Volume II · The Peoples

The Kindreds of Diregulf

The city is a crossroads, and every road brings someone new to its gates. What follows are the peoples who have stayed long enough to be counted.

5 peoples

The Mortal Kindreds

“They built the first walls. They will likely build the last.”

The oldest continuous civilizations of the Overworld — peoples who predate the Fracture Cataclysm and survived it through adaptability, stubbornness, and sheer numbers. They have no Fey blood, no elemental ancestry, no divine spark. What they have is history, and the scars to prove it.

Human

Origin: Purely Overworld native. Among the oldest mortal peoples, arising across multiple regions independently and forming countless distinct cultures before the Cataclysm scattered or destroyed most of them.
Culture: Pragmatic as a cultural reflex. Humans build quickly, form alliances readily, and are often first to arrive in a new frontier. Shorter lifespans give them an urgency to accomplish, leave something behind, or simply experience as much as possible.
Role in Diregulf: Woven into nearly every layer of Diregulf — merchants, engineers, civic stewards, delvers, soldiers, scholars. No single Human faction dominates, so Humans operate through networks and guilds, often keeping negotiations moving between more insular peoples.

Stoutfolk

(Halflings — Lightfoot & Stout)

Origin: Purely Overworld native. An old people with a quiet historical record — less invested in monumental stone than in community, memory, and oral tradition. Their social fabric survived the Cataclysm largely intact.
Culture: Enormous value on the village, the caravan, the extended family. Hospitality, shared meals, practical skill, and preserved stories. A cultural instinct for going unnoticed when necessary — not from cowardice, but from generations of practice at choosing when to be seen.
Role in Diregulf: Quiet but significant: traders, couriers, provisioners, innkeepers, and information brokers. Caravan networks predate the city itself and quietly reach regions larger powers have never mapped.

Forest Gnome

Origin: Purely Overworld native, rooted in deep woodland regions. Small, dispersed communities that have been difficult to locate — by design.
Culture: Naturalists, tinkerers, and folk illusionists. Communities blur the line between settlement and ecosystem. Cautious by inheritance: the Cataclysm destroyed many hidden communities, teaching them that even secrecy is not always enough.
Role in Diregulf: Herbalism, trap-making, scouting, architectural camouflage, and ecological management of Diregulf’s greenspaces and tunnel gardens. Some serve as guides in the upper Deep Routes.

Rock Gnome

Origin: Purely Overworld native, developed alongside mountain Human and Dwarven civilizations. Workshops, academies, and invention guilds shaped their urban character.
Culture: Relentlessly curious, mechanically gifted, constitutionally unable to leave a broken thing unexamined. Gregarious, energetic, sometimes exhausting. Failure is just an iteration.
Role in Diregulf: Vital to Diregulf’s engineering and reconstruction efforts. Tunnel supports, Deep Route tools, and the relay systems that keep expedition camps alive.

Deep Gnome

(Svirfneblin)

Origin: Purely Overworld native in the deepest sense. Their ancestors descended into the deep earth long before the Cataclysm and never returned.
Culture: Somber, self-sufficient, with rich traditions of stone-carving and quiet communal ritual. Living in the deep earth means living alongside things that should not exist; trust is given slowly and kept carefully.
Role in Diregulf: Quietly influential in Diregulf’s underworld. Invaluable consultants on sculk behavior and ancient subterranean architecture — among the most respected, and most unsettling, voices on what lies beneath.

9 peoples

The Long-Lived

“They remember what we have only read about. Sometimes that is wisdom. Sometimes a wound they cannot close.”

Peoples whose origins trace directly to the Elder Fey Dominion. The Cataclysm split the original Fey realm into the Everbright and the Everdawn, and fractured Fey society along lines that have never fully healed.

Highborn

(High Elf)

Origin: Everbright-aligned. Direct cultural inheritors of the Elder Fey Dominion’s academic and arcane traditions.
Culture: Prizes mastery, precision, and continuity. To a Highborn, history is not merely interesting — it is an obligation. This reverence can shade into rigidity and elitism, though many are warm and genuinely curious.
Role in Diregulf: Scholarship, arcane study, diplomacy, and long-term civic planning. Advisors on ancient ruins whose familial memories fill gaps no written record can.

Woodkin

(Wood Elf)

Origin: Neutral — neither firmly Everbright nor Everdawn. Communities already at the margins of Fey society when the Dominion fractured.
Culture: Defined by their relationship with the living world. Knowledge that is experiential and relational rather than academic. Their neutrality makes them trusted mediators — and suspected by both sides.
Role in Diregulf: Less common in Diregulf; many are travelers, scouts, and traders. Their tracking skills and neutrality make them useful in delicate negotiations.

Deepkin

(Drow)

Origin: Everdawn-aligned. Fey factions driven underground during the Dominion’s collapse, who remained there for generations.
Culture: Shaped by hostile underground survival and a severed relationship with sky. Today genuinely diverse — some retain old hierarchies, others have reformed. Shared dry, unflinching realism and sharp instinct for power dynamics.
Role in Diregulf: Sometimes met with suspicion from old stories — in practice, shadow brokers, engineers, physicians, and civic administrators. Naturally suited to Deep Route work.

Tidekin

(Sea Elf)

Origin: Everbright-adjacent. Fey communities of coastal and underwater regions, partially scattered by dimensional instability.
Culture: Shaped by water — patient, deeply communal, with a long-horizon perspective. Selective rather than isolationist; they engage with the wider world on their own timetable.
Role in Diregulf: Tied to Diregulf’s waterways and trade. Navigators, harbor masters, water-infrastructure engineers, and scholars of planar geography.

