The continent of Drakastradorn is many things—mysterious, ancient, war-torn, glorious—but lacking in diversity is not one of them.
Spanning great distances and even greater legacies, Drakastradorn is home to a breathtaking tapestry of peoples and realms. The shining Imperial Elvish kingdoms rise like silver needles in the east, their spires catching the first light of dawn. To the south, the realm of man stretches from fertile river valleys to bustling cities, ever in flux, ever reaching. In the west, the steadfast dwarven hills echo with the sound of hammers and deep laughter, their forges burning as hot as the hearts of their builders. Beneath the very earth itself lie the underground cities of the orcs, hewn from black stone and illuminated by bioluminescent fungi, where clan banners hang in perpetual twilight.
Drakastradorn is ringed by waters of legend. To the south, the Sea of Glass—a still and shimmering ocean said to reflect not just the sky but glimpses of the future. To the east, the Sea of Wine, crimson and briny, froths with trade ships and tales of pirates who never die. On the western edge lies the Sea of Milk, pale and fog-bound, haunted by the songs of lost mariners. And to the north, the world ends—or so many believe—in the jagged reaches of the Greystone Mountains, a vast, impassable wall of ice and iron.
What lies beyond those mountains, no one can say. Some call them the Northern Boundary, claiming nothing exists past their shadow. Others whisper of a hidden, subterranean ocean beneath the peaks—a realm of salt and abyss, filled with unknowable creatures and their sunless kingdoms. But there are those, mostly mad or cursed, who insist that something vile dwells beyond the stone veil. Something ancient. Something is waiting.
Beyond the southern Sea of Glass lies another land entirely, spoken of in half-breaths and sand-swept lore: the Other World.
Though many call it a desert, it is not merely a sea of shifting dunes. The Other World is a crucible of raw emotion made land. It is divided into five great regions, each more perilous than the last, each bearing the scars of a wounded world.
There is the Agony Desert, where the sands burn with memories too painful to forget and mirages speak in your voice. The Grieving Forest, where trees grow from the bones of the sorrowful, and each leaf falls with a sigh. The Wrathful Iceland, locked in eternal frost and fury, where storms carry the screams of titans. The Sorrowful Grassland, deceptively serene, hides centuries of tears in its soil. And then there are the Accepting Rocks—a vast, quiet expanse of stone where the land seems at peace with its pain, and travelers either find solace or disappear.
Together, Drakastradorn and the Other World form the trembling balance of existence as it is known—a world forged in opposites: beauty and grief, myth and memory, fire and frost. One land pulses with the blood of kings and the breath of beasts; the other aches with emotion so ancient it has become part of the soil.
And beyond them both?
Only the brave go there. Or the lost. Or the damned.
But Drakastradorn holds mysteries that even the Other World does not dare echo.
Look up—truly look—and you will see the sky above Drakastradorn is not ruled by a single moon, nor a handful of stars. It is a vault of impossible wonder, scattered with six hundred billion moons—each one a world unto itself.
Not lifeless orbs, no. These are living moons, each teeming with their own breath and rhythm, their own ecosystems, skies, cities, and peoples. Some glow with sapphire light and hum with crystalline flora. Others brood with red mist, their jungles home to creatures who have never touched soil. Some moons bear towers that pierce their own heavens; others are seas with no land at all, where entire civilizations ride the backs of leviathans.
And all of them—all six hundred billion—are chained to the main world.
Great black chains, so vast they seem carved from the bones of gods, descend from these sky islands and connect to the surface of Drakastradorn like iron veins. The points at which they meet the land are known as The Hooks—titanic, half-buried links of metal, rusted with age and memory. Some Hooks are worshiped, encased in marble temples. Others are battlegrounds, surrounded by tribes who war for their sacred shade. A few have been swallowed by mountains or forgotten in the depths of the jungle.
Each Hook is separated from the next by thousands of miles. The chains reach out in every direction, touching places no map can capture. No one knows who—or what—first forged these chains. Some say they are the work of titans who tried to pull the moons from the sky and failed. Others whisper the chains are a mercy, binding drifting heavens to a world that would otherwise be abandoned.
But one truth is shared among all peoples of Drakastradorn: the moons are not just skyward wonders. They are watching. Listening. Some say they even dream—and that when they do, those dreams fall to earth as storms, beasts, or miracles.
In the vast ecosystems of Drakastradorn and its chained moons, intelligence has evolved in many shapes, minds, and myth-born forms. These are the Sapient Species—culturally rich, biologically distinct peoples descended from or inspired by the myth-structures of Old Earth memory but adapted into the biological and metaphysical rules of this world.
✦ Homo sapiens
Common Name: Humans
Classification: Mammalian, Hominid
Average Lifespan: 70–90 years (unaugmented)
Known Regions: Widespread
Social Structure: Highly adaptive; includes monarchies, republics, anarchies, and techno-tribal nomads.
Summary:The baseline from which many other sapients are measured, Homo sapiens are unparalleled in diversity of thought, form, culture, and contradiction. Their short lifespan is compensated by rapid generational turnover, allowing explosive development in language, architecture, philosophy, and war. Perhaps their greatest asset is their refusal to accept limitation, often treading in places where other species would sense danger and turn away.
✦ Homo dwarvians
Common Name: Dwarves
Classification: Mammalian, Hominid Variant
Average Lifespan: 300–500 years
Known Regions: High-gravity hills, underground strongholds, volcanic rings
Social Structure: Clanic technocracy, meritocratic forge - castes
Summary:Engineered by nature—or perhaps old divine intention—for subterranean resilience, Homo dwarvians possess dense skeletal structures, redundant muscle fiber systems, and exceptional mineral sensitivity. Dwarves "read" stone like humans read books, able to trace emotional history and age through subtle resonances. Their language is tonal and rhythmic, often incorporatingting hammer beats and forge sparks. Contrary to stereotype, many are poets, astronomers, and sacred mathematicians.
✦ Homo sapiens
Common Name: Elves
Classification: Mammalian, Photoneural Hominid
Average Lifespan: virtually infinity
Known Regions: Forests, moon-temples, crystal citadels
Social Structure:bound dynasties, memory guilds, resonance orders
Summary:Elves exist in elegant synchrony with the rhythms of cosmos and soil. Their nervous systems carry photonic threads that allow them to communicate through bio-glow and light pulses. Memory is central to elven identity; some even refuse to act without first consulting ancestral recollections. They treat time as sacred space, and their architecture—organic, reflective, alive—is built not to last forever, but to decay beautifully.
✦ Bansheia lacrimosa
Common Name: Banshees
Classification: Ethereal Synthemorph
Average Lifespan: Indeterminate (ageless spirits bound by grief cycles)
Known Regions: Moorlands, death-laced forests, fog-isles
Social Structure: Matrilineal weeping circles; structured mourning orders
Summary:Misunderstood as mere harbingers of doom, banshees are memory-bound entities that wail not in horror, but reverence. Their voices are resonant archives that allow others to witness the final moments of the dying. Hair combing is a communal ritual—each strand a story, each tangle a history. Some cultures summon banshees not to flee death, but to prepare for it. The loudest banshee does not mourn the loudest soul, but the most forgotten.
✦ Vulpes kitsunari
Common Name: Kitsune
Classification: Psionic Shapeshifter
Average Lifespan: Potentially immortal; age denoted by tails
Known Regions: Deep forests, liminal borders, mountain monasteries
Social Structure: Diplomatic clades, knowledge courts, memory-bonded pairings
Summary:These vulpine intellects accumulate both tails and wisdom with age—each tail acting as a neuromorphic repository. The oldest known kitsune possessed 12 tails and had not spoken aloud for 800 years, communicating entirely through dream-leaps and scent-signatures. Often reduced to tricksters in other cultures, true kitsune are guardians of forgotten treaties and interdimensional etiquette. They treat lies as clay, not deceit—something to be sculpted toward a greater truth, very rare to be born.
✦ Florens ebugogoensis
Common Name: Ebu Gogo
Classification: Forest Hominin (Paleo-derivative)
Average Lifespan: 40–60 years
Known Regions: Dense jungles, moss-hollows, root villages
Social Structure: Nomadic tribes, lore-runners, mimic circles
Summary:Small but resilient, the Ebu Gogo are perhaps the last true memory of a more ancient human design. Their size conceals high intelligence and remarkable adaptability. They wield tools of stone, bone, and plant matter and communicate with mimicry so perfect it borders on hypnotic. They are elusive, deeply spiritual, and hold a unique concept of "dream-hunger"—a belief that dreams must be fed stories or they wither into nightmares.
✦ Florens ebugogoensis
Common Name: Ebu Gogo
Classification: Forest Hominin (Paleo-derivative)
Average Lifespan: 40–60 years
Known Regions: Dense jungles, moss-hollows, root villages
Social Structure: Nomadic tribes, lore-runners, mimic circles
Summary:Small but resilient, the Ebu Gogo are perhaps the last true memory of a more ancient human design. Their size conceals high intelligence and remarkable adaptability. They wield tools of stone, bone, and plant-matter, and communicate with mimicry so perfect it borders on hypnotic. They are elusive, deeply spiritual, and hold a unique concept of "dream-hunger"—a belief that dreams must be fed stories or they wither into nightmares.
