The Ocean is not a happy place. To be fair, most places in the world are not happy. The Oceans aren't an exception.
The Atlanteans, as they will be called until I get a better name for them than "Atlanteans", are one of the causes of this unhappiness. Scholars broadly divide them into four groups, who I will now vaguely gesture my way through. Hopefully, it'll make more sense once I'm out of the introduction.
They aren't humans. They're humanoid, but they look more like the Sahaugin than anything else I can easily describe.
The first group are generally known as "People of Basalt". They take their name from their place of origin, unsurprisingly known as the "Basalt City", which itself is built around, you fucking guessed it, the "Basalt Crystal".
Poor naming scheme aside, it isn't inaccurate. To those with enough time to pursue magic, the Basalt Crystal is everything. To everyone else, the city that depends on those people is. Magical power is derived from the Basalt Crystal, mystical visions are divined from the Basalt Crystal, and perhaps most importantly, the Basalt Crystal allows for a sort of mass production that would otherwise be impossible underwater. There are real, working forges in the Basalt City - Hell, they work better than most forges on the surface do. They can't really be used to make metal weapons, but they can be combined with an obscure magical process to create, you guessed it, basalt weapons.
For whatever reason, this power has not been used to create an empire. Instead, the Basalt City was created, and then expanded, and eventually it became a hellish network of identical tubes for anyone who isn't a native. In general, the People of the Basalt are remarkably isolationist. Still engaged in an eternal war with the rest of the world, but who isn't?
The "People of Waves" are the most widespread of the bunch. I struggle to describe specifics because I don't have any especially distinctive traits to build around, so I'll talk about hierarchy for a minute.
Atlanteans never stop growing. By the time they're considered adults, they're slightly shorter than the average man. Hundred years after that, and they're about the size of an ogre. Should they manage to survive to somewhere around their 250s, they'll rival most giants for size. They're also organized into a very strict age-based hierarchy. In effect, the bigger you are, the higher up on the ladder you are.
That being said, very few make it to their 250s. As a Person of the Waves, your life is going to go one of four ways. Either you show the aptitude to become either a mage or a priest, and are probably killed in line of duty and/or murdered by rivals, you become skilled enough at your chosen trade that you're allowed to hang around as a teacher, or you don't manage to do any of that and you're shipped off to war once you hit middle-age. Besides the very real need for troops to fuel an unending, omni-directional war in the sea, this also helps make sure that no one gets powerful enough to threaten the order of things. This system exists to some degree in every group of Atlanteans, but it's most obvious and most strict among the People of the Waves.
Above the seas, they do a brisk trade in coal, mostly with the Vampire Barons, in exchange for the mass-produced products that coal makes possible. It's a mutually beneficial agreement, all things considered.
The Vampire Barons will definitely get their own post, later down the line. They're the thing that inspired this whole as-yet-unnamed setting.
Next up, "People of Ice". It's speculated that they were originally a group of one of the other types, who were forced into Arctic regions by the Pelagics, another group of fish-people who may eventually get their own post. Whatever the case, they've managed to endure the cold weather and, through whatever means, stumbled upon the rare art of Ice-Crafting. Occasionally, they send trading expeditions South. These expeditions are huge, sailing on broken-off chunks of glacier, maintained by hundreds of Atlanteans and at least two mages - One to steer the ship and one to keep it frozen. They aren't afraid of the ship sinking, but they're pretty damn easy to board. These voyages are incredibly hectic.
They're also necromancers. Not the kind where you go through elaborate rituals to reanimate a corpse under some external power, because that kind of extremely expensive and generally inefficient. The kind where you make a corpse really easy for a spirit to inhabit, set up a few wards, and then pray to whatever deities you hold that it does what you want it to and doesn't go fucking berserk.
Finally, we have the "People of Coral". They live in coral. They make their tools out of coral. Generally, they're thought to be a bunch of disconnected and uncivilized tribes who mostly occupy themselves with raiding passers-by, both under and above the water.
Rumors of a singular Ur-Coral which links every reef in the world are, as of yet, unsubstantiated.
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