Solaris
2011-05-14, 11:56 PM
Cervitaur
Cervitaurs are primitive sylvan creatures who combine aspects of deer with humanoids in much the same way centaurs combine horses with humanoids.
Personality: Cervitaurs are skittish creatures. Though not necessarily cowardly, they much prefer flight to fighting. This has led to them preferring passive and passive-aggressive responses. Cervitaurs dislike and fear predators, and though most can learn to tolerate dogs they have a deep-seated fear of wolves that borders on the phobic. Shy and quiet around strangers, cervitaurs are nonetheless quite friendly with people they've gotten to know.
Physical Description: A cervitaur buck weighs anywhere from one hundred and thirty pounds to three hundred pounds, while a doe stands weighs from ninety to two-hundred pounds. Both genders are of about the same length and height, ranging from five to seven feet in length and four and a half to five and a half feet tall. The cervitaur's lower body has soft brown fur, often dappled white, with a white-tipped tail and cloven hooves. It is more reddish-brown in the spring and summer, turning grey-brown throughout the fall and winter. Some have entirely black fur, while rare cervitaurs have entirely white fur. White-furred cervitaurs typically only survive in the more powerful tribes due to how easily predators can pick them off. A cervitaur's fur and hair get shaggier and greyer with age, though most age rather gracefully they tend to put on weight and bulk up as they get older.
A cervitaur has four stomachs like a deer, a set of lungs in each torso, and a single powerful heart in the humanoid torso. Omnivores who eat small birds and trapped rodents in addition to their preferred leaves, acorns, fruit, cereal grains and corn, cervitaurs can also subsist on grass and hay though they dislike it. They can eat pretty much a human can eat and then some, able to tolerate even poisonous mushrooms and plants. They are similarly resistant to venomous attacks and poisons in general despite being rather frail.
Cervitaur hair matches the color of their fur, though it grows continuously rather than shedding and thus has alternating bands of reddish and greyish brown down the length of it. Their hair often has one or two white streaks. A buck cervitaur has branching antlers that grow throughout his life, while a fawn or doe has little nubs resembling small goat horns. Neither gender sheds their antlers normally, but a buck who loses an antler sheds the other and regrows them both over the course of a month or so. Cervitaur faces are elfin, with large, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and narrow jaws and noses. Their ears are leaf-shaped, with pointed tips. Bucks grow facial hair, typically full beards. Their humanoid torsoes lack fur though bucks sometimes have heavy body hair. They are slenderly built compared to humans, proportioned rather like teenagers. They have golden-tan skin, tanning dark bronze with the summer sun.
Cervitaurs wear simple garments made of fur and leather, decorating them with turkey and hawk feathers, stone beads, and carved wood. They rarely cover up their lower bodies, as their fur provides them all the insulation they need, but they wear shirts and jackets on their upper bodies in the winter months. Cervitaur bucks and fawns only wear shirts when they need to, whereas does almost always wear a tunic or mantle. Cervitaur armor is made of segmented bone woven together with strips of cloth, and their weapons are bows and spears. They wear quivers on their hips, and instead of backpacks have something very similar to saddlebags and pack saddles.
A cervitaur is mature at fifteen years old, and they can live up to a hundred and sixty years though most will die before their first century. A doe's pregnancy lasts for eight months, though she is little inconvenienced until the last few weeks. A pregnant doe can still run and fight, and a fawn can walk within hours of birth and run within a day though they spend most of their first six months to a year in their parents' hut, in a grass nest. After that, they range more freely though still under the care of their elders. Does give birth to one to three fawns, though single births are becoming more and more common.
Relations: Unlike most humanoid races, cervitaurs are not at the top of the food chain. Wolves, big cats, gnolls, goblinoids, and other creatures prey on them. Even unscrupulous humans can sometimes hunt cervitaurs for venison. They are suspicious of outsiders, and because they're so reclusive and the Great Forest so remote the cervitaurs have little contact with outsiders.
Alignment: Cervitaurs are goodnatured people, though their frequently troublesome encounters with others have left them wary. They are most commonly neutral or chaotic good.
Cervitaur Lands: Cervitaurs live in the the Great Forest of the Forest Queen, with some colonizing the Northwood and Dunwood as well. They have established small villages in the forest where they dwell in wooden huts with thatched roofs and tend to small fields of corn, squash, beans, and wheat. Wooden palisades surround cervitaur villages, protecting them against wild animals and raiders both cervitaur and humanoid. Cervitaurs also hunt and gather from the forest to supplement their diet. Their native technology is primitive, only late in the Stone Age, with flint arrowheads and cold-worked copper being the pinnacle of their native development. Cervitaurs set aside grains and dried food to store in underground clay jars, but winters are still hard for them. Cervitaurs have no domesticated animals. A tribe consists of one or more villages, depending on the strength of the stag-chieftain. Chieftains lead the bucks of a tribe into war and preside over the ceremonies, including the important harvest festival.
