The Peoples of the Planes
54+ Races
Every race carries the mark of the Frequency that made their home plane. Filter by plane to explore each civilization's place in the war for the Throne.
Showing 45 races
High Men
Heirs of the First Compact, builders of cathedral-cities whose foundation stones encode eight centuries of obligation. Politically fractured, magically disciplined, and acutely aware that another planar incursion will require cooperation they have not managed since the field at Velanthar.
High Elves
The oldest practitioners of Life magic on Aurelith, dwelling in mana-well courts whose architecture channels the Equilibrium Frequency with a precision High Men have been studying for three thousand years. Patient beyond human comprehension. Occasionally condescending about it.
Halflings
Neither the most powerful nor the most numerous race on Aurelith, Halflings are consistently present at every significant historical event, usually in an advisory or logistical capacity. A Halfling herbalist was a signatory of the First Compact. This is not mentioned in Halfling histories because they consider it obvious.
Nomads
Plains-riders who refused the cathedral-city model from the beginning, maintaining that a civilization built on roads is a civilization that can be trapped. They were right twice in the Third Planar Incursion and have been insufferably correct about it since.
Gnomes
The inventors of the Arcane Collegium's principal siege technologies, Gnomes hold that magic is engineering and engineering is magic, and that the scholars who study one without the other are studying half a discipline. They are generally correct and universally irritating about being correct.
Dwarves
The builders of the deep infrastructure: ley-line anchors, foundational wards, the vast underground cisterns and transport networks that High Men cities sit above without thinking about. Dwarves have opinions about this. They express them rarely. They do not forget them.
Dark Elves
Not a separate race from High Elves but the ones who stayed when the Great Diminishment came. Prolonged exposure to the Death Frequency elongated their relationship with shadow and gave their magic an edge it never had in sunlight. They do not consider themselves diminished. They consider themselves accurate.
Draconians
Dragon-blooded humanoids who carry a fractional Chromatic resonance in their physiology — enhanced resilience, limited fire resistance, and an instinctive tactical intelligence that non-Draconians describe as aggression and Draconians describe as realism. They were not born in Noctharion. They chose it, which says something.
Trolls
The death frequency in Noctharion's ley lines interacts with Troll physiology in a way that produces regeneration rather than decay. Every wound closes. Every severed limb regrows. Trolls do not experience injury as a permanent state, which shapes their tactical doctrine in ways other races find disturbing.
Vampires
The oldest families of Noctharion, who survived the Great Diminishment by being, in the relevant technical sense, already dead. They maintain the forms of the Twilight Realm's aristocracy with a devotion that historians call nostalgic and Vampires call correct. The forms are all that remain of what the plane was. They intend to keep them.
Nightwalkers
Entities that exist in the space between the living and the Diminishment. Not undead in the conventional sense — not reanimated corpses following a necromancer's instructions — but something that the Death Frequency produced when it was running hot through Noctharion's ley lines and had too much potential energy to simply settle.
Lizardmen
The dominant military race of Verdantis — not through empire but through proliferation. Lizardmen colonies occupy every viable wetland, river delta, and coastal lowland on the plane. Their armies do not advance through territory so much as the territory decides it is theirs.
Treants
Verdantis's oldest sentient organisms — trees that the Proliferation Frequency invested with consciousness over millennia of slow accumulation. They do not move quickly. They do not need to. A Treant remembers every fire that has been set in its forest for the last five thousand years.
Chithari
Insectoid colony-beings whose intelligence is collective, distributed, and mediated through the mycelium network. An individual Chithari is not meaningfully intelligent. A Chithari colony of ten thousand is one of the most sophisticated strategic thinkers on any plane, and it has no ego to cloud the analysis.
Myconids
Fungal beings that inhabit the deep canopy and the underground networks beneath it, serving as the infrastructure of Verdantis's collective memory. They do not fight. They facilitate the network, and the network does everything else.
Gnolls
Hyena-kin who evolved in the Verdantis savanna where the Proliferation Frequency produced the densest predator population on any plane. Gnolls are not the apex predator — there are six things on Verdantis that are larger and faster. Gnolls are the predator that survived by being willing to eat anything.
Demons
Pure expressions of the Disruption Frequency — beings of chaotic power that do not organize by hierarchy but by strength, and that do not hold territory by agreement but by the continuous demonstration that taking it back would cost more than it is worth. They are honest about this.
Demonkin
The offspring of Demon-Humanoid pairings — less purely chaotic than their Demon parent, more chaotic than their other parent, and deeply ambivalent about which side of that equation matters. They are the most politically complex beings on Infernyx, which is a low bar and a genuine achievement.
Efreeti
Beings of fire and command who emerged from the volcanic cores of Infernyx's Disruption Frequency. They organize by contract — elaborate, binding, and interpreted with the kind of creativity that makes their pact partners nervous about what they agreed to. Every Efreeti contract has a clause the other party did not read carefully.
Ashen
The people who survived the unsurvivable conflagrations of the Disruption plane because their bodies metabolized the experience and retained it. Fire is not a threat to the Ashen because fire is what they already are, at a cellular level, encoded into the bloodline by generations of exposure that had no survivors except the ones who became Ashen.
Salamanders
Lizard-kin native to Infernyx's volcanic zones, evolved to move through lava flows and Chaos Ore fields that would kill anything else in seconds. Their cities are built in calderas, on the theory that anyone who wants to attack them is welcome to try.
Devils
Absorbed into Infernyx when the realms converged, Devils brought their iron bureaucracy and pact-law into a plane that previously operated on chaos. The result is a strange synthesis: hierarchical factions in a chaotic world, binding contracts enforced by beings who thrive on disruption.
