Races#

What your race decides

Your race sets your starting ability scores, natural armor class and unarmed attack, which genders you can be, and how tall, heavy and old you can get. It doesn’t limit your class. Any race can take any class, though some start a lot closer to it than others.

Choosing a race#

Fourteen peoples of Sedia are open to players, grouped below by when they came into the world. Two more, the avaries and the daemunai, are what a hero can become once their legend is big enough for a god to notice. Each card shows a race’s two best starting scores and its natural armor class; the race’s page has the rest.

The elder races#

Age of Peace, about 26,000 BB

Made in the long peace, when the gods still walked Urd and there were no humans to share it with.

Elf Elves live longer than any other race you can play, up to 750 years, and spend most of it away from everyone else. DEX 12 · INT 11 · AC 8 · Elvish Pixie Pixies are tiny, all women, and as old a people as the elves. DEX 12 · WIS 12 · AC 5 · Sylvan Sprite Sprites are the pixies' other half: tiny, all men, made by Lythantos in the Age of Peace. DEX 12 · INT 12 · AC 5 · Sylvan

Stone and blood#

Age of Peace, about 21,000 BB

Dwarves and orcs came into the world in the same age, five thousand years after the elves.

Dwarf Dwarves keep to Jewall in the northern reach and judge a family by what it has built. STR 12 · CON 12 · AC 15 · Dwarvish Orc Orcs are the children of daemunai and the giants of old. STR 12 · CON 12 · AC 15 · Orcish

The under-races#

About 1,000 BB

The last peoples made before the Breaking. The older races still call them under-races, and say it to their faces.

Gnome Most gnomes in the northern reach are born into dwarven mines, and the ones you'll meet in Tharsis or Crecia are the ones who got out. STR 11 · INT 11 · AC 12 · Gnomish Goblin Goblins are half a human's height, sharp-tongued and, they'll tell you, descended from the daemunai. CON 12 · INT 12 · AC 13 · Goblin Kobold Kobolds come of age at six and are old at thirty, so they live fast and loud. DEX 12 · CHA 12 · AC 12 · Draconic Troll Trolls are tall desert people who go where their tribe goes. DEX 12 · STR 11 · AC 14 · Trollish

Since the Breaking#

0 TB onward

Humans arrived at the start of the Breaking and the half-races within a century of them. Halflings first turn up during the War of Souls. Nobody agrees where quicklings came from, the quicklings least of all.

Human Humans are the newest race in Sedia and already most of it. 10 in every stat · AC 10 · Common Half-Elf Half-elves are born to an elf and a human, or to two half-elves, and most would rather you didn't notice the elf part. DEX 12 · STR 10 · AC 9 · Elvish Half-Orc Half-orcs come out of the northern reach, where orc raids on human villages have gone on for generations. STR 12 · CON 12 · AC 12 · Orcish Halfling Halflings stand half as tall as a human. DEX 11 · LUC 11 · AC 11 · Halfling Quickling Quicklings are a third of a human's height, bald, and grown at three. DEX 14 · CHA 12 · AC 7 · Quickling

The ascended#

Earned, not born

No one is born an avarie or a daemune. A hero becomes one by taking up a god’s power, and they keep the scores they earned getting there.

Avarie An avarie is a hero who ascended to serve a god of light and took up that god's power. Keeps the hero's scores · AC 15 · Celestial Daemune A daemune is a hero who ascended to serve a god of the infernal side and took up that god's power. Keeps the hero's scores · AC 15 · Infernal

Side by side#

Every race’s starting scores in one place, with its best two marked. A score can climb 5 above where your race starts it, and further in your class’s two stats, so the race you pick decides where each score ends up.

Find your race#

Pick the scores your character will live on, and the races that start strongest in them come first.

Genders#

Most races have men and women. Pixies are all women and sprites are all men, which is why a pixie’s children are pixies or sprites and nothing else.

Neutral means having no sex. The avaries and daemunai are all neutral, since their gods make them rather than any parent, and so are the celestials and infernals of the old ages. A few gnomes, half-elves, halflings and quicklings are born neutral too. Each race page lists the genders it has and how common each one is.

Whispers on the road#

Not every people of Urd is accounted for. This is what travelers are saying, and some of it is even true.

Giants

Nobody has seen one since the War of Souls, but there's talk that the high elves, the royalty of the wood elves, have made friends with them.

Dryads

Tall, and lately seen fighting as blademasters. Every sighting comes from in or around Mandak's Legion.

Sea nymphs

Said to be trading with the humans of the port city Crecia. The harbor masters won't say whether it's true, which most people take as a yes.

Lizardlings

Found only among the ruins of a forgotten age of dragon riders, when draconian magic ruled the world.

Dragons

As clever as any sentient race and hidden away across Urd, waiting for the Age of Man to end.

Wyrms

Colossal things in the Plains of Endless Despair. They were dragons once, before the magic of the War of Souls made them into something else.

Hooks, not races

None of these can be played, and whether any of them is true is up to you. Any one of them is a campaign if a player goes looking.

Beyond the living#

Death isn’t always the end of a body in Sedia. Every being has an existence status, and what happens to it after it dies depends on its archetype.

An archetype is the kind of being a creature is. Your character is standard: living and whole. When a standard creature dies it’s dead and the character’s story ends, unless your storyteller decides otherwise. A raised corpse can come back as a zombie, a soul that won’t let go can linger as a spirit, and bones stripped bare can rise as a skeleton. The rest of the archetypes are things players meet, never become.

Coming back

Whether a character who has turned into another archetype can ever go back, and what it costs them, is your call. Make it cost something.

Peoples you can’t play#

These are in the world for the creatures and characters your storyteller runs. Some can talk and most can’t, and none of them is a choice at character creation. Creatures has the ones you’ll fight.