Chapter 4: Ancestries of the Known World
Who the People Are — Their History, Their Position, and What Others Think of Them
Ancestry in the Known World is not a category, but a history. Where people came from, what they did during the Second Era, and what they have built or failed to build since — these facts follow individuals into every room they enter, every contract they sign, every city that decides whether to welcome or watch them.
This chapter covers what each ancestry actually means in the Known World: the history that shapes them, the tensions within them, and how others regard them in 1,380 TE. The mechanical content — ability scores, class options, languages — belongs to Book I. What follows is everything a player needs to understand who their character is before the first session begins, and everything a GM needs to make the world respond to that character honestly.
One structural note before the entries: the Known World does not distribute its peoples neatly. Endoras is a dwarf nation where a human character might have been born and raised. Solara is majority human, but it also contains elvish families who have lived there for generations. Alvengaard has Ûrgon traders who have been doing business in the same market town for thirty years. Think of every nation as a dominant cultural tendency, not an ethnic enclosure.
Humans
Humans are the most numerous people in the Known World, the most geographically distributed, and the least coherent as a cultural category. A Solaran republican and a Cadman inquisitor are both human. So is a Norderenn resistance fighter and the Archbishop who signed the order to suppress the Kronn. If the word "human" carries any common meaning across these people, it is this: they reproduce fast, adapt faster, and have never agreed on what to do with those advantages.
Physically, humans vary as much as the climates they inhabit. The First Men of Bellaria run tall and pale, built for cold, their coloring ranging from frost-white to deep red in the manner of people who have spent centuries at the northern coast. The populations of Solara and Messalya reflect centuries of trade and intermarriage, producing a range of complexion and features that make "Solaran" a cultural identity rather than a physical one. Cadman humans present a similar range, though the Church's theology of purity has spent the last several centuries trying to make "Cadman" mean something more specific — with the usual results of such projects.
What divides them is more interesting than what unites them. Human nations do not trust one another, and they extend that distrust inward: the class structures in Val Cadma, Bellaria, and Solara are all different, and a human merchant from Solara operating in Cadman territory is navigating a foreign country's assumptions about who she is and what she represents. The Cadman Church's claim that Tar'amaan's children are superior to other people refers to faithful Cadman humans — a category that excludes the majority of human beings alive.
How others regard them depends entirely on which humans. The Ûrgons of Urgônia have generally positive relations with human traders along the Emerald Corridor. The Vartrans of Bal'mekh have watched human empires pursue them for religious reasons for two centuries and have drawn the logical conclusions: their culture and beliefs are not for public consumption, their trust is not extended by default, and the difference between a Vartran who considers you a companion and one who merely tolerates your presence is something that takes time — and demonstrated reliability — to cross. Elvish longevity means that individual Aelár, alive in 1,380 TE, remembers human political arrangements from three centuries ago, which tends to make them patient observers of human crisis rather than alarmed ones.
Playing a human means choosing which of the Known World's human cultures you belong to, and then deciding what that culture has given you and what it has cost you. A Norderenn human carries occupied territory. A Cadman human carries an institution. A Solaran human carries an argument about what governance should look like. None of these is a neutral inheritance.
Elves: Aelár and Húldar
Elves live long enough that the Second Era is not distant history for them. An elf alive in 1,380 TE could have grandparents who remember the Darkness's rule — not as stories, but as events that happened to specific people they knew. This shapes everything about how elves engage with the rest of the Known World, and it shapes how the Known World engages with them.
Physically, elves are slender and shorter than the average human, long-lived to the point that "old" means something categorically different than it does for shorter-lived peoples. Both Aelár and Húldar share the pointed ears and sharp features of their common ancestry; what the Second Era did was not change their appearance but cleave their community along lines that have calcified into something resembling separate peoples without technically being that.
