Urman - Cilanis
“They emerged from the fog, low and crouching, their yellow eyes glinting like wildfire in the dusk. There were four of them, silent, watching. I dared not speak, for fear my voice would name me prey. It is said the Urmans can smell fear. I do not know if that is true. But I know what it felt like, to be seen by one.”
“Later, I learned they were not hunters that night, but sentries. They had let us pass. Not out of weakness, but choice. That knowledge has haunted me since.”
Introduction
The Urmans are a species caught between worlds, beast and person, wilderness and war, memory and myth. They are known across Arora as clawed folk, jungle-dwellers, brutes, or worse. To many, they resemble twisted shadows of humanity, snouted, clawed, furred. To some, they are mistaken, or slandered, as kin to the Rorcans, those infamous warped beasts of ancient sin. And yet, none of these labels suffice. The Urmans are more than appearance, and far older than rumour.
They dwell primarily in the dense jungles and sun-dappled riverlands of southwestern Erothi, though they also roam the storm-hardened islands of Carthia and the wide plains of Rakhana, where nomadic clans follow herds like the wind. Their lives are tribal, their knowledge oral, and their customs opaque to most outsiders, particularly to the human settlers who, like my own people of Carthia, have spent centuries trying to live alongside them. Peace, when it exists, is uneasy. Memory runs deep, and blood deeper still.
To write of the Urmans is to write of a people rarely seen clearly. They are viewed through bars and barricades, spoken of in hushed tones, remembered not for treaties or inventions, but for skirmishes and raids, often provoked, seldom forgiven. Yet the scholar must go further. Beneath the fur lies thought. Behind the claws, intention. In their songs, though few humans have heard them, are stories of forests born before our towers, and rivers that once knew no bridges. Their language may be rough, their dress wild, but their world is rich with order and meaning, as alien to us as ours is to them.
They are neither noble savages nor monsters. They are survivors. Some have adapted to life among humans, labourers, guards, even soldiers, though they rarely rise far. Others remain in the hinterlands, where their tribes whisper to the old gods and paint their dreams in ochre on bark and bone. Many kingdoms and empires claim dominion over their vast lands; the Urmans, for the most part, ignore such claims. Not out of rebellion, but because they simply do not matter. The forest still grows. The mountains do not bow. The Urmans endure.
In this chronicle, I have endeavoured to present the Urmans not as they are feared to be, but as they are: a people of strength, strangeness, and story. What follows is no romantic fantasy, but a record of observation, research, and, I admit, no small amount of apprehension. For to study the Urman is to confront the beast that others see, and ask what part of it lives within ourselves.
Mechanics
Uncommon Humanoid Mammalian
Source: Arora
The Urmans are a bestial species of upright mammalian humanoids, distinguished by their coarse fur, clawed hands, and the deep wariness with which most civilised folk regard them. Their physiology evokes comparisons to both apes and wild canines, and their wide-set jaws, protruding brows, and sloped snouts have led to a persistent and false belief that they share lineage with the Rorcans, a race universally reviled for its monstrous deformity and cruel history. No evidence supports this claim. Yet the rumour lingers, poisoning wells and tempering justice in many a courtroom.
Urmans are physically formidable, built low to the ground but with extraordinary strength and resilience. Their powerful limbs and clawed digits make them adept climbers and formidable in close quarters, especially in wild terrain. Their senses, particularly smell and night vision, are finely tuned to jungle and forest environments. Among human cities, they often labour in menial trades or serve in mercenary companies, seldom entrusted with higher roles. Yet in their own lands, far from stone walls and paved roads, they are artisans, hunters, elders, and warriors of equal merit.
Three major ethnicities of Urman are presently known: the Ralian, who dwell within the forest and jungles all across Erala; the Fraki, a nomadic people of the Rakhani plains, known for their wide-ranging camps and ceremonial migration; and the Altic, a distant cousin of the Fraki home northern to lands so desolate and cold none else could survive it. While differing in culture and accent, all Urmans seem to share the same ancestry and biological foundation.
You Might...
- Fight fiercely to defend your people, your tribe, or your place in a world that rarely welcomes you.
- Revere nature and the spirits of land and sky, seeking their guidance in silence and signs.
- Struggle to navigate human cities where fear greets your face more often than words.
- Take pride in your body’s strength, your claws’ precision, and your people’s endurance.
Others Probably...
- Assume you are violent, dull-witted, or born of cursed blood.
- Fear your appearance and avoid your company, especially in civilised settings.
- Underestimate your intelligence, assuming silence is ignorance.
- Respect your work ethic and strength, but hesitate to trust you with authority.