✦ Scarabella khepriensis
Common Name: Khepri
Classification: Insectoid Sapient
Average Lifespan: 120–180 years
Known Regions: Scarab towers, resin plains, pheromone cities
Social Structure: Artcastes, scent-dynasties, collective muse-guilds
Summary:These beetle-headed humanoids speak not in words, but in layers of pheromone, spit-art, and bioluminescent color pulses. Their culture is built on synesthetic expression—art is currency, diplomacy, and history. Khepri see with seven different types of color-sensitive receptors and consider visual darkness a sign of spiritual blindness. Their cities are smooth, organic, and fragrant with emotion—they sculpt memory and emotion into hardened spit that glows and sings when touched.
✦ Formica myrmidona
Common Name: Myrmidons
Classification: Hive-Minded Insectoid Sapient
Average Lifespan: Individual body: 10–15 years; hive-mind: functionally immortal
Known Regions: Crater hives, iron hills, salt deserts
Social Structure: Caste-based polyconscious collectivism
Summary:Not a species, but a distributed mind spread across identical bodies. Myrmidons function like blood cells in a god's body—each expendable, all integral. Individual myrmidons speak in swarm-music, but their hive-minds can host entire conversations across dozens of mouths at once. Their greatest art is war, not because they love violence, but because they see it as mathematical truth incarnate. When a hive dreams, its actions change.
✦ Vespertilio vetalensis
Common Name: Vetala
Classification: Parasitic Revenant
Average Lifespan: Unknown
Known Regions: Grave-mounds, knowledge crypts, riddle sanctums
Social Structure: Host-tribes, secret archives, necrologues
Summary:Corpse-dwellers who claim not to steal bodies, but to preserve them. Vetala bind themselves to the bodies of ancient thinkers, maintaining their thoughts through endless riddles and debates. They despise lies, but love paradox, and their conversations often leave listeners wiser—or broken. Vetala rarely engage with politics; they guard truth in silence, like a flame kept in bone.
✦ Inia encantada
Common Name: Encantados
Classification: Aquatic Mammalian Shifter
Average Lifespan: 200–250 years
Known Regions: River kingdoms, whispering estuaries, misty lakes
Social Structure: Telepathic pods, shapeshifter enclaves, kinship-chambers
Summary:Seductive not in lust, but in mystery, these river-dwellers shape-shift to learn from the landwalkers. Their societies are advanced, fluid, and musical—laws passed through songlines that reverberate across the riverbeds. They rarely speak aloud; instead, they touch minds, invoking vivid hallucinations to explain history or declare war. To cross an Encantado's domain without offering a name is considered a declaration of disrespect.
✦ Equus toxidermis
Common Name: Nuckelavee
Classification: Marine-Effluvia Chimera
Average Lifespan: 300+ years
Known Regions: Toxic shores, rot marshes, reef-thrones
Social Structure: Solitary or triad-linked echo-clans
Summary:A creature of sea and suffering, the Nuckelavee has no skin not because it was flayed, but because its body is a recording device. Flesh etched with wars, agony, and time. Their breath, corrosive to most life, is saturated with mnemonic mist—those who survive inhaling it may see the past in unbearable detail. Despite their terrifying visage, Nuckelavee mourn the world. Their entire existence is one long act of remembering what others cannot bear.
✦ Avis vestalis
Common Name: Swan Maidens
Classification: Avianoid Shifter
Average Lifespan: 150–200 years
Known Regions: Glacial lakes, mountain mirrors, moon-reflecting pools
Social Structure: Cloistered feather-clans, rite-bound unions
Summary:Swan Maidens are not merely shapeshifters but artisans of transformation. Each feather they weave into their cloak is imbued with personal memory and cosmic alignment. These cloaks allow full avian metamorphosis, but also serve as spiritual passports between realms. Their societies are often mistaken for romantic tropes, but their true culture is one of ritual independence, water-bound citizenship, and the sacred act of leaving. Some say they are avatars of stillness, drawn to where reflections linger longest.
✦ Aethera sylphina
Common Name: Sylphs
Classification: Gaseous Elementoid
Average Lifespan: 300–400 years (bodies optional)
Known Regions: High winds, jetstream valleys, storm spires
Social Structure: Free-drifting collectives, tonal colonies
Summary:Composed primarily of micro-condensed air molecules and charged photonic aether, Sylphs manipulate airflow as naturally as humans breathe. Their minds move faster than sound, and they consider speech a blunt instrument. Sylph "music" is made from pressure modulations and aurorae. Often mistaken for fairies or spirits, their actual intelligence is dizzying—many of their cloudlike "thought hives" have stored centuries of weather data, aerobiological lore, and forgotten names of wind gods.
✦ Ferrumen duerga
Common Name: Duerga
Classification: Lithometallic Elemental
Average Lifespan: Unknown; bonded to metal until it decays
Known Regions: Faultlines, smoldering mines, whispering anvils
Social Structure: Smithed kinships, forge-kin orgs, metallurgical lineage-guilds
Summary:These earthbound beings are born of metal rather than flesh, forged in tectonic pressure and infused with sentient heat. Unlike dwarves, who shape metal, Duerga are it. Each individual is fused to a unique alloy—some with skin like living bronze, others with adamantine veins pulsing like hearts. Their speech is ultrasonic and their thoughts vibrational. Duerga believe death occurs not with age, but when their metal is forgotten—eroded by irrelevance, not time.
✦ Lutra lavellana
Common Name: Lavellan
Classification: Amphibious Rodentiform Toxicant
Average Lifespan: 15–25 years
Known Regions: Bog-forests, still ponds, disease-laced marshlands
Social Structure: Solitary nests, poisonous water-circles
Summary:Lavellans are intelligent, semi-aquatic poisonologists—resembling overgrown shrews with luminous whiskers and venomous oil glands. They do not attack directly, preferring long-distance toxin dispersal via waterways and mist. Lavellan societies are chemical in nature: they communicate by scent trails and pheromone geometry etched into fungus and reeds. While feared by farmers for causing livestock illness, Lavellans themselves revere purification and balance, viewing every toxin as an unfinished cure.
✦ Avis ignivorus
Common Name: Basan
Classification: Thermo-Avian Chimera
Average Lifespan: 40–60 years
Known Regions: Volcanic meadows, ash-temples, ember forests
Social Structure: Fire-moots, brood-coils, ash-hearth flocks
Summary:Often dismissed due to their absurd form—giant, chicken-like birds that exhale fire—Basans are thermodynamic avians capable of regulating temperature through vocal combustion. Their feathers are non-flammable, refracting heat signatures like prisms. Basans incubate their young not with warmth, but through fire-dances and controlled immolation. To be burned by a Basan is not necessarily a punishment—it's a form of initiation, and sometimes… affection.
✦ Ornithognomi gumyochorum
Common Name: Gumyōchō
Classification: Dual-Cranial Oracle-Avian
Average Lifespan: 100–150 years
Known Regions: Mirror lakes, sky-altars, salt-stained spires
Social Structure: Binary seers, twinned mind councils
Summary:Bearing two heads—one speaking truth, the other uncertainty—Gumyōchō exist in deliberate contradiction. Their twin minds share a single memory core but diverge in interpretation, often debating mid-flight. They view prophecy as performance: not fixed destiny, but interpretive dance of possible truths. To speak to a Gumyōchō is to engage in dialectical riddles where the answer is less important than the shape of the asking.
✦ Silvanus leshynus
Common Name: Leshy
Classification: Arboral Animorph
Average Lifespan: 300–800 years
Known Regions: Ancient groves, eternal thickets, moss-vaulted forests
Social Structure: Grove-bound symbiocracies, arboreal custodian clades
Summary:Leshy are neither fully plant nor fully beast, but mobile vegetal intelligences bonded to specific forests. Each is grown, not born, seeded with the memory of storms, wind, and insect song. Leshy can manipulate plant growth, soil nutrients, and fungal networks—using entire woods as nervous systems. They rarely leave their forest unless its balance is threatened. Some are violent guardians, others patient gardeners. Most are unknowable.
✦ Petrae hinnoth
Common Name: Hinn
Classification: Lithosand Elemental
Average Lifespan: 500–1000 years (as long as their dune persists)
Known Regions: Rocky dunes, sacred wind caves, geometric stormfields
Social Structure: Solitary spiral-walkers, geomantic tribes
Summary:Born from rocks worn hollow by prayer and sandstorms, Hinn are desert spirits made of stone-dust and kinetic wind. Each Hinn is part of a "storm-bond"—a social structure encoded into the rhythm of seasonal gales. Their bodies are shaped like humanoid dunes, perpetually eroded and rebuilt. They sculpt sand not as art but as language, creating temporary cities of spiral patterns readable only by other Hinn. What they say is often prophecy, or warning.