The Aelár are the descendants of those who resisted the Darkness or fled its reach into the deep forest, preserving what they could of the old ways under impossible conditions. They tend toward the greens and earth tones of their forest home, and their culture reflects the values of people who survived by staying hidden and keeping to themselves — a preference for patience, for indirect communication, for letting situations develop before committing to a position. This last quality, which Elvish culture frames as wisdom, human cultures often read as evasiveness. The Aelár are increasingly intertwined with Solara — shared commercial interest, intermarriage, and a general alignment of political values — which has made them more legible to the Inner Nations while simultaneously making Val Cadma more hostile to them.
An Aelár born from a Húldar parent tends to settle in the border cities between Alvengaard and the Inner Nations, or outside the forest entirely. No rule compels this — no edict, no formal expulsion. It is a conclusion most reach without being told. The conflict their existence introduces into a Húldar household is not one they created and not one they can resolve, and the cities where neither the count nor the inheritance applies with its full weight are the places where that irresolvable condition costs the least.
The Húldar are the descendants of those who accommodated the Darkness's administration rather than dying in the forests. The distinction sounds clean in that framing; it was not clean at the time. What the Húldar's ancestors actually did ranged from active collaboration to passive survival to quiet resistance conducted within the system rather than against it, and the categories collapsed in the aftermath into a single accusation: they were there, and they served, and they did not die. The Húldar's appearance is described in surviving accounts as "more somber" than the Aelár — darker complexion, silver-grey hair, eyes that tend toward amber and grey. The Húldar are the finest druids in the Known World. This is not a reputation they sought, but a consequence of what they preserved when everything else was being lost. While the Aelár were hiding in the forests and fighting at the edges of resistance, the Húldar were embedded in the Darkness's administrative structure, and some of them used that proximity to protect what the Druidic tradition had built over centuries. Whether that protection justifies the collaboration that enabled it is the argument the Aelár have been making for a thousand years. What is not in dispute is that the Druidic Compact, with its hierarchy, its Hierophancy, and its accumulated understanding of the natural world's relationship to Ilya's gift, survived the Second Era largely intact — and survived it in Húldar hands.
They live in the western forests of Alvengaard, adjacent to Mynyaraan — the preserved elvish city that predates the Second Era and that the Húldar control access to with a consistency that the Chroniclers have found immovable. The Hyerophancy's authority over its own people is not gentle. Húldar who pursue druidic practice without investiture are hunted — not fined, not warned, not corrected through the hierarchy, but hunted, by specialists whose mandate does not expire and whose methods the Hierophancy does not discuss publicly. What they hunt for at the far end of that hunt, what the unvested practitioner who survives long enough and goes far enough eventually becomes — the Hierophancy does not name it in any document that leaves their inner council. Most Húldar know the shape of the prohibition without knowing what it prohibits. That is by design. There is something specific that the Druidic Compact considers the worst thing a Húldar druid can become, and they have concluded that the less widely its nature is known, the better.
What divides Aelár from Húldar is not simply the Second Era, but every subsequent century during which the Aelár have benefited from not being the Húldar. The Aelár's respectability in the Inner Nations rests partly on the distinction between themselves and their counterparts, and maintaining that distinction requires that the Húldar remain clearly marked as the compromised half. Some Aelár argue privately that this is unjust. Very few argue publicly, because public argument would require them to give up something that is currently useful.
A Húldar who produces children with an Aelár partner does not produce Húldar children. The child is Aelár — shorter, without the greenish undertone, without the ancestral tie to Vengardian practice that makes druidic investiture possible. This has been true for as long as the two peoples have coexisted, and the elders do not dispute it. They answer it with policy.
The Hyerophancy's investiture cannot follow an Aelár-born child through a Húldar parent. The bloodline the High Council has always recognized is thinning along Alvengaard's edges — visibly, in the border settlements where the proportions have already shifted past the point where any available remedy would change them. The younger Húldar in those settlements do not tend to share their elders' urgency about this. The elders have largely stopped asking why, having heard enough answers to understand what the question was actually measuring.