Physical Description
Urmans are compact and muscular, typically standing between 1.5-1.7 meters tall. Their bodies are covered in coarse fur, varying from dark brown and black to mottled grey, rust-red, or bone-white. Many exhibit stripes, rosettes, or streaks unique to their bloodline, used to identify tribal lineage or ancestral ties. Their heads are broad and bestial, with flat noses, large almond eyes (often amber or green), and pointed ears that pivot to track sound. Their jaws are strong, with prominent canines suited to both speech and savagery.
Clawed hands and feet grant them excellent traction and climbing ability, though their hands retain enough dexterity to craft, write, and fight with tools. Their posture is hunched but upright, and in motion they often lope or crouch low, conserving energy through economical movement. Despite their strength, Urmans are surprisingly quiet when moving through familiar terrain, a trait that unnerves those who meet them in the wilds.
Society
Urman societies are built around kinship and mutual survival. Most live in tribes, some nomadic, others semi-permanent, structured around elder councils and communal decision-making. Clans often maintain strict taboos concerning hospitality, territory, and the treatment of prey. Leadership is earned through wisdom and deed rather than inheritance. Both men and women hunt, build, raise children, and lead, though traditions may vary between ethnicities.
Their societies favour oral tradition, artistic storytelling, and spiritual connection to land, beast, and sky. Though often dismissed as primitive by outsiders, Urman tribes maintain complex codes of conduct and governance, with ritual playing a central role in diplomacy, justice, and memory.
Those Urmans who live within human settlements often exist in marginalised communities, finding work as dockhands, guards, gladiators, or trackers. Others attempt integration, though few are welcomed. A rare few rise to prominence, but always carry the weight of their kin behind them, often as shield, sometimes as burden.
Beliefs
Most Urmans follow forms of Arorism rooted in animism and ancestral reverence. Spirits of the land, sky, and beast are called upon through dance, song, or ritual marking. Each clan maintains its own oral ancestral chains, passed from elder to child. Many believe that Siriat once walked among their kind, shaping the wild places and guiding them to harmony with the world. Sacred groves, caves, and stones are honoured across generations, and some tribes believe the dead become wind, animal, or storm, watching the living from afar.
These beliefs are often dismissed as superstition by outsiders, yet their influence permeates every Urman act, from the way they bury their dead to the way they refuse to overhunt a herd, lest the balance turn. Among urbanised Urmans, belief varies; some cling to their rites, others abandon them for survival or scorn.
Popular Edicts
- Defend your kin, tribe, or clan without hesitation.
- Take only what is needed from the land, never more.
- Honour the memory of ancestors through strength and story.
- Respect the balance between prey, hunter, and spirit.
Popular Anathema
- Kill for pleasure or sport.
- Speak falsely of your tribe or deny your kin in times of hardship.
- Violate sacred ground or dishonour the rites of the dead.
- Exploit the land or disfigure its spirit.
Names
Urman names reflect nature, ancestry, and personal deeds. A full name may include a given name, a patronymic (e.g., -son, -dotter), and a tribal or clan name. Names often draw from animals, plants, or natural phenomena, names such as Kurok Redpaw or Kaida Stormborn are not uncommon. Among nomadic clans, names may shift with life stages or achievements. Urban Urmans may adopt shortened or translated names to avoid discrimination, though doing so is seen by some as a form of quiet mourning.
Sample Names: Kurok, Arjun, Kaida, Sariel, Yarka, Voktan, Isha, Brel, Redpaw, Dusktalon, Emberhide
Urman Mechanics
- Hit Points: 10
- Size: Medium
- Speed: 25 feet
- Lifespan: 75 years (average)
- Available Ethnicities: [Altic - Urman Ethnicity] [Fraki - Urman Ethnicity] [Ralian - Urman Ethnicity]
- Attribute Boosts: Strength, Free
- Attribute Flaw: Intelligence
- Senses: Darkvision
- Traits: Humanoid, Mammalian
- Jungle-Born Climber: You ignore difficult terrain caused by foliage and undergrowth, and gain a Climb speed of 10 feet.
- Hunter’s Nose: You gain a +2 circumstance bonus to Perception checks involving scent, and can use scent to track creatures in survival checks.
- Lowland Adaptation: You take no penalties from Hot weather or Heavy Rain while travelling unarmoured or lightly armoured.
“They shed their skin in silence. Patches of fur fall like burnt leaves, and what emerges beneath is the adult: leaner, sharper, eyes no longer wide but narrowed by knowing. I have seen it only once, an adolescent crouched by the river, tearing his own childhood from his back like a thing too small to wear.”
