Human

Humans varied enormously in build, coloring, and stature depending on region, but average adults stood between 5'2" and 6'2" and weighed between 110 and 220 lbs, with wide variation even within that range. They reached physical maturity by their late teens and were considered adults by custom, if not always by law, at sixteen to eighteen. A human lifespan ran seventy to ninety years under good conditions, though few outside the wealthy or the lucky saw the far end of that range. This short lifespan gave humans their characteristic urgency. They married young, built young, fought young, and treated their thirties as the beginning of decline rather than the beginning of wisdom. Childhood was short and fiercely protected in principle, though in practice it was often cut brutally short by war, famine, or need.

Human skin tone ran a full range from near-black browns to pale, freckled pinks, tracking loosely with regional climate but crossing borders freely wherever trade and travel carried people. Hair grew in every warm colour from black to red to flaxen blond, straight, wavy, or tightly curled; though humans did not grow cooler hair colours naturally, all greyed or whitened steadily from middle age onward. Eyes came in shades of brown, hazel, green, grey, or blue, and their ears sat flush and rounded against the head. Proportionally, humans carried a head, torso, and limb ratio unremarkable by mortalborn standards, with legs slightly longer than their arms. Their hands ended in five long, fully manipulable fingers capable of precise work, while their feet kept only a limited version of that same dexterity, suited to balance and grip rather than any real manipulation.

Physical differences between human sexes were modest but present. Males averaged somewhat larger stature and musculature than females, though females alone possessed the anatomy for child-bearing and nursing. A small minority of humans were born with fluid or non-traditional genders, falling outside this male-female framework entirely. Beauty standards were notoriously inconsistent from one human culture to the next, a fact other mortalborn found faintly absurd, given that humans could not seem to agree among themselves on what their own species should look like.

Humans possessed no innate magical ability and no special faculties beyond the traditional senses of touch, hearing, taste, smell, and sight. However, they were considered uniquely resourceful, and naturally quick studies.

Human culture prized trade, growth, and accumulation over the quiet permanence or outright isolation favored by other mortalborn. Their settlements typically clustered wherever the land would support density, such as river deltas, coastal harbors, crossroads, and open plains. The great majority of humans lived within three major nations, each shaped by its own geography and government. Commona, the dominant power, was a mercantile republic occupying most of Somnum and was loosely governed by the Council of Commonlight. Scycae, to the north, was an imperium of grassland and desert, a place of vastly different cultural practices and familial expectations. Elthys, in the cold south, was a sovereign queendom bound closely to the Sea of Trees and ruled tightly by its despotic monarch. Despite these differences, core human values across all three tended toward ambition, self-determination, and a deep, almost superstitious respect for hard work, tempered by an equally deep suspicion of anyone who claimed a shortcut around it.

Commona's republic prized commerce and civic ambition above all, with freedom granted to all its member states. Wealth and office were both understood as things to be earned and displayed, and a Commoner's standing in their city or guild often mattered more to them than any title of birth. Comparatively, Scycaen identity was more tightly bound to lineage and symbolic meaning, reflected even in the way its places and people were named. The Imperium ran on stricter hierarchy and religious reverence for its land, particularly the Cinderwall, which was regarded with near-religious awe as the barrier protecting the Scyseti's Reach from the Cindersand Desert. Elthys, meanwhile, was a dour queendom which placed high emphasis on servility to the ruling Merellien house. Influenced by constant threats from the Sea of Trees and its northern foes, its people prized patient, tradition-bound sensibilities and placed unusual weight on matrilineal succession and inherited duty.

Humans produced Adventurers of nearly every class, and represented by far the most amount of adventurers in the world. They valued nearly every traditional aspect of heroism, though they held a particular fondness for great Warriors and practiced Wizards, and uniquely held no disregard for any particular adventuring class. Humans risked their lives for reasons as varied as the culture itself: poor children with no land to inherit, nobles who sought to shed their restrictive duties, merchants chasing one impossible score, or simply the restless few who wanted to experience more in their short lifespan.

