The Peoples of the Vineheart Realm
Hub for the cultures and worldviews of the realm’s peoples: how they think, not how they fight.
Where cultural lore lives
- This area (
5. Peoples) covers how a people sees the world: its values, taboos, and the friction those create with everyone else.- Race mechanics (ability scores, traits, subraces) stay in Character Creation.
- Location culture (how a specific city or continent lives) stays inside that place’s own note.
The Core Races
“Core Races” is the loose term for the peoples who rebuilt the realm’s cities and kingdoms after the Divine War: chiefly humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, and their kin. They share enough common ground (property, contracts, coin, the ordinary give-and-take of asking for help) that they mostly understand one another even when they disagree.
Their shared assumptions are so ingrained they rarely notice them. That is, until they meet a people who does not share them at all.
Index
- Humans: a life is short, so it has to count
- Dwarves: everything worth doing has one true form
- Elves: the past is not gone; they walk it
- Gnomes: to stop asking is to start dying
- Halflings: luck is shared, and must be tended
- Half-Elves: home is a choice, not a birthright
- Half-Orcs: you are who raised you, not who bore you
- Dragonborn: what you feel, you show
- Tieflings: blood is a rumor; deeds are the truth
The Others
Peoples whose worldview runs on entirely different rules. To the Core Races they can seem rude, greedy, or dangerous; to themselves, they are simply living correctly, and it is the Core Races who behave strangely.
Index
- Goblins: a people with no concept of Property
- Orcs: a people who hold that the Soul grows only through Challenge
(Both lists will grow as more cultures are written; the Goblins and Orcs are only the first of the Others.)