This issue is late this week, apologies for that. For those keeping track, I try to publish every Sunday, but I’ve been fighting off a nasty bug that has made it difficult for me to focus and sit in front of a computer for too long. I’ll be okay though. And I really wanted to share “The Kindless” with you.
Reminder
As always this newsletter is published under the terms of the Creative Comrades License, which you can read here: http://creativecomrades.org. This means that the content — words and art — shared here can be reused in your own projects, commercially or otherwise. Just attribute me as the author or the respective artist, who in this case is Yves Rahuel, whom you can find (and follow) on Instagram and Twitter.
They Came from Beyond the Stars…
The Kindless are a species of elegant looking elves whose mythology involves falling to the world of Cyndril in ages before the ice age, brought here by golden boats that sailed among the stars themselves. They have survived the long, frozen wastes of Cyndril for many thousands of years, and while they are few in number now, they still exert what influence they can on their surroundings.
The Kindless are thus named because they are dark and alien in their dealing with other sentient species, cold and devoid of any emotion except contempt. While some believe they have been corrupted by the effects of the Negative Sun, they are in fact just xenophobic. Actually I call them ‘misanthropic’, intending to imply that their hatred is targeted specifically at humans, but I think misanthropic is meant to be used to describe a human or humans who hate humanity.
But I digress.
The Kindless have innate psionic powers, are resistant to sleep and charm effects, and don’t sleep themselves but rather enter into meditative trances. They are immune to extreme cold. They are related to the hunched, guant creatures of the underearth called “dark elves”, but only in passing and having a shared mythology of having come from the stars. Dark Elves are twisted by necrotic magic to extend their lives unnaturally, while the Kindless leave near immortal lives, until a time when they choose to perform the ritual of the Fading, passing from this realm to one beyond the physical.
More on Dark Elves in a future newsletter.
Introducing the Kindless
The Kindless are meant to be distant, somewhat aloof, and not very friendly when they are encountered. They don’t speak much, preferring to observe the actions of others (and then passing judgment after the fact). They also speak to one another telepathically, making encounters with them very quiet ones. When they address lesser sentient creatures, they do so by speaking that species language, which they seem to know naturally, but the act of speaking out loud seems to cause them distress, or rather disinterest. They’d rather speak directly through telepathy, but they’ve driven quite a few creatures insane by bombarding them with psionic conversation.
They may hate other lesser species, but they aren’t monsters themselves, and aren’t eager to mind blast other beings without cause.
More to Come…
I really want to write up a few scenarios that can be used to introduce the Kindless in your own games, but I have to be honest that I just don’t have it in me this week. I don’t like writing less than 1,200-1,500 words for these newsletters, because I want to make them worth your while, but unfortunately this week I have to cut this short and focus on my health.