Uriashi

Overview

The uriashi are a species of towering, beast-like humanoids who live in the mountains ringing Vale Sangora. The developers call them mountain giants, and they are one of several peoples built out of regional folklore rather than borrowed from standard fantasy templates. Villagers who talk to outsiders about them describe horned mountain folk, and they match the horned mountain beasts that appear in the stories Zdislav passed down.

For most Sangorans the uriashi were a rumour rather than a neighbour. They were hunted to near-extinction in an earlier age, withdrew to the highest ground, and stayed there. Only recently have they revealed themselves to humanity again, which makes their place in valley society very new and still unsettled.

Where They Live

They live high up in mountains that were inaccessible to humans, and they work to keep them that way. The narrative director has said the uriashi will cause a tiny little avalanche when they need to, to make sure their secrets stay safe.

Their village is built from rocks, moss, and twigs, with houses shaped to blend into the mountainside so that the settlement is hard to pick out from a distance. Finding it on the map is described by the developers as a whole adventure of its own, so it is not somewhere Exploration hands to a player early.

Culture and Temperament

Winters spent holed up in caves have given the uriashi considerable patience. They have their own political structures, and those structures produce division within their society the same way human ones do. The narrative director describes them as quite conservative: the prevailing instinct is to keep things as they are rather than experiment, and that instinct becomes a source of tension in one of the game's stories.

The developers describe them as really intelligent creatures who do not know the human language well. Their vocal apparatus is not suited to it, they struggle to speak, and their grasp of grammar is loose. The team expects the first reaction to be to take them for dumb brutes, and expects that reaction to change: the more time you spend with them, the more you realise they are more sophisticated than that.

Magic

Where human words give the uriashi trouble, magic does not. They are strong in magic and handle it without difficulty, and Coen can take advantage of that when he deals with them. Coen's own supernatural toolkit runs through Hex Magic and Rune Carving, both of which are daytime tools because the runes cut into his body heal over at night, so uriashi dealings tend to fall on the human side of his schedule.

Under Vrakhiri Rule

The humans of the valley were largely unaware the uriashi existed. Brencis was not. He found them first, and by the narrative director's account he simply turned up at their village and told them that he calls the shots now and is enlisting them. Since then uriashi have frequently been spotted working alongside humans, providing significant extra muscle for garrisons.

That places them in an awkward position with the valley's people. In play, uriashi soldiers can look at first like cronies of the vampire regime and turn out to be considerably kinder than the humans they patrol with. One early encounter has a pair of Brencis's soldiers approaching Coen and his siblings by a river, a human and an uriash, with the uriash the friendlier of the two, talking about how good it is to live openly and take part in society now instead of lurking in the shadows.

Not every uriashi is enlisted. Others remain independent up in the mountains, curious about the lowlanders without being aligned to anyone. That split is what makes an uriashi encounter context-dependent rather than a fixed hostile or friendly flag: a player may meet one who attacks on sight as a garrison enforcer, and another who is simply interested in the human who wandered too high.

Folklore Roots

Asked whether the game would include mythical creatures drawn from regional legend, the developers named the uriashi alongside likhos, kobolds, and tatzelwurms as folklore-inspired entries in the Bestiary. The valley's monsters are introduced as village stories first and met as creatures second, which is the pattern the whole bestiary follows.

Uriashi Coen Can Deal With

The shipped game turns the uriashi from a lore entry into a set of people Coen actually trades and trains with. Three of them are documented by name or by title, and all three sit behind work rather than behind a map marker.

Two shrines belong to the uriashi. The Uriashi Hermitage, in the Briar Sloughs, is where the blacksmith works, and walkthroughs report that the same hermit sells legendary swords once Coen has business there. The shrine in the Uriash Village itself, in the Rockfalls highlands, can only be reached by following Lacra's questline through A Friend Like This and The Song of the Mountain, which fits the developers' description of a village that is an adventure to find. See Shrines.

In the village, the elder's request to find her daughter, A Mother's Plea, leads into The Heart Wants What It Wants, the quest centred on Ocha, and the achievement The Outcast is tied to helping Ocha find a new destiny. The village's goodwill carries further: two uriashi guard the ruins of The Highland Grave in the Rockfalls, and one guide reports that a Coen who has already made peace in The Song of the Mountain can talk his way past them.

What Becomes of Them

The uriashi are one of the things the ending accounts for. Depending on how the run closes they either stay in the valley among its people or withdraw to the mountains again, and one route, the one that installs a new human ruler backed by an outside army, ends with a campaign against them. That outcome is drawn from a single ending guide and is recorded as reported rather than confirmed. It is, either way, consistent with what the developers said before release about a people whose place in valley society is new and unsettled.

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