ANCESTRIES
In Nuxan, ancestry and culture are two different questions, and you answer them separately.
Ancestry is biology — the stat block your character uses, drawn from whichever of the campaign’s sourcebooks that ancestry comes from. It sets your size, your senses, and what your body physically inherits. Nothing more.
Culture is the Background you take (2024 rules) — where you were raised, what you were taught, who your people are to each other. Any ancestry can carry any culture. A dwarf raised among the Kryn is a dwarf with a Kryn background, and the two facts don’t have to agree.
A thousand years after the Exodus, mixed heritage is the default, not the exception. Most people alive are blends, and the lineages have been folding into each other for forty generations. Mechanically you still build from a single ancestry — you don’t stack two stat blocks — so choose the one whose body best matches the character you’re describing, and treat the rest of the bloodline as backstory. A genuinely single-ancestry character — a Kraghammer dwarf, a sealed elven remnant — is the flagged exception, and it usually says something about how hard their people worked to stay separate.
Heritage mixes freely, with one real limit: size. Lineages too far apart don’t produce children together — a goliath and a halfling, a bugbear and a goblin. The bird-boned lineages, kenku and aarakocra, pair with each other. Aeormatons are built rather than born, and stand outside heredity entirely.
Woven Throughout
The lines you find in every region of Nuxan, in every city and on every road. If a stranger passes through, odds are they’re one of these — or carry one of these somewhere in them.
Human
Player’s Handbook 2024
There is no typical human. They stand from five feet to well over six, across the full range of skin, hair, and eye coloration and build, and a great many carry the visible trace of some other lineage. They are the connective population of Nuxan — present everywhere, and the thread most other ancestries are mixed through.
Dwarf
Player’s Handbook 2024 (duergar included)
Under five feet but broad and dense, a dwarf can weigh as much as a human a foot taller. Skin runs in earthen tones from deep brown to red-tinged tan; hair is worn long. Duergar — gray dwarves — are the deep-dwelling line, ashen-skinned and often hairless, their eyes built for total dark. Kraghammer’s long isolation makes its dwarves one of the few truly single-ancestry populations left in the world.
Halfling
Player’s Handbook 2024
About three feet tall and stoutly built, roughly forty pounds, with skin from tan to ruddy-pale and hair usually worn simply. Small enough to move through a world built for larger folk without drawing a second look. They live across all of Nuxan, most often inside other peoples’ communities rather than lands of their own.
Tiefling
Player’s Handbook 2024
Broadly human in build and marked by an infernal pact struck generations back. The marks vary from one bloodline to the next: horns of some shape, a long tail, pointed canines, often eyes of a single solid color. Skin runs nearly any hue — human tones through deep reds, blues, and violets. The bargain that made them is ancient history now, but the traits still breed true.
Strongly Present
Common enough that no one blinks, established in their own regions and history, but not the universal presence of the Woven lines.
Elf
Player’s Handbook 2024 (drow included)
Slender and fine-featured, ranging from under five feet to just over six, and long-lived by an order of magnitude over most of their neighbors. Coloration covers the human range and then some — copper, bronze, near-blue skin; hair of green or blue. Drow are the dark-skinned, pale-haired lineage, associated in Nuxan with the Kryn Dynasty. With the Feywild sealed, the elves’ oldest tie to their own origin is cut.
Gnome
Player’s Handbook 2024 (Forest and Rock lineages)
Petite folk, three to four feet tall, with oversized eyes and pointed ears, dark-adapted and long-lived — up to four centuries. They run in two lineages: forest gnomes, with a knack for illusion and small-beast magic, and rock gnomes, with one for tinkering and clockwork. A small line; mixing skews away from the largest peoples.
Orc
Player’s Handbook 2024
Tall and broadly built, gray-skinned, with sharply pointed ears and prominent lower canines that read as small tusks. Gruumsh, the god said to have shaped them, departed with the rest of the pantheon — the physical inheritance stayed.
Goliath
Player’s Handbook 2024
Seven to eight feet tall, distantly giant-blooded, with skin in stone-like tones and often a lithic patterning across it. Built for cold and thin air even having never seen a mountain. A very large line, and mixing skews hard toward that size.
Dragonborn
Player’s Handbook 2024 / Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount (Draconblood and Ravenite lineages)
Upright, heavily scaled draconic humanoids standing well over six feet, with clawed hands and a draconic head. In Nuxan they run in two lineages: the bright-scaled, imperially descended Draconblood, and the duskier-scaled Ravenite, who keep the long tail the Draconblood lines lost. Scale color ranges widely. They hatch rather than being born live.
Changeling
Forge of the Artificer
Shapeshifters. In their true form the features are faded, almost blank; most spend little time there, wearing crafted faces the way others wear clothes. The mutable essence of the sealed Feywild still lingers in them. They pass, unremarked, through every society in Nuxan.
Goblin
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Small and sharp-featured, three to four feet tall, dark-adapted, carrying a fey inheritance from the old Feywild courts. Found in every corner of the world, and among the common folk of the Kryn Dynasty.
Hobgoblin
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Taller than goblins and shorter than bugbears, five to six feet, with a martial bearing and coloration from ruddy orange to deep red. Since the Iron Authority collapsed into a scatter of competing hobgoblin micronations, they are a major regional power in Nuxan.
Bugbear
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
The largest of the goblin-kin — six to eight feet, long-limbed and heavily built, fur-covered, with a reach beyond their frame. A large line; mixing skews toward their size.
Aeormaton
Warforged stat block — Forge of the Artificer
Not born: built. Sentient constructs of wood, metal, and stone laid over root-like alchemical cords, the surviving work of fallen Aeor. An Aeormaton has no bloodline and no parents — it stands entirely outside heredity and does not mix. Each is effectively one of a kind, and many reshape their own bodies over a long existence.
Rare Threads
Present in Nuxan, but you might go a long time without meeting one. A rare thread at the table is unusual, not impossible.
Kenku
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Wingless, raven-like humanoids covered in dark feathers, beaked, roughly human-sized, known for flawless mimicry of sound and exact duplication of craft. A bird-boned line — crosses more readily with other avian folk than with anyone else.
Genasi
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Broadly human in silhouette but marked by an elemental parent — skin of red, green, blue, or gray, and some sign of the plane worked into them: flame-lit hair, a voice like moving water, a frame like set stone. Rare and scattered, turning up wherever elemental power once broke through into the world.
Firbolg
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Giant-cousins, seven to eight feet and powerfully built, with bovine features and a quiet magic that lets them move through wild places barely noticed. They live up to five centuries. Uncommon anywhere in Nuxan.
Tabaxi
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Feline humanoids, taller than humans and slender, in every coat a cat can wear — big-cat markings, housecat patterns, or unusual colorings. Travelers more than a settled population, and rarely seen twice in the same place.
Tortle
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Turtle-folk who carry a full shell as natural armor, five to six feet tall and heavily built, colored like real turtles. Coastal and riverine wanderers; rare inland.
Aarakocra
Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
Feathered, beaked bird-people with a broad wingspan and true flight, light-boned and around five feet tall, tied by origin to the Elemental Plane of Air. A bird-boned line — crosses with other avian folk. Rarely found on the ground in Nuxan.