Races of Aedamphia

I found more notes of the AD&D 2e (unbeknownst to me then, basically ran it Free Kriegsspiel-style) campaign I ran from ten to thirteen years old. I'm translating them and keeping them as is for your entertainment. Also yes, I was a weird kid.

Human - you are human, with all the wonders and wickedness that it entails. Your northern Empire has crumbled three years go. Solaris is occupied by Elves. The Circle of Harmony is being reformed by a crusader-king. Baronies of the west want lands to the east. Beyond the east is the desert of Shaq' Thar where felines dwell.

Elf - you have antlers, patches of moss grow on your skin, cats' eyes or pointed ears. You are on leave from the Fae Armada for a few years. You cannot die, though you can be maimed. If your body is entirely destroyed, EMPTINESS FOR ALL ETERNITY. You are a natural sorcerer, able to turn telluric energies into impossible feats of magick and ben spirits to your will. You know other races to be lesser and deeply flawed, and you hate them with burning jealousy for their mortality. Your people have came back from self-inflicted exile three years ago, and are now occupying Aedamphia's greenest lands in the name of ecological duty. Your people took dwarves under its wing when they came back, made them soldiers and spies. One day you will be done fixing the lesser races' mistakes.

Dwarf - you are short, stocky, alabaster-skinned, after generations of selective breeding for underground labour. Your eyes were sewn by gnomes. Your tongue was removed by gnomes. You utter throat-song gargles to your peers, and use sign language to communicate with taller races. You kill gnomes. There are no dwarven women left - they were taken away by gnomes. Nobody knows where they are. Perhaps they're all gone forever and your people will disappear. Your people are free since three years ago and it does not matter. Nothing really matters.

Gnomes - your body is salt. You will melt in the rain or if submerged. Your shape is that of children. Your people created the greatest wonders of engineering of this era and advanced technologies that serve all other races of Aedamphia came from gnomic laboratories and workshops. Your ancestors were enslaved by dwarves for their sins, alhough history has forgotten what these sins were, or if there were real in the first place. According to your own history. Your people erased the legacy of Dwarves - their history, their culture, and killed all of their women. Or perhaps hid them away, nobody knows. Three years ago a strange winged-man destroyed your undercity and freed the dwarves. The world turned against your people, and now you are hunted by all. You are free from clan duties, for there is no clan anymore. And it does not matter. Nothing really matters.

Felines - you're a man-sized, bipedal cat. You speak, somehow, perhaps partly due to your magical nature. Your people was one of the first, living in paradise. Your paradise is a dry land of burning sands now, but you're too proud to admit that perhaps, it is not the paradise of old. Nevertheless your kind is still materially rich enough for your civilisation to walk the fine line between past-glory and total decadence. Adventures are criminals, as they steep lower than servants would by embracing the strange moors of foreigners. Criminals are adventurers, as they can never stay in one place too long, for fear of the watch, or even an impromptu frontier justice militia of angry locals. Yours is a culture of rigid etiquette, codified social behavior and strict, blind adherence to the Laws.

Trolls - you are huge, towering over any man, large as a boulder. Your fur is thick and rough. Your tusks can impale a wild goat. But your kind is a peaceful one. The tribes live off the land, moving from one place to another in the great steppes beyond the City of No Gods. Only trolls have the fortitude required to take the weather and giant beasts. When conflict between individuals or tribe arise, games of wits are played, contests of jokes or debates are held to find the best possible resolution. Those few trolls that choose a violent way of life are seen as mentally ill, and de facto, ostracized. They often leave their tribes in shame and seek feral trolls to kill and rid the world of their more brutal brethren. The truth is, the more a troll kill, the more beastly he becomes. Troll-Hunters one day become the hunted, and that is how it is.

Faeries - you are tall as a man's hand, and all of you were made female. You fly with bat, butterfly or dragonfly wings imbued with a magical powder which makes you lighter than air. If your wings are cut, you die. If you are kept in a cage for a full lunar cycle, you die. Your kind is a little more than a century old and split into three factions. The Shameful believe that the God-Master has forsaken your kind and left them purposeless out of disgust for your imperfections. The Vengeful believe that the God-Master was wrong to give you life, and that if you one day meet them, you should kill them. The Lost admit that none of you have any memories of the God-Master beyond a warm hand of unknown sex, and that no faerie should tell another how to live her life. Your kind lives in the City of No Gods, as the Philosopher do not recognize the God-Master as an actual "God" in the metaphysical sense, and thus it does not breach their absolute rule of suppression of any and all divnity in the psychosphere.

Daughters of the Wolf - you are a race of men and women that paint their bodies and only wear wolf furs. You go bare foot and file your teeth into fangs. You abandoned language and civilisation decades ago, following a Corvid Guru who preached that the very idea of humanity was rotten to the core, and that you would be better off as beasts. You prowl the southern woods, and perhaps you just lost your way. Or perhaps you just found it.

Mentats - you believed in the supremacy of the human mind over all things, including reality. Your psychic powers were a testament to this belief. You honed this skill in a flying city on a boulder lighter than air, weighed down by a gargantuan steel chain. Your mind belonged to the Overmind, the most powerful of psychics, and their circle was one that ensured the safety and spiritual/moral purity of all the minds bent to that will. You broke free from that influence and left the island. There are no voices left in your mind but your own now. You are lonely at night but that is the price of freedom.

Corvids - you are not a people, nor a culture. Rather you are an anti-culture, gathered together by serendipity or fate at the border of the dry sea. All of you believe in absolute freedom. Freedom from family, friends, enemies, peers, civilisation, society, oneself, time, space, body and mind. Your determination to keep living in whatever way you see fit at the expense of even your physical and mental well-being is a testament to the worth of freedom as the ultimate signifier and signifying. Most of you die of starvation or thirst when they decide to no longer be slave to their bodies' needs. Some agonize at the bottom of cliffs after they take the fight to gravity. You know that you are right, or perhaps you know nothing. Either way, this is the only way you know, until proven otherwise through your own standards and methodology of reason. Most of you are free from the shackles of sanity. One of you freed the Dwarves three years ago, and in doing so, stopped being what he was. Most of you mutate in the desert, perhaps because of the magical radiations, or perhaps because will truly is the only factor that truly matters.