Every person enters Rhuna with a beginning. Origins explores those beginnings: the histories, natures, and possibilities carried by the peoples who inhabit its world.
The chapters are arranged around four great Origins—Astralkin, Vathian, Nuhlrin, and Orvah—and the peoples within them. Meet the Zaltar, Rhunai, Veloth, and Karthine; explore the Gahlians, Pahric, Ezhani, and Kalthir; discover the Duranine, Ereth, Corvians, Imari, and Meridians; and encounter the Tangled Bloods of the Daathru, Tyrru, and Uthuru.
Within these accounts, you will find the histories and qualities that distinguish each people, including their appearance, senses, abilities, and relationship with the world around them. Read for the stories themselves, or use them to imagine the inheritance your Hero carries into a life of their own.
Begin with an Origin that draws your curiosity, then follow its chapters into greater detail. For the traditions, communities, and everyday belonging built upon those beginnings, continue into Cultures. An Origin gives your Hero a starting point; the life that follows remains theirs to shape.
Seed, Kind, Culture, and HomelandCopy link
Origin Seed is the broad nature of a Hero’s beginning: Astralkin, Vathian, Nuhlrin, or Orvah. Origin Kind identifies a people within that Seed, such as Zaltar, Pahric, Duranine, or Tyrru. Culture describes shared traditions and belonging; Homeland is the place that shaped the Hero’s upbringing. These describe different parts of a life and need not all point to one community.
© Charles Hildreth / Rhuna Games, LLC. 2019
Rhuna is a fantasy RPG in active development.
Current artwork and lore serve as concept pieces while we build the setting and seek creative collaborators for future publication.
If you are interested, please inquire.
THE PEOPLES OF RHUNA Copy link
Rhuna’s peoples are commonly understood through four great Origins—Astralkin, Vathian, Nuhlrin, and Orvah—each shaped by a different relationship with divine power, the Threads, mortality, and creation. Alongside them are the Unbound, who are not a fifth Origin, but peoples whose culture and belonging have grown beyond the Origin that first shaped them.
ASTRALKIN Copy link
At the height of Rhuna’s mythic order are the Astralkin, rare beings whose existence begins with cosmic force rather than ordinary mortal birth.
The Zaltar embody Zal’s Order, the Rhunai arise in answer to Balance, the Karthine reflect Kar’s lunar legacy of Reflection and Empathy, and the Veloth emerge as unintended consequences of Vel’s presence where reality grows thin.
Astralkin are often revered, feared, or interpreted as signs of cosmic intervention. Yet their extraordinary nature comes with its own burden: many enter the world already carrying a purpose and must decide whether to fulfill it, reinterpret it, or become something beyond it.
VATHIAN Copy link
The Vathians are the fractured remnants of the Astraleth, ancient divine beings shattered by Xantyr so they could never become whole again.
Their peoples include the Gahlian Dalo, Gahlian Cora, Ezhani, Kalthir, and Pahric. Each carries one heightened Sense and one diminished or absent Sense, giving rise to the Endless Hunger that defines much of Vathian experience.
Reborn through the Mothers across repeated lives, the Vathians carry broken memories of what they once were. Their brilliance, longing, and instability all grow from the same wound: they are fragments of something divine that can never fully reform.
NUHLRIN Copy link
The Nuhlrin are Rhuna’s mortal peoples: singular lives defined by mortality, inheritance, adaptability, and choice rather than divine recurrence.
Their great peoples include the Duranine, Ereth, Imari, Corvians, and Meridians. Through architecture, stewardship, illusion, trade, law, craft, and civilization, they have shaped much of the mortal world.
The Nuhlrin lack the recurring existence of the Vathians or the cosmic manifestation of the Astralkin. What they build must survive them. Their strength lies precisely in that fragility—the ability to create families, cultures, institutions, and legacies despite knowing none are guaranteed to endure.
ORVAH Copy link
The Orvah, or Tangled Bloods, were born when severed Threads, broken life-forces, and divine influence became tangled together and the Life-Webs forced those fragments into living form.
Their three great lineages reflect different answers to that instability. The Daathru impose Order upon the Tangle, the Tyrru survive through Balance between opposing forces, and the Uthuru allow Chaos to keep the Tangle in motion.
No Orvah is assembled exactly like another. Their bodies carry the evidence of incompatible possibilities surviving together—beast, mortal, Thread, and stranger forms intertwined. Once regarded as aberrations, they have endured as guardians, wanderers, warriors, builders, and living proof that broken things can become something new.
THE UNBOUND Copy link
The Unbound are not a separate Origin.
They are peoples whose identity has come to rest somewhere other than the culture associated with the Seed that first shaped them.
A Vathian can become Unbound.
An Orvah can become Unbound.
A Nuhlrin can become Unbound.
The Stranded build community from exile, abandonment, and survival. The Irenuk reject permanent borders and inherited authority in favor of migration, chosen kinship, and life within the Wild. The Zhe go further still, entwining themselves with beasts, hives, migrations, and living ecologies until host and community become inseparable.
The Unbound challenge one of Rhuna’s most persistent assumptions:
An Origin may explain how someone entered the world. It does not decide where they belong.
The four Origin Seeds and their ancestry Kinds are covered in this book. Stranded, Irenuk and Zhe are cultural identities described in Cultures; they are not a fifth Seed or additional ancestry Kinds.