Men

Bigger, stronger, and — according to some — greater than their cousins, Men rule this late Second World. They have long lifespans and mighty bodies, and an exceptionally strong drive towards greatness, a drive to leave a legacy, that borders on psychosis. No other race has ever produced as many heroes per-capita as the race of Men, and it seems unlikely any ever will: Men, after all, do not like competition.

Singular Man
Feminine Woman
Denominative Mannish

The race of Men needs no introduction, for they have ensured that all peoples know their name. Taller than orcs, stronger than dwarves, and more enduring than either, Men have spread across the known world not through cleverness or adaptability but through the simple, brute fact of being too large and too stubborn to stop. Where other races found their niche and settled into it, Men found their niche, and then decided it wasn’t enough. The great Mannish empires were not built on ingenuity, nor even magic, but on the backs of soldiers who could march further, fight harder, and hold longer than anything they met on the road. The meek do not, indeed, inherit the earth: for Men are Lastborn, Last of the Second World, and with the departure of the greater things of earlier days it seems to some there is nothing that can stand against their rise.

They are creatures of ambition and hunger, driven by a need to have and to hold that borders on compulsion, and the heroes born of this need are legion — for he who takes and he who takes back both are heroes, though neither be heroic. Men are not sages, nor are they seers. They are blind to divine edict and the workings of spell alike, and deaf to the whispers of the Fair Folk and Demons both; and though their bodies are mighty and their will strong, not all things can be defeated with might alone, and a strong will does not defeat that which there is no will to fight. But what Men lack in perception and magical might, they make up for in sheer bloody-minded refusal to yield. A Man on the brink of death is not a Man defeated: the sky is always most beautiful at dusk.

It is not just ambition that drives him, though. Men are blind and deaf to the unseen world in a way that no other race is — no other race is born so entirely bereft of purpose, of necessity, of anything greater or more meaningful than brute, contingent fact. There is no reason a Man must be, no inbuilt drive, no divine conduit. Alone with his thoughts, a Man hears his own breathing, and the wind, and nothing else — and so he fills the silence with himself. He speaks, and builds, and conquers, and names things, and plants flags on hills, and says this is mine, not because he needs it but because nothing in the world will ever tell him it was meant for him, and he cannot bear the quiet of a world that does not know his name: he is nothing, he can be anything, so he will try and become everything. His defiance is not courage; it is the desperation of a creature that was given no purpose at all, and refuses to go without: the spite of something extraneous, which refuses to be made optional.