Sahuagin - Fish-Man Empire
Aug 9, 2018 1:05:19 GMT -6
Post by Amanojyaku on Aug 9, 2018 1:05:19 GMT -6
When most bashers think about the Syrne's accomplishments, what come to mind are their successes... the Orks, the Eldarin, beautiful and terrible artifacts and spelljammers to withstand the rigors of history. What they don't try to think about are the mistakes... the Eldarin curiosity that caused the War of the Monster's Fall, or the vicious, ugly prototypes that even their Eldarin cousins tried to forget about. The Sahuagin were buried by their cousins, left to die out in the seas they could not leave.
If only history could be so kind, Lemuria would have been destroyed entirely, rather than simply subsumed into the Abyss. Thousands of years in that warped crystal sphere have mutated the Sahuagin beyond recognition, transforming what should have been elfin perfection into pelagic horrors, somehow capable of using those Warp-born waters to travel between worlds. The Sahuagin despise their Eldarin cousins, perhaps seeing in them what they could have remained.
Physical Characteristics
Average Height: 1.8-2.2m
Average Weight: 80-100kg
Languages: Trade, Aquan
Common Personality Traits: Arrogant, vicious, vengeful, secretive, patient
Common Physical Traits: Fishy odor, large eyes, scales, spiny fins, sharp teeth and claws
Example Names: Dagon, Hydra, Arlong, Kiora, Zegana
Racial Statistics
Characteristic Bonus: +1 to Constitution or Intelligence
Skill Bonus: +1 to Forbidden Lore and Intimidation
Power: Devil Reef Deeps: Gain the Amphibious trait, and you are unaffected by high pressure and low temperatures. You can breathe water, but must be in a highly humid environment or rehydrate yourself at least once every hour; otherwise, you receive one level of Fatigue. The Dragonblood's Water Blood Quickening allows you to treat any environment as a "highly humid" one.
Size: 4
Racial Feats
Arms fo' Dayz [Paragon, Sahuagin, Thri-Kreen]
You have four fully-functional arms. A roll of 5 or 6 to determine an attack's hit location hits the second left arm or the second right arm, respectively, instead of the body. This gives you an extra pair of hands for all purposes, and nothing else.
Blood in the Water [Sahuagin]
Sahuagin tend to spurn the surface world except as a source of food that can't fight back easily... adapting against wandering ashore as a result. Gain Dark Sight and Heightened Senses (Smell) while underwater, but you are Dazzled while outside the water. In addition, you gain a Bite attack with the following stats: 1k1 R; Pen 3; Brawling, Razor Sharp.
Cheshire Shark [Sahuagin]
Whenever you get 2 or more raises on an Intimidation test, you gain Fear 1 for the rest of the round. If you've hit with an unarmed attack this or last round and have yet to clean off any blood, each raise past the second adds 1 to your Fear rating, to a maximum of one-third (rounded up) of the wounds dealt.
Malenti [Sahuagin]
You are a biological throwback, smaller and leaner than your brothers and sisters... with your smooth skin and soft appearance, you can almost pass for an elf. Your characteristics are somewhat different from the average Sahuagin. You lose a dot of Intelligence, but gain a dot of Charisma. You no longer have to keep hydrated or a moist environment while out of the water, and take -1 Size. You can cast the spell Command once per Scene on any creature with the Amphibious trait, treating your Level as your rank in Enchantment.
Scion of Akheilos [Sahuagin]
It's no secret that Sahuagin have an affinity for sharks. Your parents... yeah. This feat can only be taken during character creation. Your legs are fused into the tail of a shark, so you only have one, but it has Armor 4 and gives you the Crawler trait on when moving on land instead of causing any penalties for having only one leg. Additionally, you have the ability to speak with sharks, allowing you to use your social skills as normal with them, and vice-versa. If you are a Rokea, you can also communicate normally with non-sharks while in shark form.