Biology
The Urman body is a living record of adaptation, every claw, muscle, and sinew shaped by the demands of a life lived close to tooth and root. Though superficially similar to humanoid species such as humans or Kathuri, the Urmans retain many physiological markers of their mammalian ancestry: fur, claws, snout, and jaw. Unlike the Lizvar, who wear their reptilian strength as armour, or the Paokus, who move like wind-drawn silhouettes, the Urmans are earthbound, solid, dense, and wild of form.
They are not brutish, as some claim. They are built for survival in a world that often offers only teeth in return. Compact yet powerful, agile yet grounded, their biology betrays none of the slowness often ascribed to them in cities. Rather, theirs is a form that knows how to run, climb, strike, and vanish before the mind has caught up.
Urman anatomy is defined by low height, high strength, and anatomical efficiency. Their thick bones and dense musculature give them exceptional resilience and physical force, especially in short bursts. Their arms and legs are proportionally longer than a human’s relative to torso length, allowing for enhanced climbing ability. Their clawed feet can grip bark and rock alike, and many Urmans will crouch or perch when at rest, conserving energy in positions that appear unnatural to others.
Hands are broad and padded, with thick claws in place of nails, dexterous enough to tie sinew, wield a bow, or carve symbols, though perhaps not for fine calligraphy. Their tails are vestigial in some bloodlines, more prominent in others, often used for balance or ritual ornamentation. Internal physiology suggests a heightened capacity for anaerobic exertion, Urmans tire slowly, and recover quickly.
Urmans reproduce sexually and give live birth after a gestation period of roughly eight months. Litters of 1–3 cubs are common, with larger births regarded as auspicious or spiritually significant. Infants are born with soft, fine fur and closed eyes, completely dependent on the tribe for survival. Nursing and early education are communal responsibilities, though mothers take primary roles in bonding and instruction until the cubs can walk unaided.
Names are often given days or even weeks after birth, following signs from dreams, the behaviour of local animals, or the first words spoken by the child. It is not uncommon for a cub to bear one name in early life, and another upon reaching adulthood.
Urmans reach physical maturity by the age of 14–15, at which point they undergo what their people call “the thickening”, a period of physical transformation wherein their juvenile fur is shed and replaced with their adult coat. This process may last several weeks and is often accompanied by restlessness, aggression, or ritual solitude. In some tribes, the first complete shedding is celebrated with a night of silent vigils and a ceremonial hunt.
They live, on average, to around 75 years, though some tribal elders have been known to surpass 90. Physical decline is slow and graceful. An elder is not expected to lead hunts, but to advise them, by scent, memory, and story.
Urmans are highly responsive to environmental change. Their fur thickens in colder seasons, particularly in northern bloodlines, and lightens in colour and density in heat. Some Fraki nomads even experience seasonal colour-shifts, with reddish tints in summer and grey in winter. In the deep jungle, Ralian Urmans have adapted to humidity by developing shorter coats and skin beneath that resists fungal infection and parasitic infestation.
In extreme cold, some Urmans, particularly of Altic stock, enter states of partial hibernation, conserving energy and reducing caloric need for weeks at a time. Such states are rarely observed in urban Urmans, where diet and shelter have changed the rhythm of life, but the instinct remains beneath the surface.
Among many human scholars, Urmans have been historically underestimated in terms of cognitive complexity. This is, bluntly, a mistake. Their intelligence is not easily measured in civilised terms, but it is no less present. They are deeply knowledgeable in herbal lore, terrain mapping, weather prediction, and animal behaviour, skills passed down through oral transmission and lived experience rather than formal instruction.
Their memory systems are social, not archival: stories sung and retold, dances that encode historical migrations, tattoos and paint that mark bloodlines and treaties. Their language may seem blunt, but its structure allows for layered meaning through gesture, breath, and rhythm. When an Urman tells a tale, it is not only heard, it is seen, smelled, and remembered in the body.
In truth, their intelligence may be no less than ours, only shaped by different needs, and different fears.
“They carry their knowledge in teeth and story, not scroll. They do not write. They remember. And so long as the fire burns and breath flows, nothing is truly forgotten.”
Appearance and Adaptation
The Urman body is not one that was shaped for cities. Their form is rough-hewn, powerful, and practical, adapted to vine, claw, and canopy rather than marble stair or crowded street. They appear to many as brutes or beasts, but such impressions are reflections of the viewer, not the viewed. To an Urman, the body is not a tool to be honed or shaped into beauty, but a vessel of utility, ancestry, and resilience. Theirs is a form that carries generations in the curve of the spine and the twist of the ears.
