Roo shares its forests, mountains, houses and old places with beings that ordinary people almost never encounter. Elves, giants, trolls, goblins or vättar, rå, forest gnomes, house gnomes, woodlings and other supernatural beings are real — but rarity has turned reality into folklore.
Why most people do not believe
Encounters are exceptional rather than part of daily life. A farmer may know a dozen stories about trolls and still die convinced that trolls are only stories. Someone who insists too strongly that the hidden beings are real may be treated as foolish, superstitious or mad.
That distance matters. Roo is not a place where monsters line every road. The hidden world presses against ordinary life only occasionally, which makes a true encounter far more disruptive when it happens.
Trolls
Trolls are real. A mountain troll is confirmed in the story, but most Rooans know such beings through rumor and old tales rather than personal experience.
Woodlings
Woodlings belong to the hidden world and are associated with Ambiguity magic, where uncertain meaning or conviction can produce strange and unpredictable results.
Rå
Rå exist among the supernatural beings of Vanaheim. Their exact nature is not common knowledge to ordinary people, and the wider truth about them remains deliberately unrevealed.
Elves, giants and gnomes
Elves, giants, forest gnomes and house gnomes are all part of the world's hidden reality. Their existence does not mean that ordinary Rooan society understands them.
Goblin / vättar
Goblin-like beings, known as vättar, exist within the setting. As with the other hidden peoples, sightings are rare enough to remain disputed in everyday life.
Necken and Hinhåle
Necken is an ancient magic user rather than an ordinary hidden creature. Hinhåle is an Aesir-created demon carrying Aesir or Unknown magic, and is not a god in his own right.
Magic behind the stories
The hidden world overlaps with Roo's six forms of magic. Woodlings are associated with Ambiguity. Necken sustains his unnaturally long life through Lie magic. Hinhåle is tied to the far more dangerous Unknown magic associated with the Aesir.
What the people believe is not automatically the truth. Roo's folklore may preserve fragments of reality, misunderstand it, or mix several different things together. The existence of hidden beings is canon; what every tale claims about them is not.
The effect of a real encounter
For someone raised to dismiss trolls, woodlings or spirits as superstition, meeting one is not simply seeing an unusual animal. It breaks the boundary between the accepted world and the world people were taught not to believe in. That uncertainty is part of the atmosphere of Roo: the impossible can be real long before society has language for it.