Pact-Bound
Mortals who have entered binding agreements with Infernyx powers, granting them access to pact magic in exchange for services rendered across planar time. They are not enslaved. They are invested. The distinction, several of them have noted, seems less meaningful the longer the contract runs.
Crystal Elves
Beings whose physiology has been partially crystallized by long exposure to the Reverberation Frequency — their thoughts echo in their physical structure, and their physical structure in turn echoes their thoughts. They cannot lie without developing stress fractures. They find this an acceptable trade.
Dream Weavers
Entities who emerged from the boundary layer between the material and echo realms, able to exist in both simultaneously. Their magic operates through the same membrane — they do not cast spells so much as they remind reality of what it agreed to be, and reality, being the Reverberation Frequency, remembers everything.
Phantoms
The Reverberation Frequency's purest product — beings made entirely of pattern, with no material substrate. They exist in the echo-realm exclusively, interacting with the material world only through the patterns they impose on it. They are very old and find physical existence philosophically impractical.
Echomancers
Humanoid practitioners who specialize in the echo-realm layer, able to read the pattern-memories stored in Aethermist's accumulated echoes and extract information about civilizations that no longer exist anywhere else. They are the librarians of things that should have been forgotten.
Void Walkers
Beings adapted to the boundary between Aethermist and the Void — able to navigate the space where the Reverberation Frequency becomes so attenuated that reality starts to lose its coherence. They return changed from every trip and consider this professional development.
Void Spawn
Entities that emerged from the Abyssal's Void Chaos when the consuming hunger of the plane produced something that could think about what it was doing. They do not have goals in the conventional sense. They have appetites that have learned to prioritize.
Chaos Fiends
Beings of raw Void Chaos magic that have achieved temporary coherence — not stable enough to be called permanent, but persistent enough to be dangerous. Every Chaos Fiend is one bad day from dissolution and does not intend to have one.
Abyssal Terrors
The Abyssal's apex lifeforms — not the most intelligent, but the most persistent. They have survived in an environment that kills everything eventually by being too large to consume quickly and too resilient to consume at all. They are aware of this and find it adequate.
Flesh Shapers
Entities that express the Abyssal's extruded architecture — beings that build from biological material the way other races build from stone, without a blueprint, without apparent purpose, and with results that make architectural theorists very uncomfortable.
Rift Walkers
The only Abyssal entities capable of sustained existence on other planes, they serve as the Abyssal's scouts, messengers, and advance forces. They do not require permission to cross planar boundaries. The boundaries require their presence to maintain integrity. This is not a detail the other planes like to acknowledge.
Spirit Folk
Entities who exist in a state of expanded presence — distributed across multiple memory-impressions simultaneously, anchored by the Reverberation Frequency in its purest form. They do not experience death as other races do. They experience it as the beginning of being remembered.
Shade Walkers
Beings native to the space between the Ethereal and material planes, able to move through both without fully existing in either. They are the messengers and scouts of the Spirit Compact — entities trusted to carry information between the living and the remembered.
Ether Weavers
Practitioners of Spirit magic in its original form, before the school was systematized by Aethermist scholars. Their casting is not incantation but negotiation — with the memories in the Frequency, with the entities that inhabit the echo-realm, with reality itself, which on the Ethereal is willing to listen.
Memory Keepers
The archivists of the Ethereal — entities who specialize in the Memory Shores, cataloguing the echoes of civilizations that no longer exist and determining which impressions are accurate enough to be used as intelligence. Their standards for accuracy are high. Their archive is vast.
Pale Ones
The oldest entities on the Ethereal, whose origin predates the plane's current configuration. They have been watching long enough that they no longer distinguish between past and present events. Consulting a Pale One is reliable only if you know which time period their answer is from.
Wraiths
Death-Frequency entities born in the Umbrath Shadow Deep — not reanimated corpses but something the Death Frequency produced directly when the concentration was high enough. They phase through terrain because they are barely present in physical reality, which is not a tactical advantage so much as a statement about their ontology.
Dark Dwarves
Dwarves who descended into the deep places and stayed long enough that the absence of sunlight and the presence of Chaos Ore deposits changed them — their metalwork now channels Disruption Frequency, which makes it highly effective and structurally alarming.
Ratkin
Rat-folk adapted to the Underdark's tunnels, existing in a permanent state of resource competition that has produced extraordinary adaptability and the most efficient scavenging economy on any plane. They have survived in environments that killed everything else by being willing to eat the environment.
Stone Golems
Constructed guardians bound to Underdark dungeons by the ancient compact between the Deep Smiths and the powers of the deep places. They do not have intelligence in the conventional sense. They have instructions, and the instructions have been running for long enough that the distinction has become somewhat academic.
Merfolk
The dominant race of Aurelith's ocean zones, organized into matriarchal city-states built on deep-water continental shelves where the Equilibrium Frequency runs through ocean currents rather than land ley lines. Their Life magic is specialized for aquatic application, which makes it uniquely effective in water and largely non-functional on land.
Sea Serpents
Not a civilization-building species but a powerful presence in the aquatic zones of every plane, where the Frequencies run through ocean currents in ways that produce something like Planar Dragon behavior — territorial, resonance-bonded, and deeply unhappy about being approached without appropriate tribute.
Deep Ones
Aquatic entities with Abyssal resonance — beings whose long habitation in the deep zones where Abyssal ley lines touch ocean floor has given them a connection to the Void Chaos that makes them distinct from conventional aquatic races. They are not hostile. They are simply operating on a set of priorities that have very little overlap with surface civilization's.