Differences between populations
Intro and Elves
“What is humanity?” has always been a very disputed and controversial question. Some populations have never had their humanity put into question, while others have seen their status shift due to political opportunity, philosophical trends, or scientific developments.
Beastfolks, Halflings, and Matras, while considered ensouled, have sometimes been not regarded as human.
Humanity is the ultimate beneficiary of Creation, the ones for whom the universe was created. Humanoids that the scriptures suggested were designed to maintain and manage the cosmos are, therefore, not human: they work for humans. But this is not necessarily a disparaging observation: some say that makes them more than human since they were closer to the Divinities helping them directly (and this has fueled various supremacist sects throughout history).
Outside academic circles, if you are “shaped” like a person and behave like a person you are human. Emifolks, with their peculiar bodies and exotic customs, are the ones more often “dehumanized”. Their scarce presence in the Scriptures also doesn’t help their position as peers to other populations. While, unfortunately, this has often been an excuse to oppress them it has also caused fascination and awe.
The other big question is: what are humans relative to the rest of humanity? Most sources point to humans as the “original” version of humanity: orcs, dwarves, elves, gnomes, and tritons are variations picked by different divinities as “chosen people” and further shaped by those divine patronages.
Another version is that humanity is not the starting point but the result: humans are what comes out when all races mix for centuries. While one has to do some philological gymnastics to make the scripture say such things, it would be an explanation as to why different populations have such a hard time interbreeding. It could be that humanity started in many varieties that mingled so much to become one race, leaving only the specimens unable to mix as distinct populations.
Some differences are clearly biological (like the Triton’s ability to breathe underwater) and others are definitely cultural (like the dwarves’ affinity for engineering and mathematics), but many are an ambiguous mix of both. Minotaurs probably have a slight predisposition for orienteering but it seems mostly a self-reinforcing stereotype. Similarly, orcs’ resistance to pain may have some biological basis but their contempt for complainers and whiners may just mean that they don’t express it. The world is becoming more interconnected but people raised completely outside their culture are rare and it’s hard to draw conclusions about nature and nurture with few exemplars. On the other hand, anatomy is a slow-moving field of inquiry: the dissection of cadavers is a fraught practice in most cultures. The reason is that there is always a possibility that a deceased may manifest a ghost. The phenomenon is rare under normal circumstances, but tampering with a dead body may skew the odds. Most religions want to prevent the formation of ghosts, and to do so they cremate the body in a pyre quickly after death: keeping the deceased around for days for study seems a way to increase the chance of a ghost. Other religions like the Spirits’ way, the ghost’s creed of the ash steppes, and the Second Sun worshipper want, on the other hand, to improve the chances of ghost creations, any interference with the funeral rites would interfere with that.
In the Empire, the recent development in Mana Field theory has substantiated the theory that ghosts have no souls and are just simulacra imprinted onto the Mana Field. This would mean that ghosts can “be dispelled” without fear of interfering with a soul. The Diabolsit church is embracing this possibility, but cautiously, they will begrudgingly allow in-depth autopsy on criminals. The Angelic Unison is cautiously lifting the vetos against dissection to other ends: they want knowledge of undeath studying how ghosts form. The clergy will allow autopsies on people who had shown signs of “post-mortem life”, like spasms, jerks, mumbled words, subtle movements of surrounding objects, etc. (some of which could be real, and some could be just overblown impressions).
ELVES
Elves’ distinctive feature is their long lives. This factor causes a peculiar sense of time: elves “squander” minutes or hours in activities that others would execute in seconds. They like to make things to perfection and contemplate their actions, weighing them against their enormous memories. To them, the other races are like hyperactive children whose days are endless and must be filled with nonsense. This doesn’t mean boredom is not an issue for elves, on the contrary: most of them, at some point in their lives, feel the weight of repetition and crave stimuli and experience. Elves of the sultanate are the people who most often travel for pleasure with even farmers taking years off to see some other place.
Elves of the steppes, on the other hand, are always in motion and the ghosts they find are all the “novelty” they need.
While elves can collect an incredible amount of memories their forgetfulness is the same scale. With age, a human may mix up facts swap people in their memory, or have events lost to oblivion while others are perpetually crystal clear. In elves, this is amplified and they may have centuries’ worth of personal chronology all jumbled up, with the blackout that covers years, forgetting events that for others would be life-defining.
This is one of the reasons why almost all Elves keep diaries.
The elves of the steppes don’t keep personal records but have scribes that record their clan history, a sort of collective diary.
Another characteristic of the Elves is their sight: they have excellent vision. Eyes problems, like myopia or presbyopia, are absent, and their vision can adapt to any light condition: starlight is enough to make them see clearly at night and they can unflinchingly gaze at the sun.
The other senses are good as well even if not supernatural: the elves’ median hearing or smell is equal to that top tier humans, with many instances of perfect pitches, and “perfect noses” able to recognize elements of complex fragrances. It’s not a coincidence that many elves found outside the sultanate are luthiers or perfumers.
The good sight makes elves excellent marksmen, and the Elves of the Khanate are the most feared and respected archers in the world. The khanate trackers are almost legendary in their ability to follow the subtle hints left by their prey, animal or otherwise.
This “perfect” sense makes the elves light sleepers, to the point that people think they don’t sleep since they always find them awake. To avoid becoming very irritable due to the continuous waking up, many elves, especially when traveling, employ self-suggestion meditation-like techniques to deepen their sleep. It’s also quite common the use “sleeping turbans”: scarf to be warp around the eyes and ears to isolate the sleeper.
Elves tend to have a long and slender frame, with a median height comparable to humans. There are no “heavy” elves: only people with some health issue will gain weight to the point of obesity, and even that is a rarity. For a long time, it was unclear if it was some metabolic quirk, but modern scholars think the real cause is the widespread use of magic. All Elves know at least some magic and use spells in their everyday lives: for example, you won’t find a match or a flint anywhere in the sultanate as only the kids don’t know how to light a fire with magic. Spells are fueled by life force and consist mainly of metabolic energies, so, to put it bluntly, casting spells burns calories. And, if you think about it, spellcasters around the world tend to be quite thin.
