Corrupted Races
Not every dangerous thing in the world is dangerous by choice, circumstance, or misunderstanding. Some things are broken at a more fundamental level: not morally culpable the way a person is, but genuinely irredeemable. No path back exists because no path forward was ever available.
This is categorically different from the prejudice that attaches to the Thylini, whose reputation is built on fear and structural bias. Seven such broken races are known to exist, each a corruption of one of the seven Laws of Ren.
Castborn
Section titled “Castborn”Corruption of Recurrence
Castborn are the most common corrupted threat encountered across the Remnant Continent, particularly in Gankora’s wild interior. They emerge from sites of heavy Ren corruption: steaming breeding pits, churned earth, places where Ren has pooled and festered long enough to produce something that walks.
A Rennim who senses Castborn finds something immediately wrong. Their Ren is smeared thin, dragged into crude loops that never resolve. Where a living being’s circulation settles into stable patterns, a Castborn’s stutters and catches, permanently incomplete. They exist in a state of perpetual want that cannot be addressed because the mechanism for addressing it is broken.
They grow by consuming. As a Castborn feeds, it accumulates enough mass and corrupted Ren to fragment: one creature splitting into several weaker ones, each independently persistent. The cycle repeats. What begins as a single threat can become a horde through predation alone, with no breeding required. A Castborn that does not fragment grows instead, that consumed mass and Ren concentrating into a single, more powerful body.
They also take. Castborn have been documented abducting Thuim women, specifically to facilitate a different form of multiplication. The hybrid offspring produced this way are called Arch-Casts. Where a standard Castborn is a thing of perpetual want and no cognition, an Arch-Cast carries a measure of intelligence. They can direct. They can organize. A horde with an Arch-Cast at its center operates with purpose.
Left alone, Castborn are chaotic and predatory toward each other as readily as toward anything else. When something is organizing them, the nature of the threat changes entirely.
Hollowlings
Section titled “Hollowlings”Corruption of Coalescence
Hollowlings are rarer than Castborn and more dangerous. The Law of Coalescence holds that Ren cannot be created or destroyed, only removed or concentrated. A Hollowling’s Ren does exactly that: removes and concentrates Ren from other living beings into itself. What a healthy creature sustains through its own circulation, a Hollowling sustains by draining it from elsewhere.
They are intelligent. The predation is not mindless. A Hollowling understands what it is doing and does it anyway, because no other mechanism for survival exists within what they are.
Rennim make preferred targets. The Ren a Hollowling drains from a trained Rennim sustains it far longer than the same feeding on a Renak. A Rennim whose Ren is fully drained does not simply die. The body, now hollow of everything that sustained it, begins its own corrupted Coalescence. The Hollowling ranks grow from their victims.
They are the creation of Lygwithinin, now the spirit of Blood. He made them during his transformation into a spirit and cannot unmake them. Most factions cannot communicate with Hollowlings in any meaningful way. The Black Chalice can, operating through Corruption polarities that resonate with what Hollowlings are. Whether the arrangement that results is an alliance or mutual exploitation has never been clearly answered.
GM: Lygwithinin and the Hollowlings
Lygwithinin is the spirit of Blood and the Hollowlings’ progenitor. He is aligned with Ylelaim and actively opposes the Hollowlings. He has not been forgiven for making them. He seeks that forgiveness without any assurance it exists. He cannot destroy what he made. He can only work against it.
As the spirit of Blood, every Hollowling feeding resonates through him. He is the concept they have inverted. This is not a distant theological condition for him. It is constant.
The Hollowlings do not know or care about their progenitor. They simply are what they are.
World-eaters
Section titled “World-eaters”Corruption of Conversion
The Law of Conversion holds that Ren alters its nature to persist, that identity is mutable but essence is not. A World-eater’s corruption runs through that second part. Essence is not protected. Essence is consumed.
World-eaters devour everything they kill. Flesh, bone, Ren-rich tissue, Ren crystals encountered in the wild: all of it is processed and stripped of its essence, which the World-eater incorporates into itself. A creature that has consumed something fast gains a measure of speed. One that has consumed something with thick hide carries that resistance forward. One that has fed on Ren-saturated materials becomes harder to wound with Ren techniques. The longer a World-eater has lived and hunted, the more layered its absorbed properties become.