There are about six hundred thousand cervitaurs divided between the three forests, two-thirds of them in the Great Forest.
Religion: Cervitaurs honor the Forest Queen above all others. They worship her as royalty and creator, and all cervitaurs recognize her as the high ruler of their tribes.
Central to cervitaur spiritual life is their harvest festival. Not only a celebration of the year's crops and thanks to the Forest Queen for the abundance, it also marks the beginning of rutting season. Bucks compete with each other in wild games for does' attentions in the week-long celebration, which includes jubilant feasts, music, and dancing.
Language: The cervitaurs have no language of their own, and instead they speak Sylvan.
Names: Their given names are typically common words or descriptive phrases which the cervitaur's parents grant him shortly after his weaning based on the omens the tribal shaman reads on the naming day. Cervitaur tribal names are simplified versions of fey names, perhaps honoring a long-ago ancestor.
Male Names: Bold, Little Knee, Running Hawk, Wind.
Female Names: Dancer, Moon and Stars, Seven Oaks.
Tribal Names: Aoibhinn, Fearghus, Helaininn, Lorccan, Muadnait, Orfhlaith, Tiarnach.
Adventurers: Cervitaur adventurers are often exiles or lone survivors, as they don't often take to wandering. Sometimes, though, a young buck or doe takes it into their head to go out and see the world.
Cervitaur Racial Traits
- Ability Modifiers: +2 Dex, -2 Con, -2 Int. Cervitaurs are quick and agile, but not as mentally adept as humans and slight of build.
- Monstrous humanoid.
- Medium-Sized: As Medium creatures, cervitaurs have no special bonuses or penalties due to size. As quadrupeds they have half again the carrying capacity of a biped.
- Speed: Cervitaur base land speed is 40 feet.
- Natural weapons: 2 hoof attacks that deal 1d4 + 1/2 Str damage as secondary natural attacks. They may use their hooves to attack as part of a full attack action that includes hand-held weapons.
- +1 natural armor: Cervitaur hide is tougher than human skin.
- +4 racial bonus on Hide and Move Silently checks in natural environments: Cervitaurs naturally blend in well with their environments and are adept at moving stealthily.
- +2 racial bonus on Fortitude saves against mundane poison: The cervitaur's constitution protects him against the ravages of natural toxins.
- Primitive: Cervitaurs receive Primitive Weapon Proficiency instead of Basic Weapon Proficiency. They may not begin play with proficiency in firearms or with ranks in the Repair skill. Cervitaurs are illiterate, and must spend 2 skill points to become literate.
- Automatic Languages: Sylvan, the language of the fair folk and woodland creatures. Bonus Languages: Common, Elven, Goblin, Orc.
- Favored Class: Ranger (for bucks), Scout (for does) or Bard (both).
Racial Feats:
Goring Antlers
You can attack with your antlers. Your antlers are larger, sturdier, and generally more impressive than other bucks'.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur male, 1st-level only.
Effect: You gain a gore attack as a primary natural weapon. This gore attack 1d6 + Str piercing damage. When attacking with a manufactured weapon (except on a charge), the gore attack is used as a secondary natural weapon. You can make a special charge attack with your antlers, dealing double damage on a successful hit.
Due to your impressive rack, you gain a +2 bonus on Charisma-based skill checks with other cervitaurs.
Infinite Step
You can move with supernatural speed.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur female.
Effect: You may use this ability as a free action 1/day per 4 HD. While active, it allows you to move up to your speed as a swift action. This lasts for a number of rounds equal to 3 + your Dex bonus (minimum 3 rounds).
Nimble Runner
You are good at avoiding attack while running.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, Run or fast movement class feature.
Effect: When you move at least 10 ft in a round, you gain a +2 dodge bonus to Defense. This dodge bonus increases by +1 for each additional 10 ft you move in a single round. You also gain a +2 bonus to Reflex saves when you move 10 ft or more in a single round.
War-Hoof Focus
You are particularly adept at using your hooves in combat.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, BAB +1.
Effect: You may treat your hooves as primary natural weapons. You gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls with them.
Special: This feat is treated as Weapon Focus (Hooves) with regards to prerequisites.
War-Hoof Specialization
You can follow up a hoof attack with a powerful kick from your rear legs.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, BAB +6, War-Hoof Focus.
Effect: You gain an additional hoof attack that deals 1d6 + 1.5x Str damage. It takes a -5 penalty to attack rolls. If this attack hits and deals damage, your opponent is dazed for one round.
