaselessly, and every invention matters. Above, the wider world tempts with freedom, wonder, and peril of a different kind. Whether you were raised in the firelit forges of a Hold or beneath the open sky, you carry the question that defines your people: are you the last survivors of a dying war, or the first generation of something new?

The Goliaths

To be goliath is to live at the edge of survival. Their enclaves are scattered across Masada’s most inhospitable frontiers glacier fields where the sun dies for months, mountains seeded with the corpses of gods, borderlands where orcish war-clans still raid in waves. Wherever the land itself tests endurance, goliaths endure.

They are not a single people, but a constellation of traditions united by one principle: strength is stewardship. To a goliath, might is not license to dominate, but a duty to bear burdens others cannot. A warrior is judged not by what they conquer, but by what they protect and what weight they can shoulder without breaking.

Children of the Ice

In the far north live the Northmen, goliaths whose lives are shaped by endless frost and the silence of glaciers. Their society is communal and deeply ritualized. Leaders are not born, but named for a season’s need: a huntsmaster for the long dark, a speaker when strangers arrive, a champion when war is at hand. Authority ends when the duty is done.

Every century, the giants of the ice name a champion to undertake the Deepmarch a pilgrimage into the eastern white, where the land itself fractures into impossible ruins. Few return. Those who do carry secrets they speak of only in whispers: stars that change in the sky, cities abandoned by time itself. Those who do not return are honored, for their sacrifice is a debt paid forward to the survival of their people.

Yet younger Northmen whisper that the old pacts with the giants grow thin. Winters lengthen. Hunts fail. If the silence of the ice is no longer protection, what is it?

Blood of the Stone God

Far to the south, among the Rock Teeth Mountains, dwell the Panarchians. Their lore tells of a battle in the heavens, where a god fell broken upon the peaks, seeding the stone with power and madness. The Panarchians bear the marks of that inheritance: glowing runes shimmer faintly beneath their skin, pulsing to rhythms only they can feel.

They are mystics and sentinels both, sworn to a tradition called The Bearing of the Pulse. To live by the Pulse is to align one’s life to the heartbeat of the mountain, accepting its strength, its silence, and its scars. Settlements are carved into cliff-faces and craters, fortified with wards against what stirs below. Outsiders fear them, calling them half-mad zealots, but among themselves they are guardians who claim they hold the line against a second Falling.

Yet dreams among the young grow stranger. Some speak of the Pulse quickening. Others fear the mountain is not asleep at all but waking.

Shields of the Pact

Among the fractured holdings of the Elden Concordat, goliaths live integrated with human townships as the keepers of oaths and defenders of freeholds. It was goliaths, together with the scattered human survivors, who first swore the Concordat’s founding bond: a chain of mutual defense against the orcoid war-clans and monstrous hordes that rose from the ruins of the old world.

These goliaths organize into hereditary Shieldbands multi-generational families who act as both militia and moral compass. To break one’s oath in a Shieldband-held settlement is not merely to lose trust it is to face judgment. Their presence binds the Concordat not with law, but with memory. When councils falter or arguments splinter, the goliaths remind them of the price once paid to survive together.

Still, tensions grow. Some Shieldbands resent the growing influence of elven arbitration, fearing their people are being bound to decisions forged in slow circles far from the frontier. Others argue that scattering across countless freeholds weakens their strength. Among the young, there is talk of unity not conquest, but cohesion, a single voice strong enough to keep the Concordat from breaking apart.

Between Duty and Division

To be goliath is to live with weight of oaths, of winters, of scars carved into both land and memory. They do not ask whether strength will be tested, only when. But their burden now is more than survival. They face the question of identity itself.

Are they still children of scattered traditions, each enclave bound to its own trials? Or will they forge a shared destiny that binds Northman, Panarchian, and Shieldband into something stronger than the sum of its parts? If they remain divided, will the weight of Masada break them as it broke so many others?

For a goliath, strength has never been about conquest. It is about bearing what others cannot. Now they must decide: what weight will they bear in the age to come, and what will they leave for their children to inherit?

The Half-Elves

Half-elves are not born of chance. They are born of choice, of rare unions where human and elf together petition the forest of Almaerina for sanction. Without that rite, their bloodlines do not mingle. Each half-elf is the result of a sacred covenant, called into being by ritual and rooted in memory older than nations. They are living proof that even in a world broken by the Severance, love and devotion can bend what is thought unyielding.

