Ulaan is full of different sentient races from across the planet that are huddled together (sometimes through tense alliances) in densely packed cities around the Water Towers. The main races who hold power in the world are: Humans, an industrious race of nonmagical creatures that live throughout the world. Through training or otherworldly means, they can learn to wield magic. Elves, the magical masters of water, and the upper crust of modern society. They have the magic that can create water from the stone of the towers and have a stranglehold on the lower classes by controlling the flow of water. Orcs, elves that were strengthened and changed by the power of solar magic. They are shunned by elf society and have spent centuries carving out a niche for themselves through alliance and trade. Beetles, a race of sentient bipedal bugs that can survive the harsh desert. Once viewed as barbarians and raiders, in reality, they were defending their homeland from colonial states trying to steal resources from the desert. Now countless centuries-old wars have been tentatively put aside as the two societies slowly mesh. Steelborn, a race of magical machines that can build complex technology and have an intuitive knowledge of the ebbs and flows of magic across the planet. Mechanix can be ancient or newly made. Steelborn see the creation of a new sentient machine as important as the birth of a child.