Gnomes

Most everyone hates gnomes.  They're small, arrogant, and very good at killing people.  Let's discuss.

History

A dwarf would describe a gnome as a rare type of cancer that happens when gemstones are allowed to rot underground, instead of being mined and properly cut.  The gem goes to seed, but it's still a gem.

A human would tell you gnomes are diminutive humanoids with gemstone eyes.  Apparently, gnomes will buy gems from you at a good price, if you can keep the little fuckers from killing you first.  They have gemstone eyes and terrifyingly white teeth.

A gnome would tell you that they are victims of an ancient curse.  Sabu Monga, the Troll King, once turned nearly their entire race into stone.  But the surviving gnomes were persistent, and labored for generations to find all of their petrified kin, eventually restoring all of them. 

The Troll King saw this and was angered.  This time, the turned them all into gems--objects that are just as worthless as stones, but were designed to inspire mindless lust among the fleshy races.  They would covet these stones, and hide them in their vaults.  In this way, the Troll King tricked the other races into helping him lock away the gnomes forever.

This is the source of all gems, they say.

Gems

Just as dwarves claim all the gold beneath the earth, so do gnomes lay claim to all gems. 

Any gem can be turned into a gnome.  There is a certain process that only gnomes are fully proficient in.  The gem is washed with alternating bathes of milk and blood, before finally being buried in a rare salt.  After two weeks, a gnome-child crawls from the dirt, full of half-memories from the time it was a gem.

Dwarves are capable of the opposite process.  Bring them a gnome (living or dead), and through a process involving a a specialized set of vices, squeeze the gnome back into its gemstone state.  You will get paid and the dwarf will get a fine gem.  Everyone wins.

Despite all this, gnomes and dwarves get along as often as not.  They have the same enemies, underground.

All gnomes can speak with gems.  All gnomes remember much of what they experienced as a gem (so be careful what gems you sell to the gnomes).

Gnomes treat anyone carrying gems as a slaver.  Anyone who attempts to sell them gems is a dirty, filthy slavemaster, and deserves to be put to death for their offenses against freedom.  (They're pretty big on Freedom.)  But, if there is no way to kill the slavers, they will pay top dollar to purchase the freedom of their family.

Eyes like this.
This is Jupiter's sableye, from the pokemon manga.

Gnome Biology

Much like ants or apes, gnomes are very strong for their size.  The tallest ones are about 10" (25 cm) tall.

If a gnomes gemstones are removed, they die.  (In addition to the normal trauma of removing someone's eyes.)  A gnomes gemstone eyes are not as valuable as a product of a dwarven gnome-vise.

Gnome skulls are conical, and grow increasingly more conical as the gnome ages.  This is a sign of beauty among gnomes, and tall hats are common among them.  (Human nobility, ever alert for new fashions of power, have even attempted to imitate it.)

Types of Gnomes

Common gems make common gnomes.  There is nothing about common gnomes that precludes them from becoming rangers or illusionists, but they lack the mad vigor of their more chromatic siblings that predisposes them to such careers.

Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and other exuberant gems are used to make gnome surveyors.  (More on them later.)

Diamonds make a megagnome, a gnome that is capable of changing size between mouse-scale, gnome-scale, human-scale, ogre scale, and any size in between.  They lack the gem-eyes of the usual gnome, and instead have their gem embedded in their bellybutton.  Aside from a slight infundibular affect of their skull, they can pass perfectly for a human in their middle form.

Opals, moonstones, and other similar gems tend to make white-haired illusionists, an especially respectable career among gnomes.

Quartz makes for moronic gnomes called gnomens, who have a perfect memory but little other activity in their pointy heads.  Despite this prodigious power, gnomens are usually found standing in the village square, staring at the sun, calling out the hours.

Pearls are not a true gem, but despite this fact, they can be used to create the gnomefish, whose tender flesh and succulent vitreous make it a prized gemstone among the gnomes.  It is said that their nobility cannot marry without a feast of gnomefish.

The gnomefish itself is a prodigiously ugly fish, with goggle eyes, bulbous nose, and rosy cheeks.

You must never let them get their hands on bismuth.

A gnome attacking a human barbarian.

Gnome Lands

You will know that you are in gnome territory by their effigies.  Gnome lands are riddled with wooden carvings of themselves.  Sometimes crude, sometimes perfectly lifelike.  You will find these mock gnomes peering out from beneath toadstools and leering at you from the crooks of trees.

Gnome villages are well-defended and hard to find.  Still, they are worth searching for--a sack of gnomes is enough to retire on.  By all accounts, the villages are happy places, full of songs and strong communities of well-adjusted gnomes.

They also really like pineapples for some reason.  Every village has a few.

Gnome lands are usually riddled with tunnels and traps.  Beware of badgers, who are often hired as shock-troopers.  Badgers are dangerous on a normal day; badgers can handily kill you when you are blinded and hanging by your heels.

Those who wish to contact the gnomes are advised to sing songs and wear pointy hats.  These signs of civilization will endear you to them, making you seem more gnomish, and making it harder for them to kill you as just another mindless beast.

While selling them gemstones can be profitable (they pay +50% or +100%), it can also be dangerous, since they will hate you for it, and may murder you afterwards.  Giving them liberated gems is a quick way to earn their gratitude.  Also, talk shit about trolls; they hate trolls.  Better yet, bring them some troll heads.

A gift of a diamond is precious.  50% chance that a gnome surveyor joins your party as a hireling.  This is the only way to play a gnome PC.

Fighting the Gnomes

Wise men fear the gnome.  While most gnomes live bucolic lives in their villages, sipping mushroom wine from buttercups, the gnome surveyors are the battle-hardened protectors of their communities.  A gnome becomes a surveyor only after they have killed a wolf without any assistance.

Gnome Surveyor
HD 3  (HP 6)  AC plate+4  Greatrazor 1d4*
Move as human  Jump as cat

Grapnels
Gnomes have strong arms and low bodyweights.  In a forested environment, they can combine their grapnels and natural jumping ability to easily move 20' vertically as part of their movement.

With a grapnel and a nearby tree, a gnome can strike halfway through their movement, making an attack and ending their turn on a branch or inside a hollow log.

Greatrazor
The razor's damage is doubled if a gnome can attack any of your weakpoints: genitals, eyes, or neck.  If all three of these areas are protected, the razor's damage is a mere 1d4.

Gnomish greatrazors are also valued as shaving razors.  Dwarves, especially, prize their beards and will pay handsomely for them.

Decapitation
If a gnome brings a PC below 0 HP, the PC is instantly decapitated.  Characters will full helmets are immune to decapitation.  (Gnomelands and gnomes are well-known for this.  Make sure that your players are fully informed of this before adventuring near gnomes.  Consider a helmet-seller who charges double.)

Gnomes are aware of this limitation and have a number of method to combat it.  If their victim is wearing a coif, one gnome will jump to your shoulder and lift the coif, while their partner strikes at the back of your neck.  They also make use of bees, tarthrowers, and heat metal.

Gnomes also make use of illusionists, but you already know how those work.

If you are able to fight gnomes without grapnels, greatrazors, trees, and traps, they're quite easy to defeat.   Inside their forests, you are most likely to encounter a patrol of 1d4+2.

Gnomes fighting a human houndmaster.

Rules for Fighting Tiny Humanoids

You can grab them as easily as you can hit them with a melee weapon.  Grabbing them is probably preferred, since they become helpless when they are grabbed.  You can choose to deal damage to them automatically on the next turn (1d6 unless you have a really good way to deal more) or throw them at their allies, potentially taking out two gnomes at once.

Also, if your game has special rules for when the PCs fight giants, the gnomes can use those against you.

Hyperparabolic Macrologies

I wanted to write more about Yog, but before I can do that, I have to explain about these guys first.

A Story

Imagine that your world was dying.  Your sun was fading,  Ice and starvation begin to chew your civilizations apart.

And so you set out in a bizarre ship, it's design purchased at great cost from the greatest and farthest of the demons of the upper air.  It the wealth and time of an entire generation, but you set out.  You travel farther than the margins of your maps, farther than the light from your farthest stars, and beyond the trappings of conventional physics.

