Olez is a big world, full of both dangers and opportunities. This might well be even more true for people living in Thalor, a fractured continent that has seen its fair share of wars and calamities over the past 200 years or so.
Here, you'll find some of the basics for character creation.
Playable Races
Olez is home to pretty much every races available in the core rulebooks. But please no homebrew races. In Thalor, humans, elves, dwarves, dragonborns and orcs are predominant but by no means are they the only species living on the fractured continent.
I would recommend players used to settings like the Forgotten Realms, Eberron and the likes to come into Olez with an open mind. Many things are the same or similar but many are also completely different. This goes for races just as much as for places.
The most important rule regarding races: the good-evil alignment exists only for characters. Some tropes survive, like the fact that elves and orcs tend to be chaotic in nature, dwarves and dragonborns tend to be lawful while humans sit right in the neutral middle. But being a gnoll, kobold or a goblin by no mean signify that a character is evil. Just as being a human, elf or a dwarf does not make you good.
I highly encourage players to make use of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything to customize their lineage as they see fit.
Languages and cultures
A major difference from pretty much every other D&D setting: languages and cultures are very much regional features like in otherwise real life. A few places do share somewhat related languages or cultures but there will usually be an historical reason behind this - such as the Ten Town Alliance turning into a bit of a melting pot of sub-cultures to reach for an ideal of respect and understanding between species, in no small part due to merchants acting as diplomats across the alliance to foster understanding of each others and highly lucrative trade deals; or how the infamous wizards of Tyaan developed Tyaanese into such a magically charged language that spellcasters still use it as their verbal component of choice, more than 5,000 years after the Tyaan Empire collapsed at the hands of the gods.
When creating your characters and setting your languages, please refer to the languages section and choose languages local to your birthplace or that fit with your circumstances (the exception to this rule will be for anyone starting in the Rise Up campaign; you'll understand why later). If your locale is not listed or you want to be from somewhere remote or outside of Thalor, please discuss this with me.
If you do choose to keep Common (known in Thalor as Trade Tongue), please make sure you also come up with a reasonable explanation as to why - it would be natural for a merchant or for anyone born within the Ten Tows Alliance to know Trade Tongue; less so for a dwarf farmer living in the hearts of the Nammok Hills who has never travelled further than Hrafrost (and for scope, it's about 600 miles as the crow flies between Hrafrost and the closest town in the Alliance - Bridwood).
Gods and Primal Beings
Unlike some others, the gods of Olez are very much present and involved in the day-to-day lives of the mortals. Like most divine beings, they also have their favourites, their champions and their hated enemies. In Thalor, three regional pantheons are vying for the mortals' attentions but a pact of non-aggression has kept peace between them for over 1000 years. They are the Inorese, Draxic, and Mikuro Pantheons.
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