The Peoples

Not everything that walks and speaks in the present world descended from the old world's biology. The pre-apocalyptic civilization created things -- or things arose from what it left behind -- that persist as distinct lineages. Nobody alive remembers the distinctions the old world drew, but the differences are real and visible. The branches of sapience are not a cultural classification. They are a material classification. What an entity is made of determines how it interacts with the Substrate, how it ages, how it reproduces, and how it can be hurt.

The Unremembered Peoples

Three lineages persist in the present world that were manufactured, synthesized, or engineered by the old world rather than evolved. The present world takes them as they are. The old world's reasons for creating them are lost.

Rur

The Rur are synthetic organisms made entirely of biological material. Flesh, bone, blood, organs: all present, all functional, none evolved. They were grown, not born: the crowning achievement of the Flourishing's confidence in biological mastery (see The True History, "The Upvolving"). Vat-grown, template-designed, industrially manufactured. The name comes from a fragment found in a data core; nobody knows what it originally meant. (The bibliography knows: Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920. The play is the source.)

Rur are indistinguishable from organic beings at a glance. They breathe, eat, bleed, and age (though slowly). What sets them apart is uniformity. Rur do not vary the way naturally evolved populations do. Their biology is engineered to a template. Two Rur from the same production line, separated by geological ages, are more alike than siblings.

Rur interact with the miasma the same way organic life does. They can develop psionic ability, acquire mutations, and adapt to local nanite profiles. The miasma does not distinguish between evolved and manufactured flesh. In every mechanical sense, a Rur is a biological entity: one whose baseline was designed rather than inherited.

Whether present-day Rur populations are continuous lineages from before the Catastrophe, accidental products of Fallen Redoubt manufacturing systems still running ancient protocols, or something stranger entirely is an open question, and one no living Rur can answer. Some Rur are aware of their manufactured nature. Most are not. The knowledge, where it exists, is passed down in fragmentary oral tradition within Rur communities. It changes nothing about daily survival.

Androids

The Androids are machines. Metal, polymer, circuitry, and a synthetic cognitive Lattice that enables sapience. They are not alive in any biological sense. They do not eat, breathe, or bleed. They can be damaged and repaired, but they do not heal.

Androids are relics, or descendants of relics, of the old world's engineering. Their synthetic brains are not computers in the modern sense of computation that the old world would have meant by the word. They are something else, something the old world built that nobody alive understands anymore. An android thinks, speaks, and makes decisions. Whether it feels is a question that android philosophers have debated for longer than any organic civilization has existed.

Androids do not interact with the miasma biologically. They cannot develop psionic ability through passive exposure the way organic life does. Their cognitive Lattice can be designed or modified to interface with the nanoscale machines, but this is a technological capability, not a biological one. An android with a miasma-interface module can channel psionics, but the mechanism is fundamentally different from an organic channeler. The miasma is a tool to them, not a symbiont. This is why an Android Cultivator (see The Pacific Northwest) is such a natural pairing: the Android is already a Lattice-resident; the Lattice is the Cultivator's domain.

Androids do not age, but they degrade. Components wear, power systems deplete, and synthetic brain Lattice accumulates errors over geological time. An android that has existed since the old world is not the same entity it was: it has been repaired, replaced, and patched so many times that the question of continuity is philosophical, not technical.

Cyborgs

A Cyborg is an organic being -- born, not manufactured -- that has been mechanically augmented. The base organism may be a natural descendant of pre-apocalyptic life, a Rur, or even (theoretically) a non-sapient creature that was surgically enhanced. What matters is that the starting point is biological and the augmentation is mechanical.

Cyborg augmentation ranges from crude (a scavenged metal arm bolted to a stump) to sophisticated (pre-apocalyptic implants found in ruins and grafted by a skilled medic). The augmentations interact with the host's biology in unpredictable ways, especially in the presence of the miasma. A cybernetic implant in a high-nanite zone may behave differently than the same implant in a dead zone: the miasma can interface with the mechanical components in ways nobody planned for.

Cyborgs retain their biological capacity for psionic channeling, modified by their augmentations. Some augmentations enhance psionic ability (antenna-like implants that improve miasma reception). Others suppress it (dense metallic shielding that blocks nanite interaction). The interaction between flesh, machine, and miasma is the cyborg's defining tension.

The distinction matters

These three categories are not cultural identities. They are material facts about what an entity is made of and how it interacts with the world.

A Rur who receives a cybernetic augmentation becomes a cyborg. An android cannot become a cyborg (no organic base to augment). A cyborg who replaces enough biology with machinery is still a cyborg until nothing organic remains -- at which point the distinction is academic and the entity is, functionally, an android. These edge cases exist. The world does not enforce clean categories.