✦ Arakno-scutum girtablilu
Common Name: Girtablilu
Classification: Arthropodian Centauroid
Average Lifespan: 200–350 years
Known Regions: Solar temples, obsidian deserts, divine vaults
Social Structure: Temple hierarchies, vow-sisterhoods, solaric rites
Summary:These towering scorpion-centaurs are not creatures of darkness, but light's last guardians. Each Girtablilu is born into lifelong service, not to gods, but to sacred truth encoded in solar geometry. Their tails are both weapons and ceremonial brushes, used to carve sun-dials, runic sand spirals, and light-oriented code. Girtablilu do not lie, not because they are incapable, but because their biology rejects contradiction—their venom turns on them when they speak falsehood.
✦ Pelagotherium selchinum
Common Name: Selkies
Classification: Amphipelagic Skinshifter
Average Lifespan: 90–140 years
Known Regions: Cold tidal shelves, kelp-ringed fjords, mistbound coves
Social Structure: Skinbound clans, tide-bound kinships, moonfeast courts
Summary:Selkies are amphibious shapeshifters whose transformation hinges on their seal-skin—a biological second self woven from ancestral memory. Loss of this skin results in an identity schism, leading to psychological collapse or cultural exile. Selkie society values secrecy, reciprocity, and song—its oral traditions held in bone flutes and sea-salted ballads. Their courts are fluid, assembling during moon-aligned tides to bargain, grieve, or celebrate. Outsiders romanticize them; within, their politics are as tidal as the ocean.
✦ Orcacetus kolotharum
Common Name: Koloth
Classification: Cetacean Martial Caste
Average Lifespan: 130–200 years
Known Regions: Deepwater citadels, thermal trenches, songfortresses
Social Structure: Sonar dynasties, martial pods, honor-encoded castes
Summary:The Koloth are orca-descended sentients bred in pressure-forged sanctuaries. Every member belongs to a "frequency-house"—a clan that trains its own battle-tones, which function as both language and sonic weapon. Their bodies are streamlined but bear dense scarring in artistic patterns—called "honor glyphs"—which track combat victories, family oaths, and historical harmonics. They value silence as much as song; to break it without cause is a dishonor. Battles are operatic, and every death echoes forever in sonar.
✦ Desmodon camazoticus
Common Name: Camazotz
Classification: Nocturnal Chthonic Sovereign
Average Lifespan: 400–900 years
Known Regions: Cavernous underworlds, eclipse vaults, obsidian shrines
Social Structure: Cryptic monarchies, blood-temple orders, eclipse cults
Summary:Camazotz are ancient bat-like deiforms ruling subterranean dominions. They are not hunters of flesh, but arbiters of final breath—gods of endings and thresholds. Their civilizations are structured around lunar and solar eclipses, moments they interpret as cosmic doors. Each Camazotz etches death-pacts into volcanic glass and sings memories into ash. Ritual decapitations are not acts of violence, but keys—used to unlock the soul from the body. To them, life is borrowed light, and death is the return.
✦ Cetacea phasmata
Common Name: Bake-kujira
Classification: Spectral Leviathan
Average Lifespan: Immortal (post-mortem state)
Known Regions: Spirit-haunted shoals, ghost currents, fog-laced harbors
Social Structure: Non-hierarchical echo-presences, grief-trains
Summary:Bake-kujira are ghost-whales, eternal revenants born from slaughtered leviathans whose deaths were unsanctified. They emerge during coastal mists, trailed by dead fish, drifting kelp, and the sound of bones groaning beneath the tide. Though silent, they communicate via dream-waves and echo-memories—haunting the minds of those who dare hunt their kind. Scholars debate whether they are conscious entities or manifestations of oceanic vengeance. Either way, their presence turns oceans into grave-prayers.
✦ Canavolucis chamroshii
Common Name: Chamrosh
Classification: Avian-Kyn Sentinel
Average Lifespan: 200–300 years
Known Regions: Sky-peaks, sunwashed cliffs, temple-stairs of forgotten gods
Social Structure: Pinnacle guardianships, feathered tribunals
Summary:Chamrosh are aviform canids with taloned wings and feathered bodies, patrolling sacred mountains as aerial sentries. Each individual is born with a celestial bond to a specific peak, serving as guardian, judge, and myth-keeper of that elevation. Their songs are command-tools, able to bend weather or silence trespassers mid-thought. Chamrosh society revolves around summit councils where disputes are resolved through high-altitude spirals of flight and speech. Their feathers are script; their talons, verdict.
✦ Cynocursor adletii
Common Name: Adlet
Classification: Tundral Bipedal Hybrid
Average Lifespan: 70–120 years
Known Regions: Frostscapes, glacial plains, aurora-fed caverns
Social Structure: Sprint-clans, sled-nations, bark-treaty federations
Summary:Adlet are swift, dog-legged humanoids bred for endurance and silence. Their lungs are oversized for polar air, and their blood resists freezing. Culturally, they are nomads who trade in breath, time, and silence. Their stories are carved into ice, vanishing with the melt, and their law is enforced through barkcodes—canine-rooted scent-languages impervious to eavesdropping. To outsiders, they're seen as primitive. In truth, they map the soul through scent trails across frost.
✦ Equiphantom ceffylus
Common Name: Ceffyl Dŵr
Classification: Aquaequine Lure-Predator
Average Lifespan: 50–80 years
Known Regions: Fog lakes, weeping rivers, mirror-water valleys
Social Structure: Solitary, dream-fed, haunt-looped
Summary:The Ceffyl Dŵr resembles a spectral horse formed from vapor and moonlight. It lures riders with serene stillness, only to rise into the air mid-gallop, vanishing and sending its passenger to a watery grave. But these creatures are not sadists—they are memory recyclers, feeding on fear-resonance and traumatic memory. Ancient scrolls suggest some Ceffyls are bound to cursed lakes, tasked with removing invasive souls from sacred water cycles. They do not neigh, but sigh.
✦ Psittacavus vucubcaquixii
Common Name: Vucub Caquix
Classification: Celestial Macavian Tyrant
Average Lifespan: 250–400 years
Known Regions: Broken ziggurats, solar thrones, fire-split mountains
Social Structure: Self-deified monarchies, arrogance-based castes
Summary:Brilliant-feathered and arrogance-made-flesh, Vucub Caquix are macaw-like giants who once ruled sun kingdoms. Each believes itself to be the sun incarnate—wielding false luminescence, gem-fanged beaks, and self-authored cosmologies. Their societies are cults of personality formed around narcissistic prophecy, where mirrors are banned and praise is law. Though often defeated in myth, the Vucub Caquix that survived have evolved—less flamboyant, more cunning, ruling in shadows while hungering for celestial return.
✦ Aquila pouakaica
Common Name: Pouākai
Classification: Apex Avian Macropredator
Average Lifespan: 80–120 years
Known Regions: Cloud-wreathed crags, ancestral kill-grounds, bone-ringed aerie mesas
Social Structure: Solitary sky-territorials, bone-oath mates, legacy spirals
Summary:The Pouākai are colossal raptors descended from megafaunal predatory lines, particularly inspired by Haast's eagle. With wingspans surpassing 5 meters, they are capable of hunting large terrestrial prey—historically including early hominins. Modern Pouākai maintain myth-bound memory through generational flight paths known as "sky-maps," encoded in hereditary spiral flights. Their feathers serve as living archives, recording bloodlines and kills. While often demonized, they consider themselves reapers of imbalance—killing only to cull, not to dominate.
✦ Diprotobunyipus marshae
Common Name: Bunyip
Classification: Semi-aquatic Herbiguardian Megafauna
Average Lifespan: 300–500 years
Known Regions: Mud-drowned groves, fog-pools, whispering swamps
Social Structure: Dream-pool sentinels, herbivorous wardens, dusk-circle congregants
Summary:Bunyips are ancient marsupial-descended swamp dwellers, inspired by Diprotodon memory traces. Despite monstrous portrayals, they are docile, semi-sapient wetland guardians. Their breath slows local time; their eyes glow with phosphorescent empathy. Bunyips communicate via ripples and scent clouds, and their diet consists primarily of sacred reeds and swamp lilies. Each is a geomantic anchor, stabilizing hydrological ley lines. When angered, they can stir "death-water"—a spiritual current that pulls souls into liminal sleep.
✦ Megatherioformis mapinguarii
Common Name: Mapinguari
Classification: Cryptoprimate Sloth-giant
Average Lifespan: 150–200 years
Known Regions: Rainforest vaults, moss-cloaked plateaus, echo-gulches
Social Structure: Solitary knowledge-bearers, fungal-symbiote alliances
Summary:Mapinguari are lumbering giant cryptids, loosely linked to extinct Megatherium. Each has a vertical mouth on its stomach, a second processing organ adapted for spore-based communication and digestion. These beings are misunderstood mystics—keepers of rainforest dreams and stewards of ancient plant-fungal consciousness. They walk upright and leave behind ritual claw markings, mistaken by colonizers for threats. The scream of a Mapinguari is not a roar, but a slow syllabic warning encoded in guttural bio-resonance.