Despite assumptions of sameness, great variation exists among Urmans across Arora. Differences in fur texture, posture, facial structure, and size emerge between jungle-born Ralian, northern Altic, and plains-ranging Fraki. Some stand upright and proud like any city-dweller, while others move in crouches or low paces more suited to stalk or spring. What binds them all is motion, every Urman moves as though the world might bite, and they must always be ready to bite back.
The average Urman stands between 1.4 and 1.7 meters tall, though their hunched posture and lowered gait can make them appear shorter. Broad-shouldered and deep-chested, they possess dense musculature packed into compact frames. Their limbs are long and slightly bowed, optimised for climbing, lunging, and grappling. The hands and feet are clawed, with thick pads for traction. When moving through the jungle or brush, their balance and reflexes rival that of any cat or primate.
Urbanised Urmans often adapt their gait and bearing to appear less threatening, standing straighter, keeping claws sheathed, and dressing more heavily to mask their fur. Among tribes, however, posture is expressive. To crouch is to show humility or focus. To rise fully is a sign of challenge or ritual address.
Urman faces walk the line between beast and man. Broad muzzles with flat noses, strong jaws, and exposed canines dominate their profile. Eyes are typically wide and slanted, with reflective irises in hues of yellow, gold, green, or deep brown. Ears sit high on the skull, long and pointed, capable of rotating independently to track sound. Though their faces lack the full range of human expression, their body language and vocal inflection compensate with layered nuance.
Facial markings, natural or applied, are culturally significant. Scars are sometimes ritually enhanced with dye or ash. Tribal Urmans often wear paint to denote rank, age, or ritual state. Jewellery, when worn, favours bone, claw, or carved wood over metal. Urban Urmans may pierce or file their teeth to conform more closely to human expectations, though among kin such practices are controversial.
Fur covers the Urman body in varying density and colour, influenced by climate, ancestry, and diet. Most common are shades of dark brown, black, and ash-grey, though ochre, sandy red, and ivory have been recorded. Some Fraki clans are known for rosetted or striped markings; Ralian herders often display pale dorsal bands. Altic Urmans frequently have longer fur around the neck and shoulders, creating a ruff-like silhouette used to signal aggression or display.
In tribal settings, fur is kept neat but not styled. Grooming is communal, and shared brushing or combing often serves as a social act. Ritual shearing is performed during times of mourning, penance, or rebirth. Urbanised Urmans may trim or bind their fur for comfort or to reduce confrontation from humans.
Skin beneath the fur is thick and resilient, typically dark in tone and highly scar-resistant. Patterns of skin pigmentation, especially along the face and hands, are used in some clans as identifiers, with elders memorising birthmark maps and stripe alignment for genealogical recordkeeping.
“He stood tall when he wanted to frighten us, but I remember the next morning better. He crouched in the shallows, combing another’s back with the slow patience of a father grooming his child. I’d never seen teeth so sharp used for something so gentle.”
Habitat and Lifestyle
The Urmans are not a species shaped by stone. Their lives are carved into bark and bone, their stories traced through root networks and windpaths. They do not conquer landscapes, they grow into them. Whether climbing the moss-hung trees of Erothi, stalking game beneath Carthia’s volcanic canopy, or tracking herds across the Rakhani plains, the Urman is not an intruder in the wild. They are of it.
Each of the three primary ethnicities, Fraki, Altic, and Ralian, has developed ways of living that reflect the specific demands of their environment. Where they build, they do so low and with reverence. Where they wander, they leave no trail but memory. To the Urman, the land is not a possession to be measured or sold, but a partner. And partners, they say, are not to be chained.
Ralian Urmans are most commonly found in the steaming jungles of southwestern Erothi, where dense undergrowth, tangled roots, and thundering rivers define the terrain. Here, they construct homes from woven cane and hollowed trunks, raised on stilts above floodwaters and predator-paths. Tribes gather in clearings around central fire-pits, shaded by palm-frond shelters and spirals of painted stone. Hunting, fishing, and foraging supply the bulk of their food, with game preserved through smoke or buried in cool soil caches.
Altic Urmans, by contrast, dwell in the highland rainforests and volcanic ridges of Carthia and Hyperbol. Their settlements cling to ridgelines, carved into rock faces or sheltered beneath stone overhangs. Altic clans often cultivate small terrace farms, growing root vegetables and spicefruits, while trading carved tools and mineral dyes with coastal communities, if peace allows.
Ralian Urmans are nomadic, following the migration of plains-beasts across Rakhana. Their tents are hide and bone, collapsed and carried on their backs. Camps are erected at nightfall, disassembled by morning. Unlike their forest cousins, Ralians travel in large caravans, coordinated by wind-whistlers and fire-signals. Their culture is oral, migratory, and always moving. The land changes, so they follow.