Finally, beyond the margins of the possible universe, you find an impossible one.  A place of slow time and unimaginable gulfs of space.  You find an entity that lives in that place.  It is colossal beyond imagining-a million miles long, itself more diverse than all of the ecosystems of your homeworld.

At first, your only contact is with the people that live upon it.  Whole civilizations nurture and instruct upon the entity's body, subsisting in secret among its detritus.  Many of your people choose this life, and leave your arcology forever. 

But certain members of your society wish to speak with the entity.  And so you do, though it takes many lifetimes to learn how to speak with it.  Your ship is of a comparable size--it is possible.  It takes a year to speak a couple of sentences to it, another year to hear the response, another year to decipher it.

Over the generations, you learn of the shapes and limits of this outer world.  You meet other entities, and although some of their thoughts and motivations are utterly inscrutable, you are still able to find common ground.  They, too, need to eat every few millenia.  Like you, they have children, some of which are shameful to them, others that are their pride.

These people are similar to bacteria.  We are the entities that they interact with, on an multi-generational timescale.  The hyperbolic macrologies are their arcology ships, which exist uncomfortably in our space.  It is uncertain whether they sprang from the same source, or if they all arrived independently.

People also call them cosmogores.

Walking Arcologies

Having to deal with gravity, limbs, and "walking" is pretty alien to the worldview of bacteria.  About as strange as hyperspace would be to us.  Perhaps that's the closest analogy--a flying arcology that enters hyperspace and never leaves.

The macrologies exist in a variety of shapes, but the most common one is a sphere that walks on a series of articulated, metal limbs.  It's central sphere is almost indistinguishable beneath arrays of bulbous sensory apparatus, and its manipulator arms reflect a short-sighted series of past needs.  (For example, they build a page-turning hand, but it is too fine to be used for any other purpose.  They couldn't afford a better one--the act of building that simple manipulator nearly bankrupted them, and caused riots that lasted for generations.)

Sometimes they just hire someone to carry them around--a pitted metal pearl with a thousand subtle seams and apertures.  This is risky, though, and even these macrologies must be able to sprout legs when the need arises.  The importance of self-sufficiency is not lost of them.

Older, successful macrologies will have bodies attached to themselves, usually necromantic.  (The analogy breaks down a little bit here, but it would be equivalent to an ark ship attaching itself to the corpse of a space-god in order to better interact with an alien world.)

They can offer a few superlative services.  Playing chess!  Generating vast amounts of mediocre music and poetry!  The construction and repair of ultra-fine structures!  (They can pluck the flaws out of gemstones.)  Many of them become wizards.

The civilizations that exist inside the macrologies tend to be fundamentalist, autocratic regimes.  The true nature of the macrology is almost always hidden from the inhabitants--something that they've learned over many revolutions and purges.  By most accounts, they tend to be pretty brutal and uncompromising.

A macrology piloting the corpse of an ogre.
(Actually concept art from Bioshock Infinite.)

Interacting with Macrologies

Because of the sheer number of minds at work within macrology, you might think that they would be extremely intelligent.  And this is true--most of the time.  Although they have a billion minds thinking much faster than we could, they are prone to disruptions and errors of memory.  

"Why should I broadcast the answer to a problem that my great grandfather tasked me with?  There are no such things as Ancient Ones.  There is nothing out there but stars."

One of their "years" goes by approximately every 30 seconds.  Any task that lasts more than a few minutes requires a extremely stable power structure with immaculate record keeping.  

They have deep, synthetic voices.  They tend to talk fast.  They usually hate being told to speak slower--every second you delay costs them precious time.

Macrologies tend to be difficult to wake up in the morning--a thousand years pass every night, and the inheritor civilizations must follow the orders inscribed on their pyramids.  How do you get someone to carry out an instruction a thousand years in the future?  How do you ensure that type of consistency?

They are also prone to sudden bouts of torpor and inactivity, as their worlds are ravaged by civil wars and plagues.  Sometimes they simply destroy themselves unexpectedly, simply destroying themselves though pollution, genocide, or exposure to the outside air.  Dead macrologies can be sold to other macrologies for a hefty sum (a new world-ship!  a second chance!) unless the macrology is uninhabitable for some reason (radioactivity, billions of microscopic undead).

Working with them is also frustrating, because they are sometimes mildly contagious.  It is no uncommon for a (microscopic) ship to leave the macrology every hundred years or so, which is to say, roughly every hour.  If this tiny ark lands on you, you can expect to enjoy a skin rash called "gripworm".  This is the tiny descendants of the macrology attempting to subsist on you.

But within a few days (within a few thousand years) your immune system will fully mobilize to the site and the infection will clear up.  There has never been a recorded case of these tiny people living successfully outside of a macrology--our world is hostile to them in a way that is difficult to explain.

If you scrape out the inside of the blister, you will find the same thing that you will find inside a macrology: very complex dirt.

This post is inspired by a Scrap Princess post about a time bomb, that I cannot find for the life of me.  EDIT: This one.

Stats

HD 6  Armor plate  Ragged Claw 1d20+effect
Move dwarf  Int 14

Immune fire, ice, lightning, poison

Weakness sonic

Spells As level 3 wizard.
Sample Spells reverse gravity, emergency exit, transpose

Claw Effects [d3]
1 - Blind (until Con save).
2 - Cast all of your spells at once.  Save to choose target; otherwise random.
3 - Poison 1d6 (until Con save).

When a macrology succeeds on an Int roll, it succeeds in the way that a hypergenius would.  When a macrology fails an Int roll, it fails horrendously, as if it has forgotten something that happened a few minutes ago, or as if it were ignorant of some basic fact.

The Mother of Osk

I'm going to tell you about a place, and then I'm going to tell you about a class.

This is going to be a difficult class to play. 

It is difficult because you are a parasite, and you only infect other player's characters. 

You will be powerful together, but eventually you will consume their body entirely, and they will die.  You will remain, but they will need to roll a new character.  You killed them.

Becoming an Oscadian

In the yellow wastes of Abasinia, there is a plateau called Osk.  Atop the plateau is the is the city of the same name, the city of living rubies, where the black sugar is made and love is only known to slaves.  We will not speak of them.

Beneath the plateau are the caves of Osk.  And in the largest of the caverns is the Mother of Osk, who has grown too large to ever leave.  Her first birth was as a dragon, but her second birth was as an Oscadian, and indeed she is the only mature Oscadian in the world, for Oscadians do not reach sexual maturity unless their first birth is from the embers of a dragon's egg.

The Mother is a gentle creature, who has grown weary of war, and loves the quiet dusk beneath the plateau.  Even those who seek her out in order to kill her, or steal her many treasures, are usually not killed, if she can help it.  They are merely maimed, then nursed back to health.

She consorts with poets, philsophers, and priests.  She is a devout follower of Hesaya.  If you do her some great service, and if you are gentle with her rough children, she may reward you. 

This reward may take the form of wisdom, treasure, or healing.  The poets are wise, the gold is lustrous, and her milk is thick with potency, but the greatest gift she can give is to infest you with one of her children, a rite normally only reserved for dragons.

Total psychic consent is required for this process to be successful.  NPCs are unreliable in this regard--only PCs can carry a parasitic Oscadian, and only PCs can play an Oscadian.  They are too powerful and subtle for anything less.

DM's Note

Oscadians are a full PC class.  Part of the fun of this parasite class is the fact that you essentially become two players inhabiting the same body.  This is unusual and intimate, and is hopefully a unique roleplaying experience, culminating with the death of the host.

But yeah, sure if you want to treat it as a living suit of armor that casts spells, sure, go ahead.  Be boring.

End of DM's Note

Class: Oscadian

Oscadian A: Sharing a Body, Spellcasting
Oscadian B: Living Armor
Oscadian C: Ragged Claw
Oscadian D: Consumption

An individual Oscadian is actually a colony of clonal organisms, like a coral reef.  There are nineteen types of sub-Oscadians that will grow and differentiate inside the host's body, each one technically an independent animal that shares a bloodstream with its siblings.  These sub-Oscadians will eventually replace every organ in the body.

