Children of the Ice, Part 1: The Dorrem

In Arrhenius, character creation begins by choosing your character's Heritage.  A character comes from a community that frames their view of the world. 

A character’s Heritage usually determines what their general appearance might be, as well as certain cultural norms that might influence their behavior. Heritage will offer an idea of what a character’s familiarity might be with different levels of technology, different languages, or different belief systems. Of course, rules were made to be broken, and so a Heritage might also inform all the ways in which a character differs from the people around whom they were raised.

Each player starts by selecting one of the five available Heritages for their character: Dorrem, Ekavir, Muter, Ozzit, or Scab. Today, we're going to take a look at the Dorrem.

The Dorrem are cavekin, the ones who went below. They saw the inevitability of the ice and moved underground, fleeing the cold in favor of the planet’s warmer core and taking technology with them so as to survive. Their eyes can’t naturally handle the White Above, but they’re highly technologically advanced so they invent ways to cope. Dorrem are the kind of humans* who still knows what Latin is.

• Likes: Tattoos and synthetic fashion
• Dislikes: Cave-ins and running into a pack of umbra in a darkened lava tube

The dorrem are in many ways the human race as it could have continued topside. They dream and they invent. They explore and they war. They chronicle who found what and when and how they all eventually messed it up. And yet, they live underground in cities they’ve had to blast from solid granite. Everything they have, they’ve had to find or make or grow or force into existence. Their sweat and ingenuity are in every tunnel. 

Appearance:

Dorrem have pale eyes and hair. Their skin is often gray, light blue, or occasionally even translucent. Dorric bodies are often lithe, lean, and athletic from genengineered diets, though not always. They are all, however, extremely sensitive to sunlight. A dorrem cannot see outside in the White Above without special glasses or self-adjusting corneal nano-implants. With everything so devoid of color in the Great Dark, the dorrem enjoy artificially tinting their skin and hair or tattooing their bodies as a means of personal expression.

Temperament:

Dorric society sees itself as the last great memory of the human race. There can sometimes be a clinical detachment inherent in their bookish approach to the meaning of existence. For the most part, dorric cultures lost religion like a vestigial tail-that is to say, they slowly lost that which they hardly ever used until its disappearance went unnoticed. Dorric morality can be subjective. New data can often mean a necessary shift in perspective.

(Art by Justin Barcelo and Raphael Siska)