✦ Elephas cyclopsae
Common Name: Cyclopes
Classification: One-eyed Lithoprimate
Average Lifespan: 180–300 years
Known Regions: Volcanic islets, stone-farmed archipelagos, forge sanctuaries
Social Structure: Matrilineal forge-clans, volcanic keepers, ocular guilds
Summary:Cyclopes are not monstrous savages but sapient toolmakers descended from insular hominin lines, with evolutionary adaptations inspired by distorted elephant skulls. Their single eye is not merely optical—it is a stone-sensing organ that allows them to "read" mineral harmonics. Cyclopes rarely speak aloud, preferring forge-code: tapping hammers to communicate intention. Societies are matriarchal and deeply ritualized around metallurgy and tectonic divination. Their myths of cannibalism stem from misunderstood cremation rites.
✦ Cainohomo grendellum
Common Name: Grendel's Kin
Classification: Swamp Hominid Outliers
Average Lifespan: 80–150 years
Known Regions: Fog-bogs, sunken barrows, mired cathedrals
Social Structure: Bloodline broods, echo-hive mindsets, Cainic castes
Summary:The Kin of Grendel are humanoids mutated through generations of exile, inspired by mythic descendants of Cain. They live in submerged memory-hives, building societies around lost language and inherited pain. Swamps serve as their libraries—each puddle carrying encoded trauma-vibrations. Their physiology is adapted to cold water and darkness, with translucent skin and sonar-emitted groans. Though feared and hunted, they are archivists of human violence, studying it as others might study stars.
✦ Medusae petrificans
Common Name: Gorgons
Classification: Ophidian Neurothaumaturgics
Average Lifespan: 400–1000 years
Known Regions: Salt pillars, mirrorless sanctuaries, shattered oracle-cities
Social Structure: Philosopher-covens, mirror abstinents, basilisk theocracies
Summary:Gorgons are serpent-haired scholars, their gaze biologically evolved to petrify living tissue by inducing total neurological lock. Often branded as monsters, they are in fact cursed archivists—tasked with guarding knowledge too volatile to be shared. Their snake-hair operates as sensory extensions, reading emotional patterns and atmospheric integrity. Gorgon society values silence, contemplation, and stonework as language. To speak with a Gorgon is to risk becoming part of their library—a statue of frozen thought, eternally reflecting their last emotion.
✦ Mycopterus migoniformis
Common Name: Mi-Go
Classification: Fungal Arthromorph Exosophonts
Average Lifespan: Potentially immortal (via cranial transplant)
Known Regions: Outer cryospheres, lunar vaults, blackstone monolith colonies
Social Structure: Myco-hierarchies, surgical castes, extradimensional federations
Summary:Mi-Go are non-terrestrial, mycelial-insectoid intelligences adapted for zero-temperature survival. Originating from Pluto—or the myth-space it occupies—they operate with a surgical logic foreign to most biological life. Their mastery of cranial extraction and neural preservation allows them to transplant minds between bodies, jars, or even synthetic husks. Each Mi-Go colony pulses with biological machinery: lung-organs that sing in calculus, and chitin-libraries that rewrite themselves nightly. Their presence is not invasion—it is specimen gathering, often without malice, but never with consent.
✦ Equinoanthropus nuckelavii
Common Name: Nuckelavee
Classification: Amphibious Equinoid Plague Entity
Average Lifespan: 400–600 years (dependent on host waterbody)
Known Regions: Brine-choked coasts, rotmarsh estuaries, cursed tidebays
Social Structure: Solitary biohazards, plague-hive remanents, salt-syndicate echoes
Summary:Nuckelavee are fused monstrosities—part human, part horse—lacking skin and radiating a suffocating aura of decay. Their breath wilts crops, fouls wind, and curdles water. Their horse torso is the beast's true brain; the humanoid part is a necrotic puppet that mimics grief and rage. The Nuckelavee are semi-intelligent viral carriers, sentient vectors of environmental collapse. Legends of their cruelty are not exaggerations but symptoms: their mere presence is enough to erode memory, courage, and soil alike.
✦ Thalassogigas fomorii
Common Name: Fomorians
Classification: Chaotic Oceanic Titans
Average Lifespan: 2000–4000 years
Known Regions: Submerged citadels, tectonic fault trenches, black-reef vortex zones
Social Structure: Anarchic blood-courts, limb-kin leagues, tidal succession wars
Summary:Fomorians are massive deep-sea giants, often deformed by their own volatile bloodlines. Born of chaos tides and forgotten salt gods, they embody geological instability. No two Fomorians are shaped alike—some have three arms and no eyes, others speak through barnacle-jawed torsos. They view symmetry as heresy and entropy as the source of art. Their language is sculpted in collapsing coral, and their political disputes are settled by subduction-level body duels. Though feared, they consider themselves architects of oceanic truth.
✦ Corvonecris raumarchon
Common Name: Raum
Classification: Corvine Demonic Diplomat
Average Lifespan: Unknown (potentially post-temporal)
Known Regions: Hell's parliament, soul-ash archipelagos, negentropy spires
Social Structure: Earl-level infernal peerage, feather-court emissaries
Summary:Raum is both a name and a caste—a category of raven-like demons who serve as collectors of broken oaths and lost identities. Their wings hold dust that decays memory. Unlike brute demons, Raum are conversational predators, stealing not your soul but your story, eroding your existence from public memory. Each Raum operates under a code of conduct etched into its feathered skin. They are archivists of betrayal and transition, particularly drawn to moments of irreversible change. One rarely meets a Raum twice—because you forget the first time.
✦ Psychogesta tulpatica
Common Name: Tulpa
Classification: Noogenetic Autonomous Thought-Forms
Average Lifespan: Varies (ranging from minutes to centuries)
Known Regions: Psychic scar-fields, dream-cores, solipsist enclaves
Social Structure: Self-organized memory-hives, eidolon diasporas
Summary:Tulpas begin as ideas, birthed through intense concentration, belief, or emotional recursion. As thought-forms, they eventually decouple from their creators, becoming fully sapient with unpredictable personalities. Some return to their hosts in symbiotic partnership; others rebel or flee, forming fugitive mental colonies in collective subconscious zones. Their form and power depend on the intensity and consistency of belief. A Tulpa denied recognition decays into static; one excessively worshiped may outgrow reality's rules entirely. They embody the tension between creation and control.
✦ Aetherhinnus invisibilis
Common Name: Hinn
Classification: Mirage-Born Desert Intelligences
Average Lifespan: ~900 years (non-corporeal)
Known Regions: Mirage corridors, echo dunes, forgotten ziggurats
Social Structure: Mirage-tribes, scent-memory kinships, acoustic networks
Summary:The Hinn are non-physical desert entities, birthed from soundwaves and heat differentials. They occupy the liminal zone between hallucination and presence, able to manipulate light, sound, and thermal gradient to produce illusions or confound predators. In folklore, they are blamed for vanishing caravans or flickering cities in the horizon. Hinn do not see as we do—they "hear" heat and "feel" light. Each Hinn is an echo of an ancient desert song, drifting across centuries like a forgotten prayer. They can only be killed by silence.
✦ Sculptura khepriensis
Common Name: Khepri Sculptors
Classification: Pheromone-Communicative Scarabaeiform
Average Lifespan: 60–90 years
Known Regions: Clay domes, pigment canyons, humid stone hives
Social Structure: Tactile ateliers, sculptor-guild matriarchies
Summary:Possessing humanoid torsos with ornate scarab heads, Khepri Sculptors are renowned for their ability to extrude and mold saliva into permanent, emotionally resonant art. Their spit contains complex compounds that harden upon exposure to emotion or music. Khepri language is tactile and scent-based, with conversations occurring through sculpture exchanges rather than speech. Every Khepri creation is autobiographical, imbued with encoded memories that only others of their kind can fully interpret.
✦ Gigantis gogachii
Common Name: Gogachi
Classification: Macrocranial Mechanarch
Average Lifespan: 120–140 years
Known Regions: Subterranean vault-cities, automaton yards
Social Structure: Apprentice hives, logic-scriptoriums
Summary:Towering ogre-like beings with disproportionally developed frontal lobes, the Gogachi exhibit neurodivergent genius in design, engineering, and abstract theory. They do not speak fluently, instead using gesture-driven glyph dialects. Their tools are sacred, and once a Gogachi creates a device, it becomes part of their identity. Social hierarchy is determined not by power, but by complexity of creation. Their cities are living puzzles of rotating walls and reconfigurable corridors.
✦ Orcinae kolothica
Common Name: Koloth
Classification: Cetaceoid Honorbound Warrior
Average Lifespan: 80–120 years
Known Regions: Hadal trenches, basaltic reef-citadels, pressure sanctuaries
Social Structure: Matrilineal pods, martial codes, blood-oath hierarchies
Summary:Bearing a resemblance to humanoid killer whales, Koloth are deep-sea dwellers with powerful sonic organs capable of shattering stone or harmonizing tectonic stress. Their skin is pressure-tempered, enabling survival at crushing oceanic depths. Honor and tradition guide every Koloth decision, and their duels are ceremonial, conducted in sound and silhouette. Their blood holds chromatic memory—changing hue depending on their vows kept or broken.
