Species Branch and Civilization Framework

Overview

This framework keeps species design broad-first.

A species should not be defined only by crises, monsters, wars, or exceptional variants. Each species needs a clear ordinary baseline, a sense of historical development, and a distinction between inherited population difference, cultural lifeway, and formal civilization.

Core Terms

A species is a broad kind of people with shared biological, metaphysical, constructed, or otherwise inheritable continuity.

A branch is a durable inherited population difference within a species. It may be biological, ecological, magical, metaphysical, or constructed. In lore-facing prose, branch, lineage, kindred, stock, or a species-specific term is usually cleaner than subspecies.

A lifeway is a recurring way of living. It may shape identity strongly without being a biological branch or formal civilization.

A civilization is a durable historical order with institutions, law, economy, memory, legitimacy, and enough continuity to outlast individual settlements or rulers.

A compact, house, order, camp, warren, circle, league, or concord may be smaller than a full civilization while still being historically important.

Branch and Civilization Distinction

Branches and civilizations can overlap, but they are not the same thing.

A branch answers what kind of people a population has become over time. A civilization answers what durable order those people have built, inherited, joined, or resisted.

Elven branches often align closely with civilizations. Human identities usually align more with regions and civilizations than with biological branches. The Wrought have design lineages rather than biological branches. Goblins and Kobolds often have local lifeways and compacts more than large civilizations.

Timeline Rule

Branches and civilizations do not all develop in parallel.

They emerge, merge, fragment, vanish, transform, or survive as ruins, taboos, absorbed populations, legal categories, and old names. The medieval age should show only the current visible layer, not every historical experiment that ever existed.

Use the timeline as a layered field rather than as a checklist. A species may have an old biological baseline, a later first civilizational founding, still later secondary branches, and medieval lifeways that are mostly institutional or regional rather than inherited. The branch history should therefore be read alongside the Timeline Layering and Parallelism Framework, not as a separate species-only chronology.

Branch-History Timeline Bands

Branch and civilization history should usually be placed into broad bands before exact dates are assigned.

Band	Use
Ancestral Field	Early pre-branch or pre-civilizational continuity, often remembered only through origin myths, body logic, deep ancestry, or inherited taboos.
Stabilized Baseline	The point where a species becomes recognizably itself across a durable range of places.
First Heartlands and Orders	Early territories, lifeways, houses, compacts, or civilizations that give the species its first strong historical shape.
Secondary Divergences	Branches, lifeways, and successor orders that emerge from pressure, expansion, isolation, crisis, or contact.
Absorption and Vanishing	Historical forms that merge, lose institutional continuity, become taboo, survive only as names, or leave ruins and successor customs.
Medieval Visible Layer	The living branches, lifeways, civilizations, orders, and legal categories that current people can still encounter.

Not every species needs every band in equal detail. Long-lived peoples may have long, sparse bands with a few deep divergences. Short-lived or stressed peoples may have many local forms in the later bands. Constructed peoples may move through design lineage, use, repair, release, and recognition rather than ancestry, divergence, and descent.

Lifespan Rule

Long-lived species usually have fewer branches, slower divergence, and deeper continuity.

Short-lived, highly mobile, or highly stressed species can produce more local branches, lifeways, and extinct or merged forms. Constructed peoples diversify through design lineage, repair tradition, and recognition history rather than reproduction.

Canonization Rule

A branch, lineage, lifeway, or civilization should be canonized only when it explains at least one useful thing: living identity, ordinary life, geography, a major institution, a successor civilization, a vanished people, a ruin, a taboo, a merger, an extinction, a contact zone, a legal conflict, or a meaningful difference in body, magic, ecology, memory, or social role.

Recommended Scale

People Type	Usual Living Structure	Usual Historical Structure
Very long-lived peoples	2-5 living branches	1-4 major historical branches
Long-lived but exposed peoples	3-6 living branches	2-6 historical branches
Human-like or highly mobile peoples	1-4 true branches	3-8 proto, regional, merged, or vanished population traditions
Short-lived, stressed, or locally adaptive peoples	3-8 living branches or lifeways	4-12 historical or absorbed forms
Constructed or intentionally made peoples	2-6 living design lineages	3-10 obsolete, absorbed, disputed, or destroyed predecessor lines

Ordinary-Life Rule

Every species branch or civilization should have ordinary anchors before crisis anchors.

Ask what its people eat, repair, celebrate, teach, inherit, bargain over, mourn, build, protect, and repeat. Crisis should reveal or strain the ordinary order, not replace it.

Broad-First Workflow

When developing a species, use this order:

Planetary and regional distribution.
Species-wide ordinary baseline.
Living branches, lineages, lifeways, or design lineages.
Major civilizations, orders, compacts, or institutions.
Historical branches that vanished, merged, or transformed.
Contact zones with other peoples.
Crises, wars, monsters, exceptions, and story hooks.

Current Design Implication

The known species should not all receive the same kind of internal structure.

Elves can have branch-civilization alignment. Dwarves can have hold-worlds and rare deep branch differences. Humans can remain mostly regional and civilizational. Goblins, Kobolds, Trolls, and Ogres can have many local lifeways without large states. The Wrought should use design lineages and recognition orders.

This asymmetry makes the setting feel more historical and less like a catalog.