Setting:
A gigantic, largely magical forest simply referred to as The Great Woods, The Forest, etc. It is inhabited by many types of sapient beings, fauna and flora, as well as other sentient entities. Various hamlets, elven retreats and other camps and nests scattered throughout it.
 
Deeprock Mountain, other times referred to simply as "The Mountain", a colossal mountain range towering above the forest. Now largely abandoned, it once housed a great dwarf tribe, The Deeprock Anvilmen. It is now home to shadows and dust, and some other forgotten, nameless entities.
 
Races:
 
Humans, known sometimes as "the simple ones", are largely dim witted and harmless, and possess no affinity to magic or interest in technology of any kind that is more advanced than simple ironwork. They live in hamlets throughout the forest, and worship simple deities represented by wooden idols, and do not possess writing of any sort. They are friendly to the major sapient species, but respond in kind to hostility. They are known to be stubborn and refuse to evacuate their hamlets even when facing overwhelming danger. Once in many, many generations, a special human child is born - highly intelligent and able to use magic, they are quickly casted out of their communities, and usually become hermit-mages. Fewer still, some of these mages are tempted to study the black forms of magic, and can become demonologists, necromancers and worse.
 
Elves, "Arcana's Children", are highly intelligent and are the most proficient and dominant users of magic in the forest. They generally keep to themselves in tree-shaped elven retreats, and sometimes more human-looking camps. They are natural hunters and gatherers, and show great hostility to anyone who might disturb their peace, or abuse magic in any way. Their relationship with humans, on the rather few occasions where they meet, is generally exploitive, using the humans for menial tasks in return for beads and other trinkets the humans prize. Their lifespans are naturally quite long, the eldest of them usually around 300 years old. Their relationship with magic is mythical, and dates back to their creation by their mother-goddess and, indeed, the creator of magic itself - Arcana. Most elves are quite religious, and hold regular ceremonies in honor of Arcana and all of nature's magic. They possess no writing of any sort, and their tradition is passed down orally only.
On seldom occasions, elven children are known to grow slowly insane during puberty, as sometimes they are born not completely capable of handling the huge amounts of magic their bodies absorb naturally. These children, when not identified in time and mercifully eliminated, often escape their communities and lead a brutal lifestyle as poachers for hire, highwaymen, and even become apprentices to black forms of magic, provided they can maintain enough sanity to control it. Truly, sometimes they cannot, and the results are often catastrophic.
 
Dwarves, once the most secluded of the races in the forest area, are short, stout, and fond of drink and labour. The Deeprock Anvilmen tribe was known to bring forth precious metals from the earth, and were revered for their skill as blacksmiths. Just like humans, they possessed no affinity to magic at all, and were never interested in it. Their ability to develop new mechanical devices was astounding, from animal-like automatons to siege engines and bombs, sold to foreign warlords. Their lifespan, while shorter than elves, is long - their eldest live to 200, and they generally remain healthy to their last days. Their religion consisted of worship of the earth, their priests carrying runes with strange powers - completely unrelated and unknown to users of widely known magic. They are proficient readers and writers, usually carving entire books in great stone slabs.
However, a strange, magical plague erupted among The Deeprock Anvilmen, making them incredibly susceptible to magic, and contact with a nearby elven community shortly drove the entire tribe insane. They fled their mines and workshops, their deep homes and halls, and went off to the forest, raving and babbling. The Forest's dwarves are now known as an insane people, living in tiny scattered communities and living off carrion and whatever else they can gather, too deeply into their strange psychosis to even properly hunt. They reproduce slowly, and their young go insane as infants, only some basic instinct driving their parents to feed them.
 
Merfolk, "Silence's Children", are the inhabitants of the forest's lakes and pools, a humanoid people with scales, fins and gills. They are entirely mute, and communicate only through gestures and rudimentary drawings in the mud. They are entirely, religiously xenophobic, and drive away other races with burning fear and hatred, spear and claw. Amphibious, they live both in underwater caves and grottos, and simple shacks on their lake's shores. All of the Merfolk worship their mother-goddess, Silence, and often perform ceremonies that involve tribal dancing and blood sacrifice in her honor. Their priests can cure ailments through magical means, as well as perform water-related rituals that can result in rain, a cleansing of a pool gone stagnant, or even the boiling of another creature's bodily waters. All of the Merfolk can read and write via drawings, usually in mud, sand, and in certain rituals, blood.
 
Characters:
 
Arvish the Uncaring:
A perpetually gloomy and sociopathic dwarf of the Deeprock Anvilmen tribe, he is the bastard son of a foreign emissary from another tribe and a barmaid. His father left the mountain before he was born. Arvish was raised while being continously looked down upon for being a fatherless bastard, and grew a tough, uncaring exterior. There was no love lost between him and his mother, and during his teen years he frequently went into bouts of rage and then ran away for days at a time, usually returning as if nothing happened. When the strange plague struck his tribe, Arvish was oddly unaffected - as his fellow dwarves grew insane and fled the mountain he remained, feeding off the mountain's stores and working alone in the workshops, slowly building automatons to guard himself from the outside world. His interest in what happened to his tribe, or indeed the outside world at all, was extremely limited.
 
Ekko the Spellsowrd:
A brash and quick-witted warrior elf, she left her home encampment in search of greater understanding - and things where she can stick her sword. She was born to a peaceful tribe of magicweavers, and her parents intended for her nothing other than carrying on their heritage, and the marriage of a respectable man. However, during a lone trip to gather herbs, she witnessed a pair of wolves ambushing and devouring an elk - triggering a vision in her mind of her encampment, in the near future, being destroyed by a nameless, massive evil force. She returned to her home and tried to warn her friends and family, only to be met with utmost disregard. In the dead of night she stole her father's heirloom sword, and fled her home.