Dwellers, the Peoples of Rhuna Copy link
The peoples of Rhuna do not share a single beginning. Their bodies, cultures, instincts, and relationships with the Threads are shaped by four Origin Seeds: Astralkin, Vathian, Nuhlrin, and Orvah.
These Origins are not nations or social classes. They describe the deeper nature of a people—how they entered the world and what forces shaped their existence. Two peoples may live beside one another for centuries while carrying profoundly different relationships with mortality, divinity, memory, and the Threads.
Astralkin — Divinity Made Manifest Copy link
Astralkin are beings directly materialized through divine power. They were not shaped through ordinary mortal ancestry, but emerged as expressions of greater cosmic forces and purposes.
Each Astralkin people carries a different relationship to Rhuna’s divine history. Zaltar, Rhunai, and Karthine were deliberately given form; the Veloth are the unintended exception, emerging from Astravae swallowed by Vel. Their beginnings do not prescribe an individual’s purpose or allegiance.
Astralkin are rare, and their appearance can carry tremendous spiritual significance. Yet being created for a purpose can also become a burden. Many Astralkin struggle between the role they were intended to fulfill and the identity they choose for themselves.
The Astralkin peoples include:
Zaltar — Fire-born guardians shaped by Order and the divine flame of Zal.
Rhunai — Keepers of Balance who mend division and hold opposing forces together.
Karthine — Moon-forged beings of reflection, emotion, memory, and adaptation.
Veloth — Living manifestations of Chaos whose shifting identities challenge the idea that Chaos must inevitably become destruction.
Vathians — Divinity Made Mortal Copy link
The Vathians descend from the Astraleth, powerful beings who once existed much closer to divinity.
Through an ancient catastrophe involving Xantyr, the Astraleth were fractured and scattered into mortal existence. Their descendants now live as peoples of Rhuna, carrying only fragments of what their ancestors once were.
Vathians therefore exist somewhere between divine memory and mortal limitation.
They may experience echoes of forgotten lives, strange instincts, inherited spiritual hungers, or connections to powers far older than their present bodies. Many are bound to cycles of rebirth and to the pursuit of Va, the essence of life that offers momentary relief from the incompleteness left by their fracturing.
This makes the Vathians some of Rhuna's most ancient and spiritually complicated peoples. Their cultures often carry extraordinary knowledge, but also the weight of remembering—sometimes only faintly—that they were once something more.
The Vathian peoples include:
Gahlian Dalo — Proud, fiery descendants of fallen divinity whose cultures emphasize strength, leadership, craft, and legacy.
Gahlian Cora — Adaptive and deeply intuitive Vathians who perceive patterns through emotion, water, transformation, and thought.
Kalthir — Scent-bound descendants of Kalthi whose cultures revolve around memory, bonding, fertility, living ecosystems, and the preservation of life.
Pahric — Desert visionaries who study fate through stars, symbols, possibilities, and the movement of the Threads.
Ezhani — Winged, song-bound descendants of Ezhan who shape harmony through voice, movement, and resonance.
Nuhlrin — Mortality Made Free Copy link
The Nuhlrin are the great mortal peoples of Rhuna.
The Nuhlrin descend from mortal peoples created by gods and deities on distant planets across distant galaxies, using uncorrupted Threads. They had families, histories, and established lineages long before they answered the Call for Balance. They were not created for that Call. Their inherited Threads are distinct from the cursed Threads of Rhuna, including those bound into the Vathians; arrival did not make them fragments of Rhuna’s divinities.
Their strength does not come from divine purpose.
It comes from adaptation, invention, culture, choice, and survival.
Across Rhuna, Nuhlrin have founded cities, kingdoms, trade networks, traditions, schools, workshops, religions, and civilizations of every imaginable kind. They are extraordinarily diverse, and no single philosophy or destiny defines them.
Where an Astralkin may ask what they were created to become, and a Vathian may struggle with what they once were, a Nuhlrin is especially defined by what they decide to make of themselves.
The Nuhlrin peoples include:
Duranine — Builders and architects whose traditions reshape stone, settlement, and structure.
Ereth — Peoples closely associated with the natural world, wilderness, and the protection of living places.
Imari — Dream- and mirage-associated peoples whose traditions blur imagination, perception, and possibility.
Corvians — Traders, negotiators, travelers, and deal-makers whose cultures thrive through exchange and connection.
Meridians — Great organizers and civilization-builders strongly associated with institutions, cities, law, and empire.
Orvah — Creation Made Tangled Copy link
The Orvah are known throughout Rhuna as the Tangled-Bloods.
They arose from severed, broken, and chaotic Threads, creating forms of life that did not fit comfortably within the structures of the other Origins. For much of history, this made them objects of fear, superstition, persecution, and misunderstanding.
Their existence was often interpreted as corruption.
But the Orvah endured.
Through the guidance of the mysterious Valanarks, many Orvah traditions eventually came to understand their tangled nature not as something that must be erased, but something that could be directed.
Three great paths emerged.
Daathru — The Path of Order
Daathru seek structure within their tangled nature. Their cultures often emphasize discipline, construction, permanence, responsibility, and the deliberate shaping of oneself.
Tyrru — The Path of Balance
Tyrru embrace the meeting place between contradictory forces. Their forms are often hybrid or highly varied, and their traditions emphasize coexistence, adaptation, relationship, and harmony without uniformity.
Uthuru — The Path of Chaos
Uthuru accept change, instinct, transformation, and unpredictability as fundamental truths of existence. Many live outside rigid civilizations, following traditions rooted in movement, freedom, survival, and primal experience.
The Orvah remain among the most misunderstood peoples of Rhuna. Their tangled origins can produce extraordinary variation between individuals, and many continue to face suspicion simply because their existence refuses easy categorization.
Yet that same quality makes them powerful symbols of self-determination.
They were born from broken Threads.
What they become afterward is their own choice.
The Unbound — Culture Beyond AncestryCopy link
The Stranded, Irenuk, and Zhe are Unbound cultures. Their communities may include Nuhlrin, Vathian, Orvah, and mixed non-Astralkin heritages. Astralkin are excluded. An Unbound identity does not create a fifth Origin Seed or replace the underlying Origin Kind.
Stranded — Resilient descendants of displaced peoples whose cultures prize adaptability, grit, and survival.
Irenuk — Wandering peoples closely connected with wild lands, migration, and life beyond settled civilization.
Zhe — Beast-touched peoples whose forms and traditions often emphasize instinct, embodied wisdom, and relationships with the natural world.
Together, the four Origins describe four very different relationships with existence:
Astralkin were made with purpose. Vathians remember something greater. Nuhlrin build meaning for themselves. Orvah make identity from what was tangled.
None represents a greater or lesser form of life. They are simply different answers to the same question:
How does a person come to exist within the Threads of Rhuna—and what do they choose to become once they are here?