For the new arrival
Who you might be
Iron Psalm has 30 playable kindreds: five human and twenty-five other peoples of the world. This page is the menu.
Two groups
The five human kindreds are the most numerous people in the world by far, organised more by how their lineages live than by where their borders run. A Drifting trader from one kingdom and a Drifting smith from another have more in common than the kings of either place will admit.
The twenty-five other peoples are sapient lineages that evolved beside humans — different bodies, different niches, different cultures, but people. A typical member of any of them weighs about the same as a typical human and walks the world in the same way. The famous goblin-king and the elder vampire scholar are unusual individuals, not the typical case.
Both groups play by the same rules. The difference is mostly about who treats you as people.
The five human kindreds
Human
Drifting
the Wandering Kind, the Many, the Common Kind, the Unmarked
- Manner
- Short-lived, fertile, mobile. No specialised niche; fluent across cultures.
- Body
- Humanoid, medium. The most variable body of the five — general-purpose by design.
- Found in
- Temperate, mixed, urban, agricultural. The world’s largest population.
Best for players who want to be everybody’s neighbour. Picks up new trades fast; dies fast. The default if you don’t yet know what you want.
Human
Enduring
the Frost-Marked, the Pale Folk, the Snow-Sworn, the Long-Patient
- Manner
- Slow metabolism, deep memory, distrust of haste, indifference to discomfort.
- Body
- Humanoid, medium. Pale or weather-darkened; slow-aging; cold-immune; reduced fertility.
- Found in
- Polar latitudes, sparse-substrate steppe, high tundra. The great north and great south.
Best for players who want to outlast trouble rather than outfight it. Long-lived; oral memory; sharp readers of weather, season, and omen.
Human
Working
the Stone-Folk, the Lode-Blooded, the Stay-Sworn, the Deep-Skinned
- Manner
- Dense flesh, long-lived, physically hardy, slow-spoken. Mastery accrued across generations.
- Body
- Humanoid, medium and dense. The world’s deepest craft traditions; isolationist by reflex.
- Found in
- Mountain, high-elevation bedrock, ore-rich regions, the deep crust.
Best for players who want to master a craft over centuries. Hard to harm; slow to admit outsiders; their guilds run for generations without dissolving.
Human
Speaking
the Sun-Tongued, the Bright-Voiced, the Sun-Burned, the Long-Throated
- Manner
- Vocally gifted, ritual leadership, ordering the collective by the saying of the word.
- Body
- Humanoid, medium and slim. Heat-tolerant; short-lived by human standards.
- Found in
- Equatorial belt, tropical latitudes, dense and warm populations.
Best for players who want to lead a cult, run a court, or unmake a kingdom with a speech. Brilliant; unmissable in a room; more priests per capita than any other human kindred.
Human
Crossing
the Tide-Folk, the Shore-Sworn, the Wave-Kin, the Between
- Manner
- Threshold-living: life at boundaries, carrying memory across the breaks that destroy other lineages.
- Body
- Humanoid, medium and lean. Webbed extremities, semi-aquatic, excellent navigators.
- Found in
- Coastal, tide-zone, estuary, archipelago. Boundary regions in general.
Best for players who want to live at the edges and outlast every kingdom that thought to absorb them. Nomadic-coastal; diplomatically fluent; carriers of long memory across the breaks of history.
Other peoples of the world
Twenty-five kindreds, grouped here by how they live. None of these are monsters in any sense the word usefully serves. Some are at war with their human neighbours. Others are diplomatic partners. Most are simply busy with their own lives.
Hunters of forest and range
The four-legged peers of the deep forest and the great-bodied predators of the mountain niches.
Wolf-Kin
the Pack-Sworn, the Lupines, the Old Hunters of the Wood
Body · Mammal-quadruped, medium. No hands; speaks human languages with effort.
Best for players who want pack-loyalty, instinct-driven combat, and a body that cannot wield tools. Honour-bound; absolute in their loyalties.
Pardine
the Great-Cats, the Pride-Folk
Body · Mammal-quadruped, large. Great-cat counterpart to the Wolf-Kin.
Best for players who want apex predator at solo or small-pride scale. Higher lethality per individual; lower numbers; less politically organised than the Wolf-Kin.
Lizardfolk
the Saurians, the Hot-Blooded
Body · Reptilian, saurian-bipedal, medium. Scaled; tool-using.
Best for players who want a tool-using scaled body with stone-craft and rough rune-work. Swamp and jungle niches; a controlled hypermetabolism ritual lets them function in cold.
Ogres
the Great-Brute, the Mountain-Eater
Body · Humanoid, large, solitary. Cousin to the giants of folk-tale; smaller and less dignified.
Best for players who want to be large, simple, and peaceful so long as they are fed. Mountain and cave niches; brutish; not stupid, merely uninterested in talk.
Tribal peoples and warband cultures
Organised non-human polities whose numbers and discipline make them peers, not pests, of the kingdoms they share borders with.
Goblins
the Small-Tribes, the Hill-Crowd
Body · Humanoid, small. Marginal-land tribal.
Best for players who want to start as outsiders, in marginal land, with few friends in high places and long memories for slights.
Hobgoblins
the High-Tribe, the Order-Goblins
Body · Humanoid, medium. Militant cousin of the Goblins.
Best for players who want military discipline and a tradition of vassalising the careless. The orderly cousin of the Goblins; raid-and-rule cultures.
Orcs
the Warrior-Tribe, the War-Sworn
Body · Humanoid, medium, warrior-build.
Best for players who want a warrior-culture peer to the human kingdoms. Plain dealing; less patient with euphemism. Not the bestial sub-humans of folk-tale.
