Limulian - Horseshoecrab Pirates
Aug 9, 2018 1:25:25 GMT -6
Post by Amanojyaku on Aug 9, 2018 1:25:25 GMT -6
Hailing from a crystal sphere long forgotten, the Limulians are an ancient race, but one relatively new to the greater portion of the Wheel. Their first spelljammers were liberated from the Elves who made first contact with them... stolen, disassembled and reverse-engineered to suit their own physiologies. Limulians have since made themselves a reputation as raiders nearly as bad or worse than the Dark Eldarin, entering crystal spheres to take whatever strikes their fancy and leaving with it to study it at their leisure.
Limulian technology is reverse-engineered from their plunder, ideas stolen from others and redefined to suit their own claws. Limulians have since been found to be incorrigible researchers, all of their "wrongdoing" since venturing out into the Wheel simply the graspings of socially maladjusted children. That hasn't stopped some governments from going to a shoot on sight policy whenever the lobsterfolk show their ugly heads, mind.
Physical Characteristics
Average Height: 2.4-2.7m
Average Weight: 120-180kg
Languages: Trade, Limulian
Common Personality Traits: Curious, intelligent, conformist, reckless, obsessive
Common Physical Traits: Bright carapace, big meaty claws, sharp mandibles, luminous eyes, hunched back
Example Names: Upsilon, Weavel, Trace, Berserker, Clamps
Racial Statistics
Characteristic Bonus: +1 to Constitution or Intelligence
Skill Bonus: +1 to Athletics and Tech-Use
Power: Enemy Crab: Gain Armor Plating equal to your level, and you can breathe underwater.
Size: 5
Racial Feats
Calculated Cruelty [Limulian]
Limulians have a reputation for cold sadism. Whenever you inflict critical damage with a melee attack, you can choose to inflict that damage to any body location other than the one your attack hit.
Heavy Graspers [Limulian]
Your claws are strong; they won't bend. You gain a natural Claw weapon (0k0 R; Melee; Brawling, Snare).
MTF Elite [Limulian, Paragon]
You're a bit smarter than usual for your creche, your shell's tougher than normal, and you've gotten the best training as a result. Increase the value of your Armor Plating by 3, and you can spend an Action Point to make yourself immune to the non-damaging effects of attacks until your next turn.
The Opposite of an Uncreative Mind [Limulian]
The same obsessive focus that leads to reverse-engineering stolen tech also lends well to oddball engineering decisions. When you serve as the Chief Engineer on a ship, any time you gain rolled dice due to raises on a test related to an Engineering Action, you gain one additional kept die for every two rolled dice gained, as you apply means that only your twisted lobster brain can think of to solve the problem.
Physical Qualities
A Limulian is a rather striking mashup of humanoid and arthropod, with long, articulated limbs and massive scissor-claws taking the place of hands... it's probably best not to question just how they make use of most standard weapons with those. It stands head and shoulders over most humans, with a slightly hunched posture. The head is vaguely triangle-shaped, with notable mandibles as well as mouthparts resembling those of a crab or lobster. Limulians have no bones, supported instead by their armored exoskeletons.
Limulian shells range in color from drab grey to brighter shades of primary and secondary colors, to shining gold. Clothing is a functional vanity; with no nudity taboo nor any notable dimorphism to prompt it, Limulians have no need for clothing except as a means to carry things that they can't dig out slots in their shells for... or to cover the new, developing shell during their bi-yearly molt. Armor, however, is still very useful, as some heavy materials offer greater protection than the Limulian's shell does.
Limulians spawn large broods during a bi-yearly mating period, dying after mating. The young are raised in creches, reaching maturity before their second year, and most die when pressed into military service shortly afterward. A Limulian is biologically immortal, incapable of dying of old age... but the nature of Limulian safety regulations (there are none) means that most are expected to die before they're forty.
Playing a Limulian
For all of their intelligence and curiosity, Limulians rarely develop the force of personality required to become leaders themselves. A Limulian society is essentially controlled chaos, with some performing dangerous experiments, others dissecting stolen technology in an attempt to replicate it, and yet more collating whatever minutiae is generated by the first two groups. The Limulian tongue doesn't have a word for "civilian," the closest being "spawn" and "broodwarden;" every Limulian at its biological maturity is considered a military asset.
Limulians have a strong tendency to obsess over certain subjects. One who finds himself hounded or stymied by a specific individual over two or three incidents will quickly begin considering that individual to be a fated rival, vastly overestimating his own relevance to him. Another might continue trying to engineer an armor module despite all attempts invariably killing his test subjects. There is also a noted tendency to design ships or structures with linking tunnels that only smaller races can fit into, or that require inserting metal spheres of oddly specific sizes to function.
Despite this tendency to obsess, the Limulian mind is generally cool and logic-oriented. Cold, calculating, and sometimes cruel and callous to others, but rarely malicious... most malice attributed to Limulian "torturers" has been found out to be the result of a total lack of understanding regarding other races and their reliance on drugs before surgery. Limulian compounds have also been known to collect strange objects and creatures only to lock them away, occasionally taking notes on their properties.
Limulian Heroes
Subject Delta was once a noted "scientist" (as lightly as that term must be used when discussing Limulians), who had the misfortune of being assigned as a superior's "stick" when the time came to poke a strange meteorite that had landed near her compound. The thing cracked open at her touch, unleashing a glowing blue slime that immediately flowed over her and soaked into her shell. Now she's the subject of a new series of tests, to verify the abilities of the symbiotic ooze now bonded to her nervous system.
Weavel could have been a general. But that potential was cut short in its prime, when his strike force met with a human settlement that had the presence of mind to launch a counter-raid. Weavel was broken in the resulting battle, half his body gone... but he could be saved. The plans stolen from the humans were pressed into use immediately, designs for extensive prostheses sheathed in an eerie grey metal. While he has his life, Weavel resents this transformation... not least because the "reconstruction" left him still on life support, and because his shattered claws have been replaced with hideous, disgusting human hands.
Spending most of his life on a ship based on Tau designs, Sitri never believed in the Warp. He never considered that his existence might depend on a Gellar Field generator that none of his crew knew how to maintain. That all ended when the generator finally failed, and Sitri found himself surrounded by wreckage on a daemon world, struggling to breathe as a creature of black ink explained exactly what had happened. Sitri had never believed in the Warp... but he did value his own life. Accepting the being's offer, he found his body suffused with sustaining necrodermis, and stood anew.