Ethnicity index

Barrowmen
Most westerners in northern Chalice trace their roots back to the barrowmen, a people that began inhabiting Chalice in the Second Age. After the Chrassian Empire and the Zelthynese incursion most have forgotten everything of their ancestral culture and simply acknowledge they're a separate people from the Zelthynese. Many rural communities carry the tradition orally and whisper tales of a time the north was free and strong leaders called barrow kings kept peace in various small kingdoms where worshippers of Dyné, Nyghta and Minatal alike inhabitated the same land. Especially the nobility likes to remind people of these times as they draw their right to rule from old bloodlines.

Melysseans
Named after an old kingdom of the barrowmen, the Melysseans are people who live in the Melyssean Peninsula. They include westerners and Talaneans alike. Melysseans have no uniform culture but the south, particularly Freehold, displays aspects of the religious Talanean ways of the Great Continent. Living in general is different from the rest of Chalice. There is no widely established nobility and few regulations on religion or the practice of magic.

Zelthynese
The Zelthynese people are a mixture of two westerner broods: the barrowmen and the Naelites of the Great Continent who followed Asegan in his exile. Although their blood relation is strongest to the barrowmen, they have adopted the ways of Naelum, including widespread worship of Ymdras. Zelthynese nobility is mainly of Naelite descent and frowns upon marrying outside Naelite families. Despite uniform culture, the ancestral division of Zelthyn is sometimes acknowledged with the terms "Zelthynese Naelites" and "Zelthynese barrowmen".