Orcs are weird: they have many babies, mostly males, and even after deaths and geldings, that still means there are far more males than females. Even the intact males will mostly be sexually-frustrated, and their relationships will mostly be with fellow gang-members. How do they pull this off? Probably a combination of being able to eat basically anything, and orc males growing quickly rather than bothering with brains. (Your character might be an exception.)

The women are effectively in charge, says the book: no, the women should obviously be in charge, and look like it. (Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’re nice, though.) The men probably don’t care because they’ve got more exciting things to do, but it should be clear that they don’t matter most of the time.

Orc villages are typically a collection of crude rough-hewn huts in the mud. Unavoidably shaped by their past as a slave race, they were in turn traumatised by the blood mist. During that time, their only proper moment of release was raiding other orc villages during the summer.

Now that the blood mist is no more, the smarter orcs are conscious that they are in a position of weakness. Properly-exploiting the forests near them is a good first step; since the Alder wars there’s a large amount of metal gear made for orcs and it would be useful to learn how to make more. Orcs’ ferocious breeding makes them quite reasonably unpopular with other Kin, so maybe if they want to make diplomatic inroads, this calls for a different type of orc? This may explain why there are efforts to no longer kill out-of-hand useful weird orcs, or, more controversially, seek to breed orcs that can do sorcery.

Once you’ve exposed your players to the full and frank nature of a typical orc village, maybe it’s time to look at some more weird encounters. A village with few or no women, for instance, or one where all the men are gelded (the King wants them dead, but the Queen disagrees; the players had better find a solution that satisfies both of them). Maybe they can encounter a gang of orc navvies building a road, or orcs trying to learn crafts.

It’s unclear whether orcs are supposed to be terrifying monsters or harmless clowns, and that’s what interests me about them so much.

Gracenotes:

Orc males who end up enslaved cut off their own testicles and eat them, partly for humiliation, but mostly because that’s funny; see also orcs eaten by terrifyingly-large and -vicious pigs, or ill-advised attempts to breed cassowaries.

Unexpected places to find orcs: robbing stagecoaches in the Robin Hood style, pretending to not be orcs and, because of their eye colour, mistaken for Merigall or their children, a village of gelded orcs who can’t breed but want to maintain their community anyway, orcs trying to invent pig cheese or becoming unnervingly good at baking.

Not only should dragons mostly be a threat to e.g. Galdane Aslenes with their large herds, or rich humans with coins of precious metal in cities back in the day, rather than dwarves, dragons should like living next to dwarves. The dwarves can build them a pretty good aerie, and at the point where a dwarf city can think about spending time on kitting out a dragon’s house, they can also spare people to go mining for the metals and jewels the dragon wants if that means they get the prestige of having a dragon advisor.

So what happened? My theory is that one city accidentally lost their dragon, a religious movement rationalised that embarassment into “we meant that”, proceeded to kill everybody else’s dragons, and now it’s commonly accepted that dragons were always bad. Indeed, so complete has been the victory of the anti-dragon forces that the conflict has now mostly been forgotten.

But not by the dwelvers, who still have the young dragonling Scarne in an ancient dragon nursery a kilometre beneath the ground, which Scarne has now outgrown, but the dwarven leaders above prefer to avoid making a decision about what to do with her.

As for Scarnesbane: while it might now be intended as the weapon to kill Scarne, it was probably crafted as a teaching exercise, or maybe even a goblin prank.

Gracenotes: religious sophists using twisted logic to argue that dragons are bad, and your use of perfectly-good logic is in fact use of “dragon words”, which means you can’t be trusted, is exactly the sort of thing that Arvia should say to your players and drive them spare; ancient blinged-out armour as both dragon-bait and propaganda; the path to Pelagia is paved by injured tough guys who tried to wield Scarnesbane; if dragonlings are fed gold and precious jewels by their dwelver teachers, maybe the ancient birthright coins the dwelvers make are effectively made of dragon shit; wherever the Glethra mines were, there should be a dragon squatting there; the PCs’ stronghold needs a dragon; dragons must have a justified instinctive hatred of haflings; put a cave painting of dwarves and dragons in Wailer’s Hold.