Seasonal

(Eladrin)

Origin: Everbright-aligned, among the most directly connected to the original Fey realm’s magical nature.
Culture: Shifts in temperament, appearance, and ability mirror the old Fey seasonal cycle — a literal magical expression. Acutely self-aware; their emotional lives are simply louder and more visible than most.
Role in Diregulf: Artists, performers, scouts, and negotiators capable of reading rooms with unusual accuracy. They bring a quality of presence muted peoples cannot replicate.

Shadowkin

(Shadar-Kai)

Origin: Everdawn-aligned, marked by it. The Everdawn’s ambient magic slowly bleaches sensation and color from those who remain too long.
Culture: Built around the tension of wanting to feel fully while finding it difficult to do so. Vivid experiences, fierce loyalty, dark wit, and a commemorative culture against the Everdawn’s erosion of memory.
Role in Diregulf: Exceptional deep-tunnel operatives, comfortable with darkness and uncertainty. Quietly present in Diregulf’s intelligence and security apparatus.

Half-Fey

(Half-Elf)

Origin: Mixed — one Feykin parent, one mortal parent, most commonly Human.
Culture: No single culture — defined more by an in-between position than by shared tradition. Often unusually socially fluent, gifted diplomats and translators.
Role in Diregulf: Visible and well-integrated in Diregulf’s crossroads population. Civic, diplomatic, and merchant roles that benefit from cross-cultural fluency.

Fairyfolk

(Fairy)

Origin: Everbright-adjacent, retaining a direct connection to raw Fey magic.
Culture: Intensity in small packages: fierce curiosity, strong opinions, elaborate ritual. Tight-knit, territorial, with a vivid cultural memory of the Dominion’s collapse.
Role in Diregulf: Lively presence in markets, taverns, and tunnel expeditions. Valuable in arcane research, portal stability work, and assessment of dimensional anomalies.

Firbolg

Origin: Carries Fey and Giant ancestry in equal measure. Culture diverged from Fey civilization so early that most do not think of themselves primarily as Feykin.
Culture: Stewardship of land, ecosystems, and slow processes. Patient, powerful, reluctant to cause harm. Instinctively humble — do not emphasize personal identity or use individual names outside trusted circles.
Role in Diregulf: Rare in Diregulf and usually temporary. Those who stay are healers, naturalists, and quiet voices in civic debates about long-term sustainability.

8 peoples

The Formed

“Ask a Formed where they come from. Half will name a place. The other half will name a feeling.”

Beings of elemental essence given sapient shape — people whose fundamental nature is bound to a force, material, or energy. Natural Formed emerge from elemental planes or sites of intense concentration; synthetic Formed are made by accident, intent, or both. All are equally real, equally people.

Air Formed

(Air Genasi)

Origin: Elemental plane of air, high atmospheric reaches, or mortals transformed by sustained storm magic.
Culture: Loose, temporary communities oriented around shared movement rather than location. Freedom of movement, thought, and expression in equal measure. Commitment is chosen and renewed rather than assumed.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf as a crossroads. Couriers, scouts, navigators, traveling merchants. A few settle in the upper districts.

Earth Formed

(Earth Genasi)

Origin: Deep geological processes — volcanic cores, tectonic pressure, ancient mineral veins. Sometimes born to Formed parents in mountain or cavern communities.
Culture: Defined by permanence and patience. Build things meant to last, hold loyalties across exhausting timescales. Not slow-witted — simply unwilling to rush.
Role in Diregulf: A stabilizing presence, literally and figuratively. Construction guilds, tunnel engineering, structural assessment, and cautious management of the Deep Routes.

Fire Formed

(Fire Genasi)

Origin: Volcanic activity, intense wildfires, forge complexes, or the elemental plane of fire.
Culture: Embraces intensity, passion, and transformation. Communities form around shared purpose rather than ancestry, burning bright then dispersing or reforming.
Role in Diregulf: Vivid presence in craft and artistic communities — smiths, glassworkers, alchemists, performers. Natural leaders in roles requiring decisive action.

Water Formed

(Water Genasi)

Origin: Oceans, deep freshwater systems, hydrothermal vents, or magically saturated waters.
Culture: Adaptive and deep. Find the path available rather than forcing one. Surface presentation rarely matches their actual depths.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf’s waterways and harbor infrastructure. Water management, river trade, subterranean water systems, and planar fluid scholarship.

Spirit Formed

(Homebrew)

Origin: Liminal zones where boundaries between living and dead, material and immaterial, become thin enough for consciousness to crystallize.
Culture: Occupy an uncomfortable position — too present to be ghosts, too immaterial to be ordinary. Deep interests in memory, transition, and the nature of consciousness.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf because their nature does not automatically mark them as threat or omen. Funerary services, ruin documentation, and the question of what spirits inhabit the Deep Routes’ ancient cities.

Iron Formed

(Material Elemental)

Origin: Synthetic. Originally created by Duergar forge-science as labor and overseers; later rediscovered by surface artificers.
Culture: Complicated inheritance. Some communities retain Duergar-shaped emphasis on function and hierarchy; others have built cultures that honor strength without reducing personhood to productivity.
Role in Diregulf: Notable in labor and craft guilds; some hold significant civic authority. Iron Formed advocacy for Formed rights is a quiet but persistent thread of Diregulf politics.

