the fallen races

[evtrax]

i decided to do what vampire hunter D suggested on the your headcanon thread and start a thread about the fallen primordial races. i would start us off by detailing a race of my own creation, but i dont have any at this time. so instead i will give an overview of them. My overview might not fit with 3ed canon.

The Fallen Races

Despite what the common folk think, humanity is far from the only race in creation. The primordials made many different beings before they made humanity. Of these the best known are the Dragon Kings who ruled over humanity in the primordial age, the Mountain Folk who toil under the surface and the degenerate Lintha. The fallen races one and all suffered in the wake of the Primordial war. Not even those who fought alongside the gods and the exalted were spared, as the Dragon King civilization was broken by the fighting and the treachery of Thrice-Damned Gorol and the Mountain Folk were reduced forever by the Great Geas, forced upon them by Autochthon by the paranoia of the exalted, exacerbated by the Great Curse. But despite the Dragon Kings near total destruction and the fundamental lessening of the Mountain Folk's entire potential, breaking the people of adamant and enslaving them to the exalted for all eternity, they still got off easy compared to those races that dared to stand against the exalted.

Of those who fought for the primordials the Lintha family is the best off. However, they have fallen so far from there former glory, the surrender of the Yozi Kimberly having resulted in there current state. The Lintha are inbred, cannibalistic and twisted by exposure to the wyld, stealing from the very poor region of the west, making there home upon a dying Behemoth, reviled by the ghosts of there ancient ancestors. But despite how far they have fallen, they still have a base that sees the sun, and despite there castration and inbreeding they are still fundamentally Lintha. All other races who stood with the primordials were either completely wiped out by exalted or forced into places the exalted couldn't or wouldn't follow them. Some were banished alongside there masters, either willingly following the Yozi or being dragged by the petulant defeated primordials in an act of defiance. The Mountain Folk fight an endless war against the Darkbrood, composed of those races the primordials rejected as well as those who fled underground to escape the exalted purges. And in the depths of the wyld, there are certain horrors that originate not from chaos but from the order of the Primordials.

Of the Fallen Races, only the Dragon Kings and Mountain Folk do not hate humanity (save for certain small factions). They alone do not worship the Primordials (certain fractions of the Mountain Folk non-withstanding) and would rather not see the primordials return. While the sun weakens the Darkbrood, they still seek to destroy humanity. In the wyld the banished dream of vengeance, even those who have been enslaved by the Raksha (who were the first foes of the Primordials). Even those races long dead can return, be they reanimated by the will of the Neverborn or resurrected by other means. The past just might come back to haunt humanity. Unless the exalted repeat the acts of there ancestors and throw these monster into oblivion or cause them to fall even further.

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Ok, now it's your turn. Give me your Primordial races, and how they might come back if they are dead. You can also expand the canon races (i still have no clue where i can learn of the dark paths that the dragon kings have). I will leave you guys to it, and if inspiration strikes i will post.

[Accelerator]

edit: Accidentally pressed save. This will be a placeholder until I finish my writeup.

[Baaldam]

Considering i've toyed extensively with underbroods and forbidden gods in the two previous editions, would be definitely up to joining the thread to toy with the subject once more.

In fact 3e corebook's lore update of elementals, reintroducing them as of multiple independent origins and in some cases possibly older than the gods themselves has lead me into rethinking the subject a bit, using them in the role of "Primordial but not exactly pro-Yozi/Neverborn" races or "strange kind of inhuman people from foreign lands" one might find in ancient or medieval travel chronicles, with some "fantasy (D&D) monster races" mixed in, among other things.

Due to that "elementals as primordial races/adapting D&D monsters" line of thought, that i would come up in a previous thread with two homebrewed races: some "basalt elves" kind of riffing on Jadeborn and Drow both - and has since gone from their pseudo-underdark roots to evolve into a kind of lintha-esque niche (more on that later) and the "long-handed", a race of beings with qualities of bats, moles & flying fishes, capable of using their extended forelimbs as both wings to fly, paw-shovels to move & shape the soft earth from riverbeds and/or flippers to swim and thrust themselves through water, plus cries/songs used to ecolocate both in and outside of water or for social and magical attacks.

(My initial idea was just porting a race of bat-people from a "homebrew underdark" i did for a Pathfinder game - in itself a reskin of their version of the harpy, that has siren-esque singing - but then the "bat wing as shovels & fins" image hit me and they become something more idiosyncratic. I really have to further flesh out and use those guys...)

Anyway, getting a lot of milleage out riffing any variety of monsters/elder races/etc as elementals. So much so that i have unintentionally left the Underbroods and "old school fallen races" by the wayside, i guess.

And that when not outright subsuming previously existing races into my homebrewed elemental races &/or courts, like remaking the People of Air as a nation of air elementals, both naturally spawned & "emancipated" summons, instead of altered mortals or the popularity of a race of zebra jasper midgets as summons among Dynastic sorcerers in a certain period inspiring a fashion in the Realm and jumpstarting the Djala slave-trade, for just two examples.

[Baaldam]

Here goes a slightly expanded & tweaked rewrite of my previous ideas on one of these samples, in this case the jadeborn/drow expies (that turned into more of a kind of lintha thing).


Basanites (aka basalt elves)

The basanites are an elder race of precise origins lost in time. These basalt-skinned humanoids of elfin features and limestone hair have inhabited Hamoji and other volcanoes spread across the archipelago now known as Wavecrest since times untold.

In their dark, fiery and smoke-enshrouded abodes they dwelt in relative seclusion, until roiling, boiling passions shared with their homes would overtake them and they would spew, either by lonesome foot, in bands, or sailing their flaming outrigger, double-hulled ships and trimarans, which cut equally across the surface of earth and sea.