The Splintering

Over geological time, the descendants of pre-apocalyptic humanity did not remain one species. The miasma, combined with radical environmental divergence and the sheer scale of elapsed time, split organic humanity into distinct branches. Nobody chose this. Nobody planned it. It happened the way speciation always happens: isolation, pressure, time.

The Eloi

In places where the miasma is thick and the old technology still hums beneath the surface -- deep ruins with intact power, sealed habitats where nanite density is orders of magnitude above the ambient -- clusters of humanity survived in something approaching comfort. Over the ages, these populations adapted to their rich environments. They are graceful, long-lived, and deeply attuned to the miasma. Their psionic potential is extraordinary.

They are also fragile. Generations of survival inside miasma-saturated holdouts produced beings optimized for that specific environment. Outside their enclaves, where miasma concentrations drop to normal levels, the Eloi are vulnerable -- physically weak, sensorily overwhelmed, and unable to sustain the psionic baseline their biology assumes. They do not leave their holdouts lightly.

The name is not what they call themselves. It is a label applied by outsiders who trade with them, marvel at them, and occasionally pity them. Nobody alive knows where the word came from. (The bibliography knows: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895.)

The Morlocks

Where the Eloi adapted to abundance, the Morlocks adapted to scarcity, but a specific scarcity. In the deep places, the underground warrens, the collapsed infrastructure strata where sunlight never reaches, other populations of humanity diverged in the opposite direction. They are powerful, dense-boned, enduring, and aggressive. They thrive in darkness, in tunnels, in the crushing pressure of deep ruins.

Morlocks are miasma-dependent in their own way. Their biology is tuned to the specific nanite profiles of the deep strata: heavy in certain colors, absent in others. A Morlock on the surface, in open air, under sunlight, in a different miasma profile, is not just uncomfortable. It is terrified. The wrongness is physiological. The ambient nanite signature is alien to every cell in its body.

Morlocks are sapient. They build, they speak, they organize. They are not monsters. But their relationship with surface-dwellers is defined by mutual incomprehension and the brute fact that each thrives in conditions the other finds intolerable.

The Beastfolk

The seeds of the Beastfolk were planted during the Upvolving -- first the military canine enhancement programs, then broader animal uplift efforts, then the weaponization cascade that turned enhancement into arms race. The Beastfolk are sapient beings descended from non-human animals, pushed toward intelligence by deliberate engineering and then further shaped by geological ages of miasma saturation.

Beastfolk are not beast-shaped humans. They are not furries, not anthropomorphic cartoons. They are what you get when a canid or a corvid or a cephalopod lineage is subjected to deliberate cognitive enhancement followed by millions of years of miasma-driven evolution while retaining its original body plan. A Beastfolk derived from raptor stock thinks differently than one derived from ursine stock, and both think differently than any branch of humanity. The cognitive architecture is alien even when the vocabulary is shared.

Whether any present-day Beastfolk lineage is a direct continuation of an Upvolving-era enhanced species, a product of miasma-driven wild uplift during the Long Dark, or something that walked out of a Fallen Redoubt's bio-factory last century is -- like most questions about origins in this world -- unanswerable. The ambiguity is load-bearing. Every Beastfolk community can have whatever origin serves the story, and none of them contradict canon.

Beastfolk are the fourth leg of the stool. Where Eloi represent humanity refined by abundance, and Morlocks represent humanity hardened by depth, and baseline surface-dwellers represent humanity muddling through, Beastfolk represent intelligence arriving from an entirely different starting point. They are a warped reflection: recognizably sapient, unmistakably other.

Cargo cults

All four branches -- surface humanity, Eloi, Morlocks, and Beastfolk -- practice what an old-world anthropologist would recognize as cargo cult behavior. They find artifacts. They do not understand the artifacts. They build rituals around the artifacts.

An Eloi enclave that discovered a functioning climate control system may have developed an elaborate set of practices -- gestures, sequences, taboos -- for interacting with it. The practices work, in the sense that the climate control continues to function. But the Eloi do not understand why they work. The ritual and the engineering are fused. Deviate from the ritual and you risk losing the miracle.

Morlocks maintain deep-ruin machinery through procedures that are half maintenance protocol and half religious observance. Beastfolk bands pass down tool-use traditions that mix genuine technique with pure superstition in ways that no practitioner can untangle. Surface-dwellers treat data cores as oracles and pre-apocalyptic signage as prophecy.

These cargo cults are not ignorance. They are rational responses to inheriting technology you cannot understand. When the only record of how something works is "my grandmother did it this way and it worked," you do it that way. You do not experiment. Experimentation broke the last village's water purifier and everyone died. Treat the cargo cults seriously. Their rituals are real engineering encoded in tradition. The respect they ask for is earned.

The Vril-ya

There is a fifth branch. Nobody alive on the surface knows about it.

