Factions
Crowns, clans, companies and outcasts. Some send charters. Some send raiders.
Aethras Kingdom
Everything here has a price, and the price is knowable.
Chivalry in Aethrassia is a matter of appearance, not practice. Their court is ruled by seals, favors, and quiet payments, where a knight’s loyalty is purchased as readily as a magistrate’s judgment. Their colonies serve as currency in a larger game of power, land granted to secure obedience, markets bled for revenue, titles sold to those who can afford them. Yet the old victories still matter. The crimson griffon carries history with it, and to march beneath it overseas is to act in the long shadow of kings.
Bloodhound Brotherhood
Take what you can hold. Answer for none of it.
The Bloodhound Brotherhood is a loose confederation of raiders, smugglers, and killers bound by shared rules rather than shared ideals. They live by taking what they cannot earn and enforcing their own brand of order where law has failed or fled. Loyalty to the Brotherhood matters more than mercy, and betrayal is answered without hesitation. To the Bloodhounds, theft and murder are not crimes, but tools, and survival belongs to those willing to use them.
Eldrin
No wall, no treaty, no moment at which to object.
The Eldrin walk as if the soil itself bends to carry them, their beauty and grace masking an indifference as deep as the roots of their forests. They see the world’s wild edges as extensions of their domain, and their colonies are rarely settlements in the human sense, they are curated expansions, sculpted glades and perfect rivers, claimed not with walls but with the quiet certainty of ownership.
Forlorn Outcasts
We will answer it with a house, and another house.
A faction born of human and elven blood, carrying a heritage neither side fully accepts. Branded an abomination by some, the Forlorn Outcasts endure in the space between rejection and resolve. They pursue coexistence not as compromise, but as conviction, believing that something new can be built without erasing what came before. Their path is one of resilience and restraint, seeking to heal old wounds while refusing to answer hatred with fire.
Free Western Colonies
Nobody granted it. That is why it holds.
Practical necessity and mutual dependence shaped the Free Colonies from their earliest days. Governance grew out of shared risk and negotiated obligation. Their settlments grew in a quiet expansion that left self-rule entrenched long before the wider world acknowledged it.
Gorehorn Clan
You are worth the effort. That is the compliment.
The Gorehorn Clan lives by violence as others live by law. Minotaurs of immense strength and fury, they hunt, fight, and clash for sport, honor, and dominance. Every battle is sought, every skirmish welcomed, and rage fuels them as naturally as breath. Tradition and instinct temper their fury, forming a code understood within the herd but terrifying to all beyond it. To face a Gorehorn is to confront not just brute strength, but the deliberate, calculated force of creatures who revel in the fight.
Laeroth
This ground answers to us now, or we answer for it.
Once fair as the first dawn, the Laeroth now wear the scars of divine spite, green skin, burning eyes, and hearts tempered in unending struggle. Their society prizes strength above all, yet it is bound by intricate clan oaths. Colonies are warcamps that harden into cities, each new land a proving ground where the untested become warriors or bones.
Lyaud
We are not what we were. We are more than you would like to fight.
The Lyaudites wear their poverty like rusted armor, each dent a reminder of decades locked in fruitless war. Their empire’s glory is a faded banner, patched and frayed, yet they march still, if only to keep from collapsing entirely. Colonies serve as lifelines, desperate bids for resources and allies, but also as proof to themselves that they remain a people worth fearing, worth remembering.
Mongrel Company
Violence needs no banner. It needs a rate.
The Mongrel Company is a mercenary host stitched together from deserters, criminals, and sellswords with nowhere else to go. They fight for pay, not cause, and their loyalty lasts only as long as the coin holds weight. Discipline exists when enforced, and law is followed only when it is profitable. To those who hire them, the Company is a blunt instrument; to those who face them, a reminder that violence needs no banner.
Sahid Empire
The land was always fertile. Only the hands were wrong.
From the burning heart of the desert rides the Sahid host, convinced not in conquest’s cruelty but its necessity. To them, a weak hand cannot hold a blade, nor a crown. They believe foreign lands are ill-tended gardens, and only under their disciplined rule can they truly bloom. Colonies are forged with spear and fire, their garrisons as much schools of war as they are seats of power.
Sintari
You called us the error. We have decided to be the correction.
Rising from the same shattered origins as the Outcasts, the Sintari drew a different conclusion. Generations of scorn and exclusion hardened into conviction, until vengeance came to be mistaken for truth. They see themselves not as a compromise, but as the rightful culmination of a flawed world, and believe the hatred of humans and elves to be born of envy rather than fear. In their eyes, mercy is weakness and coexistence a lie sustained by submission. Bound by certainty and consumed by a justice long since derailed, the Sintari answer fire with inferno, tolerating outsiders only so long as they do not stand in the way of what must be done.
Steadfast Crag
You are welcome. The path is that way.
The Steadfast Crag stands as a community of skill and discipline, their hunters and farmers taking life only when necessary. They maintain careful trade and cautious diplomacy with outsiders, but patience has its limits: when their homes or people are threatened, their strength and coordination turn every defender into a force to be reckoned with. The Crag endures, unyielding, a bastion of culture, skill, and ferocity.
Stoneheart Concord
The claim is premature.
The Concord moves mountains by will, not through cataclysm but through the slow pressure of time. Their expansion mirrors stone itself: gradual, inevitable, and heavy enough to reshape what lies beneath. A settlement is considered legitimate only once the land has been worked long enough to bear their mark.
Thorgaz
What is cut is kept, and what is kept is defended.
Beneath mountain crowns of iron and frost, the Thorgaz carve wonders in halls that have never seen the sun. Stone sings under their hammers, and the veins of the world yield riches that feed their booming holds. Their colonies often begin as mining enclaves, but where dwarves dig, fortresses rise, and in time the rock itself becomes loyal to them.
Tidebound
Build well. It will make a fine reef.
The Tidebound are coastal settlers and navigators, thriving where land meets water. They build their communities with care, taking only what the shore and surf provide, and rarely act beyond necessity. Loyalty runs to the faction, and every decision is measured and deliberate. Mostly passive, they endure through patience, resourcefulness, and an intimate knowledge of the tides that shape their world.
Vuskar
The ocean is a road, and the bones along it are the milestones.
The Vuskan longships cut deeper than waves, they carve memory into the sea itself. To the Vuskans, the ocean is not a border but a road lined with the bones of those who failed to sail it. Their colonies often grow from little more than a beachhead and a campfire, swelling into thriving ports where tide and law bend to the same rhythm. Every mast that rises abroad is a new verse in their living saga.