The bloodline question has an answer, at least partly. The demographic one does not. Húldar numbers have been falling in the border settlements for three centuries and in the interior for longer, and the intermarriage explanation does not account for it — the timelines diverge too sharply. The Hyerophancy has studied it. What conclusions they have reached, they have not announced beyond their inner council. What is observable: the Húldar die without obvious cause; fewer are born than the population should support; the elders describe the condition in a term the druidic texts do not translate cleanly. No Aelár scholar and no Ilianist theologian has produced an explanation the Húldar themselves have found adequate. The Húldar, when asked, give answers that amount to grief. This is not informative, but it is probably honest.
How others regard them: Val Cadma persecutes all elves but reserves a specific theological charge for the Húldar — historical alliance with the Darkness, which is either accurate or a convenient amplification of a complicated truth. Solara regards the Aelár as allies and the Húldar as the Aelár's problem. The Chroniclers have been trying to get inside Mynyaraan for long enough that the attempt has become institutional policy, not individual ambition.
Dwarves: Duergar and Duardeen
The dwarves of the Known World split centuries ago, and both halves are too proud to admit they miss each other.
The Duergar are the older branch — the dwarves who never left the mountain halls. They occupy Nara'baraan, the last functioning dwarven city in the old tradition: carved into living rock, organized by clan, governed by a tradition that has been accumulating for longer than most human nations have existed. Duergar are stocky even by dwarven standards, their skin a permanent grey-tinged brown from generations underground, their hair ranging from iron-black to bone-white depending on clan. They are exceptional miners, engineers, and craftsmen, and they are aware of this in the specific way of people who have had nobody outside their own community to impress for a very long time.
They regard the Duardeen with the particular contempt reserved for a family who have done something unforgivable and then thrived. The Duardeen left. They walked out of the mountains and went to the plains, which, in Duergar cultural understanding, is the same as walking away from everything that makes a dwarf a dwarf. The fact that the Duardeen built Endoras — one of the most economically productive and politically significant nations in the Known World — is not, from Nara'baraan's perspective, a mitigating factor, but proof that leaving works, which is worse.
The Duergar sealed their lower halls during the Second Era and waited. The waiting required governance, maintenance, and the preservation of a people in difficult conditions — none of which the Duergar discount. What it did not require was fighting. The peoples above ground who contested the Darkness directly emerged from the Second Era knowing what resistance cost. The Duergar emerged knowing what absence from that cost looked like from the inside. Nara'baraan's tradition does not address this distinction directly. It does not need to.
The Duardeen are the Duergar's descendants who made exactly that choice several centuries ago, descending from the mountains into the Emerald Plains and establishing what became Endoras through a combination of agricultural innovation, political organization, and a willingness to coexist with the Ûrgons, Badakis, and humans who were already there. They are physically lighter than the Duergar — more time above ground, more dietary variety, more intermarriage — and their culture has opened in ways that Nara'baraan finds embarrassing and Endoras finds functional.
Duardeen dwarves run the Valdan Iron Mines, dominate the Merchant Council, and hold leadership positions across Endoras's guild structure. They have not forgotten they are dwarves. They have decided that being a dwarf does not require living underground, which the Duergar consider a definitional error.
The Emerald Plains the Duardeen descended into were already settled — by Ûrgon clans along the southern reaches and Badaki communities in the eastern hills. The Duardeen did not arrive in open territory. They arrived in occupied territory and proposed a nation at Three Rivers, the most strategically valuable location in the region. Whatever negotiation followed produced the Emerald Corridor Alliance and, among its terms, Nardûk: an Urgônia city that controls the corridor's southern access into Endoras and has controlled it since. Whether the Ûrgon Elder Council regards what happened as a negotiation or an accommodation that was not entirely theirs to refuse, the clans do not agree. The Badaki memory of the same founding is not recorded in any document the Emerald Corridor Alliance has chosen to commission.
