Sigil:Peoples

Sigil Lands

Kingdoms are drawn upon maps. Peoples are written into the land more deeply: in language, custom, memory, food, faith, grudges, songs, and the stories told beside the fire.

From the Book of Kindreds: No folk may be understood by measuring the length of its bones, the shape of its ears, or the color of its skin. Ask instead what it remembers, what it fears, what it owes, and what it teaches its children.

Peoples of the Sigil Lands

The Sigil Lands are home to several great peoples, each with histories extending far beyond the borders of the kingdoms they presently inhabit. Each has its own understanding of kinship, honor, faith, death, memory, work, and the unseen world. Some have lived in the Sigil Lands since before Rhone chroniclers kept written histories. Others arrived during the migrations and upheavals that followed the elder wars. Their histories often overlap, and often violently.

The Rhone

The Rhone are the most numerous people of the central Sigil Lands and the founders of most of its present kingdoms. Their history is one of tribes becoming baronies, baronies becoming kingdoms, kingdoms breaking apart, and new crowns rising upon the ruins.

Rhone culture varies enormously from realm to realm. An Angharan knight, a Rhessian freeholder, a Sarrivellan sea captain, and a Brannach oathkeeper may all be Rhone while disagreeing about nearly everything else.

Among the institutions most strongly associated with Rhone civilization are feudal lordship, knighthood, guilds, written law, hereditary titles, and the great organized faiths of the present age.

The Seylandri

The Seylandri are the oldest surviving people openly known in the Sigil Lands. Long-lived, private, and deeply bound to the Saël, they remember events that other peoples know only through legend.

Once their forests covered an immense portion of the continent. The Great Wrath shattered that world. Today most Seylandri dwell within hidden Seylannon, while Wayfarers occasionally travel beyond its borders. Their relationship with song is unlike that of any other people.

Memory Songs preserve places, events, and histories.

Craft Songs shape living things through the Saël.

Unmaking Songs are rare, feared works capable of undoing what song has made.

Because of their great longevity, Seylandri sometimes call shorter-lived peoples mayflies. The word need not be contemptuous. To a Seylandri, it may simply describe an obvious and melancholy fact.

The Vulkah

The Vulkah are the people of the mountains and deep places. Their oldest traditions say that their ancestors came upward from beneath the world after some disaster whose nature they rarely discuss with outsiders. Vulkah society is built around great extended families called Septs, craftsmanship, endurance, memory, and the keeping of promises.

They are renowned as smiths, miners, masons, and builders, but no Vulkah is defined simply by a trade. Their fortress-cities, burial customs, religious traditions, and communal histories make them a civilization distinct from any Rhone kingdom.

A promise spoken by a Vulkah may be carved into stone. Stone, they say, remembers.

The Tobon

The Tobon are a small folk found both upon the roads and in settled communities throughout the Sigil Lands. Some are Wanderfolk, traveling in caravans as tinkers, merchants, entertainers, craftsmen, messengers, and traders. Others are Stayfolk, living in established neighborhoods, villages, farms, and towns.

Both have survived in a world dominated by larger peoples through adaptability, community, wit, practicality, and a willingness to use tricks when straightforward strength will not do. For this reason, many Tobon have a special affection for Lalochai, the Laughing Knife: trickster, jester, satirist, and patron of victories won by brain over brawn.

The Uragh

The Uragh are a tall, powerful people whose greatest homeland is Kuragh Torrh. They are traditionally associated with clan life, long marches, open skies, fierce personal honor, and an extraordinary cultural emphasis upon truth.

Their history with the Rhone is long and bloody. Uragh warbands have invaded settled lands, served foreign kings, fought one another, defended their own territories, and marched against enemies no southern army wished to face. They are not naturally riders. Horses dislike them intensely, and Uragh warfare developed accordingly around endurance, marching, spear fighting, and the ability to cross enormous distances on foot.

Among many Uragh, Rhugash the Marauder remains the great Power of war, fire, courage, and truth.

The Gholibin

The Gholibin are among the oldest survivors of the Sigil Lands. Small, sharp-toothed, ingenious, irreverent, and extraordinarily difficult to frighten into silence, they once marched in hosts of almost unimaginable size.

During the Numberless Wars, their armies were remembered by their enemies as the Numberless Horde. The later stereotype of the Gholibin as cowardly creatures is badly mistaken. A Gholibin might mock a king, a saint, a monster, or a Dragha if the joke seemed worth making. Whether doing so is wise is another matter.

Their philosophy of fate is captured in the word skûr — pronounced skoor. Things happen. Fortune turns. Plans fail. Death eventually wins. And yet, here we are.

Gholibin humor is therefore not merely entertainment. It is survival sharpened into philosophy.

Kindred and Kingdom

People and political allegiance are not the same thing. A Rhone may be Angharan, Rhessian, Calaline, Sarrivellan, Neydran, Brannach, Mazarine, or something else entirely. Tobon communities exist throughout many kingdoms. Seylandri Wayfarers travel far beyond Seylannon. Gholibin settlements may lie beneath or beside lands claimed by Rhone nobles who scarcely know they are there.

Vulkah merchants, Uragh mercenaries, Tobon caravans, and mixed neighborhoods make the great cities considerably less uniform than their rulers sometimes pretend. The question “What are you?” may therefore have several answers. Kindred. Kingdom. Clan. Faith. Guild. Household. Company. All may matter.

Customs and Difference

The peoples of the Sigil Lands do not share a single culture. Ideas of hospitality, marriage, inheritance, law, religion, property, vengeance, rank, and acceptable behavior may change dramatically within a few days' journey. Some things that seem perfectly ordinary in one kingdom may be insulting, unlawful, or incomprehensible in another. For travelers, learning such differences is not merely polite. It may be essential.

Further Reading

• Gazetteer — The kingdoms and regions in which these peoples live.
• Faiths and Powers — The religious traditions of the Sigil Lands.
• History — The migrations, wars, and catastrophes that shaped the Kindreds.
• Life in the Sigil Lands — Customs, law, trade, hospitality, and daily life.
• Languages and Literacy — Speech, writing, and education among the peoples of the Lands.

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A kingdom may fall in an afternoon. A people usually takes much longer.

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