The Sythyn are a species from a world they call Llyr aRraanor, or Land of the Blood: a harsh, chilly world with small, island-like continents bearing mainly mountains, pine forests, and open, misty plains. Their origin is steeped in myth, but the reality is that they were simply a magical accident. A bodiless species, called in myth the Ghosts, briefly colonized the planet in its youth, but its intense presence warped and infused a number of creatures already on that planet with magic, including the Sythyn. After the appearance of sentient creatures, in what seemed a very brief amount of time to the Ghosts, they abandoned their colonies and left the newly evolved life to fend for itself.

Because of their peculiar birth, the Sythyn people have peculiar traits. The first and foremost is a biological addiction to the magic that created them: without a regular ingestion of that substance, a Sythyn will slowly start to weaken and, before a year is out, he or she will die from biological withdrawal. This addiction can only be satiated through the actual eating or drinking of something infused with that magic. Though a few types of animals on Llyr aRraanor have small amounts of magic in their makeup, the most reliable source is in the Sythyn people themselves, for although they need it to live, they also generate it to some extent.

The expression of this has manifested on the world in two main ways: cannibalism, which is the more uncommon; and vampirism, which is by for more common. Both usually occur in a ritual context, within strictly defined boundaries and under specific circumstances. In every culture on that world, blood has a high value, though the type and expression of that value varies. To some, it has become a drive for sacrifice; for others, it symbolizes unity; to others, it led to warfare, and to yet others, to extreme pacifism. The most advanced culture on the planet, on the most hospitable and most central island-continents, chooses the peaceful approach, tempered with a focus on order and guidance, though rarely do other peoples on the planet accept their guidance.

A second peculiarity about the Sythyn is their difficulty at bearing children. A Sythyn couple might not conceive until they had been married fifteen years, but even then their child will be both their first and last. Sythyn women can only bear one pure-Sythyn child in their lifetime; their reproductive system alters, after the chemical changes involved in pregnancy and birth, to be unable to fertilize another egg with Sythyn seed. Children, then, are a priceless thing to most Sythyn.

A twist to this difficulty, however, is that they remain fertile for men of another species, such as human, elf, or anything else physically compatible. This has led, in the past, to many Sythyn escaping their home planet to seek out lovers elsewhere; some still find ways to escape, in modern times, despite the knowledge. The magic in them adapts to foreign genetics, so that halfbreeds with nearly any other species is possible, but often those half-breeds receive unstable genetics as a result, resulting in madness, deformations, genetic diseases, magical disasters, and any other oddity one might imagine. Some of these children live perfectly normal lives, but the majority do not.

As knowledge of the results of Sythyn-offworlder pairings slowly were brought to light, such pairings became outlawed, originally simply against the law and eventually turned into a social taboo. In some cultures, this was transmuted into a fierce superiority complex, but in most, particularly those who knew the reasons for it, instead there rose a desire to somehow aid those who were the victim of their parents' choices. This spawned Searches, or small groups of Sythyn sent off-world in search of mixed-breeds with their blood, to offer them what help they could, whether in the form of a safe place to return to, knowledge, or what healing or therapy the Sythyn could provide. A few, however, have tried to exploit the unstable gifts of part-Sythyn, and these have spawned the Hunts, where small groups of Sythyn search out and destroy these aberrations. 

Finally, the more superficial oddities about Sythyn biology include: a thicker, less sensitive covering of skin than most humanoids, due to the harshness of their planet; double fangs, evolved to aid in the blood-feeding addiction; and a wide variety of hair and eye colors, due to the wild magic in them, though their leathery skin is uniformly monochrome, between a colorless white and an equally colorless black. Only on places where their skin is thinner and more sensitive-- the hands, neck, chest and belly, and groin-- can the faint pink of blood running under the skin be made out. Those places are nearly always kept covered, even when indoors and shielded from the elements, except in the most intimate or ritualistic of circumstances.

Language Notes: Some Phrases

duVaa anon: "By the Three"; general exclamation, equivalent to "God!"

Rosura sythvaa: greeting, literally "good morning"

Shurdunor: general curse, somewhat translatable to "wasted blood"

Wyrsythu: general curse, equivalent to "damn"

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