No one really really give a shit about that, though.  When someone sees an Oscadian, they see a human body overgrown with thick, homogenous, grey scales.  Each of these scales is a sub-Oscadian (one morphology out of the nineteen).  Each one has a single red eye that they open when they cast spells.

When the head is replaced, it is will a flat, heavy-browed face that is mostly occupied with a single red eye the size of a fist.  If the calcite eye is ever pried from the skull, it is a gemstone worth 200s.  It will not regrow.  There is only a narrow slit on the bottom of the head.  This is the polite mouth, and it is used only for speech.  It is incapable of eating.

Luckily, at this point the rude mouth has already grown out of the solar plexus, and is capable of assuming this responsibility with a formidable efficacy.

This process is gradual, though. You begin your life as only an arm.

These humanoid Oscadians are sterile.  True Oscadians are generated from a draconic host.

Sharing a Body

Roll your ability scores as normal.  When you fully take over this body, you'll inherit the physical ability scores from them, but until then, use your own physical ability scores. 

You currently control an arm.  Your host loses control of that arm.  You can use your arm normally.  This potentially allows you to each make a melee attack against a target, or you can both coordinate your turns to fire a single arrow at your target.

Generate your HP normally.  You now share an HP pool with your host.  This makes you very hard to kill.  If either of you die, you both die.  You have separate minds, but a singular body.  If a spell or poison affects one of your bodies, it also affects the other one.

Spellcasting

As a wizard, with one MD per level, up to a maximum of 3 MD.  An Oscadian begins knowing only two spells: speak with reptiles and speak with insects.  At Oscadian B they learn acidbolt.  At Oscadian C they learn dominate insect.  They can use scrolls but cannot replace the spells they know.

You require the use of your arm to cast these spells (as normal).  You don't require a mouth (which is good, because you don't have any).  You can produce the speech required for spellcasting by buzzing all of your sub-Oscadians simultaneously.

Living Armor

You grow to cover the entire body except for the face.  You count as a suit of plate, except you do not take up any inventory slots.  (You still sink automatically if you fall in water.)

Similar to how shields are sundered, you can choose to shatter some of your sub-Oscadians as a free reaction.  If you choose to do this, you may reduce the incoming damage by 1d8, and your AC decreases by 2 points.  You can do this twice, but not thrice (since that would kill too many of your sub-Oscadians).

It's also pretty traumatic, since you then have to watch your siblings (pieces of yourself) flex and squeak and bleed to death on the floor, like legless beetles.

Your dermal population will regrow in one week.

Ragged Claw

Your hand is not a normal human hand anymore.  It is a jagged talon the size of a shovel's head.  You can attack with it to deal 1d6 damage, but you cannot do any fine manipulations with it.

You can also perform a horrific haymaker with it.  You get +2 Attack and deal 2d6 damage, but if you miss or fail to kill your target, you lose your next standard action as you recover your poise.

Consumption

You finally grow populous enough to consume your host's head.  You retain many features from your host, but the face is not one of them.  Your face is now dominated by a glassy, cyclopean eye.

You also consume the brain.  You gain access to all of your host's memories, and you retain one class ability from your host.  This is negotiated with your DM, but I recommend retaining their most iconic ability, such as a barbarian's rage or a wizard's spellbook.

You have one regular humanoid arm and one Ragged Claw.

You are now more than just an arm, you are the entire body.  Your host is now dead, and their player will have to roll a new character.

Oscadian Psychology

If an Oscadian were to read this blog post, they would have many objections to the terminology that I've used.

They do not see a parasite, nor do they see a host.  Instead, they see a first child and a second child, who eventually mature together into the Oscadian.

In their minds, an Oscadian is made up of many subunits, each of which is technically an individual animal with it's own heart, lungs, and (linked) mind.  A human, too, is theorized to be made up of tiny individual animals as well.  None of this is an obstacle to the concept of all these disparate parts seeing themselves as a unified whole.  An Oscadian's sense of self is no less fractured than a human's.

The way they see it, an Oscadian has four parents.  A human father and a human mother.  An Oscadian mother (Mother) and an Oscadian father (long dead, except for what remains in Mother's spermathecae).

An Oscadian who visits their human parents would be just as loving and understanding as the host human would have been, and will probably try to gently explain that changes that they have undergone.  They still love their parents.  They still love the Prophetessa (May She Live Again).  And they still love beer, even if they can't taste it anymore.

The Joga and the Tamberlanders

The Joga

The joga are a race of constructs, although they would never describe themselves as such.  They look like stylized humanoids made from brass and wood.  They take pains never to look to similar to humans, as they would never like to be confused with a human, and they would never like a human to treat them as more than a tool.

They live inside churches, and rarely leave their designated chambers.  They are memory-keepers, able to record their memories perfectly, copy them quickly, and trade them among themselves.  These memories are stored as copper rods, which are kept into their chest.  (Their heads are usually full of their bulky optical and vocal apparatuses.)

The downside to their impeccable memory is the size of it.  Each joga's capacity for memory is much smaller than a human's, and surplus memories must be stored outside of their body.  Each joga must decide what knowledge/memories/goals are important enough to keep loaded (in their body) and which must be kept on the bookshelf.

Because daily activities are seldom of any great importance, it is common for a joga to fail to recognize you from day to day.  They are like a microscope--seeing a tiny part of their own history, but with an immense level of detail.

Joga: "Good morning, brother.  Have you come to worship the prophetess (may she live again)?"

Korgoth: "I was here on April 9th, asking about a demonic weasel.  You said you would research it for me."

Joga: "Seek patience."  [finds and inserts the relevant memories]  "Ah yes, the musteloth.  It was described by St. Gwinnious of Fynn. . ."

Each Joga usually keeps an index of their important memories, usually a tome of some sort.

They "replay" their memories by speaking.  Each of them is an impressive caricaturist and vocal impersonator.  It is believed that they can never lie.

They illustrate their memories by painting.  Each of them is a technically masterful painter, and each of their fingers is capable of wielding a paintbrush independently.

Each generation of Joga is built by the previous one.  The secrets of this manufacture are not shared with humans--it is the only secret that the Joga keep.

This is their rationale for such secrecy:

The joga are perfect, and exist only to serve the Church.  Humans are not perfect.  If humans were allowed to create a joga, they might create an imperfect joga, and thus corruption may spread down our line.

It is a mistake to think that they are creatures composed entirely of logic, without any emotion.  They are stoic, yes, but they also mourn, laugh, and grow wrathful.

Above all, however, they insist that they are not alive.  In their own words, they are just "mechanisms undergoing a very complicated unwinding".  They will destroy themselves if ordered to by a high-ranking member of the Church.  (They will cry during this, although they will deny that they feel any sadness.)

Usually, however, the Church will order the joga to simply melt down their brass rods, effectively rebooting the joga.

Because their memories are so easy to isolate and erase, the Chuch usually employs them to identify and catalog heresies.

Because heresies constitute a moral hazard (they imperil your soul's ability in the afterlife), it is not uncommon to spread knowledge of a heresy across multiple joga.

Alternatively, heresies are sometimes summarized through several joga (or more reasonably, the same joga in different states), by wrapping the heresy in layers of summary and encoding (such as translating parts to a different language that the joga currently has no understanding of).

For example, each paragraph of a heresy can be encoded in a different language.  By cycling languages, a joga can access each paragraph quickly and individually, without being exposed to the corrupting effect of the whole.

Joga were purchased from the Tamberlanders, who are their ancestors.

The Tamberlanders

Most people know them as the balloonists: mad, goggle-eyed men who fly across Centerra in harnesses suspending from balloons.

The balloons are (mostly) alchemical, and can fold up and fit into their own backpack, which is attached to the harness that each tamberlander wears.  The balloons quickly break when not in the possession of the tamberlander.  They are tricky devices to maintain, and the tamberlanders maintain their secrets well.

This allows them to drop in and out very quickly.

Their faces are fake, and their fingers are cold.  They will remove both when they believe themselves to be alone.  They communicate to each other by sticking their rod-like "tongue" into the ground--which is inconvenient for a race that spends so much time airborne.  (Or at least, the tambermen you meet in Centerra will most likely be travelling balloonists).

Sleeping is performed in a similar way.  Face in the dirt, anchored by their tongue, feet in the air, body stiff as a rod.