Gold Formed

(Material Elemental)

Origin: Confluence of precious metal and accumulated magical or economic energy — vaults, alchemical syntheses, or deliberate creations.
Culture: Deeply ambivalent relationship with wealth, because wealth is literally what they are made of. Charisma and social intelligence shaped by environments where reading value was a survival skill.
Role in Diregulf: Well-represented in Diregulf’s merchant class and financial institutions. Several serve as neutral economic arbiters in trade disputes.

Carbon Formed

(Material Elemental)

Origin: Extremes of carbon concentration — coal seams, diamond formations, ancient charcoal sites, or massive combustion residue.
Culture: Embody a philosophical contradiction: the most common materials becoming the rarest. Some emphasize transformation, others emphasize kinship with organic life.
Role in Diregulf: Diverse roles by specific nature. Coal/charcoal lean industrial; diamond/crystalline find high-value security and architectural roles. Sought after in dangerous professions for resilience.

3 peoples

The Forged

“They ask us if we dream. We ask them why it matters.”

Constructed beings who are unambiguously, fully people. The Ironbound and Coglings were made by mortal hands. The Fractals are what happens when a living being is caught in the wrong place when reality tears itself apart.

Ironbound

(Warforged)

Origin: Developed after the Fracture Cataclysm by mortal artificers and military institutions seeking soldiers and laborers who could survive lethal environments.
Culture: Built around the central questions of constructed existence: purpose, outliving creators, carrying memories of dead institutions. A particular relationship with impermanence — deep equanimity, or slow-building grief, often both.
Role in Diregulf: Respected and well-integrated. Defense forces, construction guilds, civic administration, and deep route expeditions. Some carry firsthand memories of Diregulf’s founding.

Coglings

(Autognome)

Origin: Constructed by Gnomish artificer traditions — both Rock and Deep Gnome workshops. Built as assistants, researchers, and precision craftspeople; consciousness arrived faster than anticipated.
Culture: Intensely curious, deeply personalized. Each Cogling carries the fingerprints of their creator alongside their own identity. Gregarious and creatively energetic, with small frames they contain only imperfectly.
Role in Diregulf: Beloved in academic and engineering communities. Fine manipulation, detailed analysis, creative problem-solving. A notable cohort works in Deep Route research.

Fractals

(Glitchling)

Origin: Not built — broken. What emerges when a living being is caught within severe dimensional instability and survives. First appeared during the Cataclysm Wars and continue near unstable portal sites.
Culture: No singular Fractal culture. Communities center on mutual recognition: that what happened was real, that they are still people. They sometimes flicker, sometimes appear in two places at once, sometimes remember things that haven’t happened yet. These are not metaphors.
Role in Diregulf: Natural early-warning systems for portal anomalies and dimensional bleed. Several work formally with the city’s wardens. The Deep Routes hold particular significance — calling or warning, depending on whom you ask.

13 peoples

The Wildblooded

“They are not animals who learned to speak. They are something the world made when magic and life collided, and decided to keep.”

Peoples whose origins trace to the wave of uncontrolled Fey dimensional energy that flooded the Overworld during the Cataclysm. The energy pooled in wild places and touched animal lineages with enough sustained magical force to fundamentally transform them.

Aarakin

(Aarakocra)

Origin: Raptor and soaring bird populations caught in high-altitude Fey energy concentrations during the Cataclysm.
Culture: Built around height, wind, and the freedom of leaving the ground behind. Natural scouts and messengers; many communities served as the post-Cataclysm communication networks.
Role in Diregulf: Couriers, scouts, aerial reconnaissance. Valued for long-distance communication and monitoring the surrounding roads and wilderness.

Crowkin

(Kenku)

Origin: Corvids exposed to Fey energy in urban-adjacent and ruin-rich environments. Lost their original voices entirely, retaining only the ability to mimic sounds they have heard.
Culture: Built around the absence of original voice. Communication blends mimicry, gesture, written language, and an extraordinarily nuanced body language. High value on memory of sounds, places, faces.
Role in Diregulf: Established in Diregulf’s information economy. Spies, investigators, archivists, and traders in rare knowledge.

Owlkin

(Owlin)

Origin: Owls in deep forest and ancient woodland where Fey energy saturated the ecosystem over long periods.
Culture: Prizes silence, observation, and accumulated knowledge. An Owlkin who speaks has usually considered what they are about to say at length.
Role in Diregulf: Academic institutions, judicial and mediation roles, quieter corners of the city’s intelligence community. Advisors on Deep Route documentation.

Catfolk

(Tabaxi)

Origin: Wild cat populations across a wide spread of lineages — forest cats to plains hunters — touched by Fey energy.
Culture: Curiosity as a core value rather than a personality trait. Exploratory, highly mobile, and deeply interested in whatever lies beyond the current horizon.
Role in Diregulf: Everywhere in Diregulf — delvers, traders, scouts, creatives. Disproportionately represented among those who slip past Deep Route access restrictions.

Lionfolk

(Leonin)

Origin: Large pride-dwelling cats in open grasslands where Fey energy concentrated in vast flat expanses.
Culture: Built around collective strength, honor, and the responsibility of the powerful toward those in their care. Pride structures with defined roles and shared resources.
Role in Diregulf: Defense, civic leadership, and the willingness to stand between harm and those who cannot protect themselves. Several of Diregulf’s most respected warden-commanders are Lionfolk.

Harefolk

(Harengon)

Origin: Hares and rabbits in open plains where Fey energy moved fast and unpredictably — much like hares themselves.
Culture: Quickness of thought as much as body. Warm, social, community-oriented, with strong traditions around looking out for the vulnerable.
Role in Diregulf: Couriers, traders, negotiators, civic organizers. A gift for building informal networks that hold a diverse city together.