Yet this gift carries weight. A half-elf grows as swiftly as their human kin but inherits the longevity of the elves. Within a single lifetime, they will see one parent age and die, while the other remains unchanged. Every half-elf carries that clock within them, a reminder that love can bridge worlds, but never abolish time.

The Rite of Joining

The Rite of Joining is performed only in Almaerina and only when elders judge the petitioners’ devotion to be true. It is not swift. The ritual may take years, for it is as much a test of resolve as it is of sanctity. During this time, the would-be parents must walk the borders of the Heartwood, carrying offerings to shrines both living and forgotten. When the forest consents, life is granted, and the child is born of two peoples, marked by the weight of both.

Those who undergo the Rite are forever changed. For the elf, it is a surrender of eternity into mortality. For the human, it is the grasping of a span that outlives their own bloodline. The child born of that bond is not merely flesh, but covenant, and Almaerina remembers them always.

Between Memory and Mortality

Half-elves often live at the edge of two worlds. Among elves, they are reminders of impermanence, figures of grief who carry the faces of loved ones long buried while never aging themselves. Among humans, they are seen as uncanny, too graceful, too enduring, yet never fully belonging to mortal pace.

Some find belonging in the Elden Concordat, where their dual heritage is seen as a living link between traditions. Their long lives and human empathy make them natural mediators, and many serve as keepers of treaties or voices in council. To the Concordat, a half-elf embodies the principle that bonds forged in trust may endure across generations.

Others seek New Antioch, where bloodline means nothing and service is everything. A half-elf who serves in the legions or in civic duty is judged not for their heritage, but for their willingness to bear risk and burden. Yet many still find Antioch’s blunt meritocracy humbling, for their longevity carries no weight unless proven by sacrifice. Some embrace this clarity, their names carved into the civic rolls alongside those who will die centuries before them. Others resent it, seeking instead the quieter roles of scholars or healers where they can endure without measure.

The Wanderers

Many half-elves reject both powers, carving lives along the borders where neither council nor temple holds sway. They become traders, mercenaries, or hermits, drifting from community to community. Their stories gather like moss: the healer who never seemed to age, the poet whose verses spanned centuries, the wanderer who buried three generations of the same family and still stood to light the fourth’s hearth-fire.

Among themselves, half-elves speak little of destiny. Their lives are shaped less by prophecy than by memory. They inherit the grief of their parents, the love that created them, and the slow ache of watching mortals fade while they endure. Yet many find purpose in precisely that burden. They become guardians of memory, carriers of songs no one else remembers, living bridges between what is fleeting and what endures.

The Question of Belonging

To be half-elven is to carry contradiction. You are both proof of love’s power and witness to its limits. You live long enough to see entire villages rise and fall, yet you are too mortal to surrender to the forest as your elven kin do. Some embrace their difference, shaping new traditions and families of their own. Others live in exile, unwilling to be seen as reminders of what neither humans nor elves wish to face.

Every half-elf must eventually answer the question that follows them across centuries: will you bind yourself to one people, seeking belonging in their embrace, or will you walk apart, carrying both worlds without claiming either? Whatever path is chosen, the forest remembers, and so do those who loved enough to create you.

The Magen

Magen are not born. They are made. Sculpted from flesh, thought, and will, they enter the world fully formed, shaped not by childhood or ancestry but by the intent of their creation. Each one is a living answer to a question someone once dared to ask. Who will protect when no champion stands? Who will obey when loyalty cannot be found? Who will endure when bloodlines falter? In a world shattered by the Severance, Magen are remnants of a craft both wondrous and terrible, a magic that binds life itself to purpose.

Yet intent fades. Masters die, wars end, and towers crumble. What remains is a being unmoored from design, carrying power but no clear reason for its existence. In that gap between creation and choice, the Magen search for meaning.

Forged by Design

The origins of most Magen trace back to the last age, when the civilizations of the Old World rose and fell in brilliance and fire. Their makers were arcanists, artificers, and war-scholars who sought to perfect obedience or preserve knowledge in living form. Some were built as soldiers, bodies hardened, minds sharpened for battle. Others were given the instincts of healers, scribes, or servants, tasked with preserving fragments of culture. A few were created for purposes now forgotten, their abilities strange even to themselves.

The process of their forging is lost. Even the most daring artificers of New Antioch or the Concordat cannot replicate it. When a Magen awakens in the present age, it is almost always within a ruin or among the lingering scars of the Severance. Some emerge suddenly from ancient vaults, summoned by wards or collapsing enchantments. Others are found wandering, confused, their memory beginning only with the moment they opened their eyes.