Like the joga, they are primarily made from wood and copper, along with clever prosthetics they use to hide their nature.  They are also a race of constructs, but believe themselves to be people just like any other.  Most are mildly contemptuous of the Church.  Most of the ones you'll meet in Centerra are a bit mad, and tend to have strange obsessions.

They're renowned as scouts and traders.  Most will hire themselves out for a high price, or trade in small, transportable valuables: saffron, sapphires.

In their homeland, power is correlated with having the most descendants, who are (mostly) loyal to their creators.  But since it takes a tamberlander over a year of labor to build a child, and the parts required are costly, it is not easy to quickly raise an army.

Parts can be quickly obtained by killing another tamberlanders and scavenging their parts, but this is as risky as murder is in our society.  Although this does seem to be the prior norm.  Only the current power structure in Tambool seems to restrain them, allowing (because of) aggression against Yog.

Their homeland is far to the north, across the deserts of the Madlands, past the Infinite City of Yog.  They live on the Isle of Tambool, which is not an island but a mountain.  

Tambool is described as an island because it rises above a sea of poisonous fog. The tamberlanders produce the fog themselves through their alchemy, as a defense against invasion.  Being constructs, the poison doesn't harm them directly.

The tamberlanders have declared war on the Infinite City of Yog, which has not yet noticed.  (The messenger is, presumably, still threading his way to the throne room of that great city).  But they will, eventually, and when that happens, it is best to hide behind a giant poisonous cloud.

Until then, their bombing campaign continues, which is similarly unnoticed in Yog.

A city has a great deal of needs, besides food and farmland, and for this reason the tamberlanders are constantly venturing out on their balloons and ekubas (undead horses, usually purchased from Kel Dravonis).

It is not known how the Church came to purchase the children of the tamberlanders, what they paid for it, or how their progeny was ultimately transformed into the (very different) joga.

The Inextricable Grace of Elves

I've written about elven psychology, linguistics, origin, military, weapons, half-elves, and their infinitely looping kingdoms at the end of time.

But one thing I haven't written about is what it's like for the PCs to actually encounter true elves, face to face.

Should I do a recap first?  I feel like I should.

Boring Elven Lore Shit

Originally, you had baseline humans.  When transhumanism resulted in True Elves, they basically started running the show.  They made slave-races for different tasks: spacers (halflings), soldiers (orcs), laborers (dwarves), while the baseline humans went extinct, only leaving various races of subhumans (bred to be fulfill different types of magical sacrifices).

Eventually, the technology slipped away and the True Elves lost the ability to create more of themselves.  Their degenerate offspring are the High Elves (who are the Low Elves) and they are the most beautiful creatures on Centerra (save nymphs and such).  The True Elves have either left the planet or jumped ahead to one of the temporal estates at time's end.

Elves have the best civilization and the best historical records because many of them were spared the Time of Fire and Madness; they were safely living on Eladras when it happened, a tree that grew downwards from the moon.

(I thought I wrote a post about Eladras, but I didn't.  It's roots are still in the moon, pieces of its trunk form some of the orbital biomes, its branches fell in the Dustwind, and its seeds were used to make grow Aglabendis.)

So the High Elves live forever, magical and powerful, isolating in the beautiful places they have claimed for themselves (often forests).  Each High Elf city is ringed by Wood Elves, the outcasts that society has deemed too ugly or too offensive to dwell among them.  (They're still extremely beautiful by pseudo-medieval standards.)  Elves claim all beautiful things, not just beautiful forests (which sometimes resemble parks) and so sometimes the wood elves are more like beach elves or mountain elves but you get the point.  They're the dirt-elves that range away from the parties plazas.

And then percolating through all elven society are their slave-races, except they'd never call them that.  They are their little brothers and little sisters, and they are enslaved by love.  They love their older siblings, and revere them even though they aren't allowed to sit at the same table as them, or even speak to them directly.  These are the half-elves (elf-men and elf-women) who are sterilized adult humans who have been created via semi-elfification of stolen infants, the alchemical orcs who have been restored to some of their original prowess as super-soldiers, the ashakka who are wooden golems powered by elven ancestors, and all manner of magical bullshit that they are capable of conjuring.

Most people think that half-elves are the true elves, since those are the ones that sometimes engage in trade.  Most scholars know of the furtive Wood Elves, and believe them to be the true elves.  And a vanishing few mortals have been to the elven cities and met the High Elves (who are the Low Elves) and believe them to be the true elves.  And everyone is wrong once again.

How Elves Talk

The thing to realize is this: unless you've been living in elven society for a few hundred years, you're going to offend someone terribly within a few seconds of walking in the door.

Remember that all of elven society is predicated on beauty and positivity.  Unpleasant things are corrected, removed, or ignored.

A smelly adventurer with blood in his mouth and shit on his boots represents an extremely significant challenge to etiquette, best avoided altogether.  An adventurer will find it nearly impossible to access an elven city, because they really don't want you in there.

But even within the elven city, all discussion of unpleasantness is avoided.  This means that they avoid discussing pretty much all of the outside world.  Talking about unpleasantness is an offense that entails punishment: shunning, resocialization classes, and in the most extreme cases, banishment to the wood elves.

If you could sum up the elven civic philosophy, it would be this: don't inconvenience others.

More specific advice on how to talk to an elf.

• Don't talk about unpleasant things, you may make someone uncomfortable.
• Don't make too much eye contact, you may seem intimidating.
• Do not ask questions about absent friends, something bad might have happened to them.
• Hell, don't ask questions at all.  That puts a burden on the other person to ask.
• Compliments are basically mandatory.  A lack of compliments is basically an insult.
• Don't talk about things that the other person might not know about.  If you don't know if the other person knows something or not, it is best to approach the topic obliquely.

Conversation is best limited to safe topics.  Pretty things like the clothing that the other elf is wearing.  Local music.  Delicious food.  Art.  Culture.  Weather.  Reminiscing about other happy times.  Inside jokes.  

You might think this sounds boring, but elves are brilliant and clever and pretty.  They're always alluding to other things, connecting different areas.  They're hilarious.  If they were talking to a human they liked, they'd be careful to only refer to areas of culture and history that the human was likely to know about, in order to avoid making them self-conscious of their ignorance.  Humans love hanging out with elves; they're like humans who have learned how to avoid offending people.

An elf who was interrogating you might stand at the other end of the room, look out the window, and wonder aloud "I wonder where my kinkajou is?  It's almost time for his massage."

That's remarkably direct, for an elf.  That's bad news.  You're about to be slowly lowered into a vat of acid over a 36 hour period.  You better tell her where her kinkajou is, dude.

You might think the inability to ask questions is a bit limiting.  You'd be correct.

Books are the exception.  When an elf is alone with a book, the pretense is dropped.  After all, there is still a need to learn about the actual world.  And if an elf wishes to learn about unpleasant things in the privacy of their own home, they are certainly allowed to do so, as long as they don't inconvenience others.

Written and spoken words have very different purposes in elven society.

Another workaround is the use of intermediates.  A servant hears a politely coded message, conveys it to a subservant in a less polite form, and then the subservant will meet with another elf's subservant, and the two of them will have a plainly spoken discussion.  Then the resolution will make its way back up to the elf, who is then informed of what he has decided.

Sometimes the elf is her own subservant, in a different guise and identity.  This is actually pretty common in elven society--compartmentalizing their identity into polite and impolite forms.  While wood elves might use masks to accomplish the same thing, high elves use glamours and actual transformations.

This is an advantage in fighting a high elf.  If you surprise them with combat, they'll usually refuse to fight until they can assume their "war face" (combat identity).  They're very good at running away, but try to make that first combat count.

Pretense is as important as air.

Unpleasant things are usually disguised as something else.  Combat is often referred to as dancing, but even that euphemism is becoming worn and distasteful.  Combat is now often referred to as "music appreciation" or "physical listening" or something similar.

The distaste is now even rubbing off onto actual dancing, which was beginning to have a more negative connotation due to its association with combat.  So dancing is now referred to as "joyful warfare" or "imitating the wind".