How others regard them: The Inner Nations deal primarily with Duardeen and regard them as reliable partners and sharp traders. The Duergar are distant enough and isolated enough that most Inner Nations' populations have a vague sense of their existence without much detail attached. The Chroniclers maintain respectful relations with Nara'baraan — dwarven institutional memory is a scholarly resource, and the Chroniclers are not above mining it.
Ûrgons
The Ûrgons were made for war. They know this. The fact that they have spent the eleven centuries since the war ended becoming known as craftspeople, mediators, and keepers of practical wisdom is either irony or deliberate correction, depending on which Ûrgon you ask.
Created by the Three Sisters alongside the Badakis to give the Eymanarynn an army capable of contesting the Darkness's forces, Ûrgons are large — a head and a half taller than an average human, broad across the chest and shoulders, with the grey-brown skin and heavy-boned structure of people built for endurance rather than speed. Their features carry the visual ancestry of the great elephants of the southern plains: wide-set eyes, rounded ears, a nose that in full-grown Ûrgons develops a slight elongation that their people consider distinguished and that other peoples find easier not to stare at if they've been forewarned. They are one of the longest-lived mortal peoples after the elves, and they age slowly enough that an Ûrgon who appears middle-aged in human terms may be older than the Cadman occupation of Norderenn.
Their population is declining. This is the central demographic fact of Urgônia, and it is not a secret — the Elder Council has been discussing it for four generations without arriving at a solution that doesn't require the clans to agree on something. The reasons are cultural as much as biological: Ûrgon clan tradition places significant weight on choosing a permanent mate carefully, and "carefully" in a people who live two centuries sometimes means choosing very late. The clans that have adapted their practices produce more children. The clans that have not are watching their numbers contract.
How others regard them: The Ûrgon reputation for wisdom is genuine and has been earned — their elders carry institutional memory that shorter-lived peoples cannot accumulate individually. The Emerald Corridor's traders know Ûrgon mediators as the most trusted arbiters of commercial disputes in the region, not because of any mystical quality but because an Ûrgon mediator who says something is settled has usually worked out why both parties should accept it. The peoples with longer memories receive them differently. An Aelár who carries the Second Era in their lineage — not as history, but as something that still has weight in how the family tells itself its past — does not deal with an Ûrgon mediator the way a human merchant from Solara does. The attention they give is not hostility, but the specific kind you extend to someone when you know what they were built for and can see what they chose to build instead. The Badakis, their war-born counterparts, and Emerald Corridor Alliance partners, regard them with the complicated affection of siblings who were made for opposite purposes and have to coexist anyway.
What divides them: The clans. The Elder Council's consensus requirement is simultaneously Urgônia's most stable institution and its least responsive one. Individual clans have strong identities and histories of inter-clan disagreement that predate any current political crisis. Navigating Urgônia as an outsider means navigating the clan map, which is not written down in any form that outsiders have access to.
Badakis
The Badakis were made for the same war as the Ûrgons, and they have made significantly less peace with the fact that the war ended.
Badakis are powerfully built humanoids averaging two meters in height, their skin a dense grey-brown with a texture that suggests the rhinoceros ancestry their creation myth does not dispute. Their faces are broad and heavy-boned, with wide nostrils and, in older adults, the beginning of the bony growth at the nose bridge that their culture considers a mark of maturity. They move with a deliberateness that outsiders sometimes misread as slowness; Badakis are not slow. They are conserving.
Their culture is organized around clans and the code of Boros: discipline, mastery of a chosen craft or skill, protection of those weaker than yourself, and the specific honor that comes from ending a fight efficiently rather than gloriously. The last point distinguishes their martial tradition from what outsiders expect. A Badaki warrior is trained to finish conflicts, not to perform in them. The fighters the Gwan'tor clans export as mercenaries are expensive and worth it, and the reason they are worth it is that they were trained at Duskhold to solve military problems rather than to look impressive while being part of one.