Human spirituality was, like everything else about the species, a fractured thing, and there was no single human faith. Unlike mortalborn whose faith was bound tightly to a single tradition, homeland, or clan, humans treated religion the way they treated most things: as something to be argued about, reformed, abandoned, and reinvented within a single lifetime. Among the many divinities humans recognized, five drew particularly widespread devotion: Asanye, Ilios, Luhtari, Thestus, and Umera, honored in their own ways as patrons of life, community, progress, justice, and protection. 

Humans generally agreed that the fundamental forces represented by these religions existed distinctly, and these names were typically accepted across most of Commona, Scycae, and Elthys. However, in far-off places with distinct cultures, these forces went by other names, and it was the job of many frantic scholars to link these deities with various frayed etymologies. Such scholars would also learn of other sects devoted to the night, trickery, or even undeath, though such practices were looked upon poorly in most human societies.

Though practices and deities varied, all humans living in Somnum in some way held great respect for the Epochal Artifacts which protected them. These magic items were what gave them the ability to maintain their borders and live in an age with less conflict than the one which had come before. A statue of Iodun the Unifier was present in nearly all Common settlements, bearing his tome Cometfall and the Stonebinding Scepter; the Terrescel family maintained rule over their imperium with possession of Scyseti; and the Elthysi Sovereign ruled over its land with a mysterious umbral power, though the specifics of their artifact were unknown to its people.

Human history before Common Unification was poorly recorded, remembered as the "Age of Giants" or the "Pre-Unified Age". For most of that era, mortalkind's very survival was consumed by a long struggle against the Dragons and Giant-kin of the Head of the Greatwyrm, a struggle eventually won by driving both into the Body of the Greatwyrm. Much of what humans knew of their own deep past sat somewhere between history and folklore as a result. A Common Calender Timeline only became properly recorded when Iodun Myrdinn looked to unite all under one "Common League".

When Iodun turned his ambitions northward, he would end up accidentally consolidating a unified Scycaen Imperium under the Terrescel family. While occupied elsewhere, he entrusted the northern campaign to his general Yilmaz Mylenthalas, who met Riyissan Terrescel's forces at the Battle Of Sylphglade, the largest battle ever fought between two largely human armies. An early rout in Mylenthalas' favor turned to catastrophe once his army pursued the Scycaens into the Fey-haunted glade itself: a hidden garrison under Terrescel struck from behind, and the battle ended when Riyissan split a mountain in two with Scyseti's Cut, breaking what morale remained in the Common ranks. The defeat permanently ended Commona's northward ambitions; a treaty struck nearly four years later fixed the two nations' shared border at Scil-Torrenae, and Scycae entered the Unified age as a sovereign power rather than a conquered one.

To the east, Iodun met a different kind of resistance: the tribal peoples of the Dotted Plains, descended from Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls, and giant-kin, who shared little with one another beyond a love of war and a refusal to bow to any human banner. Rather than commit his army to a long, grinding campaign across open steppe, Iodun took a small company of elite warriors and turned Cometfall against the region directly, in what came to be called the Eastern Sundering. The resulting massacre left the eastern tribes all but annihilated, with the land itself scarred beyond recognition. The few survivors fled to the Neck of the Greatwyrm, leaving the "Pockmarks" a sparse and haunted country. 

In the south, a Common regiment pressing into Elthys was set upon by a vast Undead horde, and resulted in the Unholy Siege Of Fort Verdane. Iodun's bastion of Emblem answered by raising Fort Verdane virtually overnight, and the fort held against the horde for nearly a month before the tide finally broke and vanished into the Howling Hollowland, never to be seen again. The battle was remembered as a triumph of Common resolve, but the tenuous truce between Commona and Elthys remained uneasy ever after; Merellien's rulers were long rumored to hold a quiet grudge against their northern neighbors for the incursion that had provoked the horde in the first place.

