RACES/KIN(??????????) OF CAIRN PT 1/2

i don't care for most implementations of fantasy races and i honestly find it almost gratifying how much flack WOTC is getting for more or less perpetuating the tropes first codified by noted racist gary gygax without trying to change them at all until they were forced to.

all of my complaints about how most d20 games do fantasy races have been said a million times by people more eloquent than me. races with stat boosts are not only like, uh, pretty racist, but boring. you're actively de-incentivizing players from playing against type and that sucks. "monstrous races" is like, in the top ten most loaded phrases derived from the entire field of tabletop gaming. no one with the exception of like, 1) the guy who wrote eberron and 2) paizo seems to be capable of even beginning to address the concept of some groups of fantasy races being deemed unpeople by the neutral, objective voice of the dm's guide. 

that being said, i still wrote a list of the six "standard" "races" (species? maybe, but species sounds closer to sci-fi. ancestry? maybe but that's like not really accurate to this. i'm leaning towards "kin".) / "kin" of cairn, the fantasy setting i've been writing for the past couple of years. no stat bonuses of any kind. i have a very high minimum threshold for what necessitates establishing something as its own kin, and i wish i could put it into words more elegantly than "they have to be wildly physically different and potentially magically different as well." most kin bonuses and drawbacks are explicitly magical in nature, and those that aren't are weird enough to may as well have been. i'm not going to write out rules for stuff like half-elves or half-dwarves because there's technically no "humans" and because of that i'd have to write, what, 15? new things and i don't even know if i want to establish if half-elves are even possible and it's never really come up for me personally and i'd much rather just leave it up to the dm. your call. if a player asks to play a half-dragonman then say sure and write something up for me and let me know how it goes.

PLEASE CLICK THE READ MORE BUTTON.....IT'S A LOT LESS NOTICEABLE THAN I EXPECTED LOL

1: KITH - THE CHILDREN OF TERN

Nasir from FE:9

Kith are the most populous people of Cairn. The beloved children of the dead sea-god Tern, the first kith were adopted by Umraut, last of the wild gods. Tern created them to be expert craftspeople, making them dexterous and acquainted with tool-use. As such, before their adoption by Umraut, kith were entirely human. Umraut was appalled by the state her adoptive children were in - their fleshy, unprotected skin, their delicate nails and teeth, their lack of tails, their nonexistent snouts! And so, she gave them her gift: the features of the rest of her children. Henceforth, all kith became variably bestial in appearance.

Kith are the human equivalents of Cairn, and they exist across a spectrum of being furries. A lot of them are just humans with weirdly good senses of smell. A lot of them have tails and furry ears. Horns are common. Some have snouts and paws (but this is relatively rare). Kith can have the bestial features of any single animal (no chimeric stuff). Beast features tend to run in families, but occasionally children will get born with no animal features at all, or with the features of an entirely different animal than their family. If two kith that look entirely human have a child, that child will have the features of a random animal. Thanks to all this variability, there's no correlation between ethnicity, nationality, or type of furry. Kith nations are physically diverse, and shared identity is based entirely in cultural practices rather than appearance. 

Here are the rules for playing a kith character:

• At character creation, choose a specific variety of tool or instrument. Chisels, violins, fishing nets, hoof knives, etc. You were born proficient with this tool, and, once per week, can ask a tool of that variety a question. Tools are pretty single-minded, can remember about a week into the past, and can generally only answer questions about their usage or the vague details of past users.
• You start knowing the language of whatever animal you have the features of. If you just look human, base this off of what your parent's look like. Just because you know an animal's language doesn't mean they'll be friendly with you.
• Wolves hate you more than other kin. When meeting a wolf, their reaction to you is lowered by one step, even if you speak their language. Umraut considers kith to be traitors for developing civilization, and wolves are her angels. This drawback can be nullified if you do something for wolves as a whole, or join the cult of Umraut.

2: OGRES - THE CHILDREN OF OGRAM

An orc from Allods Online. Forgive me for not having a better picture from an ancient, niche, Russian MMO. They're like this but taller and with horns.

Ogres, or ogramda, claim descent from the wheel-deity Ogram, or Div to some. Most ogram cultures are migratory, moving seasonally to feed their herds of trumpetbills (fantasy hadrosaurs). These cultures consider the act of traveling to be a holy act, a celebration of their deity's bountiful gifts to all ogramda. Even sedentary populations of ogres will uproot en masse every few weeks to go on an aimless, circular pilgrimage, exulting in the act of movement. While not as populous as kith, their travels make them just as widespread across Cairn, and most nations keep their borders open for ogram caravans in order to take advantage of the trading opportunities such caravans present.

Ogres are usually around 6 or 7 feet tall, and tend to hunch over to various extents. They have tusks, and grey-to-green skin, and big curling horns jutting out from their heads (they could make goring attacks with these, if the horns weren't fragile and mostly just used to show off). There are, of course, more delicate ogres, just as there are bigger and smaller humans. Female ogres aren't small or delicate compared to male ogres - this isn't WoW. They hate standing still.

Here are the rules for playing an ogre character:

• If you're outside, and there's no sort of magic impeding your sense of direction, you can't get lost. Ogres have the same sort of deal that some species of pigeons do, and can detect the magnetic fields generated by Cairn in order to keep their bearings. 
• You can talk to wheels. Generally this means you can just ask where they've been and they'll tell you a list of directions they've gone in over the course of the past day. 
• You can't fall asleep inside a building unless you're drunk, sedated, or injured. It feels unnatural. Caves and underground dungeons don't count if you're camping in them, but camping in aboveground buildings (like a wizard's tower) counts.

3. DWARVES - THE CHILDREN OF CAIRN

some dwarves i doodled while failing to fall asleep

Dwarves are the children (or even angels, according to some dissident dwarven priests) of Cairn, the sleeping earth-god. Their priests commune with his dreams, and they dig through the world according to the schematics he dreams of. Their mountainhomes are found throughout the world's mountain ranges, each a state unto itself. They have practiced metalworking since before fire was gifted to mortals, but among other kin they are famed for their scholarly traditions and ancient universities. Comparative theology is an especially famous dwarven science, with many aboveground theologians holding underground texts and authors in the highest esteem.

Dwarves are 3-5 feet tall, stout, bearded across all genders (most dwarven cultures historically recognize between 3 and 15 genders). They have cute little horns that they try to polish and file down to little numbs (unless you're important enough to show them off) and long floppy ears like rabbits. I wanted to call them delvers but I figured that was kind of meaningless considering the average player will look at them and say they're just dwarves, dude! And they are just dwarves, although I want them to be a little bit more multifaceted and interesting than your average dwarves (Guild Wars did dwarves the best by far and I won't contest the "dwarves turned themselves into stone and now have a hive mind" territory) and less anti-Semitic than Tolkien's run at them. 

Here are the rules for playing a dwarven character:

• If you put your ear to the ground, you can hear what is buried beneath you up to a depth of 50 feet.
• You can see the shapes of things in the dark up to 30 feet. This isn't technically sight - your beard is picking up the movement of air surrounding you and you can use this to tell what's around. This can't pick up colors, obviously.
• Crossing aboveground rivers causes 1d4 damage to you per round spent crossing them. This damage isn't applied if you're unconscious, and the ocean doesn't count for some reason. The damage is caused by stress and isn't physically apparent. No one really knows why this happens, but some fringe dwarven theologians see it as an unconscious response to seeing Cairn's body bleed water.

That's all I want to write right now! Next time we'll have hillfolk, dragonmen, and, scariest of all, elves.