How Elves Live

Usually alone or in romantic pairs/trios/quartets.  Except not alone alone.  Each elf has a large estate consisting of their "family" of non-elves (half-elves, alchemical orcs, human sycophants), servants, playthings, protectors, and fashion statements.

Like if an elven household was a dungeon, it might be a redwood with a pavilion at the top and a branching complex in the roots.  It would have a romantic pair of elves as the "bosses".  One room might have 3d6 "little brothers" (alchemical orcs armed with crush gauntlets and jump jets) and a ziggurat made of hot tubs.  Another room might have Sir Hembriss the Curator, a charmed rakshasa who does hair and makeup.

Elven households are very diverse, because fashion.  No elf wants to show up to the gala with the same color rakshasa as their rival.

I've painted a pretty negative picture of elves, but there are plenty that take good care of their adopted families.  Many of them are effective mentors, and a few are even friends with members of their household.

Children aren't common because (a) some elven cultures practice population control, and (b) raising an elven child is risky and unpleasant.  Too much messy biology, too much disappointment and death.  It's also incredibly expensive: the same magical manipulation that improved human stock into elves also made them dependent on magical technology that is absent, faulty, and/or poorly understood.

For example, the elven fetus was never meant to be grown to parturition inside a uterus.  They were designed to be grown in a vat.  And since those vats no longer exist, the elves have had to invent some pretty drastic workarounds.  Expensive, unpleasant, and especially risky.

This is true for all stages of an elf's development, not just pregnancy.  Elven procreation requires a lot of infrastructure and technology.  It's not an exaggeration to say that an elven hospital is the third parent, since mom, dad, and magic all make tremendous and necessary contributions to the final product.

This restriction means that you'll hardly ever see elves living in the slums.  An elf will have wealthy parents, or they'll never make it past the first trimester.

How Elves Fight

Some cultures of elves will just run away, in order to don their war identity.

Other cultures of elves will fight you directly, but under the pretense of "dancing with you".  This requires having a bard nearby, who will strike up music during the combat.  If the bard stops playing, the pretense drops, and the elf will be forced to fight you directly.  (This makes the combat worse, not easier.)

How do you shoot an arrow at someone indirectly?  You shoot it very high, so that it takes a high, arcing path.  That makes it easier to pretend that you were shot by accident, so as not to upset the elf.

Couldn't you just hold your shield over your head and be safe from elven arrows?  Well, no, because high elven arrows don't fly in a straight line.  They're curved so that they fly in spirals.  Elves do other tricks with the fletching, such as ablative rachides and clockwork oscillators, that make the arrows fly in even more complex patterns.

Then they spend a few decades mastering it.

This means that elvish arrows are essentially useless in human hands.  (The inverse is not true.)

<sidebar>Elves really hate to see anyone else using their toys.  There are various ways to accomplish this, such as covering them in diseases that only affect humans to remaining inert unless surrounded by elven DNA (which is easily bypassed by anyone wearing elfskin gloves).</sidebar>

Elves are capable of producing pretty much every entry in the monster manual, but they prefer bodyguards who don't leave a mess.  Stranglers (such as a lesser wind) and devourers (such as an ooze) are ideal.  Elves really hate it when their bespoke stuff gets broke.

They also aren't above simply paying you to go away.  Giving an adventuring party a large ruby works fine: they have plenty more gems.  Besides, a large ruby in the hands of mercenaries is likely to bring nothing but turmoil to human lands, without making the humans any wiser, more numerous, or more powerful (all things that elves seek to prevent).

The elves would find it hilarious if it wasn't already so eye-rollingly banal at this point.

How Elves Die

The pretense persists until their dying breaths.  It is an inextricable part of their souls.

Consider the words of Milasham vin Valtir, an elf who was stabbed in the aorta by adventurers while attempting to recover her stolen kinkajou.

"Look," she said, reaching into her breast pocket and pulling out a bloody hand.  "I have found rubies."

Hobgoblins, Half-elves, and Half-giants

Genetics doesn't work the same in Centerra.  The race of your children is mostly determined by where they were born, for example.  (Accents are the shibboleths and the grounds for discrimination, not skin color.)

And of course, ogres are made from children via a specific diet and certain treatment.  

But making ogres from children is just the tip of the iceberg.

by tsvetomir georgiev

Hobgoblins

Goblins are right horrible little bastards, and everything that joins them at their table will also become a right horrible little bastard, too.

It doesn't take long.  A few months of goblin food will do it.  If you join them in in their songs, the process will hasten even further.

Goblins sometimes do it intentionally.  They you in a pit full of goblins.  They feed you their horrible food (usually at least 5% goblin secretion by weight).  They force you to play their horrible games, such as stomp-rat, piss-glug, and wrestle-worm.

And you'll dwindle.  First one inch, then another.  You'll be six inches shorter before you're done.  Your nose will lengthen and fresh rows of sharp teeth will grow in behind each other, like a shark's.  Your hair will flee from you.

Your eyes will yellow and become beady.  Your skin becomes a sickly shade of green.  And your mindset will become goblinish--rapacious, curious, hasty, loud, quiet.  You will not be pleasant to be around, and the only people who will tolerate you will be goblins and other goblin-men.

There are many goblin-men (and goblin-women) in Goblintown.  (Stats as normal humans, plus darkvision and the personalities of goblins, including the lack of self-preservation.)

Humans are not the only thing that goblins can transform thus.  Goblins can make everything horrible.  (Daniel Dean has said this before.)

Expect to see long-nosed goblin dogs skulking around Goblintown, They sneak into rooms and shit in your boots.  They piss in any open container of drinkable water.  Packs of them will bite open your packs, swallow valuables until they gag, and then run off with bellies of silver.  And they never bark, only ever mustering a wheezing laugh or mad yowling.

There are goblin pigs, which are a bit like greenish, long-nosed pigs, except for their remarkable flexibility and their habit of shitting in their own mouths.

There are goblin bats who--to be perfectly honest--just shit on everything.  They'll follow you quietly until combat breaks out and then they'll try to shit in your eyes (10% chance per bat per turn, blind until you wipe it out + disease chance).

And you'll find all sorts of other goblin-animals in Goblintown.  Goblin hippos lounge in the filth-fountains.  Goblin geese will whack the shit out of your kneecaps.  They're all shitty, hairless (although not featherless), greasy, and slightly smaller than usual.

Setting Note: I never liked hobgoblins as "militant goblinoids who got their shit together".  I always felt that orcs could fill that niche better.

a classically smug elf
from Lord of the Rings

Half-Elves

Elves (and by this I mean low elves) surround themselves in beauty.  This requires them to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.  

And insulation requires walls, of course.  Some walls are temporal, some are spatial, and some are literal walls.  (But even the literal walls are subtle--an enchanted forest that diverts all travelers from the elven city at its heart, and thwarts all attempts to map it.  This is pretty bog-standard as far as elven isolation magic goes.)

But even elves sometimes need to interact with their neighbors.  

This is a repulsive idea.  Everything that is not an elf or of elven manufactures is usually repulsive at beast, and nauseating at worst.  (If the average party of gore-spattered adventurers bursts into an elven wedding, expect half of the elves to cast disintegrate spells and the other half to spend their first turn vomiting into their silken napkins.)

So that is what elven slaves are for--except they aren't slaves.  They're loyal little brothers and little sisters to the elves that they are forbidden to meet, less their ruin their older siblings delicate appetites.  (It takes very little to ruin an elf's appetite.)

These pseudo-slaves are usually elevated into pseudo-elfhood through the administration of elven hormones and genetic activators.  (Of course, the elves don't know the science behind their own elevation.  They only know that making certain types of wine from certain types of plants turns elven children into elven adults.  The plants of course, were genetically engineers millennia ago for this very purpose, although the purity and potency is a tiny fraction of what was originally intended.)

So elves give their loyal slaves elf-drugs to make them more elfy.  When administered to a prepubescent human slave, the result is the creation of a half-elf.  Confusingly, they are also called elf-men and elf-women.

Like all responsible pet owners, elves spay and neuter their little siblings.  This makes them easier to control and explains why elves are always buying human babies (or stealing them).  It also means that if you want to play a male half-elf in one of my games, you're not going to have any testicles.  (We can discuss the plausibility of a quest to recover them from the elves.)