The Flickering Striders, their many-legged champions, beings that look like eerie crystalline blends of man, spider & vaaktri, devotees of a sorcerous initiation unique to their society, move over the seas like water striders and climb beneath the waves as raft spiders, encircled by a mantle of air bubbles, generated by steaming the water as they dive into it. Savants and mystics whispers rumours of how the most experienced among these warrior-sorcerers eventually learning to shape their essence in a way that allows them to metamorphose further, melding with demesnes of earth or fire to attain a monumental manse-like condition akin to the gemlords that gives birth to their domains - and according to some occultists, birthing grounds.

With dreams of empire from the time the Flame marched against the Sea they spread, to trade, to raid and conquer, pursuing loot, pets, slaves or other volcanoes all across the Archipelago and beyond, through the whole West and even farther to conquer and remake into their dark citadels, the Dimmuborgir, challenging, allying with or betraying Lintha, Mosok, Niobrarans, mortal kingdoms and all kinds of beings, with the ebb and flow of the tides of war. Eventually they joined the Exalted Host against the Niobrarian, exchanging their ambitions for victory, favors and stability and wars of conquest for ritual games & competitions of skill along with the occasional bit of trade, tribute or worship.

Charm ideas (WIP):
- a shower of fiery rocks ranged attack.
- flying/shooting oneself as a smoldering boulder?
- generate heat &/or fire by touch.
- transforming into flowing lava for faster movement, flowing & oozing around people, objects and places (while burning up everything). Can lead to accidental petrification (in irregular shapes for extra inconvenience) if hit with a large quantity of water or any other source of cold.
- using "lava transformation" to reshape their own limbs & forms (or genders. Basanites start genderless and them develop it or not by personal preference through association with other beings).
- a group of basanites "melt & merge" into a single gigantic warrior. The more individuals, more physically powerful, but also harder to access individual memories & skills.


Flickering Strider Charm ideas:
- heightened speed &/or multiple attacks
- wall-crawling & vertical climbing.
- walking over the waters.
- dive into the depths surrounded in an envelope of heated air bubbles.
- shaping a bubble of hot air to levitate and even float into the heights of the skies.


(The name comes from the ancient latin/greek word for basalt. To give them a little more than "rock drow/jadeborn" for character, leant on the basalt/igneous rock angle as a stepping stone of sorts, leading to the volcanic connection and from there to the idea of them as "igneous marauders", spewing explosively from their abodes as a literal burning legion or sailing in rafts of flaming pumice like a cross of Lintha with Maori made from fire and stone. The Dimmuborgir was a very lucky discovery that gave me a nice norse/metal support in giving the Basanites an identity more their own, while the "many-leged champions" are just a riff on Driders to which i added the water-walking and diving tricks as little thematic twists inspired by actual water-walking or hunting insects. The idea of them potentially evolving into the Dimmuborgir was a way to highlight the weirdness of elementals and make the term & locale into something more than a cool regional name for manses. The "shooting like smoldering cannonballs" thing is a newer bit of imagery that i still have to do something from).

[Baaldam]

Going to do some rewrites of the "long-handed" and the "people of the Anacreon" later on when i get some ideas to expand and further flesh them out.

One quality incidental of these three races in contrast to other of my homebrewed elementals like the People of Air & Jasperfolk and i'm taking a liking to is a shared liminality of sorts, each of them existing in a threshold of sorts, where traits of two or more elements converge to form beings of more peculiar qualities. Seriously tempted to make it into a pattern to more "Primordial" races of elementals in relation to more "refined" ones generated in millenia of interaction with the divine hierachies and mortal principalities, as their order replaced the whimsy, petty squabbling and savage rivalries of powers older than Creation itself.


(Have also thought of maybe giving the "dark rock elves" thing a non-volcanic, more "vanilla earth" retry later on. My best provisory candidates are hematite and tourmaline for now)

Aaaaand sometimes an idea just hits you like a brick out of nowhere, priorities be damned.....



Lodeston, the Land of Shards

A land and people supposedly originated from the fragments of Lode, the Black Spiral, a dragon born of the shadow of Pasiap,
that challenged the Earth Dragon for possession of the Omphalos and lost, according to the legends of the lodestoni people.

Though broken in the time before history, the nation and beings sprung from its remains can still feel the tugging of its vital force
inside their stony cores, compelling them with to supernatural attractions and repulsions of mysterious purpose, the source of
much esoteric, philosophical and esoteric among those versed in their culture's most celebrated text, the Magnetic Principles.

These urges and the tugging that makes them forever aware of the Pole of the Earth at the center of Creation have inspired
much of their long history of religious disputes, campaigns of unification or separatism, sacred peregrinations and conquering
warbands to the heart of the Blessed Isle, across the eras of Creation and the vagaries of the people above and below the earth.



[hematite led me to magnetite, from there a dumb wordplay between lodestone and -stan inspired me the idea of "ferromagnetic people in an eternal cycle of debate and dispute over the attraction, repulsion and the magnetic pole at the core of their being as both individuals and nation". From the magnetic pole angle came the image of a dragon that challenged Pasiap for the role of Omphalos and a little nod to the Black Spiral as cited in RotSE. Some things still churning in my mind are the subject of a relation or not to the Ebon Dragon - what could go to all kinds of places depending on truth or lie of the legends and how it feels about them - and interactions with the Raksha, that may work in quite different ways depending if lodestone still counts as iron for fae-stuff purposes or a arcane material that changes iron from a fae-bane into something else]