Every world in The CosmOS is inhabited. The races here are not window dressing — they are the civilizational bedrock that makes locations feel lived in, factions feel grounded, and the player's choices feel like they land on something real.
Across The CosmOS, human societies tend to organize themselves through kingdoms, corporations, stations, and practical survival systems. They are ingenious, adaptable, and often the first to impose structure on uncertainty.
A deep, institutional fear of The Void appears across many human cultures. It can become doctrine, law, or silence, shaping whole societies long after the original trauma has been buried.
Dwarven peoples like those of Uldgard build worlds of stone, steel, and permanence. Their identity is rooted in craftsmanship, ritual, and the belief that tradition must hold even when the mountain itself begins to fail.
Their strengths can become their weakness. Pride, secrecy, and reverence for inherited order can turn a fortress into a closed system no one inside knows how to save.
The Fae carry one of the oldest and most complex civilizational histories in The CosmOS. Their cities, courts, and lineages are shaped by old splendor, long memory, and divisions that never fully healed. In Avaloria, the more settled fae societies are often expressed through Elvish and Wildkin lineages.
Elvish and Highborne lineages tend to carry the weight of legitimacy, inheritance, and political memory, while Wildkin peoples express that same ancient heritage through more embodied and varied forms. Even within the 'civilized' fae races, history is never shared evenly.
Beastkin cultures carry a different relationship to place than the more urban and courtly peoples of The CosmOS. They often emerge where survival, adaptation, and embodied life matter more than inheritance or institutional order. In Avaloria, this lane can include peoples as different as Pandorans and Kitsune, who share a closer bond to instinct, land, and living systems.
This category will likely widen over time, but it already matters as a distinct cultural lane. Beastkin are not simply lesser variants of other peoples; they often represent entire worldviews built around instinct, survival, and relationship to the living environment. Where some emphasize raw adaptation, others carry that same bond through ritual, balance, and spiritual precision.
In Avaloria, Orcish peoples carry a more primal expression of ancient fae-adjacent life: grounded in strength, tribe, land, and physical continuity rather than courtly inheritance.
They should not be read as a lesser offshoot of more 'civilized' races. Orcs represent a different cultural answer to survival, power, and belonging, especially in harsher and more elemental regions of the world.
Some constructs in The CosmOS were programmed only to serve a function: golems, hard-light workers, candy people, and other made beings shaped for labor, ritual, or placekeeping. Others have lived long enough, or deeply enough, to become something more than their original purpose.
This category will widen later, but for now it holds one of The CosmOS's most important truths: not every person was born. Some were built, summoned, printed, or authored into being, and many now live full lives of their own.
Not every people in The CosmOS belongs cleanly to the familiar lanes of human kingdoms, fae inheritances, beastkin cultures, or crafted life. Some emerge from stranger sectors, drift between worlds, survive outside stable civic memory, or carry biology and perspective that feel alien even to long-settled residents.
Wanderers should be treated as a widening classification, not a single unified faction. At the farthest and most dangerous edge of this idea sit the Voidbeings themselves: not merely foreign peoples, but extreme alien presences whose relationship to reality, identity, and creation may be fundamentally incompatible with ordinary life inside The CosmOS.
Races give the worlds their residents. Factions give those residents their institutions, conflicts, and the organizations that outlast any single generation.