A half-elf looks a lot like an elf, minus the extra foot of height and twitching xenophobia.  Unlike elves, they can be PCs.

They are agile, beautiful (by human standards), and wise.  In fact, most people think that half-elves are actually elves, never suspecting that their more agile, more beauteous, more genocidal masters lived deeper in the forest, disgusted by the possibility of having to talk to a human king.  (The hair!  The pores on their faces!  The smell of defecation!)

Sidebar: Dragons also breed clans of loyal humans called drakencults!

Half-Giants

Little is known of this particular transformation, but we do know that it requires at least two things (a) large volumes of giant food consumed over a year, at a minumum, and (b) marriage to a giant.

Other possibilities (the consumption of giantish breast milk, beating a giant in a contest of strength) are rumored but not confirmed.

Half-giant Stats

(posted here not because they are good, but because I don't want to lose them)

Str +1 or Str 14, whichever is higher.

Once per day, can treat Str as if it were 20.

Can zone out and build buildings as long as you have enough raw materials.  Can only ever build buildings (towers but also things like bridges) and earthworks (trenches) due to weird racial compulsions.  More giants working together can build exponentially larger buildings.  In one 8-hour building frenzy, the giants can build X * Y * 100 square feet of wooden house, or X * Y * 5 square feet of stone house, where X is the number of giants and Y is also the number of giants, but Y maxes out at 5.  Usable once per day.

Race, Inheritance, and Casvetania

Genetics is a lie, just like germ theory.

Creatures born in Centerra inherit the acquired traits of their parents.  Muscular parents birth muscular babies.  A daughter is born with a scar that matches her fathers.  A blind mother will birth a child with terrible eyesight.

So, your parents affect your genetics, but not as much as where you were born.  Or more specifically, where your mother spent her time when she was pregnant.

This is how it works for most of the races of Centerra.  For example, if your mother spent most of her pregnancy aboard a ship, you'd probably be born as a marinel.

The Land of Flowers is sterile.  Nothing is born there.

Creatures born in the Valley of the Maggot grow up large, hungry, and violent.

Those born in the Red Thickets of Diosassus are hairless and vampiric.  (They are not true vampires, however; they just have a curious dietary restriction.)  In fact, that entire ecosystem is vampiric.  Hairless deer suck the sap from the pale trees in the crimson shade.  They are preyed upon by hairless, albino wolves.  And so on, and so on, all the way up to the creeping monstrosity that is Diosassus himself.

Everything on the Little Island is diminuitive.  Lilliputian.

And then there is the case of Casvetania's Castle.

Casvetania's Castle

There are many stories of tragic wizards.  (Their stories are often retold, since their mistakes so often spill from their domain into our own.)  But the stories are usually of insult, grave redress, the folly of immortality, abominable invention, and that sort of thing.  Wizard shit.

But this story begins with a pair of married wizards who lost a daughter to disease.  Her name was Casvetania.

Their grief was raw, powerful, and sincere.  Their sorrow became their ambition, and when it was hitched to the wheels of their sorcery it dredged up some deep sorcery that has not been seen before, or since.

The Church sealed off the castle.  If you want to know what is inside, you'll have to consult their secret archives in Coramont, or else travel there yourself, pry the white lead out from between the bricks, and take a peek for yourself.

But the village below the castle is called Buckins Harbor, and it is still inhabited.

The magic of Casvetania's Castle seeps in the land around it.  On quiet nights, you can feel it in your heartbeat.  And everything that is born in the shadow of that castle is Casvetania.

Above a certain size, of course.  Anything that is larger than a dog and is pregnant near the castle for the majority of its pregnancy will birth a Casvetania.

She's a small girl, even when grown.  Wispy hair.  Wide-spaced eyes.  Button nose, but a bit too much gum when she smiles.  The majority of Casvetanias suffer from dementia when they get older.  Sometimes as early as 45.

Small pregnant creatures instead give birth to small masses of undifferentiated tissue.  Pink skin, pale hair, and perhap a couple of teeth.

And of course, the fish and the sharks birth Casvetanias too.  Not a week goes by without a newborn Casvetania washing ashore, all blue and fish-nibbled.

The woods are full of wild Casvetanias.  Raised by families of immigrant wolves, perhaps.  You'll see them in the trees, faces painted with lichen milk.  Most commonly, their are found by their older sisters and then raised in the family tradition.

Buckins Harbor is full of them, as you'd expect.  You'll probably meet one before you arrive.  A lot of the ships that sail into and out of Buckins will have a Casvetania on their register.  They won't call themselves "Casvetania" of course.  They'll be Salla, or Mara, or Casana,  But they will be a Casvetania.

You see them at all ages.  Grey-haired Casvetania's haggling in the marketplace with pair of teenage Casvetanias.  A pair of Casvetanias arguing in a tavern, one flush and ruddy, the other hollow-cheeked, like an abused twin.  Upstairs, a pair of Casvetanias are fucking in front of the fireplace.  Back in the alley, one Casvetania has just slit the throat of a much wealthier Casvetania (no tear slides down her cheek, but she is still careful not to look in the face of the woman she has just murdered.)

They don't leave Buckins very often.  They say that the rest of the world looks alien, and that nothing gives them a greater feeling of belonging than looking around a street and seeing your own face.

Many of them feel sorry for us, since we will never know that feeling.

Most people in Buckins Harbor are not Casvetanias.  They make up about 40% of the population.

Once there was a murderer who only killed Casvetanias.  The bodies were always found badly defaced (literally) and shoved into cribs.  When the killer was discovered, she was found to be a Casvetania herself, of course.

Some Casvetanias try to individuate themselves.  Obesity is a common method.  So is fashion.

Some Casvetanias have formed a cult.  They carve their own face into every available surface.  They control at least one neighborhood in Buckins, where only Casvetanias are allowed.  Each one takes another Casvetania for a wife.  They dress identically.  Alone among Casvetanias, they each go by the name of Casvetania, and differentiate themselves by secret hand signs, known only among themselves.  They are said to be ruled by the spirit of the original Casvetania, the unhappy soul of a child trapped in a chandelier.

Some other Casvetanias have banded together and investigated the sealed castle, in defiance of the Church's wishes.  (Buckins Harbor has a tiny church, but the two paladins quartered there also lead the town guard.)

They returned once, to sell off some loot they had found inside.  The said that the inside of the castle was covered in monuments to the dead daughter, the first Casvetania.  They also found evidence of earlier methods that the couple used to conceive a child.  They sold a map to an oil merchant, but the priest confiscated it.  Then they purchased every mirror in town (giving no explanation) and returned to the castle.

The paladins waited outside to arrest them.  But after three days, they still hadn't emerged from the castle, and so the entrance was bricked back up again.

Using This at your Table

Let your players be Casvetanias.  (Actually, I'd love to see how players differentiate their Casvetanias from each other.)

Hunt down the Casvetania killer.

Infiltrate the Cult of Casvetania.

Delve the Sealed Castle of Casvetania.

Casvetania Casvetania Casvetania.

Merfolk and False Shipwrecks

Trade

Merfolk want metal, because you can't smelt anything underwater.  In most places, it is both illegal and taboo to trade metal to merfolk.  Those that do are sometimes called iron whores.

Merfolk mostly trade with vast quantities of delicious fish and/or weird artifacts from long-drowned civilizations.

Most nations of merfolk claim all the oceans, and forbid humans from sailing on them.  In warmer waters, merfolk usually dominate the seas (by agreement or warfare).  In some places (Abasinia, Basharna), this schism between land and sea is so strong that humans live by the oceans, but almost never eat fish.  Fish is called wet food, and is considered either a delicacy or a traitorous food (depending on whether or not we're at war with the local merfolk).

Cities

Contrary to popular belief, most merfolk cities are along the coastline.  (Real world fun fact: coral reefs are just as productive as rainforests, but the open ocean is about as productive as an arctic tundra.)  Some of the most productive pieces of coastline are where rivers empty into the ocean.

This means that humans and merfolk are in direct competition for the same pieces of prime real estate.  They both desire coastal cities.