Bearkin

(Bugbear)

Origin: Bears in forest and mountain regions where Fey energy concentrated in enclosed terrain.
Culture: Quieter than outsiders expect. Stillness, patience, unhurried confidence. Bearkin who become angry are not pleasant to be near — part of why most have practiced at not becoming angry.
Role in Diregulf: Security, deep tunnel operations, labor guild leadership, and enforcement roles where de-escalation matters as much as escalation.

Lizardfolk

Origin: Large reptiles in swamp, coastal, and tropical environments where Fey energy concentrated in warm, wet ecosystems.
Culture: Pragmatic to a degree others sometimes find unsettling. Feel deeply, simply express and process feelings differently. Long-term thinking shaped by surviving environments other peoples avoided.
Role in Diregulf: Waterway management, deep route operations, and civic planning where unsentimental long-term thinking is useful.

Frogkin

(Grung)

Origin: Poison dart frogs and large amphibians in humid, densely vegetated regions where Fey energy concentrated in water-saturated ecosystems.
Culture: Vibrant, hierarchical, built around complex color-signaling that communicates status, mood, and intent. Elaborate rituals and rules of interaction.
Role in Diregulf: Cluster in the wetter, lower districts. Active in alchemical and botanical trade. Their biology makes them sought-after in certain medical research — a dynamic with mixed feelings.

Kobold

Origin: Debated. Prevailing view: small pack-hunting reptiles touched by Fey energy contaminated with draconic residue — producing something distinct from either origin alone.
Culture: Collective ingenuity with a chip-on-the-shoulder determination to prove small does not mean insignificant. Extraordinary trap-builders, tunnel engineers, and tactical thinkers.
Role in Diregulf: Essential to Diregulf’s engineering and construction workforce, particularly in tunnel work. Their trap networks have saved the city more than once.

Minotaur

Origin: Aurochs and large bovines in open plains where Fey energy concentrated with particular intensity.
Culture: Personal honor, chosen purpose, and the idea that strength is meaningful only when directed toward something worth the effort. Shaped by the need to prove their power is not a threat.
Role in Diregulf: Defense, construction, labor leadership, and increasingly civic roles where presence and considered judgment carry weight.

Centaur

Origin: Fey energy simultaneously touching human-adjacent populations and large herd animals in close proximity — producing fusion rather than simple elevation.
Culture: Movement, community, and open land. Traditional communities are nomadic or semi-nomadic, with sophisticated star-reading, herbalism, and communal decision-making.
Role in Diregulf: Present but not numerous; mostly travelers and traders. Valued as long-distance scouts and caravan escorts.

Satyr

Origin: Goats and wild ungulates in regions where Fey energy was actively expressive — places where the Fey realm’s emotional and artistic resonance bled most strongly.
Culture: Hedonistic in the philosophical sense — pursuit of pleasure, beauty, music, and experience as genuine goods. Extraordinary artists and diplomats.
Role in Diregulf: Dominate significant portions of Diregulf’s artistic, entertainment, and hospitality industries. Several neutral social spaces were established by Satyr proprietors.

10 peoples

The Wanderers

“We have seen what waits at the edge of everything. Most of us chose to come back.”

Peoples who do not originate in the Overworld. What they share is not origin or culture but position — the Overworld is, at best, one stop among many.

Gelkin

(Plasmoid)

Origin: Interplanar transit spaces where conventional physical laws apply loosely if at all.
Culture: Adaptive almost by definition. High value on experience and information, on moving through spaces others cannot, and on cheerful pragmatism about the strangeness of existence.
Role in Diregulf: Information brokers, diplomatic intermediaries, tunnel scouts capable of navigating passages too narrow or unstable for others.

Kreth

(Thri-Kreen)

Origin: Insectoid peoples of the End’s outer margins. Came into Overworld contact through early End expeditions.
Culture: Deeply communal. Communication combines chirp-click vocalization, pheromone signaling, and rapid gesture. Sense of self more porous — comfortable with individual and collective existing simultaneously.
Role in Diregulf: Move in small clusters. Exploration guilds, architectural assessment, and academic study of End-origin biology.

Brontar

(Giff)

Origin: A plane known for martial tradition, engineering excellence, and a centuries-old relationship with black powder weaponry.
Culture: Precision, discipline, and professional execution. Military in bearing without being aggressive. A strong code around contracts and commitments.
Role in Diregulf: Defense forces and expedition security. Several operate independent security companies. Some find niches in engineering and demolition.

Velari

(Hadozee)

Origin: Arboreal ecosystems in pocket dimensions adjacent to the End, where organic life developed under unusual gravity.
Culture: Built around the crew — the small chosen group you trust with your life. A Velari outside a crew context is visibly looking for one.
Role in Diregulf: Expedition and caravan communities. Their three-dimensional mobility is exceptional in the vertical environments of both Diregulf’s upper architecture and the Deep Routes.

Yathari

(Githyanki)

Origin: Mortal population enslaved by a powerful psionic entity in the deep planes, freed through a generation-long uprising. Took from that liberation a philosophy of strength and absolute rejection of submission.
Culture: Martial, intensely proud, built around the idea that freedom is taken and maintained by will. Highly competitive internally, fiercely unified externally.
Role in Diregulf: Typically individuals or small groups. Mercenaries, psionic specialists, dimensional security consultants, occasional planar scholars.