The Badakis were given a design for war. Boros is what they built when that war ended — a decision made after the killing stopped, by a people designed for decisive violence who found themselves looking at what remained of the world and choosing what they were going to be for the centuries that followed. There is no older inheritance behind it. The Badakis were made for the Second Era and have no civilization before it. Whether the Sisters considered this moment when they designed them, the Badakis have not addressed publicly.
Internal divisions in Gwan'tor currently run along the fault line of Emerald Corridor Alliance membership. The clans that support deepening integration with Endoras and Urgônia have concluded that collective security serves Gwan'tor's interests better than isolated strength. The clans that oppose it frame their position as honor — Badakis do not subordinate clan loyalty to political arrangements — but their position has been made more convenient for them by Val Cadma's agents, who have been cultivating their leadership for two years. Whether those clans have noticed the pattern of who is suddenly agreeing with them varies by clan leadership. Val Cadma's theology classifies Badakis as beast-peoples outside Tar'amaan's grace. Its agents offering political arrangements to Gwan'tor clan leaders operate within that theology, not around it. The clans receiving those arrangements have presumably noted the combination. Their conclusions are not uniform.
How others regard them: Fear and respect in roughly equal proportions, which the Badakis consider a satisfactory arrangement. The Inner Nations' mercenary markets price Gwan'tor fighters above all other available contractors, which has given the clans more economic leverage than their geographic isolation would otherwise provide. The Church of Tar'amaan classifies them as beast-peoples and therefore outside Tar'amaan's grace, which the Badakis regard with the contempt of people who were created by actual goddesses and don't need a sun-god's endorsement.
Val'arians
The Val'arians have been in the Known World for seven centuries, and in that time, they have told the people around them almost nothing about where they came from.
They arrived as sailors — not raiders, not refugees visibly in crisis, but a maritime people who had clearly been sailing for a very long time and who arrived with the competence of people who had planned the crossing rather than survived it. They are slender and olive-complected, with dark hair that they keep short by preference and eyes that in full moonlight sometimes appear to pick up the light in a way that non-Val'arian people find slightly unsettling. Their navigational connection to the lunar cycles is not metaphorical — Val'arian pilots use the moons as calculation instruments in ways that require a relationship with lunar movement that goes beyond observation. The Faith of the Nine, their religion, is organized around divine beings who in practice correspond fairly closely to the forces a sailor actually needs to worry about: sea, storm, wind, fire, and shadow.
Their culture values emotional control and navigational precision in ways that look similar to outsiders — reserve in social situations, extreme care with words, a preference for letting things develop without forcing them. A Val'arian who says something directly is either in a context where directness is the appropriate instrument or has decided you are trustworthy enough to deal with without the usual careful handling. Either way, you've been assessed before they said anything.
The peoples of the Known World have spent eleven centuries shaped by the Second Era — by the reclusion it taught, the resentments it created, and the wariness it made hereditary — but the Val'arians arrived after all of that. Their ease in a room is not innocence, but a formation that happened elsewhere and left different marks. The peoples they deal with feel this before they can name it. In a port city where everyone moves with the accumulated weight of inherited wounds, someone who moves differently gets noticed, and the noticing is not always comfortable.
Val'arians were already present across the Known World's port cities before the civil war made displacement a necessity. Their settlements in harbors from Messalya to the Emerald Coast predate the current conflict by generations — planted through commerce and the specific inclination of a people who seem, as a matter of culture, to prefer the edges of things to their centers. Although the civil war has not created this tendency, it has given it a different urgency.
The civil war in Val'aria has created a Val'arian diaspora that the Known World's port cities are only beginning to absorb. Northern Val'arian exiles and southern Val'arian traders both carry the same navigational heritage and the same institutional reticence about origins, but they carry it toward very different political futures, and their interactions in neutral ports are rarely simple.