Mostly-underground eusocial mammals, whiners can be fascinating once you get past some dubious official factoids. You would expect a small humanoid to favour survivability over brainpower, so with a bias towards cooperation and away from individual excellence, whiners are the closest we can imagine to a communist utopia, all working together for the good of the hive.

A whiner hive should expect to efficiently produce eggs, babies and children, and individual whiners can call on specialists when they need help. All of this, plus their very different mental model, can make it problematic if whiner hives turn up where you don’t want them. The downside of the predictability of whiners means that more-or-less-ethical researchers will be delighted to experiment on them.

Gracenotes: Whiners are eusocial mammals, like smurfs; bodymodding whiners and their subcutaneous rocks; hell, make them archosaurs so they’re really cool; maybe all the Kin are humanoid because so are the Gods; whiner specialists are really amazingly-specialised; an intelligent queen probably won’t sit around laying eggs all day; maybe don’t ask how we get more queens; the weakest part of this whole essay is explaining why they’re called whiners when underground species should have deep voices; an easy way of denoting lesser intelligence is to arbitrarily decide that whiners don’t use articles; dwarf miners look at bodymodding whiners to work out whether there are any valuable minerals nearby.

Living underground is great, except that there’s no food there. If you don’t steal food from aboveground, you’re going to have to pipe light into your caves, and find ways to cooperate with animals. You’ll turn underground rivers into canals, which you’ll eventually end up widening. Stone-singers constantly expanding the mountains might make you move from time to time, but you can move around a lot more than any other Kin, which should have done wonders for your population levels.

Dwarves aren’t happy with just basic living: conquering the undermountains lets them move onto more sophisticated challenges like art and architecture, which must be constantly tested and contested. Their economy rests on a strong safety net and individual entrepreneurialness, backed by spooky-weird coins made by the dwelvers, which you can’t take with you when you die, to encourage generosity.

The official description of clans makes no sense; each city should be inhabited by a mixture of clans. Being King is just a job, which in peace-time consists primarily of organising contests and gaining glory for your city. Mess up and you can be told to go. On top of the usual endemic problems, the end of the Blood Mist is causing dwarves to reconsider what they should be doing with their lives, and how.

Gracenotes:

Mine-cart chase!; uncomfortably-fast boat ride through twisty tunnels; what does dwarven art look like?; you’re going to have to wait to travel, the boat club has booked the river; grinding your bones to make my bread as an act of religious celebration; if comedy elf names are ordinary name + “iel”, then comedy dwarf names must be posh name + “in”.

Rejected ideas: lawlessness on the canals, the dwarves built too ambitiously and too high, cheating the inheritance rules by making a sculpture out of dwarven coins, stabbing people to win the architecture contest.

Wonders: fat quartz fibre-optics that let you do hydroponics and theatre, ancient dwarves peering over their quartz half-moon spectacles, underground-river-powered paternoster!, a fake garden made of stone has to have tiny clockwork butterflies, what’s behind the slightly-artificial underground waterfall?

Viridia doesn’t look appealing at first glance, but there’s reason to doubt the official story. It’s not clear that Scrame actually killed and ate her, or why he’d randomly stick an elf ruby into his eye unless that was planned with Viridia.

What is clear that Gemelda and friends refused to seriously listen to Viridia, and didn’t give her time to come to terms with what had happened, or seriously entertain the reasonable theory that a mature system needs destruction as well as creation.

Viridia-in-the-sword provokes bloodlust and mayhem, sure, but if you don’t like that, don’t pick up the sword of bloodlust and mayhem. Her expressed personality may be extreme, but it may just be what she thinks people looking for swords want to hear. Give her time and a more subtle Viridia may emerge.