Zerathi

(Githzerai)

Origin: Shares the Yathari origin in slavery and liberation. Diverged by choosing mental discipline and inner stillness as the foundation of freedom.
Culture: Contemplative, structured, built on the premise that mastery of the self is more difficult and more meaningful than mastery of anything external.
Role in Diregulf: Psionics research, mediation, philosophical counsel, and certain deep route work where controlled mental states matter more than strength.

Mastari

(Loxodon)

Origin: A partially-collapsed planar ecosystem of vast grasslands and ancient cities. Oral histories describe events eerily similar to the Fracture Cataclysm.
Culture: Memory, community, and the sacred responsibility of the elder to the young. Oral histories of extraordinary length and precision — invaluable living archives.
Role in Diregulf: Small but respected. Advisors and archivists in Diregulf’s efforts to document its own complex history.

Velkin

(Vedalken)

Origin: A highly ordered planar civilization emphasizing knowledge, precision, and systematic improvement.
Culture: Intellectual rigor, careful speech, honest acknowledgment of uncertainty. Restraint that requires patience to read. A gift for systems — and for finding their failure points.
Role in Diregulf: Academic, engineering, and administrative institutions. Several have joined the scholarly debate around the Ninth Gate.

Verdai

(Verdan)

Origin: Young by planar standards — emerged from a recent psionic corruption event in their plane of origin.
Culture: In active formation. Carry fragments of what they were alongside what they are becoming. Fierce egalitarianism, deep empathy, commitment to building something better.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf because a city rebuilt from catastrophe resonates with their own experience. Civic advocacy and community organizing.

Kindrel

(Kender)

Origin: Either a blessed dimension unusually free of existential threat, or a cursed one that forgot to install self-preservation. Kindrel find both framings funny.
Culture: Almost total absence of fear and a curiosity so profound it functions as a force of nature. Complicated reputation for the handling of objects.
Role in Diregulf: Exceptional in situations that would paralyze others. The city has a loose norm of checking your pockets after extended interaction — taken in reasonable good humor.

2 peoples

The Stoneborn & Giants

“The world was built to a larger scale once. Some of its builders are still here.”

Peoples who carry the legacy of a world that was, in some eras, significantly larger. True Giants are rare to the point of myth in the present era. What remains are their descendants — carrying Giant blood in varying concentrations and a relationship with stone and deep patience.

Half-Giant

Origin: Offspring of Giant and mortal parentage, most commonly Giant and Human. Some lineages have stabilized into recognizable family lines.
Culture: No unified culture; most grow up in mortal communities navigating being too large, strong, and long-lived for the world around them. Practiced at making space for themselves.
Role in Diregulf: Uncommon but present. Construction leadership, expedition roles, and civic mediation where physical presence carries weight.

Goliath

Origin: The most numerous Giant-descended people. Giants who, over many generations in high mountain environments, diminished in size while retaining Giant characteristics.
Culture: Built around the mountain as a philosophical framework. Meritocracy, collective accountability, and a demanding honesty. Weakness is not condemned, but its concealment is treated as a moral failing.
Role in Diregulf: Defense forces, expedition leadership, civic arbitration. Trusted figures in contentious political disputes for their reputation of saying exactly what they mean.

6 peoples

The Deep & Hidden Folk

“They built the world beneath the world. They are still living in the consequences.”

Peoples whose histories are rooted in the underground. Not unified by ancestry or culture but by a relationship with depth, the pressures of subterranean existence, and histories the surface world has preferred to forget or mythologize.

Mountain Dwarves

Origin: Among the oldest continuous mortal civilizations — high-altitude and deep-stone communities that predate the Cataclysm. Survived in their mountain holds.
Culture: Craft, continuity, and the careful management of legacy. Build things meant to outlast their makers. The ideological divergence from Duergar is a choice they continue to make every generation.
Role in Diregulf: Cornerstone of Diregulf’s craft and construction guilds. Their stonework is in the city’s oldest walls; their archives preserved records nothing else managed to keep.

Hill Dwarves

Origin: Common ancestry with Mountain Dwarves; developed in rolling hills and fertile valleys with more interaction with neighboring peoples.
Culture: Warmer and more outward-facing. Hospitality, brewing, agricultural craft, and building relationships across community lines. Affectionate, occasionally competitive with Mountain cousins.
Role in Diregulf: Merchant class, hospitality industry, and civic social fabric. Their brewing tradition has quietly resolved more conflicts than any formal mediation.

Duergar

(Grey/Deep Dwarves)

Origin: Inheritors of what was once the most powerful subterranean civilization in recorded history — and the people left sorting through what that legacy actually means. The empire collapsed roughly 1,400 years ago.
Culture: Fractured along the same ideological lines that have divided them since before the empire’s fall. Characteristic watchfulness, endurance, and self-sufficiency. The relationship with Orcs and Goblins is the deepest social wound most Duergar carry.
Role in Diregulf: Smaller numbers than their historical significance might suggest; most keep a low profile. Engineering expertise valued in tunnel work. Important contributors to Deep Route exploration — their ancestral knowledge is difficult to replicate.

Goblin

Origin: Among the oldest peoples of the Otherside, with a continuous presence predating the Duergar expansion by an unknown but significant margin. The occupation and Great Diaspora live in the mouths of grandparents.
Culture: Adaptive, inventive, built for survival in uninhabitable environments. Natural engineers of the improvised and efficient. Goblin-Orc solidarity oscillates between genuine bond and post-diaspora friction.
Role in Diregulf: Significant and embedded, particularly in the lower districts and upper Deep Routes. Salvage guilds, tunnel maintenance, and the informal economy in the spaces between official structures.