Mantids
the Hive-Folk, the Mantis-Folk
Body · Insectile, medium. Hive-organised with worker, soldier, and breeder castes.
Best for players who want to belong to a hive whose individual voice does not matter. Diplomacy goes through the matriarch; the hive is the polity.
The cousins who wear our shape
Old kindreds that have lived as humans for so long that few mortals can pick one out, and that sometimes cannot pick themselves out either.
Higher Vampires
the Old Cousins, the Long-Lived
Body · Humanoid, medium, mimic. Adopts human form; may not remember the original.
Best for players who want to live human-passing lives for centuries, often unaware of their own kind. Hard to identify; harder to convict.
Dopplers
the Mirror-Folk, the Borrowed-Face
Body · Chimeric shape-shifter. Loose-form sapient that adopts a target’s body.
Best for players who want to wear borrowed faces — sometimes deliberately, sometimes by long unconscious drift. Rarer and more deliberate than the Higher Vampires.
The watchers and the long-lived
Slow, ancient kindreds who prefer to wait at the edges of mortal events and to act only when certain.
Naga
the Coiled, the Long-Wise, the Serpent-Folk
Body · Reptilian, serpentine, large. Cave- or ruin-dwelling.
Best for players who want centuries of patience, ancient languages, and a body that trades information for warmth and older information. Will outwait you.
Harpies
the Wing-Folk, the Cliff-Born
Body · Chimeric, winged-humanoid. Cliff-dwelling.
Best for players who want flight, loyalty as an individual rather than as a faction, and a reputation worse than the members usually deserve.
Roc-Kin
the Great-Birds, the Peak-Sworn
Body · Avian. Sapient great-eagles of the highest peaks.
Best for players who want to play a rare great-eagle that speaks human languages with difficulty. Slow to action, decisive when acting. Some kingdoms hold ancient pacts with their lineages.
Centaurs
the Horse-Kin, the Plain-Sworn
Body · Chimeric, horse-humanoid. Open-plains herd-organised.
Best for players who want to play guards or guides of long migration routes. Long lineage-memory; politically neutral by default; devastating when crossed.
Peoples of the sea
Two kindreds that live where the surface kingdoms cannot follow.
Merfolk
the Sea-People, the Tide-Cousins
Body · Aquatic, humanoid-above and piscine-below.
Best for players who want to be the parallel humans know best — political, mercantile, ancient treaties with coastal kingdoms. Not the romantic figure of mariner-song.
The Drowned
the Deep-City, the Abyssal
Body · Aquatic, cephalopod or abyssal-piscine. Multi-limbed or long-bodied.
Best for players who want to play something genuinely alien. Deep-ocean cities humans have never seen; indifferent to surface politics; old, slow, internally rich.
The small folk and the in-between
Kindreds that live in the margins of mortal attention — the walls of cities, the hedges of fields, the storm-edge places.
Trolls
the Bridge-Sworn, the Slow-Healing
Body · Humanoid, large, regenerating. Swamp and cave dwellers.
Best for players who want regenerative biology, solitary patience, and to be misunderstood as monsters. Wounds close; limbs regrow; the bridge-troll is usually a peaceful elder.
Mousekin
the Little-Folk, the Wall-Kin
Body · Mammal-quadruped, small. Mouse-bodied, paw-using, wears simple clothes.
Best for players who want to be small, fast, brave, and overlooked. Lives in human walls and barns; runs the messenger-network most cities pretend not to have; weak in direct combat.
Hedgekin
the Spine-Folk, the Hedge-Wise
Body · Mammal-quadruped, small. Solitary, spined, slow.
Best for players who want a hermit-sage body with deep plant-knowledge. Answers questions only after the asker has waited longer than they planned to.
Maskkin
the Mask-Folk, the Hand-Thieves
Body · Mammal-quadruped, small. Raccoon-bodied, urban-edge dwellers.
Best for players who want to broker among the trades that prefer not to use their own names. Peace-of-the-table everywhere; invited officially nowhere.
Foxkin
the Russet-Folk, the Long-Tail
Body · Mammal-quadruped, small. Fox-bodied, fast, cunning.
Best for players who want to be the fox of folk-tale. Fast, cunning, hard to bind to oaths once given. Their stories turn around their teller.
Wisps
the Night-Lights, the Boundary-Things
Body · Incorporeal. Partial-substance.
Best for players who want to play partial-substance — light and motion as their language, mostly mute, indifferent to most polities. Storm-fronts and the moments before; old boundary-places.
The underfolk
The kindreds whose home is below the worked stone — miners, trap-makers, warren-cities, and the metal-shelled craftsfolk of the deep galleries.
Kobolds
the Small-Saurian, the Trap-Makers
Body · Reptilian, small, saurian. Subterranean.
Best for players who want to build no chamber without a trap. Subterranean miners, clan-organised, technologically inventive. This is policy, not paranoia.
Burrowkin
the Long-Ear, the Warren-Folk
Body · Mammal-quadruped, small. Rabbit-bodied.
Best for players who want a warren-sapient with elections, runner-castes, and farmer-treaties. Fast on the ground; well-organised below it.
Scarab-Folk
the Beetle-Smiths, the Metal-Shelled
Body · Insectile, medium. Subterranean; beetle-coded.
Best for players who want shells of grown metal as inherited technique. The most metallurgically sophisticated of the insectile peoples; calculates carry on the geological time-scale.
What you will not start as
Older and stranger kindreds walk the world — the dragons and the great wyrms, the fair-folk of still woods and wandering roads, the giants of the high places, the silent tree-folk, the standing-folk who weather into stone, and stranger things still in the deep that careful scholars do not put names to.
You will not begin as one of these. The world contains them anyway. What a long life and the right work might in time turn a person into is a question the world will answer in its own time.