How others regard them: The Known World wants their navigational skills and is willing to extend significant goodwill in exchange. This has given Val'arian communities in port cities more autonomy than other immigrant populations typically enjoy — harbormasters who need Val'arian pilots do not make their lives difficult. In inland regions, Val'arians are regarded with the mild exoticism attached to any people who are present in smaller numbers and have a reputation for being difficult to read.
What they are not saying is the question every nation with a research tradition has been investigating for seven centuries. The Chroniclers have the most thorough file. It contains significant information about where the Val'arians settled, what they traded, and who they married. It contains almost nothing about what they left behind or why. The distribution of Val'arian settlements is itself a document, if you know how to read it: a people who arrive, plant themselves at port-city edges, and spread outward across the Known World over generations without apparent urgency or plan. This pattern has more than one explanation. The Chroniclers have noted the explanations they consider most probable in documents that do not leave King's Hold.
Vartrans
The Vartrans are the people the Known World has decided to regard as a problem, and they have been living with that decision for eleven centuries.
They are the descendants of Eymanarynn, who fled the final confrontation with the Darkness — who chose survival over the battle that ended the Second Era, and who were condemned by Ilya for that choice before she descended into the Abyss. The curse she placed on them was specific: they would never remember the wonders of Eymanarann. Not that they would be forbidden to speak of it or forbidden to study it, but that the living memory of what it felt like to be part of that civilization — the texture of its daily life, the way its cities smelled, the specific quality of belonging to something that had stood for millennia — would simply not be available to them. Their descendants inherit the absence. They know intellectually that they come from the people who built the ruins the Chroniclers fight over. They cannot access what that means at the level where it would actually help them.
The curse has a second face. First Era ruins respond to Vartran blood. Mechanisms in the Dead Lands that have sat dormant for three thousand years will activate against them. Passages that open for anyone else will not open for them. Intact First Era systems register Vartrans as something specific and treat them accordingly — not as strangers, which would imply the absence of a record, but as people whose record exists and whose access has been denied. Ilianist theologians call this Ilya's seal: the condemned people barred from their own monuments. The Vartrans who have spent generations studying Zyzak and Dymoras may have arrived at a different explanation. Khundravar has not shared it.
Physically, Vartrans are unmistakable. They are humanoid and slightly taller than the average human, their bodies covered in scales that range from copper and bronze to deep blue-green and silver, depending on the individual's clan ancestry. Their facial features carry a draconic cast — wider jaw, subtly ridged brow, eyes with a vertical pupil that catches light differently than round-pupiled eyes. They are not dragons. They are not mistaken for dragons by anyone who has actually seen a dragon. They are, however, visually legible as something other than the people the Inner Nations are accustomed to, and in a world where the Church of Tar'amaan has made draconic ancestry a religious category, that legibility is a liability.
Their culture, developed in the frozen reaches of Bal'mekh over eleven centuries, organizes itself around clan eldership and a profound reverence for the Eymanarynn — the Exalted, in their tradition — that functions as something between ancestor worship and grief for a heritage they cannot fully access. They have built a society suited to survival in conditions that would destroy most people, and they have done it without the institutional memory that other civilizations lean on, which is a form of accomplishment that the Known World has generally declined to acknowledge.
Khundravar, the capital, sits at the center of a geography chosen for more reasons than defensibility. Bal'mekh's mountain borders have stopped Cadman and Bellarian military expeditions reliably enough that both powers have, over time, stopped pressing them. What those borders have not stopped — what they were never positioned to stop — is Vartran movement outward. Zyzak and Dymoras, Vysandri ruins within or adjacent to Bal'mekh's territory, have been under sustained Vartran study for generations. The discoveries made in those sites have not been shared with the Chroniclers, the Order of Magnus, or anyone else with a formal interest in what the Vysandri left behind. What Khundravar's council knows about those ruins remains inside Khundravar. The Broken Vale, lying between Bal'mekh and its western neighbors, has discouraged military approaches through it since the Third Era's early centuries. The Vartrans have not corrected whatever impression maintains that reputation.