And just as human coastal cities extend a short distance into the sea (in the form of docks, harbors, and shipyards), so do merfolk cities extend a short distance into the land.

Merfolk do this because there are certain things you can't do underwater.  Metalworking, for example.  Valdina, the largest merfolk city on the continent of Centerra, is often shaded by plumes of smoke from its smelters.

These industries are worked by either human slaves or human citizens.  (Both exist.  It's complicated.)  Usually the buildings will be separated by canals or moats (to make their city more defensible).  Sometimes the buildings will be on artificial islands.

Their cities usually have mazes of deep moats around them, studded with towers (emerging directly from ponds between the moats).  They do not build walls.

Warfare

Merfolk rule the seaways.  Every single human vs. merfolk naval war has ended with the human's defeat.

Their favorite tactic is just to swim up to a ship, grab hold of some of the barnacles on the bottom, and begin drilling holes in the bottom.  They require metal tools for this.

The most common human defense to this is simply speed.  A ship in full sail is much, much faster than a swimming merman.

The most common counter to this are blockades, nets, and traps.  A line of buoys stretched across the water will catch a ship that blunders into it, slowing it down enough for the mermen at the nearby fort to swim over and scuttle it.

When a ship runs into a ship-catching net, a sailor is quickly dispatched into the water to cut the ship free.

Sometimes the merfolk tie sharks to these nets to discourage people from getting into the water.

The zerino have been fighting the merfolk for so long that they have developed ingenious counters.  They cover their ships with spikes to keep merfolk from drilling holes.  Even when their ship is ensnared and bogged down, and they are surrounded by merfolk, they are safe within their dreadnoughts.  They dump poison into the water to kill the merfolk.

Stormsailing ships usually have a weather-mage on board.  Merfolk know to avoid these ships if there is so much as a single cloud in the sky, because these ships have metal masts that dip down into the keel.  If a weather-mage calls down a lightning bolt through the mainmast, everything in the water dies.

These are strong counters, but the merfolk counter-attack by throwing noxious sea creatures on board, releasing poisonous gases (produced in whale carcasses, which are floating alchemical laboratories), or--most rarely--with ocean mages of their own, who can summon whirlpools and giant waves.  (These get the most attention in sailor's stories.)  Or they simply fill your ship full of harpoons attached to parachute kites, which both slow you down and make your ship more visible to other merfolk in the area.

But the bottom line is this: if they succeed in slowing your ship down, they will eventually overwhelm you.  Once your ship is swamped (surrounded by many hundreds), they will swarm on board (clumsily, and with great difficulty) and hack you to pulp with shark-tooth axes.  They do this so they can capture your ship.

Ship combat versus merfolk needs to feel like Mad Max.  It's a chase, not a fight--because you'll lose if they catch you.  It needs to be full of weird weapons and weird counters to those same weapons.  Sailors need to be strapping on jellyfish gas-masks after the merfolk explode their whale corpse-bomb.

Merships

It is a fact that the fastest way to travel through the sea is to travel atop it.  If you want to be fast on the ocean, you need a ship.

The merfolk have long since learned to sail in ships, as the humans do.

Their ships are half-submerged most of the time.  When they want to be stealthy, they'll lower the mast and tow the ship.  When they want to be fast, they'll bail the ship out and sail it above the waves.

Sometimes they seal the ship, anchor it in a shallow place, and pull it down to the seabed so that it looks like a shipwreck.  When they want to give pursuit, they cut the lines and the ship erupts from the seabed.  Sometimes they are even angled so that the buoyancy forces the ship forward as it rises, so that it erupts from the water with forward momentum, at full speed.  (Like holding a bodyboard underwater, angling the nose slightly up, then releasing it.)

Merships tend to be inferior to their human counterparts (inferior wood, collapsible masts are much weaker), but in merfolk-controlled areas, there will be large areas full of ship-catching nets, sandbars engineered to be invisible, and pyramids of rocks stacked just beneath the waves--the perfect height to punch a hole in the bottom of a fleeing ship.

These places are called mazes.

Yeti

Photographs on this page by Charles Fréger

The yeti had an advanced culture before it was wiped out during the Time of Fire and Madness.  Now they exist mostly as a race of disinherited mountain bastards who sometimes have a miraculous magic item from before their fall.  They look like tall, skinny wookies with their faces hidden in their wooly hair.

All yeti can communicate telepathically with any other yeti within 100'.  They do this using their fur, which creates magnetic fields.  A freshly-shaven yeti cannot generate this field, and cannot communicate telepathically.  Among non-yeti, they are only capable of communicating in grunts, trills, hoots, and whistles, and only with difficulty.  With these unsubtle tools, they can only speak a reduced language, with a tiny vocabulary.  (This is why literal translations of yeti speech appear simple.  "Go now."  "Bad metal man.")

It's somewhat comparable to a dog trying to speak.  Even with a fully intelligent brain, they are very limited in how many distinct noises they can make.

Before the fall, they built cities atop mountains, and were famous for creating micro-climates within them.  They filled the mountain tops with forests of gossamer-leaved trees, each of which was an incubator for another micro-climate, which holds another herb.  Yeti were great herbalists (and some still are), especially specializing in entheogens and other psychotropic chemicals.

Yeti love the cold, and they love their shaggy hair, which smells spicy-sweet.  You will never find them in the warm parts of the world, except perhaps underground, where the caverns may be cold enough for ice to form.

Yeti shamans (the axle around which their entire culture revolved) were able to spend a great deal of time outside of their body.  Some of them live on still, as a race of maddeningly lucid ghosts.  The shamans also know a great deal about travel to other planes, perhaps more than anyone else in Centerra.  Most of the planes they visited were only accessible through the mind--the body must remain on the mountain top.

They were said to be allies with an alien race, with whom they sometimes traded bodies when one wished to visit the plane of the other.

But that was then.  Now, the yeti are a shattered race.  Their mountaintop homes are uninhabitable, and no longer hold breathable air.  After the Time of Fire and Madness, they became unsuccessful refugees; no other nation would offer them succor; most were killed on sight for the cruelties and experimentation that they had performed on the other races who wandered too close to their mountain home.

After the great yeti diaspora, you will find yeti living on most mountain ranges in the world in small clans.  They live in crude societies, eking out a living from the unyielding rock.  Many of these small clans have a few powerful magical items, relics from before their mountaintops crumbled.

A few other yeti exist in the cities, working as servants and mercenaries.  They mostly do their level best to stay drunk as often as possible, until they ascend into bestial old age and retreat into the mountains.

Old Age

Yetis are as intelligent as humans, and possibly must more intelligent.  However, intelligence is not one of their values.

Experiencing so many different psychic states, as they do, yetis appreciate the animal simplicity of a cruder brain.  As yetis get older, they get bigger, stronger, and dumber.  This is seen as a very good thing to happen, and many yetis look forward to the day when they are big and strong and stupid.

Lost Lykorum

When their mountaintop cities fell, the yeti were able to salvage a great deal of their resources--they were not immediately destitute.  Unable to risk warring with an established nation in their weakened state, many yeti decided to build a new homeland in the middle of the Sea of Fish.

They created the great mountain called Lykorum, which they raised out of the ocean.  This exhausted a great deal of their resources.  This was many years after they had been scattered, after the fires and infectious insanities had passed.

On Mount Lykorum, they had a second homeland.  Yetis from all corners of the world came to live there.

Four hundred years ago, the star known as the Devil's Throat exploded in the sky.  It was almost as bright as the sun.  In ancient Arkah, mages built a telescope-microscope, to isolate and focus the light from the death of the star.  The light from the Devil's Throat was used to start a small fire.

The fire was Calagnagun.

In the next part of the story, Calagnagun was a sentient forest fire, burning down cities and outmaneuvering all attempts to extinguish him.

In the last part of the story, Calagnagun was lured to Lykorum.  Once there, attempts to destroy him failed.  In order to isolate him, the mountain of Lykorum was sunk to the bottom of the ocean.  Calagnagun is a creature of alien fire, of a type not found on Centerra, and it was trapped by the mile of cold seawater above him.  It lurks still in the sunken ruins of lost Lykorum.

