A diminutive and largely isolated race of four-eyed rodent-like creatures with thin dark red fur and leathery skin, barely two and a half feet tall at their largest and armed with hefty three-fingered claws and feet for digging. They are not particularly well known to most surface dwelling peoples, for their short lifespans and abundance of strange, monstrous predators has left them a cautious, skittish, and overly conservative folk. To their credit, they are generally friendly and cooperative, and are highly adept in the magic of Geomancy, allowing their burrows to cover only a very small distance but to contain vast networks of extradimensional space.

Also of note is that their lungs are not connecting to their mouths, which due to an odd confluence of features (such as “valves” poking out of their shoulders) means that their own languages are deeply alien to most other races. The descriptions vary, but can neatly be summarized as “a harmony of wind instruments... full of wet food”.

YUL-KARROK, BURROW CITY OF THE DIPLAT
Ooluut’s history and the history of her family is closely tied to that of their once great city – Yul-Karrok of the Sandveins. Legend says that once, countless generations ago, it was founded as an outpost of a great empire that stretched across the deep caverns and tunnels of the world. But for reasons not well understood, the empire fell, and many of its towns and cities grew isolated from one another and from the world at large.

For generations Yul-Karrok maintained its independence and was little known by outsiders, save for occasional dwarf travelers and traders on its fringes. This was, for the most part, a result of the ancient diplat art of geomancy, of the careful use of leylines, stone and communal dreamwalking to compress and distort the fabric of space, literally “storing” more space in an area than it naturally should. By these means they could hold many more people, land, and supplies in what was to outside observers a largely unremarkable – if well-guarded and confusing – set of caves and tunnels.

Ooluut, specifically, was born into the families of burrow four, who were vital to the maintenance of these geomantic arrays. She was raised from a wee cub in this tradition, and as she entered young adulthood at the age of three she was already adept in this art, often tasked with patrolling the city’s edges to help maintain and stabilize the city's large network of 'geomantic arrays' - sets of symbols and glyphs in turn imprinted upon with the diplat's collective dreams and willpower, that were used to "layer" the geomancy and maintain the city's structure and secrecy.

Save, unfortunately, for those on the upper levels. So old were they, and so far removed from the city itself, that they had largely been forgotten about – it was only after a series of tremors had impacted the city, initially small but gradually larger and more frequent in the last few months, that she decided to investigate. Not long before that her cubs had been born, but they were still too young to even dream of leaving the pouch.

Despite the protests of her fellows, she decided to take the job on – it was her research that had rediscovered these arrays in the first place, damn it, she wanted to see them for herself.

THE GEOMANCER’S CALAMITY
It took her the better part of three days, navigating tunnels long abandoned and through burrows none had lived in for generations. A golem - a hefty, box-like beast of stone and metal - had come with her for protection, and once or twice they had been forced to fend off a direrat or a snaggle-toothed flower... but still, they had pressed on. Most worrying to Ooluut, however, was the tremors, and the tindalos – entities created by the fragmenting of the world that all geomancy involved, and often used as part of elaborate traps to hunt would-be intruders or predators.

But here, so close to the surface and with sunlight filtering through cracks in the stone, the tindalos were all gone - their forms subsumed back into reality. Ooluut's heart sank with terrible realization, for the geomantic arrays were not simply old. Oh no, the truth was far worse.

The arrays here were gone.

The etchings and symbols were faded, cracked and misshapen, and the lack of collective dreaming had almost completely stripped them of power. Worse still, something was leeching energy from them. Cracks in the surface revealed thick rain clouds, and… trees?! Hundreds and hundreds of strange and alien trees dotted the surface world, dwelt in by tall and monstrous insects. It was an impossibility. All of the legends and histories had clearly stated that Yul-Karrok was built underneath a great desert! In part it had thrived because no one had need of this place, and the disruption of the leylines typically caused by geomancy wouldn't attract any attention.

But as she looked over the markings of the now dead array, her mind racing for a solution that could buy the city time, Ooluut's quills quivered... and the trees of this strange landscape saw her. As the strange chittering insects turned to see her, as one they charged with claw, mandible and wing and began to breach the tunnels. All the while, the tremors that had been accelerating over the past few months were now growing ever more out of control, and a wicked realization entered Ooluut's mind.

Could she warn her people? Was there time?

‘No,’ she thought, feeling the warmth of her youngest, Tuli, nuzzling against her within her pouch, ‘There isn’t.’

But the insects broached the surface, and as they spoke to her in a foul tongue she couldn’t understand, she reached within herself. Geomancy was an art of patience and detail, but in this place, with the arrays hanging on by a thread…

The wicked thought lingered in her mind and heart, a cruel choice before her, and even as she knew she should wait her mind just as easily knew what would ensure the safety of her children.

So she did it.

She whispered the words, scratched the marking, breathed deep and reached within herself, tugging at the last dwindling thread of this ancient magic – a gift of the ancestors, the key to her people’s safety.

In a moment, it was over.

The walls that had kept Yul-Karrok a safe city were no more.

The closest array snapped like a twig, the weakest link in a great chain. In a matter of seconds, twenty centuries of magic and layered space were coiled in upon themselves and released, a spiralling rush of screaming light and coiling stone, engulfing the monstrous trees and their insects and the surface, Ooluut and her children only barely saved by the barest shred of shelter.

For what felt like an eternity, she blinked through a sky that was full of clouds and fog and shadows and dust. The world above was blinding and the underground was exposed – where the ruins of a vast city were now torn from the earth and intermingled with the broken trees of a dying, ruined forest. All around the magic was decaying, and bodies of every sort - diplat and moth and wild beast all the same - were torn and shattered against wood and stone and metal. She didn’t throw up, of course – the true immensity of it still wasn’t real, in her mind, how could it be? This was all a bad dream. A terrible nightmare.