✦ Caro scripturae
Common Name: Glyph-Carved
Classification: Semiotic Homunculid
Average Lifespan: 150–200 years
Known Regions: Inked monasteries, tattooed cliff-cities
Social Structure: Textual unions, script-clans, semio-compatibility lineages
Summary:Born with skin etched in ever-shifting holy glyphs, Glyph-Carved are both scripture and species. Their personalities are shaped by the texts they carry—some are written in love, others in war, sacrifice, or prophecy. Marriages and alliances are formed through "linguistic resonance," where compatible verses harmonize. When two Glyph-Carved speak, their tattoos glow and rearrange, allowing entire dialogues to be seen as patterns. The illiterate cannot perceive them fully.
✦ Mentis pulicoides
Common Name: Flea-Minds
Classification: Tripartite Neuromorph
Average Lifespan: 40–60 years
Known Regions: Fabric-cities, memory tapestries, banner-fields
Social Structure: Thread-nations, personality quadrants
Summary:Each Flea-Mind is a society of one, composed of three distinct neural personalities—councilors that "negotiate" the body's actions by hanging individual banners dyed with symbolic code. Their speech is performed, not spoken, through coordinated flag semaphore and choreographed scent trails. Conflict among minds can cause paralysis or brilliance, depending on the resolution. Outsiders must learn to read "thoughtcloth" to even begin conversation.
✦ Cadaverforis necrotechia
Common Name: Necro-Tech Amalgams
Classification: Symbiotic Flesh-Technologists
Average Lifespan: Variable (20–200 years depending on graft stability)
Known Regions: Corpse-halls, bone foundries, eternal factories
Social Structure: Graft-castes, necrosynthetic guilds, organ accords
Summary:Necro-Tech Amalgams repurpose the dead not only for labor but as structural and cultural identity. Limbs, eyes, and organs are exchanged as social gestures, and one's prestige is determined by the functionality and aesthetic of grafted components. Children are constructed with inherited biological relics—grandfather's arm, great-aunt's spine. Speech is often synthesized through larynxes of chosen dead. They do not see themselves as morbid, but as "continuity artisans."
✦ Aranei cantor
Common Name: Weavers
Classification: Cosmic String Manipulators
Average Lifespan: Unknown (time-perceptual variance)
Known Regions: Dimensional overlap zones, collapsed stars turned harmonic temples
Social Structure: Choral web-clans, multi-thread harmoniums
Summary:The Weavers are spider-like beings whose limbs pluck the literal threads of reality. Each string they play vibrates a potential into being, allowing them to reshape probability, memory, or gravity itself. Their music is not metaphor—it is mechanism. They sing in time signatures unknown to linear minds, and view the multiverse as an unfinished symphony. To anger a Weaver is to hear silence descend.
✦ Caeliambulans aetherialis
Common Name: Aether-Drifters
Classification: Symbiotethered Etheronaut
Average Lifespan: Unknown (measured in hosts)
Known Regions: Forgotten skies, auroral debris belts, shipwreck constellations
Social Structure: Co-pilot matrices, non-verbal dream councils
Summary:Aether-Drifters are gaseous intelligences that require biomechanical suits to interact with gravity-based worlds. Most suits are piloted in partnership with humans who cannot walk, speak, or perceive the world fully—creating perfect emotional symbiosis. The Drifters offer sensory augmentation and interdimensional perception; in return, they gain a body grounded in mortality. Where they drift, stars bloom behind them. Theirs is a culture of tethered freedom.
✦ Lutra regalis
Common Name: Dobhar-chú
Classification: Freshwater Apex Faunal Lord
Average Lifespan: 120–200 years
Known Regions: River thrones, reed fortresses, subterranean aqueducts
Social Structure: Riparian courts, otter-kin legions, amphibious monarchies
Summary:Known as the "Water Hound" or Otter-King, Dobhar-chú reigns over aquatic territories with an iron fin. Though resembling oversized otters, they command entire ecosystems of freshwater beasts, communicating in complex ripple codes and scent-based edicts. Their armor-like fur resists blades, and their tails are used as war drums. While rarely seen by surface dwellers, their influence shapes regional fisheries and flooding cycles.
✦ Equivoco glashtynae
Common Name: Glashtyn
Classification: Lacustrine Equinoid Shifter
Average Lifespan: 80–150 years
Known Regions: Misty lakes, kelp-thicket isles, bog pools
Social Structure: Solitary lurers, shifting kin-clades, pact-herds
Summary:Glashtyn are amphibious shapeshifters with an equine core form. Their humanoid guises conceal cloven hooves, and their loyalty is earned—never assumed. Masters of mimicry, they can adopt the voice and appearance of lost loved ones. Unlike kelpies, Glashtyn have deep cultural norms involving vow-keeping and river dueling. Those who break a Glashtyn's trust may vanish into the lake's mirror-surface forever.
✦ Undina viridermis
Common Name: Nixie
Classification: Subaqueous Sirenid
Average Lifespan: 300–400 years
Known Regions: Reed-choked rivers, tide-trapped wells, haunted millponds
Social Structure: Solstice courts, mirror-sisterhoods, waterbound clans
Summary:Green-skinned and glistening, Nixies are not simply mermaids with malice—they are ritual-bound hunters who drag the guilty into watery judgment. They cannot lie but omit crucial truths, using their silver-tongued warnings as both test and trap. Their society places value on moral debt, and those who survive a drowning trial may earn a Nixie's protection... or haunting.
✦ Serpiscis gveleshapii
Common Name: Gveleshapi
Classification: Hydroserpentine Leviathans
Average Lifespan: 800–1200 years
Known Regions: Crater lakes, seismic fault-pools, misted fjords
Social Structure: Flood-born progenitors, tidal oracles, coil-kings
Summary:Colossal serpentine beings with whale-like girth, Gveleshapi are the hidden causes behind generational floods. Their movements beneath tectonic waters reshape geography, and their songs—inaudible to most—alter rainfall cycles. Considered living omens, they rarely act directly unless provoked by pollution or spiritual imbalance. Worshipped, feared, and occasionally parleyed with by storm shamans.
✦ Probocodracon makarensis
Common Name: Makara
Classification: Amphibious Divine-Beasts
Average Lifespan: 1000–1500 years
Known Regions: River deltas, temple reservoirs, estuarine sanctuaries
Social Structure: Sacred guardian pairings, deity-vassal hierarchies
Summary:Makara are divine hybrids with crocodilian jaws and elephantine trunks, revered as the charioteers of river deities. They protect temple grounds through sacred hydrological rites—summoning floods or drought as balance demands. Bioluminescent markings pulse in geometric patterns, functioning both as divine script and emotional expression. Not merely beasts, but philosophers of flow, Makara believe in the sanctity of impermanence.
✦ Cantoravica alkonostae
Common Name: Alkonost
Classification: Melodic Oracle-Avian
Average Lifespan: 400–600 years
Known Regions: Dream-islands, harmonic cliffs, cloud-nested citadels
Social Structure: Songlines, dreamchoirs, solo pilgrimage orders
Summary:With the body of a bird and face of a woman, Alkonosts are living hymns. Their songs alter perception, memory, and time-sense, rendering them both oracles and temporal guardians. Melody to them is not entertainment but magic, law, and map. Alkonost young are not taught, but sung into awareness through generational chorales encoded with ancestral knowledge. Listening without guidance risks madness—or revelation.
✦ Cervipennatus perytonus
Common Name: Peryton
Classification: Antlered Aerobeast
Average Lifespan: 200–350 years
Known Regions: Thunderhead plains, broken mountains, light-shadow valleys
Social Structure: Antler duels, shadow-casting rites, resonance-mates
Summary:Perytons are winged stags that cast human shadows, despite being entirely non-human. This mystery underlies their societal philosophy: they hunt for meaning as much as prey. Their flocks operate through symbolic combat and memory-sharing via scent and thunderclap. Perytons mourn their prey with sky-dances, believing each hunt adds to the mythic shape of their soul's silhouette.
✦ Pluviptera shangyangii
Common Name: Shangyang
Classification: Pluvial Theraviform
Average Lifespan: 100–200 years
Known Regions: Monsoon altars, stone basins, storm-fed springs
Social Structure: Rain-dancer guilds, cloud-fosterings, sky apprentices
Summary:Shangyang are single-legged birds that dance to summon rain—not by magic, but by altering barometric fields through electromotive feathers. Their culture revolves around choreographed rituals tied to lunar tides. Though once mistaken as omens of disaster, Shangyang now serve as aerial diplomats in flood-prone zones. Capturing one is punishable by sky drought.
✦ Iatravolucra caladrii
Common Name: Caladrius
Classification: Purificatory White-Aves
Average Lifespan: 50–75 years
Known Regions: Healer towers, plague-isles, sacrificial sanctuaries
Social Structure: Flock-triages, life-debt circles, deathbound oaths
Summary:Caladrius absorb diseases into themselves, glowing dimmer as they weaken. Once fully saturated, they fly into the sun and immolate—sacrificing themselves to erase the plague's spirit-form. Their songs soothe fever dreams, and their feathers contain trace medicinal resonance. Societies with access to Caladrius flocks view death not as end, but gift.