Urmans are omnivores, and their diets are shaped by region and tradition. Fraki tribes hunt arboreal mammals, trap birds, and fish with woven baskets in jungle streams. They gather fruits, nuts, fungi, and edible roots, often with expert knowledge of seasonal changes and toxic lookalikes. Meat is shared communally, and hunters eat last. Food is not wealth, it is duty made edible.
Altic clans supplement foraged diets with cultivation, including small-scale tuber farming, honey collection, and domestication of jungle pigs and long-legged fowl. Mountain herbs and fermented brews are used in healing and ritual. Meals are often boiled or stewed, served from communal pots over volcanic-heated stones.
Ralian Urmans hunt massive plains-beasts using coordinated ambush and chase tactics. Their diet includes roasted meat, marrow broth, wild grains, and preserved milk from semi-domesticated beasts. Salt, when available, is a sacred trade item, used in both food and funerary rites. Despite their nomadic ways, Ralians carry intricate spice-pouches to maintain continuity of taste and memory.
Urmans exhibit behavioural traits common to social apex-predators: loyalty, territorial instinct, and a pronounced ability to shift between calm and violent states depending on threat perception. Among their own, they are communal, generous, and expressive, using gesture, scent, and posture to communicate nuances that outsiders often misread as aggression. Silence is not hostility. It is caution made visible.
When threatened, Urmans do not bluff. They warn once, then act. In the wild, this has made them formidable defenders of their homes. In human settlements, it makes them feared and sometimes unfairly judged. Many are slow to trust, especially in regions where human expansion has displaced or killed their kin.
They do not kill lightly. To take a life, animal or otherwise, is a weighty act, often followed by ritual cleansing or thanks to the spirit of the fallen. Their minds do not divide the world into predator and prey, but into balance, and brokenness.
Urman social structures are clan-based, flexible, and often matrilineal. Each clan or tribe is led by an elder council, typically composed of the eldest surviving members who still bear full memory of their oral genealogies recited during rites, disputes, and teachings. While elders advise, day-to-day leadership often falls to a hunt-leader or hearthspeaker elected by consensus.
Roles within tribes are based on skill and calling, not gender. Hunters may be female, healers male. Ritualists, scouts, child-rearers, toolwrights, all are chosen by deed. Childrearing is communal, with cubs raised by the hearthgroup rather than strictly by biological parents. Marriage is rarely a formal institution. Bonds form, dissolve, and reform over time, guided more by mutual respect and spiritual compatibility than by law.
In urban settings, social bonds fray. Isolated from their kin and culture, many Urmans form surrogate bands with other outcasts, using language and scent to form new codes of trust. These communities often develop hybrid rites, half-remembered, half-invented, marking birth, mourning, and conflict in ways neither fully human nor wholly Urman.
“In their eyes I saw the wild, not the wilderness of beasts and trees, but of meaning untouched by stone. They were not uncivilised. They were simply not ours.”
Habitat and Lifestyle
The Urmans are a species shaped by landscape. Their bodies and customs bear the mark of the world that forged them, jungles, steppes, and tundras, all written into fur and bone. No single way of life can define them. Each Urman clan adapts to its homeland, living not in defiance of their surroundings but in harmony with them. They build no kingdoms, raise no capitals. Instead, they leave behind quiet traces: woven paths, smoke-beds, ancestor stones beneath the trees. Their civilisation is written not in stone but in silence, repetition, and memory.
Though they share a common ancestry, the three known Urman ethnicities, Ralian, Fraki, and Altic, have each developed distinct lifestyles suited to their environments. Ralians cling to the damp thickets and vine-choked rivers of Erala. Fraki roam the wind-blown plains of central Frakal in wide seasonal circuits. Altic Urmans dwell in the frozen silence of the northern wastes, white-furred shadows among the snows. These lands are hostile to most, but to the Urman, they are home.
Ralian Urmans are the most well-known to human scholars, for it is their lands in Erala, southwestern Erothi, that have long been the site of colonial pressure. They make their homes in the jungle’s layered depths, weaving shelters high into trees or carving semi-subterranean dwellings beneath root networks. Villages tend to be loose and migratory, shifting with river floods, game movements, or the growth patterns of sacred groves. Palm-frond awnings, bamboo scaffolds, and painted bark shrines mark their presence.
Their diet includes river fish, small game, roots, wild fruit, and medicinal fungi, much of which is harvested communally and prepared with regional variations in spice or fermentation. Jungle hunting is highly ritualised, with kill rights and distribution governed by clan custom and local spirits. The land feeds them, and in turn they tend it, through fire-clearing, seasonal foraging limits, and sacred no-hunt zones.