She looked down at her pouch.

Her children were wriggling, chirping with nerves and confusion… but alive, she realized.

For the price of a hundred thousand other families, she had preserved this slice of her own.

Then something stirred, in the ruins. She felt it in her throat, her chest – a cruel hope. Survivors? Really?

But as she began to search the wreckage, already puzzling what she would tell them as her claws got shakier and shakier – ‘monsters, on the surface, they had been corrupting the array, I couldn’t stop them!’ – she started to notice something… off about the diplat in the ruins.

Whatever force had been feeding on the leylines diverted by her people's geomancy... it was not dead. Far from it - for shambling from the ruins came dead and wicked forms, monstrous creatures. Ghosts? This place was a graveyard of her creation, and as the things that used to be her neighbours and compatriots rose to claw at her and gnash their teeth, she could not stay.

So she didn’t.

She fled, as far from that wicked place as she could, and she didn’t look back.

THE PRESENT
Her memories of the past few weeks had become hazy save for glimmers – here, in this city of sand and giants, only the last few days provided clarity of purpose.

For days she had wandered, through dust and stone – rarely was there something to eat or water to drink. She had searched for safety, but traveling so far from home the tunnels in this place were often dead ends, or too tough for her to dig alone. During the day she had sought shelter among rocky outcroppings, hiding her sensitive eyes from the sun, and making a meal of scorpions or beetles. It was rarely enough – as her cubs desperately suckled she felt herself become weaker and weaker, until one evening amidst the cooling dark she saw a fire.

There sat a pair of large, stocky creatures – mostly bald save the heavy beards that surrounded their strange heads, and clad in silken armour. One of them saw her, and as they tried to communicate in some bizarre speech – while looking confused or making strange noises in response to her own attempts, she at last gave up on diplomacy and lunged for the food they were roasting.

It didn’t take them long to strike her, and as that gentle light gave way to darkness, so too did any chance at freedom being offered – not that she’d known it at the time.

For weeks now she has been kept in this cage, listening. Learning.

Day by day what was once mindless babble became words, meaning, commands, sentences. The conquests of this “Clan Baruq” are coming to an end, apparently – most of the other desperate souls in this place also lost their homes… albeit, not at their own hands, but she is a trophy just like the rest of them.

Three days ago they had taken her cubs, to be sold as pets to some rich merchant.

During the day she weeps and begs for them, in the hopes a stranger will take pity, but during the night she thinks, and grates her fangs, and makes markings into the floor of the cage.

Thin and eager markings.

Knowing.

Throughout the world there flow many Leylines - magical currents, carrying the 'essence' of physical matter which is transferred by the movement of such and leaves a magical 'echo' of the tangible reality. That is, magic permeates the world, but leylines are the 'routes' along which this magic becomes most dynamic, and tend to match up to geographic features like rivers or canyons, or the regular migrations of people and animals.

But somewhat ironically, because the magic in leylines is constantly moving, it is trickier to tap into through most magical systems - since it is not a magical 'source' you can't simply 'tap into it' and extract magical energy like you would by, say, using the power of a person's soul, blood, or stationary elemental sources. While some societies have mastered the art of creating 'reservoirs' of magical energy by filtering it from a leyline, geomancy is specifically the use of glyphs (symbols carved into a sensitive material) to redirect leylines. Depending on what the leyline is 'echoing' this can have several effects:
--- If the leyline is an echo of routine migrations of people or animals, it will 'encourage' or 'tug' the migration to shift its movement.
--- If the leyline is tied to a 'present' geographic feature, like a river or cloud formation, then it will alter the course of such.
--- If the leyline is tied to a 'negative' geographic feature - such as a deep pit, tunnel or canyon - then it will likewise change the position or direction of such.

But beyond this, the diplat specifically have mastered oneiric geomancy, a yet stranger art where one specifically uses dreams - collective dreaming - and overlays this onto sets of geomantic glyphs, usually called 'arrays'. These 'geomantic arrays' can affect leylines in the aforementioned ways (and thus geographic features or migrations attached to them) but because it does so by overlaying an element of dream logic, it in turn allows a number of strange and wonderful effects such as causing physical spaces within the boundaries of an array to be bigger on the inside than they appear from outside, and to contain internal structures that shouldn't normally be possible - noneuclidean spaces such as corridors that loop back on themselves, or which 'stretch out' to prevent ease of access so long as the visitor 'wants' to go there, or pits that seem to fall forever.

While in theory oneiric geomancy would be usable by any of Alwyne's peoples, in practice, most races lack the combination of collective dreaming, careful insistence on detailed texture, and the tenacity of the earth itself to make it work. For the diplat, who are deeply tied to the earth and collectively nest together in the tens or hundreds of thousands with little difficulty, this proved to be not merely theoretical but practical and powerful in a way that would allow them to form a mighty – if largely invisible – empire of their own and left their remnant cities undisturbed and secret for centuries.

What They Most Want:

If They Had a DnD Alignment, It Would Be: While once “True Neutral” might have been accurate, she has revealed a distinctly selfish streak that will act to preserve her children against any threat… no matter the cost.

Three Likes:

Three Dislikes:

Do They Follow Their Heart or Their Mind?: Ooluut fears following either too much, but trusting her instincts did ultimately saved her life and the lives of her children. Now stuck in a world alien to her senses and largely alone, she finds herself needing to trust her gut.

Worst Fear: Losing her children, but a close second would be losing what few possessions she still has from her fallen city.

Favorite Color:

Most Like The Animal:
_{That is, which animal they are most like- not which one they like the most.}

Favorite Time of Day:

How They Dress:

Favorite Season:

What Gods/Spirits/Whatevers They Worship (If Any):