Human

Before the Great Cataclysm, humans were the most widespread, numerous civilized species on Nerilia. Intelligent and highly adaptable, they spread to every corner of the world, established great nations, and built incredible structures. They were capable of establishing relations with all other humanoids, at least to some extent, and were excellent at assimilating members of other cultures, or into other cultures themselves. While they didn't live as long as some of the other races, notably elves, they could do a lot in the time that they had.

The great inventiveness of humans would eventually be their downfall, however. The most powerful, advanced nation in the world, the Cyrdian Empire, developed synthetic titans, weapons of unimaginable power. They lost control of the titans, however, and they went on a decades-long rampage that left the world nearly uninhabitable. Humans, nearly all being surface-dwelling, were impacted the hardest by this. A few were able to escape to the underground strongholds of the dwarves, along with other ancestries like the elves. The humans' adaptability, however, made them especially susceptible to the corrupting influence of the darklands where they now dwelt. Various groups of humans found themselves transformed, and very few of the original humans are left.

The darklands-dwelling descendants of humans often have little in common with their ancestors. The munavri are perhaps the most unchanged. Retaining their basic humanoid form, but with pale skin and hair, these good-natured people inhabit the very depths of the earth, and possess innate psychic powers amplified by their environment. The fetchlings, similarly, retained their form, but were infused with the energy of the shadow magic that permeated their new homes. The morlocks and caligni found their bodies much more heavily altered. Morlocks became shorter, with large eyes and pale, greenish skin. Generations spent among the ruins of civilizations that collapsed and fell into the darklands left them with an inherent understanding of machinery. Caligni, like the fetchlings, were influenced by shadow, but rather than pure magic, their development was intentionally manipulated by the evil owbs. Each caligni is born into a distinct role, which their bodies grow into, making the anatomy of the caligni highly variable.