It is the Ralian whose villages are razed by settlers, whose children are taken to be ‘civilised’, and whose warriors are most often branded savage. To understand them requires not only study, but humility.
Fraki Urmans are nomads of the vast grasslands and open forests of central Frakal. Their lives revolve around motion. Camps rise and fall with the seasons, following herds of grazing beasts, shifting water sources, or ancient migration paths carved into memory. They live in collapsible hide tents adorned with carved bone, feather, and flint. Unlike the tightly clustered Ralian jungle communities, Fraki bands can stretch across dozens of kilometres, connected by signal calls, runners, and wind-sign chants passed from rise to rise.
Diet consists of herd meat, root-stalks, wild barley, and preserved marrow stew. Unlike the jungle clans, Fraki culture features open-fire cooking and long communal feasts held under starlight. Their hunts are fast, mobile, and cooperative, often involving coordinated drives and ambushes guided by wind-scent trackers and beast-callers.
To the outsider, they may appear wild and unbound. But their path is precise, shaped by star-charts, weather patterns, and ancestral pacts spoken in thunder and hoofbeat.
Altic Urmans, cousins to the Fraki, live in the freezing northern reaches of Frakal, where trees give way to ice and wind howls without rest. Their fur is white or ashen-grey, thick as felt, with padded claws adapted for traction on snow and stone. They live in cavern-temples, snow-buried domes, and cliffside aeries accessible only to those who know the wind-paths. Fires are small, food is scarce, and survival depends on communal effort and stoic ritual.
The Altic subsist on seal-like icefish, snow hares, frozen berries, and the occasional large beast brought down in coordinated pursuit. They ferment blood into ritual broth, boil bark to create tonic, and use carved ice-lenses to preserve ancestral etchings in frost. Their rites are sombre and slow: memory dances in snow spirals, stories told in shadow flickers. They speak less than the others, but watch more.
Human explorers rarely reach their territories, and fewer return. Those who do often describe the Altic not as beasts, but as ghosts wearing fur.
Urmans are omnivorous, opportunistic, and reverent in their consumption. Their diets vary across regions but share common values: nothing is wasted, and all is shared. Food is rarely stored in abundance; instead, the hunt or harvest is followed by communal preparation and measured distribution. In times of scarcity, elders eat last, or not at all.
Ralian cuisine features fermented roots, pickled grubs, and spice-seared river meat. Fraki Urmans roast marrow bones over fire pits and carry dried trail-paste in woven hide pouches. Altic meals are boiled, salted, and rationed by rite, with shared breath over the pot considered a blessing. Urbanised Urmans adapt to city fare, but often seek out familiar ingredients, smoked meats, bitter greens, or specific spices carried from home.
Across all cultures, eating is not only necessity, it is ritual, remembrance, and communion with the land that feeds them.
Urman psychology is shaped by a deep instinct for interdependence. They are not solitary creatures. Even in silence, they move in relation to others, the elder at the edge of the fire, the sentry pacing the shadows, the cub hidden behind a crouched leg. Survival is not personal. It is tribal. It is shared.
Their emotional range is broad, but often misread. Laughter is rare and sacred. Anger is fast, but burns brief. Grief is marked not by weeping, but by stillness, fur-trimming, and the binding of names into bark. Trust is slow to build, and once broken, difficult to restore. Vengeance, when taken, is methodical, and often generational.
Among themselves, they are tactile, scent-oriented, and highly expressive. Among outsiders, they withdraw. This has led to a perception of them as slow-witted or emotionally stunted. In truth, they are merely cautious. The world has taught them that to be seen is often to be hunted.
Urman society is clanbound but fluid. Leadership is not inherited but earned, through vision, service, memory, or strength. Each tribe maintains its own rites, taboos, and history, though many share a common structure: elders for counsel, speakers for voice, hunters for defence, healers for continuity, and shamans for the unseen. Roles may shift over a lifetime. A hunter who is maimed may become a firekeeper, a child with visions may grow into a barkscribe. Change is natural. Rigidity is not.
Fraki bands often share water rights and hunting grounds in a loose alliance of kin-travellers. Altic clans live in isolated interdependency, bound by snowfall and storm. Ralian tribes, though embattled, preserve complex inter-village protocols regarding marriage, death, and peace. In all cases, community is paramount. To be cast out is considered worse than death, and exile is often mourned as though the person had died.
Among city-bound Urmans, kin networks reform through shared hardship. They create 'shadow-clans', not of blood, but of bond. Within them, old rites echo. New ones emerge.