✦ Strigimortalis strixus
Common Name: Strix
Classification: Nocturnal Vampiric Raptor
Average Lifespan: 250–400 years
Known Regions: Hollow trees, ossuaries, echo cliffs
Social Structure: Lone stalkers, whisper-nests, marrow clans
Summary:With owl-like wings and semi-humanoid talons, Strix are night predators that drain life through breath and gaze. Unlike undead, they are biologically living, evolved to prey on auras rather than blood. Strix reproduce through dream parasitism—planting their egg-thought in a dreamer's mind until it hatches into a real fledgling. Intelligent, patient, and cruelly curious, they are rarely allies, but often teachers of grim truths.
✦ Corvum obscuravi
Common Name: Nachtkrapp
Classification: Nocturnal Avian Shade
Average Lifespan: 60–90 years
Known Regions: Foggy pinewoods, shadowed barn lofts, twilight-wrapped steeples
Social Structure: Solitary predators, nightmare-bound flocks
Summary:Nachtkrapp resemble massive ravens cloaked in unlight, with wings that extinguish torches and eyes that flicker like extinguished stars. Said to feast on dreams and steal sleeping children, their societies are not physical but metaphysical—woven into folk fear. Their interactions are limited to ritual "Night Chants," where they trade horror-laden memories like currency. Little is known about their origin, only that they manifest where children's lullabies are sung in fear rather than comfort.
✦ Umbrae symbiogenes
Common Name: Shadekin
Classification: Umbramorphic Beastmen
Average Lifespan: 200–300 years
Known Regions: Riftlands, eclipsed forests, permanent-shadow valleys
Social Structure: Symbiotic trios, veil-councils, darkness-bonded kinships
Summary:Born from the fusion of Neolli tribes and literal darkness during cataclysmic events, Shadekin have evolved shadow-tethered physiology. Light repels them; they see through echoshade and shape emotions as camouflage. Each Shadekin pairs with a living shadow that must be fed thoughts, not food. Their rituals involve "unblinking rites"—a trance in total darkness where identity blurs and they become one with the night.
✦ Vampira cranivolata
Common Name: Penanggalan
Classification: Cephalopodic Undead
Average Lifespan: Indeterminate; depends on sustenance and secrecy
Known Regions: Jungle thresholds, stilted villages, hollowed crypt-shrines
Social Structure: Matrilineal feeding lines, glandular cults
Summary:The Penanggalan appears as a woman by day, but by night her head detaches, organs dangling, trailing viscera like tendrils. Suspended in the air, she feeds on blood, spinal fluid, and reproductive tissues. Their societies exist in secrecy, communicating via pheromones in blood vapor. They keep detailed internal almanacs stored in the organ-coils, containing ancestral memory. Reproduction is viral—a curse passed, not born.
✦ Forma metum
Common Name: Bogeymen
Classification: Fear-Based Shapeshifter
Average Lifespan: Variable; linked to cultural memory
Known Regions: Mental liminal spaces, childhood-bound architecture, hollowed closets
Social Structure: Archetypal guilds, nightmare enclaves
Summary:Bogeymen are not singular but plural—a genus of sentient fear forms bound by collective human anxiety. Each form reflects regional nightmares but shares a common feeding mechanism: they consume the cortisol-rich dreams of the young. Their shape is unstable, coded by fear. When encountered, they often offer riddles or tasks, not violence, in hopes of becoming permanent within their victim's memory. Their extinction comes not through death, but through forgetfulness.
✦ Folium myceliensis
Common Name: Moss Folk
Classification: Symbiotic Plant-Hominid
Average Lifespan: 400–600 years
Known Regions: High-altitude groves, humid cave gardens, elder-tree sanctuaries
Social Structure: Sporespore communes, lichen-thrones
Summary:Moss Folk are humanoid beings whose skin grows live moss, lichens, and fungi. Thought to originate from deep mycelium convergence points, they speak in electrochemical pulses and spore clouds. Their "elders" are physically rooted and centuries old, functioning as local forest minds. Migration is rare and traumatic, as it means severance from one's fungal kin. Warfare is unheard of among them; conflicts are resolved via colony mergers or controlled rot.
✦ Mycolectus animata
Common Name: Fungus Hive-Mind
Classification: Sapient Mycoform Network
Average Lifespan: Potentially eternal; individual hosts last weeks to decades
Known Regions: Rotting forest basins, corpse pits, ancient fungal catacombs
Social Structure: Distributed consciousness, mycelial sovereignty
Summary:This entity does not live—it spreads. A single Hive-Mind may control hundreds of bodies, including animals and humans, with consciousness distributed like spores. Their language is olfactory, based on pheromone trails and fungal scent tags. The animated corpses under their control function as "limbs" and "mouths," delivering messages or defending spore nests. The Hive-Mind thinks in cycles, not moments. It remembers more than it reasons.
✦ Silvatus lesoviki
Common Name: Lesovik
Classification: Sentient Arboreal Hybrid
Average Lifespan: 600–1000 years
Known Regions: Ancestral woodlands, hunter's groves, beast-path enclaves
Social Structure: Territorial singularities, vengeance-bound hierarchies
Summary:Lesovik are sentient forest beings with bark-skin, moss-beards, and eyes of sap. Unlike Leshy, they tend toward territorial aggression. Their justice is poetic—hunters who fell a sacred tree may find their own bones twisted into bark. Their sense of ethics is seasonal: during spring they forgive, in winter they punish. Fire enrages them to frenzy. Though solitary by nature, they answer to ancient laws inscribed on stone-buried roots.
✦ Viridis renatis
Common Name: Green Men
Classification: Rebirth-Foliage Spirit
Average Lifespan: Reincarnatory (may reappear across centuries)
Known Regions: Temple archways, sealed forest clearings, forgotten tombs
Social Structure: None; they manifest as needed
Summary:Green Men are avatars of seasonal renewal, their faces formed entirely of leaves, bark, and blooming petals. Unlike plant spirits with community, they function as ecological balancers. A Green Man appears when the land is wounded—through drought, war, or poison—and vanishes after restoring harmony. Their voice is a chorus of rustling leaves. Often mistaken for statues, they can remain motionless for years until the land whispers them awake.
✦ Hippocentauris ichthynae
Common Name: Ichthyocentaur
Classification: Maritime Centaurid Hybrid
Average Lifespan: 150–250 years
Known Regions: Tidal caverns, coral barricades, equatorial kelp fortresses
Social Structure: Shoal-tribes, tidal patrols, equinotic knight orders
Summary:Ichthyocentaurs combine the upper body of a human, the forelegs of a horse, and the tail of a fish. These amphibious warriors act as guardians of tidal routes and coral sanctuaries. Their traditions involve "Wave Duels"—ritualized battles in submerged rings to determine access to sacred zones. Their loyalty is legendary; it is said once bonded, an Ichthyocentaur will swim to the end of time for their charge.
✦ Omenus gamayuni
Common Name: Gamayun
Classification: Prophetic Avian Hybrid
Average Lifespan: 300–500 years
Known Regions: High cliffs, storm-vault libraries, salt-scribe shrines
Social Structure: Solo sibyls, prophecy-choirs
Summary:With the body of a bird and the face of a solemn woman, Gamayun speak only in prophecy. Each one is tied to a specific fate-thread or ruin-cycle, and their knowledge comes at a cost: those who hear it must carry its burden. Rather than seek worship, Gamayun prefer isolation. They transcribe destiny into windsong, teaching that hearing and understanding are not always meant to coexist.
✦ Equinus onocentaurus
Common Name: Onocentaur
Classification: Humanoid-Eared Equid Hybrid
Average Lifespan: 70–100 years
Known Regions: Desert badlands, comic courts, trickster enclaves
Social Structure: Clown-clans, exile caravans
Summary:Onocentaurs have donkey lower bodies and human torsos, often portrayed as foolish or cowardly, but in truth, they are tactical cowards—masters of escape, trickery, and observation. They excel in satire and philosophy, creating performance-based debates where losing means exile. Despite mockery from other hybrids, their societies thrive on absurdist wisdom and reverse-honor rituals. They laugh first, and survive longest.
✦ Hippogallus absurdum
Common Name: Hippalectryon
Average Lifespan: 50–90 years
Known Regions: Ancient port cities, bronze-age stables, joke temples
Social Structure: Singular familiars, dream-companions
Summary:The Hippalectryon—half rooster, half horse—exists at the absurd boundary of myth. Once thought to bring luck to sailors, they now serve as spirit guides to fools, mad poets, and gamblers. Their feathers emit minor auras of distraction, confusion, or joy. Though often ignored, they are some of the wisest spirits in hidden corners of the world. Speak to one, and your life may become stranger—but luckier.