Physical Qualities
Sahuagin are a vaguely reptilian race, with scaly skin tending toward greens and blues (brown hues aren't uncommon, and some mutants end up with black scales). Their mouths are filled with fangs, and they breathe through the use of gills, though they can survive nearly anywhere as long as they keep these moist. Spiny fins jut out from a sahuagin's head, back, and arms, and a sahuagin has a finned tail as well as webbed fingers and toes. Sahuagin are traditionally stronger and faster than other humanoids.
Outsiders can rarely tell one sahuagin from another, without being told exactly what to look for. Mutations aside, females tend to be slightly larger than males, with broader hips, but that's about the only difference. Sahuagin give birth to multiple live whelps at a time; most of them will kill each other off by the time they reach maturity at about ten months. Most sahuagin live for about a century, and mutants about double that.
About one sahuagin in every hundred and fifty or so is born with soft skin, and rather than the pelagic appearance common to the species, instead develops an elfin appearance as it grows. These sahuagin develop in all ways as an elf or an eldarin would, with hair color matching the scales they would have had otherwise, though they retain the sharp teeth, finned extremities, and wide, lamplike eyes of a sahuagin. These "sea elves" are called malenti (meaning "smoothskin" in Aquan), and are assumed by some greybeards to indicate some distant relationship between the Sahuagin and Eldarin races.
Rarer still are those mutants who become yet more bestial in appearance, developing four functional arms and the muscle to use them properly. These four-armed mutants don't seem to have a special name in the Sahuagin's tongue... they're simply called "leader."
Playing a Sahuagin
The Sahuagin are arrogant almost to the point of xenophobia. They're stronger and faster than the landwalker races, which (in their eyes) makes them smarter as well. They've adapted to live underwater, which makes up a vast amount of nearly any world that supports life. It's only proper, then, that the Wheel should give up and kneel to its betters.
Except, y'know, all that bluster only goes so far when you have to design ships with pools of water and mister systems and can't do much of anything on land without a gillsuit on.
Even so, sahuagin are proud warriors and natural predators, always on the lookout for weakness and gleefully (often bloodily) taking advantage of it whenever they spot it. To a sahuagin, one is either He Who Eats, or It That Is Eaten, and the latter lives at the sufferance of the former. One does not, then, simply bargain with the sahuagin; one must negotiate from a position of strength, just enough so that He Who Eats will realize this is no easy meal, but not enough that It That Is Eaten may lash out in fear. Sahuagin respect strength, and readily alter their opinions of a landwalker if they prove strong enough.
Sahuagin have a clan-based society, with most clans warring with one another with the same zeal they show to assaulting landwalkers. They're every bit as cruel and spiteful toward each other as toward outsiders, and their mutant leaders are even more so. Much like orks, it takes an enormous brute of a four-armed mutant to unify disparate clans... or just a particularly strong-willed malenti, especially in the extremely rare occasions that the two mutations appear in the same individual.
Sahuagin Heroes
Gile yearns for the days when the Sahuagin will rule as is their right, when the seas cover all of the worlds and the landwalking races are put to the yoke of their rightful, sea-dwelling masters. Those days are a long way coming... but those desires were and still are strong enough to bind the daemon to him, the Slaaneshi beast offering a way to accelerate that timetable, bring that glorious day closer. And so, with the daemon's power at his clawtips, Gile intends to show the Wheel what is just and proper...
Presented with a strange, luminous fruit that he had never seen before, Korel did what any Sahuagin with a lick of common sense would do: He ate the damn thing. Puked up the foul-tasting thing right afterward, but it's the thought that counts. He hasn't quite made the connection between eating the golden fruit and the new, powerful Abjuration magic that comes to him as easily as breathing, but he certainly isn't afraid to use the new power to his advantage, boarding landwalker ships and drowning the crew in bubbles of water.
Hydra is a malenti, an aberrant smooth-skinned Sahuagin that looks more like an elf than anything else. And she doesn't care for it, outside of the strange power it gives her to bend her brothers and sisters to her will. So she spent some years meditating at the edge of a deepwater trench, contemplating the black abysmal depths, and now she's come to a conclusion: If she's not having much fun simply tormenting her siblings, why not handicap herself by helping a bunch of landwalkers do the same?