These three campaigns, more than any single treaty, finally pushed the League to formally declare Common Unification. Iodun's legacy remained a point of pride within Commona and a point of bitterness elsewhere, particularly among those he had subjugated by force. Over time, however, once-disparate human nations slowly amalgamated into a shared culture, though Commona, Scycae, and Elthys retained the distinct identities their conflicts had carved out.

Human relations with other creatures varied widely, but just as readily as they mixed with each other, humans established some form of allyship with most mortalborn. Though Elven culture saw human lives as unrefined or even futile, Ardhon Miniel and Xilvalur nonetheless shared extensive history with humans. Similarly, despite unyielding Dwarven attitudes clashing with the adaptability of humanity, Brazenthrone and Skypeak established important trading networks with their neighbors. Halflings especially aligned with humans, often integrating into their cities, though most still feared the size and ambition of the "big-folk."

Humans had no single mother tongue, and each of the three human nations spoke its own language. Commona unsurprisingly spoke Common, which had been invented and spread deliberately in the wake of the Unification so that trade and governance could cross its many member states without friction. Scycae spoke Rundejh-Scyc or "Scycaen", a language suited to the imperium's symbolic, lineage-conscious naming culture. Elthys spoke Elthysi, a tongue that had grown close to Elven speech across generations of contact with the Sea of Trees and isolation from their human neighbors. 

Because Commona, Scycae, and Elthys each developed independently before Unification, their naming traditions remained distinct, and a person's name was often the fastest way to guess where they, or their family, had come from. However, most human cultures named a child at birth, attaching a familial surname to the given name. Regional dialects of all three remained strong even where Common had become the shared language of trade and diplomacy.

Names of Commoners ordinarily layered a personal name with a family, trade, or place-based surname, though some more well-off families took multiple surnames. Naming after admired ancestors was typical, as was naming for the circumstances or place of birth. Common men were given names such as Corwin, Talen, or Bram; Common women were given names such as Ari, Misandra, or Charlot; and both paired with surnames such as Duskmere, von Kestwick, or Fenn. Commoners outside a strictly gendered naming tradition often took names of their choice, typically with a more symbolic meaning such as Ash, Melody, or Sparrow, and some chose to forsake their surnames altogether.

Scycaen names worked differently, and were chosen with more deliberation than other humans. Each name was built from literal words of the language, carrying an allegorical meaning that combined both the weight of their lineage as well as a value for the newborn to embody. Many names contained hyphens, indicating a connection that would imply an "of" or "from" in Common. Scycaens were also given familial surnames, which themselves were closer to an inherited virtue or blessing than a literal title. Scycaen men were given names such as Iru ("Sun"), Orpunae ("Many Dances"), or Neheza ("High Water"); Scycaen women were given names such as Maqal ("Green Journey"), Jehonae ("Flowers"), or Razi ("Fire Spear"); and both paired with surnames such as Mirae-Vir ("Cinders of War"), Aph-Qulim ("Lake of Yellow Coin"), or Lisqiae ("Divine Energies"). Names were considered very important in Scycaen culture, and a person discarding or changing their name was considered strange and disrespectful. 

Names in Elthys were shaped by centuries of isolation from the north and a proximity to the elves of the Sea of Trees. They accordingly tended to sound half-elven or outright elven, flowing and vowel-heavy; like much of Elthys culture, their surnames ran through the maternal line mor often than not. Elthysi men were given names such as Valar, Eldithas, or Miratumal; Elthysi women were given names such as Faralei, Urimys, Torstina; and both paired with surnames such as Xeridrin, Rostor, or Aldien. Regardless of first name, Elthysi were defined by their surname, as one's personal worth was tied to their family's usefulness to the house Merellien. Only those who wished to leave society altogether would change their name, as the risk of being caught would mean great punishment to one's family.