Where the Odovhar announce themselves in bulk and temper, the Selkies announce themselves scarcely at all—seal-like humanoids of the colder coasts and northern waters, sleek and economical in build where the Odovhar are massive and blunt, with a grace in the water that borders on the uncanny and a wariness on land that keeps most of them from lingering there long. They stand roughly at human height, lean and smooth-muscled, covered in short, dense fur that ranges through mottled greys, deep browns, and the rare, prized silver-black, patterned in spots and swirls as individual as a fingerprint among other races. Their faces carry something of the seal's soft, large-eyed gentleness even in human posture, dark eyes suited equally to the sunlit shallows and the deep, lightless cold beneath northern ice, and their hands, while fully capable of fine work on land, show a faint webbing between the fingers that no amount of land-dwelling ever quite erases.
The Selkies are, the tome records, a people caught between two worlds and fully at ease in neither—creatures of the sea first, who come ashore out of curiosity, necessity, or occasionally affection, but who carry always a restlessness that eventually calls them back to the water regardless of what ties might hold them on land. This duality shapes nearly everything about Selkie temperament: warm, curious, and genuinely affectionate with those they come to trust, yet fundamentally difficult to hold onto, in friendship, in trade, or—as a great many old coastal tales insist, with a consistency the tome finds difficult to entirely dismiss—in love.
The Pull of the Tide
Selkies speak, when pressed, of a sensation they call the Undertow—not the literal pull of current, but an inward restlessness that builds the longer a Selkie remains ashore, growing from mild unease into something close to genuine distress if ignored too long. A Selkie can and does live among land-dwelling peoples for extended periods, sometimes years, but the Undertow eventually demands answering, and a Selkie who delays that answer too long is, by every account the tome has gathered, a Selkie growing visibly unwell. This has earned the Selkies a reputation among coastal human and Odovhar settlements alike as beautiful, welcome, but ultimately unreliable neighbors—not from any lack of genuine feeling, but from a need their own bodies and spirits simply will not let them override indefinitely.
This same restlessness has given rise to Dúnamhar's most persistent Selkie folklore: tales of a Selkie's sealskin, shed upon first coming ashore and hidden or stolen away by a land-dweller hoping to keep them, binding the Selkie to land for as long as the skin remains lost. The tome's authors have investigated this belief at some length and found it, like most folklore, a blend of genuine truth and considerable exaggeration—a Selkie does indeed feel a sealskin's absence keenly, and the loss of one is treated as a serious matter within Selkie communities, but the notion that a hidden skin can bind a Selkie against their will appears, upon closer study, to be more metaphor than mechanism, reflecting the real emotional weight such a theft carries rather than any literal captivity it imposes.
Kinfolk of the Tide-Clans
Selkie society organizes around Tide-Clans, loose kinship groups bound more by shared waters than by any fixed territory, given how readily Selkies range along coastlines in pursuit of favorable hunting, gentler seasons, or simple curiosity about what lies around the next headland. A Tide-Clan's membership is fluid by nature, with individual Selkies drifting between related clans over a lifetime far more readily than other races would consider normal for kin, and a Selkie is rarely considered to have abandoned one clan merely by spending a season or several among another.
Authority within a Tide-Clan rests loosely with its Deep-Eldest, the most experienced and widely traveled member of the clan, whose role has less to do with formal governance than with memory—holding the clan's knowledge of safe waters, dangerous currents, old agreements with coastal neighbors, and the whereabouts of scattered kin across the wider Tide-Clan network. Disputes among Selkies are rare and rarely prolonged, the Undertow itself serving as a kind of natural pressure release; a disagreement left unresolved is often simply abandoned as one party or another feels the pull of the water and departs, leaving little opportunity for grudges to properly take root.
Relations with Other Races
Coastal settlements across Dúnamhar's northern and western shores have long maintained a fond, if wistful, relationship with Selkie visitors, who are welcomed readily for their genuine warmth, their skill in matters of sea and current, and the simple pleasure of their company, even as every coastal elder knows better than to expect that company to last. Trade with Selkies tends toward the informal—favors exchanged for favors, knowledge of safe waters traded for shelter or goods during a Selkie's time ashore—rather than the structured commerce other races might prefer, a looseness that suits Selkie temperament far better than any formal arrangement would.
The Odovhar and Selkies share the same northern waters without much warmth between them, the Odovhar's blunt territorial aggression sitting poorly against Selkie preference for avoidance over confrontation; Selkies have learned, across generations, simply to give Odovhar herds and their breeding grounds a wide and uncontested berth, a strategy that has kept genuine conflict between the two peoples rare despite their shared coastlines. Human sailors and fisherfolk, by contrast, hold Selkies in considerable and genuine affection, crediting more than one close call at sea to a timely bit of Selkie guidance through waters a human crew could not have read alone, though such aid is never something a sailor can count on receiving twice from the same source.
Selkie Tide-Clans by Territory
Greywater Selkies (northern Obsidian Sea coast, near Ironshoal Odovhar waters) The most frequently encountered of the Tide-Clans, having adapted a careful, practiced distance from their blunt Ironshoal neighbors, the Greywater maintain the most regular and friendly contact with coastal human settlements of any Selkie grouping.
Deepcurrent Selkies (far northern ice-waters) Darker-furred and heavier-built than other Selkies, suited to genuinely frigid water, the Deepcurrent range the same forbidding northern waters claimed by the Frostmaw Odovhar, and are correspondingly the most rarely seen and most cautious of the known Tide-Clans.
Sunstrand Selkies (southern coast, near Silverhowl Lupin territory) The warmest-dispositioned and most sociable of the Tide-Clans, having settled in gentler southern waters, the Sunstrand maintain an unusual and genuinely warm friendship with the reclusive Silverhowl Lupin, the two peoples' shared coastal isolation having produced a quiet kinship neither extends easily to outsiders otherwise.
Wanderfoam Selkies (no fixed territory) Rather than holding to any single stretch of coastline, Wanderfoam Selkies range the entire length of Dúnamhar's shores over a single lifetime, carrying news, goods, and the occasional message between otherwise scattered Tide-Clans, and are regarded even by other Selkies as unusually restless—the Undertow, for a Wanderfoam, seemingly never fully satisfied by any one water for long.
- AQUATIC: Selkies cannot drown in water and move at their full Pace when swimming.
- DEPENDENCY: Selkies must immerse themselves in water one hour out of every 24 or become automatically Fatigued each day until they are Incapacitated. The day after the Incapacitation from dehydration, they perish. Each hour spent in water restores one level of Fatigue.
- LOW LIGHT VISION: Selkies are used to the darkness of the depths. They ignore penalties for Dim and Dark illumination.
- TOUGHNESS: Life in the depths of their watery world has made Selkies flesh dense and resilient. Add +1 to their Toughness.