This does not make them unkillable. A freshly emerged World-eater carries the properties of whatever it first devoured and nothing more. Its core can be destroyed. The difficulty scales with age: a World-eater that has hunted for years carries dozens of layered resistances and capabilities, and putting it down requires identifying what it has eaten and bringing force it has not yet adapted to. Older World-eaters become named threats, requiring coordinated effort and preparation rather than a straight fight.
The other method to combat world eaters is to give them volatile or sickly things to eat, and they become weak.
Forsaken
Section titled “Forsaken”Corruption of Harmony
A Forsaken is felt before it is seen.
The Law of Harmony holds that Ren can vibrate with concepts to achieve effects beyond what raw force allows. A Forsaken generates none of that resonance. What emanates from them is the absence of it: a dissonance that Rennim perceive as pressure, wrongness, and physical discomfort that intensifies the closer they get. For a Rennim at full sensitivity, proximity to a Forsaken is painful before it becomes lethal.
Within that field, Ren abilities become unreliable. Techniques cost more, misfire, or fail entirely. The field’s range and intensity scale with the Forsaken’s size and age. Older Forsaken have been described as producing dissonance wide enough to suppress Ren use across an entire battlefield.
Unable to achieve anything through resonance with the world, Forsaken compensate through scale. They are massive. Everything they accomplish, they accomplish by being too large and too heavy to stop through conventional means. The dissonance field means the tools best suited to stopping them are the first to fail.
Sloughkin
Section titled “Sloughkin”Corruption of Elasticity
The Law of Elasticity holds that Ren bends but does not break, and that what is displaced seeks restoration of form. A Sloughkin restores constantly. The corruption is in what it restores to.
There is no correct form in the pattern a Sloughkin’s Ren seeks to rebuild. Wounds close, but close wrong. Severed limbs regenerate misaligned. Tissue that cannot integrate into the reforming body sloughs away and falls. For younger Sloughkin this produces a constant, visible grotesquerie: a creature visibly in the process of shedding and reforming, leaving trails of discarded tissue behind it.
In older Sloughkin, that shed tissue hardens. Years of repeated shedding and layering builds up, the cast-off flesh calcifying into natural armor plating over the creature’s body. The older the Sloughkin, the more armored it is, entirely from its own discarded regeneration.
Killing one through conventional attrition accomplishes little. The regeneration outpaces most sustained damage. Fire works, and so does any sufficiently concentrated destructive force: the goal is overwhelming the rate of restoration entirely rather than trading wounds with it.
Untethered
Section titled “Untethered”Corruption of Influence
The Law of Influence holds that Ren exerts and receives force, that it is the bridge between will and world. An Untethered is what remains when that bridge severs on the world side. Spirits are coalescences of concept with accumulated consciousness. An Untethered is cruder: the concentrated malice and hatred of something that refused to stop existing, stripped of everything except the drive to exert itself on the world.
They have no meaningful body. What is sometimes visible, if anything at all, is vestigial: a shape that will left behind when it shed everything else. They pass through physical matter. Conventional weapons accomplish nothing.
Rennim can reach them. Ren, as the force that bridges will and world, interacts with what an Untethered is in a way that raw physical force cannot. A trained Rennim can unravel and vanquish an Untethered. For Renak, an encounter with one offers two options: retreat, or death.
Blightroot
Section titled “Blightroot”Corruption of Flux
Blightroot do not hunt. They spread.
They are plants, or something that began as plants before becoming a full expression of corrupted Flux. The Law of Flux holds that Ren circulates and exchanges between all living things. Blightroot rewrites that circulation in the land itself, replacing it with corrupted patterns that sustain only corruption.
The effects compound over time. Flora in a Blightroot territory becomes carnivorous and aggressive, spreading outward and consuming what it reaches. Fauna that remain in the territory long enough corrupt, becoming hostile to anything not carrying the same corruption. The soil conditions that produce Castborn breeding pits form naturally in ground that Blightroot has worked long enough.
Blightroot are why some regions east of Gankora are effectively lost. A zone with an established Blightroot presence does not merely contain corrupted things. The land itself is corrupted, and functions as hostile terrain by default.
Destroying the Blightroot is possible. The land it has already worked does not recover quickly.