Humans

**Size:** 5’ – 6’5" generally, however there is the odd exception.

**Weight:** 135-220 lbs generally.

**Average Lifespan:**

* Nobility (lesser and greater): *70-90 years of age.*
* Merchant Class: *60-70 years of age, depending on diet and ale in take*.
* Common Class: *50-60 years of age depending on life style in diet.*
* Underclass: *30-40 years of age in general.*
* Visitors To Old Town: *3 days, depending if they visit the Weeping Rose or fancy after scarlet maidens.*

**Notable Qualities:**

* Adaptable and ambitious.
* Keen explorers.
* A thirst for expansion in all things.
* A willingness to stray from their religious dogma if potential for profit.
* Culture is as flexible as their faith.
* Renowned for their diversity.
* Quick to learn.
* Often fierce and disagreeable.
* Tend to lack specialisation but can excel in many areas.

**Age of Maturity:**

Humans in Blacksteel age in physical maturity around the age of 18 – 25. Mental maturity vastly differs depending on up bringing and education. For example, someone growing up the Rookery may not be able to read or properly care for their self, but they’ll be wily to the influences in their native environment. Where as a young noble might be able to read and write, or tell you all of the gory details of the last elven revolution. Although if you were to ask them how to roast a hog, or catch a fish, they wouldn’t have the first clue on where to start.

**Appearance:**

Skin colours in humans vary, due to the various regions and differing types of people who share the Bravarian continent. Skin colour ranges from pale pink, to light tan, to darker tan, to a yellowish hue up until a dark ebony canvas. Hair colour is just as diverse, shades and colours differing between red, blonde, brown or black. The hair generally turning grey as they age, or even white in the fairer cases. Eye colours spread from brown, blue, green, hazel or even grey in some cases. Not only does the colour of these features change, so does the quantity and shape of all these variables, such as body hair, nose shape, eye sharp, lip shape, head, chin, length of limbs and so on and so forth.

**General Culture:**

The origin of humanity before Blacksteel isn’t documented as far as is aware. Education on this subject comes only through word of mouth, passed about through the community and down through the generations.

It is known that they ventured here for the precious black glistening ore within the caverns, it is known that they are unable to leave the same way they entered. It is known the local savages appeared displeased at their presence and posed a threat. The general mass of people who had ventured to Blacksteel were men of manual labour. Those chosen were on merit of them being physically strong to build, lumberjack or mine. A small portion of scholars had ventured along with the earliest noble families to document and research this peculiar and interesting phenomena.

What was this new metal? It certainly wasn’t steel, despite the poorly coined phrase of the original explorers of “black steel”. A name which stuck, causing the first camp to named “Camp Black Steel”, then the “Black Steel Mines” until the Gleaves and Castimores put their crowns behind the venture, with promise of huge profits once their raw material hit the markets of Bravarious. This dark ore was going to revolutionise how black smiths created weapons, the possibility of them breaking would surely be nullified to a point of certainty.

Time rolls forward, blood is shed and splattered as stones are pulled from the earth, cut, shaped and erected into structure, after structure after structure. The building accelerated as the population boomed. The political and religious landscape changed as much as the earth of Caraduil, after it had been shifted, moved and moulded in the manner which humans often do.

The ways of the One God were forgotten, as the people practised horrific rape against the elves, and became more generally promiscuous in nature. Babies were born, bricks were laid, more babies were born and more bricks were laid. As is the way with humans, expansion was their goal. After the first fifty years, the focus had shifted to building camp Blacksteel into a village, then a town and finally a city. Bravarious wasn’t coming back, if they had even searched at all.

The racial tensions that had existed so many years ago at the first meeting of man and elf was almost ingrained into their being. Humans looked down upon elves, called them the “first folk” in reference to them being created first by the Ancients, or present on the Isle of Blacksteel first. The name for their own kind was, “the favoured folk”. Many of the common and underclass despised elves through learnt cultural racism, and as these things often do, it cycled with the elves hating the humans back in turn.

The humans of Old Town were particularly spiteful towards the elves, using them as very cheap labour and treating them like dirt. The close proximity to the Rookery often found either area posing as battle grounds which even the Templar didn’t dare patrol or enter if possible. The nobles barely considered elves until they were making a nuisance of their self, then they would be stomped back into insignificance.

A clean and clear divide sat between the have and the have nots, separated by a huge gilded gate known as the prestigious pass. Templar guarded day or night. There was little known by the common folk about what went on behind this walls, it was often suspected that it was more or less one huge family by now, frolicking and impregnating brothers, sisters and cousins alike. If the filthiest and meanest resided over on the west side of Blacksteel, then the strangest and most peculiar certainly resided on the east.

As is often the case given the life cycle and urgency to accomplish things that humans feel, the city had come a long way from the first century. A small closed economy had been established, with their own blacksmith, fletcher, tanner, butcher, cobbler, tailor, fishing port and so on and so forth. In the earlier days, after it became clear that fleeing through the caverns was no longer an option, the damp, dirty camp seemed millennia away from becoming something mildly resembling comfort. But here they were. A triumph and example of what grit, motivation and the dedication could bring. Long live the reign of man.

**Human Ability Adjustments:** none.

**Favored Class (Any):** A multiclass human's highest class does not count when determining whether he or she suffers an XP penalty for multiclassing.

**Languages Automatically Known:** Brovosian.

**Special Abilities:**

* Quick to Master: 1 extra feat at 1st level.

* Skilled: 4 extra skill points at 1st level, plus 1 additional skill point at each following level.