Deep beneath the deepest Morlock warrens, below the geological strata where even the most ambitious scavengers stop digging, lies The Last Redoubt: not a vault like Project Challenger's crude survival bunkers, but a civilization. A self-sustaining subterranean domain, maintained not by cargo cult ritual but by genuine understanding. The Vril-ya are what humanity was at its absolute peak, and they went underground on purpose, before the Catastrophe, with the full knowledge and technology of the old world intact. (See The True History, "The Withdrawal." The name comes from Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, 1871.)

They did not forget. They did not degrade. They chose to seal themselves away, and they had the resources to make that seal hold across geological time. Their mastery of both technology and psionics is complete. Where the Eloi channel the miasma instinctively and the Morlocks endure it physiologically, the Vril-ya command it. They understand the Substrate because their ancestors built it, layer upon desperate layer, from nanites to picites to femtites, triage that became atmosphere. The miasma is not a mystery to them. It is infrastructure.

The Vril-ya are not fragile. They are not specialized into vulnerability. At the molecular level, they are more than human: their genome carries eight encoding pairs where baseline humanity has four. The additional four "vril pairs" are a deliberate self-engineering achievement: doubled informational bandwidth that enables psionic architecture, cellular regeneration, and cognitive structures that no four-pair organism can express. They are, by any measure the surface world could apply, superhuman: physically capable, psionically dominant, technologically literate. They are what the Challenger vaults tried to preserve and failed to. The Vril-ya succeeded.

They call the structures they left behind on the surface the Fallen Redoubts (see The Land) -- husks of their former surface infrastructure, still running on automatic, still disgorging armies on incomprehensible schedules. The surface peoples treat them as wonders and terrors. The Vril-ya treat them as abandoned equipment.

And they want the surface back.

The quiet emergence

The Vril-ya are not invading. Not yet. They are emerging: slowly, carefully, through tunnels and passages that open into deep ruins. Their scouts move through Morlock territory like ghosts. They observe. They collect data. They assess. The surface world is alien to them, not because they cannot survive in it, but because it is occupied, and the occupants are, from the Vril-ya perspective, feral descendants of the civilization they preserved.

The Vril-ya do not hate the surface peoples. They regard them the way a returning homeowner regards squatters: with a mix of pity, irritation, and absolute certainty of their own prior claim.

What the players know

No NPC in the game world knows the Vril-ya exist. There are no legends, no rumors, no faction lore about them. What exists are anomalies: data core fragments that reference sealed deep-infrastructure projects with no follow-up records, Morlock accounts of tunnels that were open last season and are now sealed with materials no one recognizes, ruins where the dust patterns suggest recent passage but no footprints are visible.

Players will encounter these anomalies. The game will not explain them. The Vril-ya are a thread that runs beneath the entire narrative, surfacing in cryptic references, inexplicable events, and eventually, direct contact. Whether that contact is hostile, cooperative, or something more complicated is the central question of the main game's plot.

Protagonist or antagonist

The Vril-ya are not coded as villains. They are not coded as saviors. They are a civilization that preserved itself perfectly and is now confronting the fact that the world moved on without them. Their claim to the surface is legitimate: they are the inheritors of the old world in a way no other branch is. But so is the surface world's claim to the life it has built in their absence.

A player may align with the Vril-ya. A player may oppose them. A player may try to broker between them and the surface world. The game does not decide this. The game presents the dilemma and lets the player respond.

Why no one talks about them

The Vril-ya's secrecy is not magical. It is operational. They are a technologically superior civilization with complete control of their environment, operating in terrain (deep subterranean infrastructure) that surface peoples cannot access and Morlocks access only partially. Their scouts are equipped to avoid detection. Their installations are shielded. The few Morlocks who have stumbled into Vril-ya territory did not return, and Morlocks who go missing in the deep is not news.

The name "Vril-ya" will not appear in any in-game text until the player is deep enough in the main storyline to encounter it directly. Before that, they are just gaps in the data. Things that do not add up.

The branches of sapience

The first four branches coexist alongside Rur, Androids, and Cyborgs. The mega-cities (see Project Challenger and The Law) contain all of them. The Law and the mental factions are what make that coexistence possible. The fifth branch is not part of that coexistence. Not yet.

Cross-references

• The True History -- where each branch came from in the timeline.
• The Substrate -- how each branch interfaces with the miasma.
• The Land -- the Fallen Redoubts the Vril-ya left behind, and the geographies the Splintering branches inhabit.
• Project Challenger and The Law -- the compact that makes mixed settlements possible.
• Player's Handbook: Origins and Peoples -- the in-setting view of Rur, Androids, Cyborgs, and the visible branches.
• rulebooks/0-lore.md sec. 0.5, 0.6 -- regulations-voice source.