Races

I will keep updating this chapter, until I finish describing all of the 12 races of the continent to my satisfaction. For now i will present only 4 of them, and only34 of those are still living at the time of this story.

Steppe Elves

In](http://story.In) the north we have the nomadic Steppe Elves, the people who had, centuries prior, founded the Bressund Duchy in the Valley and who brought the cult of the Spirit of The World to the Dross Valley, although today, they mostly follow the Starmother religion in a still unexplained massive, and mostly peaceful, religious transformation, something unheard of in the continent, those elves differ from their cousins, the Golden Elves, from their mostly dark complexion and long, thick hairs and beards. They live a mostly peaceful pastoral living, they only fight to defend themselves, mostly against orcish incursions on their territory, they don´t usually form unified political entities because they simply do not feel the need to. They spend their days riding horses on the Steppe Plains and praying to the Starmother. No one really knows why many of them decided to abandon their homeland to establish themselves in the Valley of the Dross Mountains, but scholars speculate those exiles were pushed back when the Starmother religion established itself as the dominant religion of the Steppe Elves, five or six centuries ago and pushed back those still faithful to the Spirit of The World through religious persecutions, this would also explain why are the religion on the Valley so different from the religion of those Steppe Elves, despite their mutual regional and racial origins.

Gray Orcs

Also in the Northern Steppes, we also have the also a nomadic race of the Orcs, also called the Gray Orcs, although not unheard of, they even more incapable of stable state building than the Nagas, never forming political entities larger than small collections of tribes controlled by a Khan, and even those are mostly short-lived. This is because of their warrior culture, valuing martial prowess more than everything else and those Khans are mostly those who are so strong as to establish their dominion over many tribes, but once a stronger, younger orc comes and challenge them, usually defeating them, as per tradition, the whole state must be re-conquered again, since the young up-start must challenge the other chiefs one by one, and few are able to do so, so most of the time, the Khanates are dismantled in quick order. But once in a good while, usually once in centuries, there is someone who is able to unify the Orc Tribes and become Great Khan, those are usually exceptionally intelligent orcs, but also exceptional warriors, adding physical to mental prowess in the right way as to be able to defeat all of comes to them, usually those are defeated by a coalition of the surrounding states. The last of those events and the biggest of them happened more than a century ago, when the legendary Great Khan Gretta, ironically a male in this male-dominated culture, managed to form the largest coalition of orc tribes in history and began an expansionist war on the whole continent until she was killed in the Vredd Campaign led by the also-legendary King Harold III of the Yarod Dynasty, but i will detail this event on another chapter.

Ice Giants

On the frozen coasts of the North, lived the enigmatic race of Ice Giants, of them only their enormous ruins and their legend remains, those states that they once built, millennia ago, a gigantic network of subterranean cities, and the enormous structural ruins they left dotting the Giants Coast are the entries for this network, and that they once dominated the whole continent though puppet rulers controlled by magic, until one day, the legends says, the magic backfired, frying most of their minds when the magical energies overwhelmed them, only those who had refused to use magic had survived and exiled themselves out of the continent, never to return (although some versions of the legends say they will come back, eventually, to take back control of the continent and its peoples, once they have learn dhow to properly control magic again. Most scholars discredit those legends as mere fictions, they argue magic is so rare and scarce, there wouldn´t be enough mana to fuel a whole civilization´s needs, so they treat the vast magics controlling the minds of rulers as impossible. They also argue that the ruins were just temples to their gods, and instead of the civilization dying because of a magical accident, they attribute the Ice Giants disappearance as extinction brought by climatic change on the continent, but this is also a disputed incident, and so, only their ruins, legends and massive skeletons speak for this extinct race.

Nagas

On the marshlands to the south, we also have one of the most politically powerful races in the world, the Nagas, a snakelike race, they are incredibly intelligent, probably the most in the whole continent and their physical strength is nothing to be scoffed at, they control the immense territory of the Southern Marshlands, and the only reason they haven't dominated the whole of the continent yet, is because of their apparent incapacity for establishing stable states on a large scale for very long, so they are divided into many petty kingdoms, duchies, counties, baronates and city-states, this is a very unstable region and any political maps of it become quickly obsolete because of the shifting politics and short-lived states, so most maps just abstract them as a large entity called the Naga Warring States. Also interesting to note the they all share a mutual understanding that if one of them are attacked by outside forces, all of them were and, in the rare cases that a ruler feels confident (and stupid) enough to take on the legendary Naga´s riches for themselves, they have to face their whole race´s wrath, once they put their bickering and intrigue aside, the Nagas are an unstoppable **** and they destroy whatever have provoked their wrath, the ruins of the civilizations they have destroyed are somber reminders, to everyone, that the Nagas are left best alone in their own in-fighting. Not even the Great Khan Gretta dared to attack the Nagas, this alone speak volumes about their reputation. But even in those events, the Nagas begin infighting just as they are finishing their genocide and their alliance break down. There are those who fear that, once the Naga figure out a way to unify on a single political entity and are lead by an exceptional leader, they will eventually conquer the continent and there aren´t many who disagree with this.

Forest Elves

In the tropical jungles at the south coast, live the Green Elves, also called Forest Elves, and for good reason, all elves are naturally adapted to the forest/jungle environment, but the Greens are on a whole other level, both culturally and physiologically, they are the very pinnacle of environmental adaptation, so much so that they have enormous difficulties adapting anywhere else but jungles and forests (but preferentially the vast tropical jungle in the south). Because of that they are extremely territorial, even more so than usual for elves, you might even be able to enter their territory, but try living in the forest and you will suffer a very rapid **** by their hands directly, or sudden arrow showers and lethal traps that are all but impossible to spot excepting for the Forest Elves and only the most elite hunters/scouts in the whole continent, but if you cut any single single tree in their jungle, your **** will not be so fast, the Green are good with ****, really good. This makes them a mysterious and isolationist race, not much of their social and political organization is known and there aren´t many Green Elves out there who are willing to tell the stories of their peoples. But even so, civilization is encroaching on their territory, each year there are more and more people willing to risk **** to find out about its mysteries. Not many of them ever come back and those who do come back either mentally scarred and insane or have their memories magically wiped, regressing back to a baby-like state, having to relearn everything from zero (more on this in the magic chapter). Their territory extends to the north, bordering with the Naga States, to the south limited by the Green Coast, at the southernmost limit of the continent, to the west they border a vast expanse of mostly uninhabited Snakr Savanas and the east there is the longest river in the continent, the Green River and its subsidiaries. This has avoided any major conflict between those elves and the rest of civilization, but most agree that a conflict is unavoidable.