How others regard them: Scholars want them for their proximity to Eymanarynn knowledge — a Vartran elder who has spent seventy years piecing together fragments from the Northern Wall knows things the Chroniclers would pay well for. The Order of Magnus regards them as research partners with irreplaceable expertise and a geopolitical situation that makes them increasingly available for arrangements the Order would prefer to keep quiet. The Tower of Nyrün — the Order's most reclusive installation, positioned in the eastern borderlands — functions as the primary entryway for Vartran mages into the Order's formal structure. A Vartran who reaches Nyrün has navigated acceptance from both the Order and Khundravar's council. They are carrying interests that neither party discusses openly. Val Cadma regards them as a theological problem with a practical solution, and has been organizing the theological arguments for that solution for two decades.
The political situation in 1,380 TE is as described in Chapter 3: Bal'mekh is running out of options and time. What this means for individual Vartrans is that the question of where to be when Val Cadma moves is one that every family in Bal'mekh is actively discussing, and that Vartrans encountered outside Bal'mekh in 1,380 TE are usually there for reasons that involve that calculation — scouts, advance parties, people who left before the situation clarified, or people who left because it already has. A Vartran encountered near Ulkär — a Vysandri ruin north of occupied Norderenn — is moving through Val Cadma's inquisitorial territory in a body that their theology considers sufficient cause for detention. The explanation most of them offer involves the general calculation about Bal'mekh's future. The explanation Khundravar would offer, if Khundravar offered explanations, involves Ulkär specifically.
What it means to play one: A Vartran character carries a curse with two faces: the absence of memory, and what functions as its inverse — the ruins recognize them, and the recognition is a rejection. What does it mean to belong to a civilization you cannot remember, and that will not let you in? They carry a political situation that follows them visually into every room they enter in Cadman-adjacent territory. And they carry the knowledge that their homeland is, with some probability, not going to exist in its current form by the time a campaign at these levels concludes. That is not a burden to impose, but material to work with.
For the GM: Ancestry at the Table
Ancestry creates texture, not destiny. A Húldar character is not obligated to be bitter about their community's history. A Vartran character is not obligated to be consumed by political urgency. What ancestry provides is the raw material of how the world will treat a character before that character has done anything, and how that character understands themselves in relation to a history they did not choose.
NPC reactions should be specific. "The innkeeper looks uncomfortable" is less useful than "the innkeeper serves the Vartran character last and doesn't make eye contact, which in this town means he's heard about the Inquisition checkpoint three roads north." Ancestry-based prejudice in the Known World comes from specific sources — religious doctrine, historical wounds, political calculation — and NPC reactions that reflect those sources are more honest than generalized unease.
The elvish split is not resolved. A GM who presents Alvengaard as having a clean internal consensus is missing the setting's most interesting internal tension. Aelár and Húldar, characters in the same party, carry a history between them that doesn't require either player to perform it constantly, but that should surface occasionally at the table in ways that feel earned.
Val'arian reserve is not rudeness. A Val'arian NPC who does not volunteer information about their origins is behaving consistently with their culture, not being obstructionist. GMs who play this as obstruction will turn an interesting cultural texture into a frustrating wall. Play it as someone who has considered what they're going to say before they say it, because they always do.
The Vartrans' situation is urgent, and the party can affect it. Bal'mekh's timeline is not hypothetical. Val Cadma has been preparing its theological and military case for two decades. A campaign that puts Vartran characters or allies at its center is operating inside a situation with a real clock. The GM does not need to force outcomes — the setting will develop honestly if the political pressure accumulates at the same rate it would outside the party's view. What the party does, or fails to do, should matter. So should what Khundravar is quietly building toward in the ruins northeast of the capital.