Grimkin

Waldovian

Location of origin: Waldovia region

　‎　About half of native Grimkin fall into the Waldovian group, as the brunt of their population has survived by remaining in cities near enough to the surface to reap its bounties, while also remaining deep enough that the threats of the world are at a safe distance. While many of them seldom see the light of day, their home region of Waldovia is the only truly accessible major territory for outsiders. Because of this access, the people of Waldovian heritage have had more access to external food, goods, and even knowledge of the surface folk, and these influences have shifted their appearances over the millennia to more of a general Varian look. At least, the Waldovian Grimkin were those who chose to welcome these new changes, rather than push them away.

While they don’t reach the same levels of complexion depth or colorful tones of hair as their fellow Varian people, the Willonians and Hinfolk, the Waldovian kin have a wider range of skin and hair diversity.

The majority of Waldovian people fall within the Wonderkin culture. In recent centuries, many Waldovian families have integrated with the deeper Cavernkin people as well, but most who choose to exist outside of traditional native societies will leave the Grimlands altogether.

Lamplin

Location of origin: Waldovia & Lumina regions

　‎　The Lamplin are a large group of the native Grimkin population, but their numbers are fairly split between the regions of Waldovia and Lumina. They have relied on similar technology and lifestyles to their fellow Waldovians, but these people have altered much of these practices to be more proudly deep-centric. They still maintain a reliance upon sight-based activities and a schedule of routines based around the day and night cycle, but perhaps due to a mixture of pride for their own culture and fear of the unknown, some go so far as believing in superstitions about the surface worlds and its dangers, mistrusting anything from the world above. It’s possible that this is the most likely reason they have become a distinct heritage group, despite their existence within the same settlements as the Waldovians.

The Lamplin retain their pale Grimkin complexions, but are the most colorless, ghostly appearance of them. Rarely sporting any natural color at all, the only true source of natural color on a Lamplin is usually their eyes.

Lamplin are generally split between the deeper Cavernkin and the Waldovian people, as many people of Lamplin heritage will trade, travel, and integrate with Wonderkin society just as much as any Waldovian.

Gloomkin

Location of origin: Deep caverns of the Grimlands

　‎　In the deepest depths of the Grimlands, the Gloomkin have changed drastically to blend with their surroundings, adopting some of the deepest complexions of all people in the world. Similar to the way the Waldovians and Lamplin people coexist in the higher settlements, the Gloomkin heritage group lives side-by-side with many of the Lamplin groups. The major difference between the two groups is not because of a different location or culture, so much that the diet and lifestyles of the Gloomkin are so drastically separated from the Lamplin that they have taken quite the visual turn in evolutionary advantage. Most of the deeper, cold tones of the Gloomkin’s complexion is thought to come from their diet of unique flora and fauna of the deep caverns. The Delveron region in particular has many settlements of the Gloomkin who cultivate odd fungal creatures as livestock for food and labor, and even as companions.

The Gloomkin have almost no visible irises, just large pupils, black and glossy. Their features are the most exaggerated of all Grimkin, very round in places like the nose and forehead, and their hands and feet are much more chunky in shape.Despite their bulbous facial features, hands, and feet, they have developed more thin builds, better to slink, skitter, and shimmy through tight crevices in their close quarters locations, but their larger headds, hands, and feet allow them to control their balance and weight distribution in strange places.

Many biological scholars of the Beanut Lands have done extensive studies of the Gloomkin people in particular, and many hypotheses about the greater Varian people have become more common thanks to the way that the Gloomkin have adapted so freely when forced to live under extreme circumstances in the deep caverns.

culture info

Vallinen

Location of origin: Lovalia and other regions neighboring the Grimlands

Ever since the primal Tok people settled in the neighboring valleys, now known as Lovalia, the Grimkin have had many interactions with them. For many ages, these interactions were minimal, but eventually enough Grimkin were curious to venture out of the caves, and the Lovalian people had settled more of the habitable valleys of the Frostlands that the two groups finally and beneficially connected in earnest.

Now, many thousands of years later, those Grimkin who have chosen life in Lovalia have grown slightly more vertical, and store more consistent protective layers of fat against the cold weather otherwise foreign to their previous Grimlands homes. Although the Vallinen are still true Grimkin, most of them have lost access to the traditional Grimkin diets from the caverns, which has shifted their hair tones to much darker average colors of brown, auburn and stony grey. It is unlikely for a Vallinen to sport the classic pale-toned hair colors.

About half of the Vallinen people have taken on Lovalian cultures, but some remain true to their roots as Wonderkin. It is not unusual for them to travel back through the Grimlands and due south to see more of the world, however, so many of them also can be found elsewhere.

Squillies

Location of origin: Anywhere in the world, and those of mixed-Varian parentage

Originally, the Squillies people were almost exclusively the product of mixed-Varian children between the traveling Hinfolk who came northward and the Grimkin who lived there. In recent years, however, only about half of the Squillies population exists in the ancestral Grimlands today.

Similar to the Vallinen heritage, many the Squillies people have ventured to the surface lands alongside their Varian kinfolk. Thanks to the Willonian people making travel and trade throughout the major Beanut Lands more viable, the Squillies population has boomed, meaning surface Grimkin such as these exist just about everywhere to this day.

The original Squillies people mostly maintained cavern-based lifestyles, but in recent centuries the population boom has made their culture split drastically. The largest consistent non-Grimlands populations exist in Willonia, as the Nolian culture.