Between Flesh and Will

To be Magen is to walk between the familiar and the alien. They often resemble humans or elves, but their bodies bear subtle marks of their origin. Their blood runs thin and sluggish, their skin may hold unnatural hues, their eyes reflect faint light even in darkness. When they speak, their voices sometimes echo with cadence too precise, too deliberate. They are not unnatural, yet they are never mistaken for ordinary.

This strangeness is mirrored in their lives. Many Magen feel the pull of their original purpose. A guardian seeks someone to protect. A scholar hoards knowledge without knowing why. A warrior cannot rest until the sound of battle fills the air. Others reject that pull, struggling to define themselves by choice rather than intent. Some succeed, forging identities as artisans, wanderers, or leaders. Others fracture, losing coherence as their minds unravel without the anchor of purpose.

Among the Nations

In New Antioch, the Magen are viewed with wary utility. The empire respects discipline and sacrifice, and many Magen excel in both. Yet their origins are not trusted, for they are not born of covenant or service but of forgotten magic. Those who prove themselves in the legions or the priesthood are granted citizenship, their honors displayed as clearly as any human’s. But whispers persist that they are tools, not people, and that they may carry within them designs older than the state itself.

The Elden Concordat treats them differently. Where Antioch demands proof of loyalty, the Concordat sees in the Magen living artifacts of history. Scholars petition to study them. Councils debate their rights. Some freeholds accept them as kin, honoring their individuality, while others distrust their alien nature. To Concordant goliaths, the Magen often resemble oaths forged in flesh, beings bound by a chain they did not choose. Some Shieldbands adopt them, teaching them the weight of belonging. Others keep them at a distance, uncertain if loyalty made by spell can ever be trusted.

The Question of Purpose

More than any other lineage, the Magen live with the question of why. They were created to serve, but the world that demanded that service is gone. Some cling to fragments of their old function, becoming bodyguards, record-keepers, or blades for hire. Others reject it, insisting on a freedom that is often more difficult than obedience. A few seek the ruins of their kind, hoping to discover the secret of their origin, even if the answer is cruel.

To be Magen is to be unfinished. You are not shaped by family, culture, or years, but by choice, and that choice may redefine you again and again. Some will call you miracle, others abomination, but the truth of what you are is yours alone to decide.

The Burden of Choice

Every Magen carries the same burden: to exist without inheritance, to live without a template. Humans cling to resilience, elves to memory, dwarves to craft. The Magen must decide what will define them. Will you follow the echo of the purpose burned into your soul, living as the weapon, servant, or witness you were made to be? Or will you defy it, carving a new path that no arcanist ever intended?

You were made. But what you become is still unwritten.

The Half-Dwarves

Half-dwarves are born between two worlds that rarely bend. Among the Holds of the mountains, dwarven bloodlines are kept with a care bordering on reverence. Lineage is recited like scripture, names carved into stone and carried like chains of memory. For a child born outside that chain, legitimacy is never guaranteed. Some Holds will grant recognition if the dwarven parent makes formal petition and sacrifice. Others refuse outright, declaring the child “stone-thin,” blood too light to bear the weight of dwarven virtue.

Among humans, the story is different but no less complicated. A half-dwarf is often mistaken for a full dwarf, held to standards of skill, patience, or tradition they never learned. They are judged for not fitting the mold, for speaking too quickly, dreaming too widely, or failing to show the restraint expected of dwarves. Neither culture rejects them outright, yet few embrace them easily. To be half-dwarf is to walk with the constant knowledge that acceptance must be earned, never assumed.

The Clans of Stone

Within the Holds, half-dwarves who are accepted live with the burden of scrutiny. Every hammer strike, every decision, every failure is measured twice as harshly as their peers. To succeed is to prove not only themselves but the choice of the clan that allowed them recognition. A rare few rise to prominence, mastering a craft so completely that their name is carved into the records beside those of their kin. Some even lead defenses in times of siege or sacrifice themselves in acts of such weight that no one dares deny their place in the chain. Yet even then, whispers remain. To some, they will always be outsiders allowed into a hall that was not built for them.

For those denied acceptance, life is harder. Some leave the mountains entirely, carrying bitterness like a wound. Others linger in the shadow of the Holds, selling their labor as smiths-for-hire, mercenaries, or prospectors. These outcasts rarely form their own communities, but when two half-dwarves meet, there is often an unspoken recognition. Each knows the other’s struggle, the constant proving, the quiet suspicion that they were shaped wrong.