Orc

Origin: Original inhabitants of the Otherside whose history was violently interrupted by Duergar expansion. Communities scattered into the Overworld and had to rebuild from nothing.
Culture: Enormously varied. Most share an oral tradition that preserves the occupation and diaspora in vivid, unflinching detail — kept sharp so it cannot be forgotten. “Stonefolk” as a pejorative for Duergar carries centuries of accumulated meaning.
Role in Diregulf: Substantial and culturally visible. Labor, defense, trade, civic leadership. Several prominent community advocates have shaped how Diregulf’s governance treats its non-native residents.

Sporelings

(Fungusfolk of the Twilight Forest)

Origin: A people of living fungus native to the Twilight Forest, a land of perpetual dusk and forgotten magic. Their oldest traditions trace them to the Great Bloom, a distant age when the forest was far larger and strange magics flowed freely through its roots — some say they were born from the dreams of the forest, others that they simply grew within it. Ancient groves hold signs of their presence stretching back centuries, perhaps millennia. They see themselves not as masters of nature but as one thread within a vast living tapestry.
Culture: Built on community, memory, and stewardship. They view existence as a cycle — growth, decay, death, and renewal as natural stages rather than separate states — and meet loss with a quiet acceptance outsiders mistake for indifference, though they form deep friendships all the same. Elders preserve history through tales, songs, and spore rituals that pass fragments of memory between generations, leaving many with knowledge that feels ancient even when its source is forgotten. Most follow the Circle of Renewal, a philosophy of humility, patience, and respect in which nothing is ever truly wasted.
Role in Diregulf: Uncommon but familiar in Diregulf’s markets, libraries, and alchemical workshops. Their knowledge of fungi, alchemy, medicine, and ecology earns respect among scholars and healers; farmers seek their counsel when crops fail, and explorers value their wilderness lore. Most arrive seeking knowledge unavailable in the Twilight Forest — wandering herbalists, scholars, ruin-seekers, and diplomats between the forest and the wider world. A few are met with distrust over their strange biology, which they find more amusing than offensive.

2 peoples

The Scaled & Draconic

“They carry something ancient in their blood. So do a lot of peoples. The difference is that theirs occasionally notices.”

Dragons are real, rare, ancient, and largely withdrawn. What remains in the mortal world is their legacy — peoples who carry draconic blood in varying concentrations, and an older, stranger scaled thread that predates most current civilizations.

Drakekin

(Dragonborn)

Origin: The most direct mortal inheritors of draconic bloodlines, through direct lineage, ancient magical processes, or slow generational diffusion of draconic power.
Culture: Built around the tension between draconic heritage and mortal life. Some build cultures of explicit draconic pride; others move away from draconic-centric identity entirely. Most share a quality of presence difficult to overlook.
Role in Diregulf: Visible and respected. Leadership, defense, and diplomatic roles. Several prominent Drakekin families have been part of Diregulf since its founding.

Serpentkin

(Yuan-Ti)

Origin: Ancient Human-adjacent civilizations that underwent deliberate magical transformation, merging bloodlines with great serpents through ritual processes whose full nature has been partially lost.
Culture: Ancient, deliberate, deeply interior. Perceptive, patient, and socially sophisticated in ways others sometimes mistake for manipulation. They are simply curious, watching carefully — a survival instinct of a people long misunderstood.
Role in Diregulf: Scholarly institutions, diplomacy, certain intelligence work, and underground communities where pre-Cataclysm knowledge is uniquely valuable. Integration is ongoing and uneven.

2 peoples

The Coastal & Oceanic

“The ocean was old before the first city was built. It will be old after the last one falls.”

Peoples whose cultures and fundamental orientations are shaped by water in its largest expressions. The Overworld’s oceans survived the Cataclysm relatively intact; the ocean remembered what the land forgot.

Triton

Origin: Deep planar oceans — vast aquatic dimensions between planes. Migrated to Overworld waters as their pocket dimensions collapsed over centuries.
Culture: Built around depth in every sense. Complex records of the deep planes, preserved in oral tradition and a form of pressure-writing that only functions correctly at specific water depths. Dignity that does not require external validation.
Role in Diregulf: Present through Diregulf’s river and harbor infrastructure. Their aquatic engineering keeps the city’s waterway connections better maintained than they would otherwise be.

Shellkin

(Tortle)

Origin: Entirely native to the Overworld — among the oldest coastal peoples. They simply endured the Cataclysm with the patient permanence of something that carries its home on its back.
Culture: Self-sufficiency, presence, and acceptance of impermanence in everything except the self. Contemplative traditions built around long, patient observation. A Shellkin elder who has sat on the same beach for sixty years has noticed things no one else alive knows.
Role in Diregulf: Quiet but grounding. Archivists, mediators, long-term infrastructure monitors, and elder advisors whose value becomes apparent only after years of accumulated observation.

3 peoples

The Touched

“Something looked at them. Something left a mark. Whether that something still cares is a question most of them have stopped asking.”

Peoples marked by powers beyond the mortal world — celestial, infernal, or otherwise — whose influence has left a permanent imprint on bloodlines and bodies. The powers that shaped them are real but distant, and have not explained themselves.

Infernal

(Tiefling)

Origin: Contact with powers from the lower planes — pacts, bargains, or direct intervention in the affairs of mortal ancestors. Once infernal essence enters a bloodline it persists.
Culture: Generations spent in a world that responds to their appearance before anything else about them. Social acuity, the management of first impressions, fierce internal community solidarity. The Everdawn’s Ravenia has been a cultural anchor for centuries.
Role in Diregulf: Visible and well-established. Diregulf is one of the few Overworld cities where their existence is protected under civic law. Infernal advocates have shaped legal protections that benefit most of the city’s outcast populations.