“The jungle does not build thrones. The plain does not pave roads. The tundra does not raise banners. And yet the Urmans endure in each. If that is not civilisation, what is?”
Culture and Civilisation
The culture of the Urmans is not recorded in scrolls or etched into monuments. It lives in gesture, in shared food, in bark-bound names and ash-ringed fires. To outsiders, especially humans, it appears chaotic, unstructured, or backwards. But what seems like simplicity is, in truth, a different form of complexity: one built not on rule, but rhythm. Not on control, but balance.
Each Urman ethnicity expresses this cultural rhythm in its own way. The Ralian clans of Erala maintain rich oral traditions centred on ancestor spirits and seasonal cycles. The Fraki nomads embed their lore in migration chants, tattoos, and wind-call poetry. The Altic clans, cloaked in frost and silence, carve their memory into ice and bone, preserving stories in flickering firelight and breath-bound vows. These traditions vary in form, but share the same foundation: continuity through voice, not law. Kin above wealth. Balance above dominion.
Across all Urman cultures, storytelling is the lifeblood of history. The Ralians conduct their rituals through call-and-response sagas sung at dusk, passing knowledge from elder to child in layered verses. Tales are often embodied, danced, growled, mimed with claw and shadow. One does not merely hear the past; one lives it, again and again.
Fraki culture blends mobility and remembrance through ritual tattooing and fire-dance. Each migration season begins with a feast and a retelling of the previous year's journeys, marking births, deaths, and spiritual encounters with songs called windstones. Tattoos are both map and journal, no two bodies alike, but all recognisable to the trained eye.
Altic tradition is slow and meditative. Their stories unfold over hours, sometimes days, told in silence broken only by tone-flutes or snow-carved sigils cast into firelight. While less expressive to outsiders, Altic ceremonies carry enormous gravity: each word, pause, and silence weighed by generations. Among them, forgetting is considered a form of spiritual death.
Though outsiders often describe Urman society as primitive, their rituals reveal a highly structured world, just one that exists beyond paper, outside cities, and below the canopy.
The Urman languages are numerous but share a common root family known as Maric. This family divides into three major branches: Ralic (spoken across Erala), Frakari (central Frakal), and Altiri (northern tundra regions). Each is highly tonal, rich in guttural inflections, and layered with metaphor. To speak true Urmani is to paint with breath, and often with gesture, scent, and posture alongside.
Ralian dialects are musical and fast-paced, full of rhythm and repetition. Fraki speech is clipped, syncopated, carried like a chant on the wind. Altic tongues are slow and drawn out, designed to carry meaning across long distances of ice and stone. Many clans use non-verbal sign systems for stealth or sacred communication, especially among scouts and shamans.
Though many Urmans in cities learn Eralic, it is often a second language, and one viewed with caution. Among some older clans, speaking Eralic in sacred spaces is taboo. It is the tongue of conquest, not kin.
Most Urmans follow decentralised forms of Arorism, an animistic, spirit-based faith centred on the worship of land, ancestor, and Siriat. Each tribe interprets these beliefs differently. Among Ralian clans, forest spirits are honoured through offerings of bone, fruit, and song. Each river, tree, and stone may house a presence to be greeted or appeased. Fraki herders leave ash-spirals at seasonal resting grounds, calling wind-spirits to protect the herds and guide the storms. Altic shamans read frost-cracks and animal tracks as messages from the dead, believing the spirits of elders ride in the northern lights and icy winds.
Though they recognise no temples or central clergy, shamans play a key role in spiritual life. They serve as interpreters of vision, keepers of taboo, and midwives to both birth and death. Rituals may involve trance-dance, tattooing, blood-letting, or sky-burning (the release of ash into wind). To dismiss these rites as superstition is common among colonists, but to the Urman, such dismissal is not ignorance. It is sacrilege.
Every Urman culture observes strict taboos, often tied to place, ancestry, and blood. To take more than needed from the land is one of the oldest transgressions. Waste is not merely frowned upon, it is dangerous. The land remembers. Spirits offended may turn silent or vengeful, and a clan out of balance risks famine, disease, or exile.
Other taboos include speaking the name of the dead outside sacred days, shedding blood within certain grove-circles, or killing animals seen in dreams. Among Ralians, to interrupt a recitation of featherline is a grave insult. Among Fraki, to step over a sleeping clanmate without song is to steal part of their soul. Among the Altic, no fire must be lit on the Day of Hollow Winds, lest ancestral voices scatter into oblivion.
Such customs may appear nonsensical to outsiders, but to break them is to fracture the invisible thread that binds the clan to its past, and its future.
