The Korrun are a race born when the primordial stone settled into Ezz and Gaea's song of creation. The stone in them is a cast laid over an ordinary life, a color and not a foundation, and it changes nothing of what lies beneath. They are wholly alive, born and breeding like any of Gaea's children, and they die as mortals die. When a Korrun dies the steadiness goes out of them the way warmth leaves a stone left out of the sun, and what remains takes the roads every mortal takes: the soul to the Astral, the shadow to Malstaris, the spirit to Celestia for as long as the name is held. The affinity simply ends. Nothing of the rock stays behind to haunt anyone. Their skin carries the grey and ochre of weathered stone, often with a faint grain or a darker vein running through it, and they are heavier than their size suggests, dense in the bone. Their eyes are the flat, settled color of river stone. They are stone-touched, not stone-made.
To the Korrun, stone is the patience they are born to, not an element they reach for. They come into the world with a wide channel to Golus, the earth layer of the Elemental Planes, and rock answers them with an ease that others spend years of training to approach. The feeling that feeds it is the kind that holds and refuses to move: resolve, endurance, the grounded patience that outlasts whatever pushes against it. A Korrun who decides to wait will outwait anyone watching. That steadiness carries its own danger, and they are clear-eyed about it. Held too long and too hard, patience sets the way an unfinished working sets, going rigid before its time, and a Korrun who lets that happen to their temper turns immovable in the worst sense, unable to bend when bending is what the moment asks. So their discipline is endurance kept workable, not endurance for its own sake. If the Neferati are the people of the fire that escalates and consumes, the Korrun are the opposite pole of the same map of feeling. They do not burn toward things; they hold, and they outlast. A Korrun grief does not flood and a Korrun anger does not climb. Both settle low and sit, and outsiders who read that stillness as coldness have usually not waited long enough to be proven wrong.
Their gatherings turn on that lesson. In the deep galleries beneath the peaks they keep the long holdings, where each shaper draws a working of stone up out of the floor and holds it open, unfinished and unset, for as long as they can bear. The holding is judged by whether the stone is still soft enough to shape when the holder lets it go, not by how long it is held. To hold long and let the stone go rigid is to fail. To hold and keep it answering the hand is to keep faith.
Stone that cannot be worked is only a wall, and anyone can build a wall. The art is in the rock that still answers your hand on the day you finally need it. — a Korrun holding-master, recorded in the Blueshale galleries
Most Korrun live in and under the Blueshale Peaks, the range northwest of Argysis that stands on an earth leyline. On that seam their attunement runs deepest, and a line raised in the galleries reaches a fluency with stone that the same blood never finds out on the flat lowland. They are not the only power in the peaks. Stormfather, the earth-attuned cyclops who once counseled the Argysisean dwarves, has held the high stone there longer than any Korrun memory, and they regard him much the way you regard weather older than your house. With the dwarves themselves the Korrun keep a wary respect. The holds raise stonework to a standard no born gift can match by instinct alone, cutting ore-rich rock clean and closing a gallery on command, while the Korrun answer stone without being taught and never quite reach the dwarves' precision. The two peoples have learned to leave each other their separate excellences.
The Circle of Stone, the ancient ring far to the north on the Earth and Force convergence, is recognized among the Korrun as their deep-ancestral work. Their ancestors raised it in an age before any Northlands people now living could name. What they built there and exactly why, the Korrun do not hold in full account — the working outlasted the memory of it. But they know the hand in it on sight, that uncanny density no later stonework has matched, and they do not dispute the claim.
Aspects
- Steady as the deep stone
- What holds outlasts what burns
Vitals
- Size: Medium
- Height: 5-6 feet
- Weight: 180-320 pounds
- Max Age: 120
Game mechanics
Stoneborn Frame
Passive ability. Your bones carry the density of the stone you are kin to. You weigh nearly double what your size suggests, and you have advantage on saves and checks made to resist being moved, lifted, knocked prone, or thrown.
Stone Soul
Passive ability. You gain an advanced attunement to earth. Rather than sleep, you must spend 4 hours in contact with unworked stone or bare ground, with no worked floor or bedding between you and the rock. You can perform undemanding tasks while you rest.