For the yeti, that was the last straw.  Without Lykorum, they entered a second era of homelessness, which brings us to their current era of yeti, where most know them as the crouching beasts that haunt the high passes, or--in colder climes--as the flea circus that passes out alone in the corner of the bar each night.

The Shining Land

Yeti books (always bound in a yeti's own hair, and with yeti leather as a cover) speak of a place that they call the Shining Land.  Most humans believe it to be somewhere in the afterlife, within the Kingdom of Heaven, where mortals may approach immortals and visit the souls of the dead.

The Shining Land is so beautiful that a single glimpse of it can be fatal (similar to the nymph ability).  Yeti adventurers who discovered that place and explored it did so blindfolded.  The Shining Land is not without its perils, but those brave yeti that mapped out hundreds of square miles did so on their hands and knees, groping along the ground, joined together by ropes.

Since the Shining Land is within the provinces of the Kingdom of Heaven, the Church has claimed ownership of all books describing how it is reached.  If you want to find the Shining Land, the road lies through the libraries of Coramont.

Many yeti desire a return to the Shining Land.  They believe that it holds relics of their olden days.

Yeti Magic

Devolution
Wizard Spell
If the target fails a save, they permanently devolve.  They permanently lose 1d6 Intelligence points and lose the ability to speak, but they gain a new atavistic ability.  For example, humans turn into hair ape-hybrids, and gain the ability to climb extremely well (automatically climb all climbable surfaces that would normally require a roll).

Trance
Wizard Spell
You fall into a deep trance and travel backwards in time to a point in time that you designate.  You do not change location.  If you prepare trance as a level 1 spell, the maximum distance is 3 days prior.  Once there, you have 1d20 rounds to investigate the world before you are pulled back to the future.  You cannot end this duration prematurely.  If you go back to dangerous times, people and creatures may notice you and attack.  Any damage you take (including death) is real, and persists after the spell ends.  You do not actually travel in time, merely into a reproduction of a past time, but even this is enough to be fatal.

Other popular spells among yeti:

• divination spells of all types
• magic jar
• invisibility
• tenser's transformation
• animate hair
• trap the soul

Amazons of Joruma

Class Abilities
In order of development.  Import them into your game however you want.

Razor Boomerang

This boomerang has a 50' range and does 1d6 damage before returning to your hand.  (People without this ability can still throw boomerangs, but the boomerang only returns to your hand if the attack misses.)

Fish Whistle

By putting two fingers in your mouth and whistling, you can create a summon fish effect.  (d20: 1-10 tasty fish large enough to feed you for a day, 11-13 small fry, 14-16 unpalatable fish, 17-19 this is not a fish, 20 disaster)  This ability can be used 1/day per location, and works anywhere that there are fish.

Shark Surfing

You begin play with a shark ally.  If it dies or leaves, it is possible to befriend a new one (the process requires petting and large amounts of fish).  This is otherwise like a paladin's mount spell.  You are able to ride a willing shark at full speed as long as it surfs on the surface of the water.

Some amazons choose to ride dolphins instead.

Delicious Fruit

Delicious fruit heals you as a potion of cure light wounds.  Delicious fruit must be perfectly ripened and picked within the last 24 hours.  Delicious fruit must be large enough to fill an entire inventory slot.  (Examples: Melons, bananas, bag of strawberries.)  Tropical towns sell delicious fruit for 1g, while it might cost 10g in a more tropical region.

Shark Bracer

Your shark (or dolphin) can morph into a bracer.  This bracer protects as well as a shield, except that it only functions as long as nothing is held in the off-hand.  It takes up no inventory slot, however.  It can morph back into a shark only when submerged in water large enough to hold a shark comfortably.

Whenever you are wearing your shark bracer and an arrow/shuriken misses you, you can deflect the arrow in a direction of your choosing.  If you use this to make an attack, you get a -4 penalty to it.  You can only do this 1/round.

Amazon Sense

You can sense (but not see) invisible creatures within 10'.  This lets you pinpoint their location.  You also get a sense of their movements, so if they are moving their limbs, you can attack them without penalty.

Amazon Cuisine

In their youth, amazons of Joruma are not allowed to pick up a weapon unless they have mastered the culinary skills of their ancestors.  When an amazon of Joruma cooks dinner (a process that takes 3 hours and requires ingredients costing 5g per diner, a fire, and pans taking up an inventory slot), the diners get +4 to save vs disease for 24 hours.

Amazons of Joruma are also adept at turning slain beasts into tasty meals.  At the DM's discretion a tasty monster corpse (ex: giant clam, assassin vine) can substitute for the night's ingredients.

Boomerang Mastery

When you throw a boomerang, it can hit any number of unique targets before returning to your hand.  All targets must be at least 10' apart, within 50' of you, and have clear lines between them.  Make an attack roll against each target in order.  If the attack misses, all subsequent attacks also miss and the boomerang returns to your hand.

Curse o' the Wisp

At will, you can cast a version of faerie fire.  The target is outlined by lights, making both invisibility and teleportation impossible.  The target takes 1 additional damage from all physical (non-spell) sources.  This spell lasts for 10 minutes.

Class: Amazon of Joruma

If you play in my house game and want to be an amazon of Joruma, these are the rules that you'll use.  They get templates A and B at level 1, C at level 2, and D at level 3.

Amazon of Joruma A - Razor Boomerang, Fish Whistle

Amazon of Joruma B - Shark Surfing, Delicious Fruit

Amazon of Joruma C - Shark Bracer, Amazon Sense

Amazon of Joruma D - Amazon Cuisine, Boomerang Mastery OR Curse o' the Wisp, +1 ranged attacks

Optional XP Rewards

At the DM's discretion, amazons of Joruma also get small amounts of experience from eating new and interesting cuisine.  (10xp for a minor food, 40xp for a signature dish.)  Each town has a 50% chance of having an interesting dish that it is known for, and big cities will have 2d6 such signature dishes--but these are often expensive and difficult to track down.  Monster tribes usually have at least one signature dish.  But please note that the swamp goblins cannot serve you their froghemoth gumbo if they are killed, and if they are enslaved, they'll spit in the soup and "forget" certain ingredients, subtly ruining its exquisite flavor.

Optional Starting Skills

Two of your starting skills are Swim and Cook.

Amazons in Centerra

Centerra is, nominally, a post-apocalyptic setting.  Very few terrestrial people survived the Time of Fire and Madness.  The elves survived by remaining in the upper atmosphere (in the branches of Eladras, the tree that grew upside-down from the moon).  Others survived by entering stasis.  

And some very small populations survived in isolated areas via gene control, parthenogenesis (since you only need one girl to reboot the species), and by shunning magic (which got pretty fucking weird during the Time of Fire and Madness).  The descendants of those parthenogenic micro-societies exist today as amazons.

This is the totally-logical reason for why there are so many warrior-woman societies all over the place.

The Amazons of Joruma are sometimes called blue amazons, because that's the color of their skin.  They reproduce by sleeping in the Womb of the World, sort of a primeval cave of fertility (as they see it).  It performs the exact same function as sex (genetic exchange, zygote implantation) except that it doesn't work if men are in the cave.  Also, the bizarre dreams it causes are culturally significant.

The Huntresses of Zao are the green amazons, I guess.  No one is quite sure how they reproduce, but they are rumored to have "husbands" back at home.  (In reality, they have a super-dominant X chromosome that basically just eats any Y chromosome that it encounters.  They can mate with any dude, but will only have daughters, who will also be Huntresses.)  Amazons of Joruma love food, and not just for eating--some amazons only feel comfortable falling asleep surrounded by fruit, fried fish, and noodles.

The Librarians of Asria are the grey amazons.  They reproduce by using a magic item that has no other purpose.

The Stranglers of Casmir are the gold amazons.  I haven't written them up yet, but they are famous for strangling people with their hair.  They can reproduce in true parthenogenic style, but these daughters are clones of the mother and are marked for a low caste.  They also have the option to change their gender to male, where they can then engage in hetero-sex and classic DNA recombination.  This process is only allowed for the nobility, and so their society looks horribly misogynistic from the outside.  They're also the only one to be highly urbanized and possess a major seaport, where they sell slaves and magekilling services.

AHAHAHA
I can't believe that dolphin surfing is a real thing.