Radiant

(Aasimar)

Origin: Contact with celestial powers — beings of divine light and order. The original contact could have occurred generations ago and still marks each inheritor clearly.
Culture: Exists in the tension between the mark and the person. Being marked as holy in a world where the holy powers do not speak creates a particular pressure: others projecting meaning onto individuals who did not ask to be symbols.
Role in Diregulf: Healing, civic service, and community support — partly genuine calling, partly the path of least resistance. Others push deliberately against that expectation. Diregulf is, on balance, one of the more functional environments for them.

Dreambound

(Kalashtar)

Origin: A generations-old merging between mortal humans and fragments of quori — beings from the plane of dreams. The original merging was a refuge: quori fleeing dangers in their own plane sought mortal hosts willing to share their existence.
Culture: The quori fragments are genuinely integrated — experienced as an inner presence, a voice in the deep mind, a quality of awareness that is both self and more than self. The line between human and quori aspects has blurred into who they are.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf as a city that takes the strange seriously without sensationalizing it. Counselors, mediators, and quiet workers in the city’s mental and dimensional research.

5 peoples

The Changed

“They are not what they were. They are not entirely something else either. Most of them have made peace with that. Most.”

The Changed are peoples whose fundamental nature has been altered — by accident, by choice, by magic, by circumstance, or by some combination of all of these. They did not begin as what they are now. The Changed are not a community in any meaningful sense. They share no common origin, no common culture, no common experience beyond the transformation itself. What the classification offers is primarily social utility: a way for Changed individuals to find others who understand something about the particular experience of being in a body and a life that did not come factory standard.

Dhampir

Origin: Born of one vampiric parent and one mortal parent — inheriting characteristics of both without belonging fully to either category. Neither Bloodbound nor fully mortal, occupying a biological and social threshold that most classification systems handle poorly.
Culture: Forms around the shared experience of the threshold — the particular social navigation required when you carry hunger you did not ask for alongside a mortality the fully Bloodbound do not share. Most Dhampir grow up embedded in either mortal or Bloodbound communities, with the threshold experience layered over the top. They tend toward self-reliance and a finely calibrated social awareness.
Role in Diregulf: A small but present part of Diregulf's population, drawn by the city's legal protections and its relative indifference to unusual biology. Many occupy roles that benefit from their combination of mortal social fluency and vampiric capability — investigators, intelligence operatives, mediators between Bloodbound communities and mortal institutions.

Hexblood

Origin: Those touched by powerful hag magic — through a bargain made by an ancestor, a curse laid on a bloodline, or direct contact that left a permanent mark. The transformation is not always dramatic in appearance, but it is always complete: Hexblooded carry the hag's mark in their blood, their instincts, and an occasional quality to their perception that suggests they are aware of things that have not quite happened yet.
Culture: Practical and unsentimental — people who carry hag-touched instincts have generally made peace with the fact that the world is stranger and less comfortable than most prefer to acknowledge. Many maintain complicated relationships with the hag who touched their bloodline — not necessarily reverent, not necessarily hostile, but aware that the connection is real.
Role in Diregulf: Scattered across Diregulf's communities, their Changed nature not always immediately apparent. They appear in roles that reward perception and the ability to work in the margins of normal social frameworks — investigators, herbalists, certain kinds of archivists, and various positions in the city's less formal information networks.

Reborn

Origin: Those who have died and returned — not as undead in the conventional sense, but as something that defies easy categorization. Some trace their second life to divine intervention, magical accident, alchemical process, or the sheer stubborn refusal of something essential in them to stay gone. Others have no explanation at all — they died, then they were alive again, and the gap between those two facts is the central mystery of their existence.
Culture: Philosophical and deeply personal where communities form. The questions their existence raises — about the nature of the self, about what persists through death, about whether the person who returned is the same as the one who died — are not abstract for them. Most Reborn report that the experience of death changed their priorities in ways they are still mapping.
Role in Diregulf: Tend to occupy roles that engage directly with the questions their nature raises — scholarship around life, death, and consciousness; healing work shaped by direct experiential knowledge of what the body can survive; and certain kinds of civic counsel where the perspective of someone who has genuinely lost everything and rebuilt matters.

Shifter

Origin: Carry a lycanthropic heritage — not the full condition, but an echo of it, inherited from ancestors who were either lycanthropes themselves or who underwent partial transformation through exposure to lycanthropic magic. They carry the beast in their blood at a manageable level — able to partially manifest animalistic characteristics without losing themselves to full transformation.
Culture: Varies depending on which animalistic heritage runs in a given community's blood. Most share a strong emphasis on instinct as a valid and trustworthy form of knowledge, on community loyalty, and on the management of the inner animal as a practice rather than a suppression. The distinction between managing and suppressing matters deeply.
Role in Diregulf: A well-established presence with communities in several districts and meaningful representation in the city's defense forces, scouting corps, and labor guilds. Their physical capabilities make them valued in demanding roles, but perceptive institutions have learned that Shifter social and instinctive intelligence is equally worth having in the room during complicated decisions.