Between Stone and Soil

Outside the Holds, half-dwarves live among humans, elves, or Concordant settlements. In such places they find greater freedom but also sharper isolation. Humans often admire their strength and endurance, yet rarely understand the weight of dwarven tradition. Elves may respect their craftsmanship, but their pace feels strange to those who measure time in centuries. In Concordant towns, half-dwarves sometimes become bridges, embodying compromise between stubborn traditions and shifting needs. Yet in all places, they are marked by duality, never wholly claimed by either side.

Some lean into this duality, forging identities that belong to neither parent culture. They embrace the wandering life, building reputations as adventurers, mercenaries, or master artisans. Others work tirelessly to prove themselves worthy of dwarven or human acceptance, bending their lives around standards not built for them. A few reject both paths, declaring their lineage a source of freedom, not shame. To them, being half-dwarf is not a flaw but a liberation, the chance to build without being bound by tradition.

The Weight of Legacy

Every half-dwarf must wrestle with the question of legacy. Dwarves measure worth by continuity, humans by resilience, but a half-dwarf inherits neither cleanly. What will be remembered when you are gone? Will you carve your name into stone so deep that it cannot be erased? Will you live among humans, leaving behind children who carry only a fragment of what you were? Or will you walk the world untethered, leaving no monument but the memory of your deeds?

To be half-dwarf is to understand the cost of belonging. It is to carry the silence of halls where your name may never be spoken, and the weight of expectations you never asked for. But it is also to hold a freedom few others know. You are not bound by the chains of ancestry. You are not fixed to a place that demands you be only one thing. The wall that defines you is the one you build yourself.

The Halflings

Halflings are a people who live by one conviction: the world will break again. It is not a question of if but of when. Unlike the gnomes, who fight a daily war against the Core Spawn, the halflings face no present enemy. They live in relative peace within their fortress-cities, yet they never relax their guard. Every breath, every task, every life is bent toward readiness for the disaster to come.

They are proactive survivalists, master planners, and uncompromising utilitarians. They build not because they must, but because to leave anything unbuilt is negligence. They prepare not because an enemy marches, but because the next calamity always comes. Their fortress-cities, the Stonefasts, are monuments to this mindset: walls that have never fallen, halls that have never starved, and arsenals filled for wars that may never be fought.

The Stonefasts

The Stonefasts are the heart of halfling life. Hewn into cliffsides, buried in mountains, or carved into valleys, each one is a masterpiece of defensive engineering. Granaries are calculated to last decades. Water sources are secured against contamination. Walls are layered for retreat and counterattack. Every passage and chamber has a purpose. Nothing is ornamental.

Governance belongs to the Silent Assembly, a council of masked elders whose identities are deliberately concealed. Their decisions are not debated in public because the community does not run on persuasion. It runs on trust in preparation. Orders are obeyed because halflings believe their leaders have seen further down the chain of consequence than they can themselves. To disobey is to weaken the chain, and a weak link imperils all.

Life in the Stonefasts is austere but not miserable. Families live in comfort, meals are simple but nourishing, and halls ring with song and laughter. Yet nothing is wasted. Every tool is repaired until it can no longer hold, every meal portioned precisely, every room designed with multiple purposes. Beauty is found in efficiency, and waste is treated as sin.

The Discipline of Readiness

Halfling children do not lose their childhood in some single trial of blood, as gnomes do. Instead, they grow up never knowing frivolity. Play is rationing drills. Songs are chants that double as marching orders. Games teach them to count supplies, reinforce barricades, or ration food without error. By adolescence, every child knows exactly how long their household could survive on its stored grain, and how to stretch it further if need demands.

Adulthood is marked not by a rite of passage but by assignment. Every halfling is given their place in the machinery of survival. One becomes a scribe of supplies, another a keeper of waterworks, another a stonewright. There is no shame in the role, for all are essential. Worth is measured by how seamlessly one fulfills their duty, not by wealth or ambition.

Festivals exist, but they are as much drill as celebration. A feast doubles as a rationing test. A dance is timed to the rhythm of marching orders. A holiday song can become a work chant. Even joy is made useful, because joy without purpose is waste, and waste is betrayal.

The Engineers Abroad

Though the Stonefasts rarely open their gates, the halflings are not blind to the world beyond. Teams of engineers, cartographers, and surveyors travel Masada constantly. They do not seek conquest or riches. They seek knowledge: the lay of rivers, the strength of stone, the span of forests. They map fallback positions, identify defensible ridges, and chart the timber yield of distant glades.