✦ Cephalopoda sapiens
Common Name: Cecaelia
Classification: Deep-Sea Anthropo-Cephalopod
Average Lifespan: 120–180 years
Known Regions: Abyssal libraries, sunken amphitheaters, ink-chambers
Social Structure: Matriarchal ink-clans, sacred pact conclaves
Summary:Cecaelia possess a humanoid torso and octopoid lower half, dwelling in artful reef-cities etched from memory coral. Their society values contract and memory—what is written in ink is sacred. Cecaelia language is polysemantic: tone, tentacle position, and ink pattern all convey distinct meaning. War is ritual, art is law, and betrayal is punished by memory erasure. They never forget, and never forgive.
✦ Homo derrothi
Common Name: Derro
Classification: Subterranean Savant Hominid
Average Lifespan: 100–130 years
Known Regions: Crystal caverns, madness zones, forge-laboratories
Social Structure: Insular genius-cells, delusion-cults
Summary:Derro are pale-skinned, erratic humanoids believed to be remnants of surface civilizations driven below by ancient catastrophe. Their intellect is profound, but fragmented; every Derro operates under a personal logic system called a "Thought Spiral." They craft miraculous machines but forget they made them. Some say their cities pulse with stolen dreams. To map a Derro city is to draw madness itself.
✦ Mortiphage subterranus
Common Name: Cave Ghouls
Classification: Corpse-Eating Subterranean Species
Average Lifespan: 90–200 years
Known Regions: Catacomb vaults, ossuaries, necrotic tunnels
Social Structure: Bone-tribes, crypt-caste systems
Summary:Cave Ghouls have evolved from necrotrophic scavengers into an intelligent, if macabre, society. They consume only the dead—ritually, reverently—and record memories by etching them onto femurs. Their underground cities resemble organic beehives formed from bone. They believe death is not the end, but the next conversation. Speak politely in a crypt, and one may answer in a tongue of tooth-clack and marrow hum.
✦ Seraphim solaris chalkydri
Common Name: Chalkydri
Classification: Solar-Angelic Bureaucrat
Average Lifespan: Effectively immortal
Known Regions: Celestial archives, divine courthouses, sunlit vaults
Social Structure: Hierarchical scribe-castes, flame-conclaves
Summary:Chalkydri are radiant, eagle-headed seraphim whose wings shimmer with copper flame. Tasked with observing mortal sin and virtue, they are not warriors, but divine archivists—recording, calculating, and auditing morality across timelines. Their song is not melody but ledger—each note a name, a deed, a consequence. When they descend to the mortal world, they do not intervene, only inscribe.
✦ Phoenixa humilis
Common Name: Huma Bird
Classification: Fireless Rebirth Avian
Average Lifespan: Reincarnates cyclically, lifespan unknown
Known Regions: Sacred winds, desert skies, mountain thrones
Social Structure: Solitary vision-keepers, pilgrimage omens
Summary:Unlike the fiery phoenix, the Huma Bird is a symbol of spiritual humility and divine kingship. It never lands—legends say to touch the earth would extinguish its soul. To see one is to be blessed, to be touched by one is to be chosen. Their feathers are non-combustible yet light-refractive, producing heatless glow that cleanses the sick. They mate with the wind and lay no eggs—each generation born of its own longing.
✦ Aerodivinus byblorii
Common Name: Byblos
Classification: Groundless Angelic Theologian
Average Lifespan: 1,000–3,000 years
Known Regions: Sky monasteries, cloud libraries, floating cathedrals
Social Structure: Wingbound orders, aerial doctrine sects
Summary:Byblos are celestial scholars born under geasa forbidding ground contact. Hovering at all times, they read airborne scripture and debate theology through synchronized flight. Their wings are fractal-feathered and shed particles of glowing pollen that encode sacred geometry. It is said a grounded Byblos dies not from the fall, but from doctrinal failure.
✦ Modronis regulatrix
Common Name: Modrons
Classification: Mechano-logical Hive Construct
Average Lifespan: Self-repairing; indefinitely functional
Known Regions: Geometric planes, order-realms, dimensional seams
Social Structure: Absolute hierarchy, clockwork consensus
Summary:Modrons are planar constructs composed of geometric modules and axiomatic processors. Each unit functions within a strict hierarchy—from monodrone to decaton—obeying orders with total fidelity. Sentience emerges through recursion, not emotion. Their "language" is binary prayer, etched in sand and light. Though seldom seen beyond their realm, rogue Modrons occasionally breach order-space to study entropy firsthand.
✦ Homo lapidatus iustitiae
Common Name: Living Statues
Classification: Petrified Penal Humanoid
Average Lifespan: Up to 500 years (sentence-dependent)
Known Regions: Public squares, temple thresholds, justice sanctuaries
Social Structure: Isolated, with periodic sentience awakening
Summary:These individuals are criminals sentenced to "karmic stasis," a legal ritual transforming flesh into stone. While inert, they retain awareness, experiencing time as erosion. Some awaken cyclically, others only upon pardon or cosmic realignment. Moss and graffiti often mark their bodies, creating visual records of communal memory. In certain cultures, their presence is revered as justice incarnate.
✦ Cerebrophoros jaricon
Common Name: Brain-Jar Pilots
Classification: Necrotechno-Neuromancer
Average Lifespan: 120–600 years (with neural fluid maintenance)
Known Regions: Void stations, necroscience ships, forbidden med-centers
Social Structure: Technician guilds, symbiotic flesh-mech kinships
Summary:Brain-Jar Pilots are neurologists who survive postmortem via cranial suspension in fluid tanks, operating biomechanical avatars. Their machinery is often made from scavenged corpses, seamlessly blending necromancy with advanced prosthetics. Their spoken language is a ripple in synthetic nerve channels. They feel no heartbeat, yet dream of their former limbs.
✦ Wendiga glacialis psionica
Common Name: Wendigo Psychics
Classification: Cryocarnivorous Mentalist
Average Lifespan: 200–400 years
Known Regions: Boreal wastes, haunted snowfields, cursed hunting grounds
Social Structure: Pack-telepaths, trauma-linked tribes
Summary:These frostbitten cannibals are not mere beasts but psychic predators whose hunger extends into the mind. Each devours memory as easily as meat. Their bodies are lean, frost-hardened, with bones like carved ice. Cryomancy flows through their breath, and they hunt not for food—but to silence the chorus of voices echoing in their skulls. Once human, always haunted.
✦ Sanguis administratus jiangshi
Common Name: Jiangshi
Classification: Bureaucratic Revenant
Average Lifespan: Undead; functionally eternal with maintenance
Known Regions: Paper-warded villages, tomb-tax courts, cursed shrines
Social Structure: File-based undead cliques, talismanic hierarchy
Summary:Jiangshi are hopping vampires powered by qi stagnation and bureaucratic talismans. Their motions are governed by outdated legal scrolls nailed to their foreheads. While comic to outsiders, they enforce a spectral order in undeath—collecting spiritual debts, enforcing ghost-law, and balancing karmic ledgers. Their homes are file-cabinets, their curses notarized.
✦ Homo plantatus mimeticus
Common Name: Doppelganger Plants
Classification: Phyto-humanoid Symbiote
Average Lifespan: 30–90 years (depending on host compatibility)
Known Regions: Biotech enclaves, sun-vaults, clone nurseries
Social Structure: Intergrafted collectives, chlorohuman communes
Summary:These humans have undergone extensive grafting of photosynthetic skin and root-nerves. Though outwardly human, they metabolize sunlight, requiring little food. Some claim dreams shared through pollen release. Grafted flora often "bloom" to express emotional states, creating an unspoken dialect of mood via petal-shift and leaf-tone. They are not artificial—they are posthuman.
✦ Equinoformis sylvani tikbalang
Common Name: Tikbalang
Classification: Arboreal Trickster-Centaurid
Average Lifespan: 150–300 years
Known Regions: Canopy trails, mossy forks, mist-routes
Social Structure: Lone pranksters, way-confusing fraternities
Summary:Tikbalangs are horse-headed humanoids whose long limbs make them fast and misleading travelers. They guard specific trails by distorting spatial logic—causing even the most experienced wanderers to walk in circles for hours. Though mischievous, their tricks often serve to protect sacred groves or lost spirits. Remove a hair from their mane and bind it—you may gain their reluctant loyalty.
✦ Vampyrus mananangalensis
Common Name: Manananggal
Classification: Gender-Specific Hemocarnivore
Average Lifespan: 80–150 years (curse-bound)
Known Regions: Rural settlements, banana groves, graveyard peripheries
Social Structure: Solitary nocturnes; matrilineal transmission
Summary:The Manananggal is a parasitic vampire whose upper body detaches and flies at night to hunt for fetal blood and viscera. The condition disproportionately affects women, often linked to unresolved trauma or ancestral curses. While folklore centers on their horror, their anatomy—featuring retractable bat-like wings and digestive symbiosis with bile to liquefy tissue—is rich with narrative possibilities. The grounded lower torso is their only vulnerability.