Cervitaurs are primitive sylvan creatures who combine aspects of deer with humanoids in much the same way centaurs combine horses with humanoids.
Personality: Cervitaurs are skittish creatures. Though not necessarily cowardly, they much prefer flight to fighting. This has led to them preferring passive and passive-aggressive responses. Cervitaurs dislike and fear predators, and though most can learn to tolerate dogs they have a deep-seated fear of wolves that borders on the phobic. Shy and quiet around strangers, cervitaurs are nonetheless quite friendly with people they've gotten to know.
Physical Description: A cervitaur buck weighs anywhere from one hundred and thirty pounds to three hundred pounds, while a doe stands weighs from ninety to two-hundred pounds. Both genders are of about the same length and height, ranging from five to seven feet in length and four and a half to five and a half feet tall. The cervitaur's lower body has soft brown fur, often dappled white, with a white-tipped tail and cloven hooves. It is more reddish-brown in the spring and summer, turning grey-brown throughout the fall and winter. Some have entirely black fur, while rare cervitaurs have entirely white fur. White-furred cervitaurs typically only survive in the more powerful tribes due to how easily predators can pick them off. A cervitaur's fur and hair get shaggier and greyer with age, though most age rather gracefully they tend to put on weight and bulk up as they get older.
A cervitaur has four stomachs like a deer, a set of lungs in each torso, and a single powerful heart in the humanoid torso. Omnivores who eat small birds and trapped rodents in addition to their preferred leaves, acorns, fruit, cereal grains and corn, cervitaurs can also subsist on grass and hay though they dislike it. They can eat pretty much a human can eat and then some, able to tolerate even poisonous mushrooms and plants. They are similarly resistant to venomous attacks and poisons in general despite being rather frail.
Cervitaur hair matches the color of their fur, though it grows continuously rather than shedding and thus has alternating bands of reddish and greyish brown down the length of it. Their hair often has one or two white streaks. A buck cervitaur has branching antlers that grow throughout his life, while a fawn or doe has little nubs resembling small goat horns. Neither gender sheds their antlers normally, but a buck who loses an antler sheds the other and regrows them both over the course of a month or so. Cervitaur faces are elfin, with large, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and narrow jaws and noses. Their ears are leaf-shaped, with pointed tips. Bucks grow facial hair, typically full beards. Their humanoid torsoes lack fur though bucks sometimes have heavy body hair. They are slenderly built compared to humans, proportioned rather like teenagers. They have golden-tan skin, tanning dark bronze with the summer sun.
Cervitaurs wear simple garments made of fur and leather, decorating them with turkey and hawk feathers, stone beads, and carved wood. They rarely cover up their lower bodies, as their fur provides them all the insulation they need, but they wear shirts and jackets on their upper bodies in the winter months. Cervitaur bucks and fawns only wear shirts when they need to, whereas does almost always wear a tunic or mantle. Cervitaur armor is made of segmented bone woven together with strips of cloth, and their weapons are bows and spears. They wear quivers on their hips, and instead of backpacks have something very similar to saddlebags and pack saddles.
A cervitaur is mature at fifteen years old, and they can live up to a hundred and sixty years though most will die before their first century. A doe's pregnancy lasts for eight months, though she is little inconvenienced until the last few weeks. A pregnant doe can still run and fight, and a fawn can walk within hours of birth and run within a day though they spend most of their first six months to a year in their parents' hut, in a grass nest. After that, they range more freely though still under the care of their elders. Does give birth to one to three fawns, though single births are becoming more and more common.
Relations: Unlike most humanoid races, cervitaurs are not at the top of the food chain. Wolves, big cats, gnolls, goblinoids, and other creatures prey on them. Even unscrupulous humans can sometimes hunt cervitaurs for venison. They are suspicious of outsiders, and because they're so reclusive and the Great Forest so remote the cervitaurs have little contact with outsiders.
Alignment: Cervitaurs are goodnatured people, though their frequently troublesome encounters with others have left them wary. They are most commonly neutral or chaotic good.
Cervitaur Lands: Cervitaurs live in the the Great Forest of the Forest Queen, with some colonizing the Northwood and Dunwood as well. They have established small villages in the forest where they dwell in wooden huts with thatched roofs and tend to small fields of corn, squash, beans, and wheat. Wooden palisades surround cervitaur villages, protecting them against wild animals and raiders both cervitaur and humanoid. Cervitaurs also hunt and gather from the forest to supplement their diet. Their native technology is primitive, only late in the Stone Age, with flint arrowheads and cold-worked copper being the pinnacle of their native development. Cervitaurs set aside grains and dried food to store in underground clay jars, but winters are still hard for them. Cervitaurs have no domesticated animals. A tribe consists of one or more villages, depending on the strength of the stag-chieftain. Chieftains lead the bucks of a tribe into war and preside over the ceremonies, including the important harvest festival.
