But the community around them would not let them go down like that. The Haćo master who was dedicated to their training (the Obi-Wan to their Anakin) interrupted their self-punishment, reminded them of their goodness, helped them see that they weren’t bound to serve Fate just because they had gone down a dangerous path. In short, their mentor showed them compassion, and revealed their own mistakes and errors and the pain they carried from them. The mind, the mentor taught, can be tricky. It can see Destiny where it is looking at Fate; it can confuse the path so one doesn’t know whence one is heading. The honor and nobility of spirit shared by the two Haćo (symbolized by a gold dragon in Intelligence) gives the two tokens on Intelligence to Wisdom. It’s also what sent the character on the path to becoming a refo (the Haćo equivalent of a qadi, a judge of positive law), one who trusts their heart and their experience of temptation more than the intricacies of the Haćo code, the endless interpretations thereof, and the impenetrable interacting hierarchies of precedents.
Their base ability scores, after gifting the extra token from Wisdom to Constitution, come out to:
Strength 14
Dexterity 13
Constitution 14
Intelligence 10
Wisdom 15
Charisma 14
Thanks to a short-lived attempt at playing with a homeless friend of mine, I’ve previously established that Scarhas’s racial context derives from Fantasy Flight Games’s ancient Mythic Races book, a part of their Legends & Lairs line dating back to the OGL boom and the early days of the company. She wanted to play a rhonian, one of the Labyrinth-muppet-looking bardic swampbirds from the book. I quickly decided that the rhonians came from the Sumer equivalent in Scarhas (since Sumer was all marshland). In the Hemeya Sea, however, fantasy reskins of Star Wars and Star Trek races descended from minotaurs warped by the cataclysm that created the sea dominate the racial context.
I’m hoping to capture some of the uniqueness of my game with these characters, so I’m going to put off looking at the Hemeyan races for this Haćo and look through the mainland races of the FFG book. The anaema, a species of demi-substantial humans, tickle my brain momentarily, but their lack of solidity makes some of the physical aspects of the character’s background ~ the drive to maximize their body’s capabilities, the idea of bullying people towards goodness ~ harder to swallow than I would like. Artaathi are the inevitable catfolk, but a comment about their sociopsychology and its union of dualities pulls at me for a moment until I realize that playing up that kind of theme is closer to Boanerges than I would like. I want these characters to all be different, after all.
Now, the blickish is super tempting. Essentially halfling aasimar who have the innate power to blink, in my setting they were born of the same celestial/mortal pairing that gave birth to the central figure in Natsiyaasim’s religion (and heritage). Making this character a blickish, thus, would give them an immediate, if minor, link to Forsetilafom. Plus, despite their small stature, they have a Strength bonus, so the whole bullying, weightlifting thing works . . . . I consider the curst for half a second, but the inheritors of a divine punishment for decadence don’t seem quite right for this character. Similarly, the planes-wandering eyeless illonis tempt but fail to quite connect to the character’s themes. The luminous, on the other hand, stand next to the blickish in the contest for this character ~ they were blessed with bodies of light and a connection to the positive energy plane after selflessly sacrificing most of their race to defeat an army of undead.
The jaguar shapeshifters known as mhuinntirs fail to quite capture the characters’ themes, despite lending themselves to the simmering anger that the character has mostly come to terms with. Something about the inherently magical pevishan almost snags on the character concept. The reptilian desertfolk known as the quissians date back to the same war that created the luminous ~ they were a mad wizard’s attempt to preserve his community from the ravages war brings to anyone nearby, whether involved or not. Something about them, perhaps their brutal nobility, puts them in the prime candidate along with the blickish and the luminous. The sendasti are another race of desert-dwellers, whose fasting abilities resonate with the character’s successful times of introspection and retreat and facing their own demons. It’s not quite enough for me to make the character a sendasti, though. Meanwhile, the sktak are another reptilian race, and their discipline and austerity actually puts them in the final running, too.
The final listing of good possibilities for this character includes the blickish, the luminous, the quissians, and the sktak. The tragedy inherent to the quissians pulls me in that direction ~ I think I’m deciding that, rather than being a warrior race created to defend a kingdom, they are the entire kingdom transformed into a sturdier race. And the attempt to save them from the horrors of a war they were never actually in was what doomed them as a civilization. It’s just close enough to the character’s personal journey to have resonance with it while remaining distinct enough that it provides depth tho the narrative, not just fractal repetition.
The next step is to convert the race from Mythic Races to Pathfinder, especially with its RP system. As written, quissians are humanoids (0 RP) of Medium size (0 RP) who get normal speed (0 RP) and +2 Constitution and -2 Charisma. I’m gonna call that combination of modifiers roughly equivalent to the Weakness quality (-1 RP). Sure, it’s not tanking Charisma with a -4, but it’s also not giving them a benefit to anything other than Constitution. It’s obviously weaker than Standard (0 RP), which would require a +2 to Intelligence or Wisdom as well, but not nearly as powerful as a Mixed Weakness (-2 RP), which would involve another +2 and a -4 moreover. So far, quissians have -1 RP. Next week, we’ll start to examine their racial traits.
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