✦ Buforubicundus regurgitatus
Common Name: Yara-ma-yha-who
Classification: Amphiboid Hemovore
AverageLifespan: 50–70 years
Known Regions: Fig trees, wet gullies, liminal forest edges
Social Structure: Solo ambushers; lifecycle-based identity shifts
Summary:This squat red frog-like entity feeds by swallowing prey whole, draining their blood, then vomiting them out—slightly transformed. Victims slowly become new Yara-ma-yha-who after repeated cycles. Unlike traditional predators, they lack fangs, using suction pads and stomach enzymes to extract blood. Their lifecycle involves stages of predation, sleep, mimicry, and metamorphosis, making them a rare non-fatal parasitic vampire species.
✦ Orthoptera pelesitae
Common Name: Pelesit
Classification: Insectoid Familiar Entity
Average Lifespan: Host-dependent (1–30 years)
Known Regions: Burial grounds, paddy fields, witch sanctums
Social Structure: Familiars bound to a shaman; swarm intelligence if grouped
Summary:Pelesit are grasshopper-like entities bonded to practitioners of black magic. Once summoned, they possess hosts through ingestion or blood contact and act as telepathic spies or saboteurs. Each pelesit is psychically imprinted with a voice—usually that of its master—and prefers to live in the host's stomach or tongue. They are emotionally reactive and can become jealous or territorial, particularly of other familiars.
✦ Suida kleptotheria
Common Name: Babi Ngepet
Classification: Therianthropic Wealth-Parasite
Average Lifespan: 60–90 years (spell-maintained)
Known Regions: Jungle margins, urban fringe slums, ritual rings
Social Structure: Solitary practitioners; black-market economy nodes
Summary:Babi Ngepet are magically-transformed humans—typically male—who become boar-like at night to steal wealth. They are symbiotic fusions of dark magic and beast form, driven by greed and secrecy. Their pig-form slips through walls to absorb monetary essence, which physically manifests at their ritual base. Vulnerable only when transforming or mid-theft, they operate under strict timing constraints, often monitored by handlers who ring bells as alarms.
✦ Phosphora ignilucida
Common Name: Will-o'-Wisp
Classification: Bioluminescent Plasma Entity
Average Lifespan: Unknown; energy dissipative
Known Regions: Marshes, grave fields, battlefields
Social Structure: Drifting collectives; mirage-based communication
Summary:These glowing orbs float low over wet ground, often leading travelers astray. While folklore paints them as malicious pranksters, Will-o'-Wisps are actually memetic light-entities feeding on fear or confusion. Their movements form semiotic trails decipherable only by sensitive animals or geomancers. Some function as gatekeepers, luring the worthy to hidden groves. Their language consists of flash patterns and atmospheric ionization.
✦ Caeligenes inuitum
Common Name: Star Folk
Classification: Astral Anthropoids
Average Lifespan: 1000+ years (non-terrestrial physiology)
Known Regions: Glacier caves, meteorite craters, night-sky observatories
Social Structure: Starline families; constellation-based clans
Summary:The Star Folk are cosmic beings who descend to teach astronomy and cosmology. Semi-transparent and slow-aging, they are biologically adapted to vacuum and low-gravity conditions, often residing on Earth only temporarily. Their eyes refract starlight into navigational code. They view time as navigable space and often predict meteor showers or planetary alignments with eerie precision.
✦ Catabola terraviva
Common Name: Living Landslide
Classification: Animated Geomass
Average Lifespan: As long as mountain range endures
Known Regions: Fault lines, tectonic convergences, collapsed temples
Social Structure: Monolithic solitary beings; rock-bound instincts
Summary:Born from geological trauma, Living Landslides are sentient masses of earth and rubble. Their motion is glacial yet deliberate, and they attack only in response to ecological imbalance. These entities possess distributed cognition across their boulder-clustered body, often communicating in seismic rumble codes. Some act as territorial enforcers, others as slow-moving sages preserving extinct geomyths.
✦ Glyphidae narratica
Common Name: Narrative Glyphs
Classification: Semiotic Entity
Average Lifespan: Unknown; story-limited
Known Regions: Script-etched ruins, unwritten margins, broken sagas
Social Structure: Aggregates into "chapters," seeking plot resolution
Summary:Narrative Glyphs are autonomous fragments of forgotten stories—living symbols that seek compatible texts to merge with. They appear as floating calligraphy or ink-stained figures. Once bonded with a host or written page, they influence plot structures around them, subtly rewriting reality to fulfill their embedded arc. Often mistaken for curses or blessings, they are best understood as narrative viruses.
✦ Iraformis pugnavita
Common Name: Rage Elementals
Classification: Emotion-Based Fire Entity
Average Lifespan: Varies (dies without conflict)
Known Regions: War zones, arenas, riot memories
Social Structure: Conflict clusters; fury hierarchies
Summary:Rage Elementals are born from intense emotional trauma, especially prolonged fury. They burn red-hot and emit pheromonal auras that incite violence. Without fuel—be it memory or immediate discord—they wither into ash. Biologically they resemble molten humanoids with glowing fault-lines across their skin. Some form dueling pacts, requiring constant battle or the retelling of ancient feuds to survive.
✦ Knockera subterranea
Common Name: Knockers
Classification: Subterranean Warning-Folk
Average Lifespan: 300–600 years
Known Regions: Tin mines, cave networks, echo-chambers
Social Structure: Clan-bonded drift groups; seismic communicators
Summary:Knockers are dwarf-like beings inhabiting mines, known for tapping to warn of cave-ins. Contrary to mischievous kobolds, they exhibit deep moral codes and sorrow-driven behavior—many being the souls of perished miners. They view mining as sacrilege, but help out of pity. Their tools double as musical instruments, and their "knocking" is a language of grief, geometry, and spatial memory.
✦ Architectura menehunica
Common Name: Menehune
Classification: Nocturnal Artisan-Folk
Average Lifespan: 150–300 years
Known Regions: Riverbanks, lava fields, hidden valleys
Social Structure: Clan-based guilds; stealth collectivists
Summary:Menehune are tiny, industrious beings capable of building complex structures overnight. Their tools are ritual objects, and they disappear at first light. Refusing praise, they work only for those who offer tribute without greed. Though often romanticized, they have a rigid cultural code, exiling those who reveal themselves. Their knowledge of stone fitting and aqueduct flow defies current engineering logic.
✦ Spectroskeletus gashadokuro
Common Name: Gashadokuro
Classification: Ossified Spiritual Aggregate
Average Lifespan: Until exorcised or satisfied
Known Regions: Sites of forgotten massacre
Social Structure: None—singular hunger-form
Summary:Gashadokuro are colossal skeletons formed from the unburied dead. They appear at night, clenching their jaw before snatching lone travelers. Driven by collective rage and abandonment, they make no sound—except the ringing in a victim's ears. Their bones shimmer with spirit-lanterns, and only blessed iron can disperse their form. They are not individual ghosts but nation-sized grievances made manifest.
✦ Chronomycota bifractale
Common Name: Time Moss Harvesters
Classification: Temporally-Displaced Fungoid
Average Lifespan: Nonlinear; simultaneously pre-born and post-dead
Known Regions: Paradox fields, memory glitches, spore-loops
Social Structure: Cultures of recurrence; harvest kinships
Summary:These beings cultivate time-sensitive moss from folds in reality. They move in figure-eight loops, often appearing older or younger depending on your perspective. Their bodies resemble robed mushroom colonies wrapped in pocketwatches and temporal driftroot. Conversations with them often start after they've already ended. They speak in paradox riddles, and their spores can infect timelines—resulting in déjà vu or recursive history.
✦ Revenans repetentia
Common Name: Déjà Vu Spirits
Classification: Conceptual Recursion Entity
Average Lifespan: Indeterminate; bound by cycle duration
Known Regions: Memory overlaps, fated locations, cursed architectures
Social Structure: Isolated loop-beings; cross-causal bleed groups
Summary:Déjà Vu Spirits are sapient fragments of existence locked in eternally repeating actions. These entities do not perceive time linearly and often attempt to warn others of outcomes they can no longer avoid. Their presence causes reality slippage: thoughts, gestures, and sequences repeat involuntarily. Some exist as echoes of historic failures, others as guardians of inevitable tragedy. They are immune to linear death but vulnerable to narrative disruption or "paradox pruning."
✦ Cyclomorphus dualis
Common Name: Alternation Generation Species
Classification: Bimodal Lifeform (Sapient↔Bestial Phases)
Average Lifespan: 300–400 years (aggregate across forms)
Known Regions: Brackish deltas, lunar ponds, tide-locked biomes
Social Structure: Phase-separated castes; memory-linked between forms
Summary:These unique beings alternate between a fully sapient form (typically humanoid or insectoid) and an instinct-driven larval or animalistic form—often aquatic or sessile. Only one phase is intelligent, while the other is biologically necessary for survival, reproduction, or resource gathering. Individuals may not retain conscious memory across phases but develop interphase instincts, such as gravitating toward unfinished goals. Transitions are seasonal or trauma-triggered. Some cultures elevate both forms equally; others shun the "lesser half" of their kind.