Gracenotes: Gemelda et al were already in Stanengist in the second meeting in the stillmist, so other elves had to rip Viridia’s emerald out of her chest somehow; if Viridia helped put her ruby inside Scrame her tiny body must have looked weird; Gemelda sounds like a tradwife and Viridia sounds pretty trans; you might think parasites are disgusting but they can be pretty great; maybe Gemelda was fine with feudal rule back in the day; you can’t quote Quentin Tarantino without swearing; the main threat to a sentient sword is the boredom of not being used; you should startle your players by having her talk to them.

The problem with saying the blood mist was karma for humanity is that precisely because humans are bastards, they didn’t feel any guilt. What’s more likely is that bloodlings are natural demon-part scavengers, and when huge demon wars happened, the bloodlings were overwhelmed and decided to triage everyone, including elves and other non-humans.

The blood mist is a network that learns, and at times individual bloodlings can fail to merge back. The more kind-natured ones would be horrified at what they’d accidentally done.

While Merigall probably had an early part in working out what was happening, and elves and dwarves probably helped, the Rust Brothers had every interest in maintaining the blood mist. What probably tipped the balance was Krasylla.

Gracenotes: let’s be nice to Erik Granström, bloodlings are here to clean up demon dandruff, Pyronax was merely the first survivor of the blood mist, I like how it’s ambiguous whether the narrator or aunt Ethel spilled beer on the baby and whether that was bad or hilarious, the blood mist doesn’t affect dwarves because the blood mist is a plant, a bloodling confused by a prepper cult gone bad, bloodling vampires, bloodling villages, elf and dwarf nerds unite, an elf-bloodling hybrid, a party of anti-Rust Brother guerillas.

Demons probably like the colour red, and it looks like mog is all about gluing demons and other things together, but we really don’t know. The best clue to demon nature is ether: it might be something like oxygen that demons need to manufacture, but it’s more likely to be food, that enterprising demons can work around, but you need to be able to make on-site if you’re going to invade. Also, demons are probably inherently conglomerations.

Gracenotes: kinky Merigall, Zytera knows more about mog than anybody else, unless they really don’t, sorcerers high on their demonic supply.

If you’ve got a good reason, or you stick to the diplomatic quarters, or you’re a guest-worker, you can come to Maidenholm. As well as many statues of the Shardmaiden in the grand temple, the town sprawls haphazardly; exactly how many people still live here is up to you.

The other half to the island is home to sea-elves, who probably don’t look like stereotypical mermaids. When above-ground, they live in a tree-village by a loch.

Gracenotes: good place for a murder, tame demons you can practice fighting against, Neyd built the Shardmaiden a garden, a proper rabbit-warren of streets and mismatched buildings, woe betide an attacking navy not looking out for attack mermaids, the unique way a Ravenlands University is funded, many Shardmaidens?, what if mermaids were in fact penguins with otter fur, oh and they swing through the trees, buildings rearranging themselves like the Terminator.

So you’ve got a bit of the Shardmaiden’s heart glued to your forehead. It should be able to tell you things she knew, and help you get help from your sisters. Being a Maiden Druid is about being part of a network of likeminded Elvenspring.

Gracenotes: does the shard change colour?, not all mystical visions are important or even useful, seriously, read The Dark Is Rising, what if elves are actually robots?, can you damage a shard?, real-time accurate communication makes Maiden Druids scary commandos, pigeons aren’t just fire and forget.

She went to an island to learn about earth, where she sung the humans to Ravenland (probably as a mermaid). Giving birth to Elvenspring required sharing her body with a baby, and understanding what it’s like to have children. So she suspended her consciousnes, with each of her heart’s shards learning from her children. One day she’ll be back.

Gracenotes: mother, maiden and crone, Neyd invented Ents, if the Shardmaiden did commit suicide, Maiden Druids are plagued by gloomy thoughts, taking ordinary names and making them elf names by adding -iel to the end continues to be funny, the shards can talk to each other.