“Their rites are neither crude nor simple. They are older than our gods, older than cities, older perhaps than language itself. The Urman does not pray as we do. They remember. And in that remembrance, something divine endures.”
History and Relations
The history of the Urmans does not lie in stone walls or gilded archives. It lies in the echo of bone flutes in the mist, in bark etched with claw, in the stories sung while stirring marrow stew beside a dying fire. Their past is not lost, it is simply not written in ways the Directorate can catalogue. For those who demand dates and declarations, the Urmans offer only lineage, myth, and the memory of migration. It is enough for them. For us? Perhaps not.
What little scholars have gathered suggests the Urmans have dwelled in Arora for longer than any human polity, perhaps since the time before the First Scripts. They do not recall empires, only ages of root and leaf, snow and hoof. Some speak of a time when the Siriat walked among them; others, of a covenant struck with sky and soil that they have upheld even as the rest of the world forgot. They claim no singular homeland, only the land they walk, and the breath they share with it.
The Urmans of Erala, known as Ralians, are the most familiar to human scholars, for they are also the most displaced. Their ancestral jungles in southwestern Erothi were among the first regions “civilised” by early Alemnic expansion. Carthian settler-colonies, with Directorate backing, now cover swathes of former Ralian land. In response, many Ralian tribes were scattered or absorbed. Others resisted, launching raids that, while small, shook the frontier settlements with ferocity and precision. These conflicts birthed the Urman image most prevalent in human cities: snarling, uncultured, dangerous. It is an image born of war, not of truth.
Further north, across the sea in Frakal, the Fraki Urmans roam the vast steppe-lands. Unlike their jungle kin, the Fraki were never conquered. They were simply circumvented. Their mobility makes them impossible to subdue, and their culture, built around swift migration, herd-driving, and mounted ambush, grants them a unique resilience. Clad in wind-wrapped leathers and bearing spears tipped in stone and iron, they ride the horizon like ghosts. Their society is warrior-poetic, bound by blood-oath and sky-lore. They do not raid for conquest, they raid for honour, survival, and song.
In the frozen reaches of northern Frakal, the Altic Urmans endure a different struggle. Isolated, white-furred, and slow to trust, they have weathered the centuries with minimal contact. Few outsiders have seen their cairn-cities or snow-bound rites. Those who have returned speak of eerie quiet, immense strength, and a culture of terrifying endurance. To the Altic, history is not spoken often, it is carried, like the wind that never stops blowing.
Urman civilisation has changed little in form, and much in circumstance. The Ralians have suffered most under the pressure of encroachment, and their culture now exists in fragments, half in the jungle, half in the margins of human towns where their names are mispronounced and their customs called superstition. Some few have risen to prominence, especially in frontier militias or mercenary bands, but always under the gaze of suspicion. Others have disappeared into the canopy, choosing to forget the world that has tried to forget them.
Fraki society remains mobile and intact. Their unity lies not in statehood but in shared law, oral, sacred, and enforced by reputation. Tales of Fraki outriders breaking Alemni supply chains or intercepting trade routes have become part of the Directorate’s military curricula. Yet, unlike Ralians, the Fraki rarely provoke without cause. Their discipline is quiet, absolute. To be Fraki is to ride far, speak little, and remember every insult, until the day it must be answered.
Altic Urmans remain a mystery. Some believe they are dying out, their numbers dwindling with each harsh winter. Others claim they are preparing for something, gathering strength beneath the snow. Whatever the truth, the Altic clans do not send envoys, do not respond to diplomacy, and do not explain. They endure. That is their history.
Relations between Urmans and other peoples are, in a word, strained. The Directorate of Valenfar maintains only the thinnest of diplomatic channels, often mediated through proxy interpreters or colonial governors. Most human citizens view Urmans as lesser, whether beast, threat, or relic of a forgotten age. In cities, they are pitied or feared. In the wilds, they are killed, captured, or avoided. Only a few border scholars, trade-guild liaisons, and spirit-walkers have made efforts to bridge the divide.
Among other species, reactions are mixed. The Lizvar respect Urman strength, but view their reverence for life as weakness. The Varlimni speak cautiously of “cousins in the bark,” hinting at spiritual kinship. Paokus rarely speak of Urmans at all, though Rai chants include symbols thought to reference “the clawed ones who walk with root-memory.” Whether this is praise or warning remains unclear.
Within their own ethnic branches, relations are shaped by geography and pressure. Ralian clans in Erala may hold tension with Fraki riders, seeing them as too distant or disconnected from the struggle. The Altic, as ever, remain outside such politics. They recognise no lowland kin, only the blood in snow, and the breath in wind.
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