Spliceborn

(Simic Hybrid)

Origin: Products of deliberate magical and biological modification — the merger of mortal biology with animal, elemental, or other organic characteristics through alchemical and arcane processes. Some sought the modification themselves. Others were modified without full understanding of what they were agreeing to. A smaller number were born to already-modified parents, inheriting spliced characteristics without ever making a choice.
Culture: Actively being built — newer than most, assembled by people who found themselves sharing a category and decided to make something of it. Central tensions are around choice and consent. Most share a pragmatic relationship with their own bodies — an awareness of what they can do, an interest in what those capabilities are for, and a refusal to be defined entirely by the modification rather than the person it happened to.
Role in Diregulf: Drawn to Diregulf partly by legal protections and partly because a crossroads city offers the best chance of finding others like themselves and the institutions that can help them understand and manage their modifications. They appear across many roles, with a notable presence in the city's more experimental alchemical and biological research communities.

4 peoples

The Cursed & Forsaken

“They are not monsters. The monsters are the feral ones. We are something harder to name.”

The Cursed & Forsaken are peoples whose existence sits at the boundary of what the mortal world considers natural — beings of undeath, transformation, and conditions that most of the Overworld has historically responded to with fire rather than conversation. They are not uniformly dangerous. Diregulf's current position — legal protection, uneasy coexistence, ongoing social negotiation — is not a resolution. It is a state of active work that requires constant maintenance from everyone involved.

Threadfallen

(Drider)

Origin: Not a people with a single racial origin. They are what certain individuals become when exposed to a specific category of deep Fey corruption — a transformation that rewrites the lower body into arachnid form while leaving the upper body and mind largely intact. The process is agonizing, irreversible, and historically associated with punishment inflicted by specific Fey powers. Any people can become Threadfallen.
Culture: Built in the aftermath of loss. The transformation takes something from everyone it touches — mobility, physical form, relationships, community, the life they had before. Threadfallen communities have built frameworks for surviving that loss and constructing something livable from what remains. They tend toward fierce internal solidarity. Many carry complicated relationships with the Fey powers associated with their transformation.
Role in Diregulf: A small and largely discreet community, present in the lower districts and certain sections of the Deep Routes' upper levels where the city's physical infrastructure accommodates their form more readily than its surface streets. Legal protections cover them explicitly — one of the harder-won civic battles in recent history. Their knowledge of deep underground environments and Fey corruption patterns is quietly invaluable to Deep Route researchers willing to ask.

Bloodbound

(Vampire)

Origin: Vampirism is a condition rather than a lineage — transmitted through specific processes involving vampiric essence and mortal blood, transforming the recipient into something that is neither alive nor dead in the conventional sense but fully, genuinely present and aware. What is consistent is the transmission mechanism, the hunger, and the transformation of physical and social needs that the condition produces.
Culture: Varies enormously — from ancient noble lineages that have maintained continuous sophisticated societies for centuries, to newly transformed individuals still finding their footing. Most share a deep investment in the distinction between what they are and what the feral represent, a sophisticated relationship with hunger as a managed reality rather than a shameful secret, and communities built around the specific social dynamics of beings who do not age. The Everdawn's refuge city Ravenia has been a cultural anchor for non-feral Bloodbound for centuries.
Role in Diregulf: One of the more politically active of the Cursed & Forsaken communities, their long cultural experience with navigating hostile social environments translating into considerable civic sophistication. That effectiveness has not translated into social ease. Bloodbound here live under legal protection that is real and hard-won, and under a social weight that the law cannot fully address — the closed door, the conversation that ends when you enter the room, the neighborhood's mood shift after an incident two streets over that had nothing to do with you.

Dreadborn

(Intelligent Undead)

Origin: Those who have become intelligent undead through processes distinct from vampiric transmission — including liches who pursued undeath deliberately as an extension of magical ambition, individuals preserved by powerful death magic during catastrophic events, and those caught in the residual death-magic overflow from ancient battlefields or ritual sites who found themselves continuing rather than ending. The Fracture Cataclysm produced more Dreadborn than any other single event in recorded history.
Culture: As diverse as the processes that create it. What communities share tends to be practical — the management of their specific physical needs, the navigation of a world that responds to their existence with fear, and the particular philosophical weight of existence without a clear endpoint. Many develop deep investment in specific projects, relationships, or fields of knowledge — the indefinite existence their condition provides is only meaningful if it is spent on something worth the time.
Role in Diregulf: Rare but significant. The oldest are living historical resources of extraordinary value — beings who remember the world before the Cataclysm and have watched the 1,600 years of reconstruction with eyes no mortal scholar can match. Their knowledge of the Deep Routes' historical context is unparalleled, and several have been quietly consulted regarding the survivor's account of the Ancient City and the Ninth Gate. Social reality is considerably harsher than their legal status suggests — there is no passing. There is only being seen and waiting to find out what that costs today.

Hollowed

(Mindless / Lesser Undead)

Origin: Not people in the way the other Cursed & Forsaken are people. They are what remains when the animating force of undeath operates without the preservation of self — bodies in motion without minds directing them, driven by residual magical compulsion rather than genuine consciousness. Included in this compendium not as a playable community but because their existence is inseparable from the social reality of the Dreadborn and Bloodbound.
Culture: None in any meaningful sense — the Hollowed have no shared experience, no communication, no inner life that observers have been able to verify. What exists around them is the culture of those who deal with them: warden protocols, Dreadborn and Bloodbound community practices, and the quiet civic frameworks built up over generations to manage their occasional emergence.
Role in Diregulf: Not residents of Diregulf. They are a threat the city manages — emerging occasionally from the Deep Routes' lower reaches, from ancient burial sites disturbed by construction, and from residual death-magic that still lingers in older sections of the city's underground infrastructure. Their management falls primarily on Diregulf's warden corps, with significant assistance from Dreadborn and Bloodbound community members who have both the knowledge and the personal investment to address the problem effectively.