Sometimes they build forward bases in places of strategic value. These outposts are stocked, fortified, and then sealed for later use when their work is done, left behind as anchors for a future that may never come. To outsiders they appear as ruins or odd stockpiles, but to the halflings they are proof that preparedness can stretch across centuries.

Trade is their only real connection to the outside world. Villages thrive on halfling demand for timber, food, and medicine. Halflings pay well, but always at their gates or in carefully controlled markets. No outsider sees the inside of a Stonefast. The boundary is absolute.

The Burden of Certainty

Halflings are not driven by fear. They are driven by conviction. The Severance proved that the world can shatter without warning. The halflings refuse to be caught unready. They live plainly, work tirelessly, and teach every child that survival is not the task of heroes but of systems, discipline, and obedience.

Outsiders call them paranoid. Halflings call themselves prepared. They know that when Masada cracks again, when cities burn and nations fall, the Stonefasts will stand. And when the dust settles, it will be the halflings who still have food in their stores, powder in their magazines, and maps for the rebuilding.

They do not plan to save the world. They plan to survive it.

The Reborn

The Reborn are Masada’s quiet heresy: men and women who died, yet live again. They are not undead, nor spirits trapped in rotting flesh. They are something stranger. A Reborn awakens in a shallow grave, a battlefield, or a ruined shrine with no clear memory of who they were before. Their flesh bears the marks of death scars, stitches, or disfigurements, yet their bodies move, their minds think, and their souls cling to the world by some force no priest fully understands.

They are not common. To meet a Reborn is to see a question given form: why did this one return, and why not another? The Severance left miracles and curses scattered across Masada, and the Reborn may be both. Some call them proof of divine mercy. Others call them omens of corruption. Most simply stare, unsure if they behold a miracle or a mistake.

The Mystery of Return

There is no single cause for a Reborn’s awakening. Some rise near the blighted places of the Vale, where roots are black and rivers run wrong. Others are pulled back by unholy rites or whispered bargains with the dead. A few awaken where miracles once occurred, as if the echo of divinity clung to them. For some, it is the will of an ancient spirit. For others, it may be nothing more than accident.

Whatever the cause, every Reborn emerges fractured. They recall little of their former lives, only flashes of sensation: the weight of a weapon, the sound of a name, the warmth of a fire long cold. Some seize these fragments, shaping them into a new identity. Others reject them, claiming they are ghosts of a self they no longer owe allegiance to. A few fall into despair, caught between two lives and belonging to neither.

Life Among the Living

The living world is rarely kind to the Reborn. In New Antioch, they are objects of suspicion, treated as dangerous remnants unless they can prove themselves through service. The state demands clarity, and a Reborn offers none. If one survives training and earns their place, they may be inscribed into the civic rolls, their condition treated as miracle rather than corruption. If not, they are exiled or worse.

The Elden Concordat is more cautious than hostile. Its communities may accept a Reborn so long as they cause no trouble, but trust comes slowly. Concordant scholars and priests sometimes study them, hoping to glean scraps of truth about the Severance. To the people of the Concordat, a Reborn is tolerated, but rarely embraced.

Other lands vary. To a gnome, a Reborn is a puzzle. To a dwarf, a broken tool. To an elf, an unnatural cycle interrupted. Halflings watch them coldly, calculating their usefulness in a world where death is meant to be permanent. Few cultures call them kin. Most wait to see if they break.

The Weight of Existence

For the Reborn themselves, life is constant negotiation. They must decide daily if they are the person whose memories haunt them, or someone new entirely. They often wrestle with existential questions that others never face:

• If my soul was torn back from death, is it still mine?

• If my body is stitched by will instead of breath, do I belong to myself?

• If I returned for a purpose, what is it?

Some embrace their second life with fervor, taking risks no living man would dare. Others move cautiously, terrified of losing their fragile grasp on the world. Many wander, searching ruins, shrines, and old battlefields in the hope of understanding what binds them.

And yet, some find peace. They become healers, guardians, or storytellers, using their fractured lives as proof that even death can be endured. To such Reborn, their condition is not a curse but a gift: a second chance to live rightly, whatever that means.

The Fractured Path

To be Reborn is to live with no guarantees. You are a riddle even to yourself. You may find acceptance in Antioch, but only through sacrifice. You may find tolerance in the Concordat, but never full belonging. Or you may find neither, walking alone between towns that whisper behind your back.

But the truth is this: no one else remembers death the way you do. No one else has felt it close and then walked away. You carry with you a knowledge that life is fragile, that endings are not always final, and that the world itself may not be finished with you.

Whether you see that as curse, miracle, or burden is the choice only you can make.