The Korlan are a people of the minotaur, not a separate biological lineage — a philosophical inversion of the Lorean's protective ethos, built around systematized dominance and the Tykos slave trade, not on any biological split from minotaur kind. The Korlan trace their lineage to the Lorean, and the connection is visible in everything except the conclusions they draw from it. They kept the tactical intelligence, the clan discipline, the capacity for cold assessment that emotion cannot cloud. What they discarded was the Lorean premise that such clarity exists to protect those in your charge. The schism is old enough that its origin is debated; the Korlan themselves consider the philosophical inversion self-evident rather than a departure. Strength justifies dominance. The Lorean arrived at the same observation and built a warrior culture around preventing anyone from exercising it unchecked. The Korlan built Slavos.
Slavos is the center of the Tykos slave trade — a great market city where the Korlan's organizational genius has been applied to the movement of people with the same systematic precision that Lorean generals apply to troop deployment. Clan territories control the sourcing routes; the ruling clan of Slavos holds disproportionate power by controlling the market itself, a structural arrangement that is occasionally challenged and has not yet been successfully overturned. The accounting is meticulous, the logistics sophisticated, and the auction houses are built to last. The Korlan find abstract moral philosophy tedious in the way that Lorean find emotional decision-making tedious — as a category error committed by those who have not thought carefully enough about how things actually work.
Seven to eight feet, bull-headed, unapologetic. Korlan clans compete for status through market share and territorial control; the forms of competition are highly ritualized, with specific acceptable and unacceptable escalations codified across generations of clan negotiation. A Korlan who violates the ritual frameworks loses face in a way that matters. A Korlan who succeeds within them is respected regardless of what the success required.
Aspects
- Strength is the only argument that requires no translation
- Every exchange has a ledger; pretending otherwise is the lie weak races tell themselves