There are about six hundred thousand cervitaurs divided between the three forests, two-thirds of them in the Great Forest.
Religion: Cervitaurs honor the Forest Queen above all others. They worship her as royalty and creator, and all cervitaurs recognize her as the high ruler of their tribes.
Central to cervitaur spiritual life is their harvest festival. Not only a celebration of the year's crops and thanks to the Forest Queen for the abundance, it also marks the beginning of rutting season. Bucks compete with each other in wild games for does' attentions in the week-long celebration, which includes jubilant feasts, music, and dancing.
Language: The cervitaurs have no language of their own, and instead they speak Sylvan.
Names: Their given names are typically common words or descriptive phrases which the cervitaur's parents grant him shortly after his weaning based on the omens the tribal shaman reads on the naming day. Cervitaur tribal names are simplified versions of fey names, perhaps honoring a long-ago ancestor.
Male Names: Bold, Little Knee, Running Hawk, Wind.
Female Names: Dancer, Moon and Stars, Seven Oaks.
Tribal Names: Aoibhinn, Fearghus, Helaininn, Lorccan, Muadnait, Orfhlaith, Tiarnach.
Adventurers: Cervitaur adventurers are often exiles or lone survivors, as they don't often take to wandering. Sometimes, though, a young buck or doe takes it into their head to go out and see the world.
Cervitaur Racial Traits
- Ability Modifiers: +2 Dex, -2 Con, -2 Int. Cervitaurs are quick and agile, but not as mentally adept as humans and slight of build.
- Monstrous humanoid.
- Medium-Sized: As Medium creatures, cervitaurs have no special bonuses or penalties due to size. As quadrupeds they have half again the carrying capacity of a biped.
- Speed: Cervitaur base land speed is 40 feet.
- Natural weapons: 2 hoof attacks that deal 1d4 + 1/2 Str damage as secondary natural attacks. They may use their hooves to attack as part of a full attack action that includes hand-held weapons.
- +1 natural armor: Cervitaur hide is tougher than human skin.
- +4 racial bonus on Hide and Move Silently checks in natural environments: Cervitaurs naturally blend in well with their environments and are adept at moving stealthily.
- +2 racial bonus on Fortitude saves against mundane poison: The cervitaur's constitution protects him against the ravages of natural toxins.
- Primitive: Cervitaurs receive Primitive Weapon Proficiency instead of Basic Weapon Proficiency. They may not begin play with proficiency in firearms or with ranks in the Repair skill. Cervitaurs are illiterate, and must spend 2 skill points to become literate.
- Automatic Languages: Sylvan, the language of the fair folk and woodland creatures. Bonus Languages: Common, Elven, Goblin, Orc.
- Favored Class: Ranger (for bucks), Scout (for does) or Bard (both).
Racial Feats:
Goring Antlers
You can attack with your antlers. Your antlers are larger, sturdier, and generally more impressive than other bucks'.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur male, 1st-level only.
Effect: You gain a gore attack as a primary natural weapon. This gore attack 1d6 + Str piercing damage. When attacking with a manufactured weapon (except on a charge), the gore attack is used as a secondary natural weapon. You can make a special charge attack with your antlers, dealing double damage on a successful hit.
Due to your impressive rack, you gain a +2 bonus on Charisma-based skill checks with other cervitaurs.
Infinite Step
You can move with supernatural speed.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur female.
Effect: You may use this ability as a free action 1/day per 4 HD. While active, it allows you to move up to your speed as a swift action. This lasts for a number of rounds equal to 3 + your Dex bonus (minimum 3 rounds).
Nimble Runner
You are good at avoiding attack while running.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, Run or fast movement class feature.
Effect: When you move at least 10 ft in a round, you gain a +2 dodge bonus to Defense. This dodge bonus increases by +1 for each additional 10 ft you move in a single round. You also gain a +2 bonus to Reflex saves when you move 10 ft or more in a single round.
War-Hoof Focus
You are particularly adept at using your hooves in combat.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, BAB +1.
Effect: You may treat your hooves as primary natural weapons. You gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls with them.
Special: This feat is treated as Weapon Focus (Hooves) with regards to prerequisites.
War-Hoof Specialization
You can follow up a hoof attack with a powerful kick from your rear legs.
Prerequisites: Cervitaur, BAB +6, War-Hoof Focus.
Effect: You gain an additional hoof attack that deals 1d6 + 1.5x Str damage. It takes a -5 penalty to attack rolls. If this attack hits and deals damage, your opponent is dazed for one round.