Origins and Peoples
Origin type and people
The Lethean Age separates two questions that many games collapse into one.
Origin type asks what your body is made of: organic life, synthetic biological life, machinery, or a hybrid of flesh and machine.
People asks where you belong: surface community, Eloi enclave, Morlock warren, Beastfolk lineage, Rur settlement, android cohort, cyborg road-clan, or some mixed place that survived by making room.
Origin types
| Origin type | Player-facing summary | Important play questions |
|---|---|---|
| Organic | Born from naturally descended life. | What branch shaped your body? What settlement shaped your mind? |
| Rur | Grown biological life made to template by old-world systems. | Do you know you were manufactured? Does your community care? |
| Android | Mechanical sapience with synthetic cognition. | Who repairs you? What do you need to keep thinking clearly? |
| Cyborg | Organic base changed by mechanical augmentation. | What was added, who added it, and what did it cost? |
Organic peoples
Surface humanity
Surface humanity is the broad, adaptable middle of the present world. Surface communities live in settlements, road networks, ruin edges, fortified farms, trade camps, and places too small to appear on any map.
Surface humans are not old-world humans. They are the descendants of survivors who adapted across deep time. Their strength is not purity. It is flexibility.
Eloi
The Eloi come from miasma-rich holdouts and sealed enclaves where abundance lasted long enough to change the body. They are graceful, long-lived, and often psionically sensitive. Outside their home conditions, they can be fragile.
An Eloi character is a good fit if you want tension between refined survival and a hostile outside world.
Morlocks
Morlocks come from deep strata: tunnels, warrens, collapsed infrastructure, and places where sunlight is a rumor. They are powerful, dense, enduring, and tuned to conditions that surface peoples find intolerable.
Morlocks are sapient people, not monsters. A Morlock character should carry the weight of a body built for one world and forced to deal with another.
Beastfolk
Beastfolk descend from non-human animal stock that became sapient through old-world enhancement, miasma-driven adaptation, or both. They are not humans with animal decoration. Their bodies and minds begin from different architectures.
A Beastfolk character should name the ancestral stock if the table knows it: canid, corvid, raptor, ursine, cephalopod, insectile, annelid, or something more local and strange.
Rur
Rur are synthetic biological beings. They have flesh, blood, organs, hunger, fatigue, and pain. They were grown, not born, but the miasma treats them as living bodies.
Some Rur know what they are through community memory. Others believe whatever their settlement believes. The difference is social before it is mechanical.
Play a Rur if you want a character whose body is natural in operation but artificial in origin.
Androids
Androids are mechanical sapients. They do not eat, breathe, bleed, or heal like organics. They can be damaged and repaired. Their minds are carried by synthetic cognitive Lattice that nobody alive fully understands.
Androids can be people of the Law, faction members, traders, warriors, medics, or wanderers. The question is not whether they count as people. In any settlement of the Law, they do.
Android psionics require a technological interface. Without such hardware, the miasma is something they can measure or endure, not something they channel biologically.
Cyborgs
Cyborgs begin with organic life and add machine Lattice. The augmentation may be crude, elegant, voluntary, desperate, inherited, or half-understood.
A cyborg character should answer:
- What part of you is machine?
- Who maintains it?
- What does it let you do?
- What does it interfere with?
- Do others see the augmentation as repair, power, shame, or proof of status?
Cyborgs retain biological contact with the miasma, but machinery can enhance, distort, focus, or suppress that contact.
Hidden or restricted peoples
Some branches of sapience are not normal starting options because ordinary surface characters do not know enough about them. The World Master may open such options for a specific campaign, but the default Player's Handbook does not treat them as common choices.
Building a character from origin
Use origin and people to make the character concrete:
- Pick one bodily fact others notice.
- Pick one custom from your home.
- Pick one thing your people taught you never to do.
- Pick one reason your character left safety.
- Pick one person or place that could call you home.
Do not use origin to excuse shallow behavior. Sapient peoples in the Lethean Age are people first, even when their bodies and cultures are strange.