Animal Men

    Index

The Species

PC Species 

The Imperial Species

Appendix: Trade Goods

Appendix: Encountering a Polity

Appendix: Travelers

Appendix: The Supernatural

Appendix: Imperial Species Numerical Index

Appendix: PC Species Numerical Index

The Species

The Imperial Species have achieved preeminence in the world through the creation of subterranean fortresses and a generality of bioform. There are nine imperial species:

The Amphibian Men

The Antmen

The Bat men

The Cave fish men

The Cave swallow men

The Olm men

The Reptile men

The Rodent men

The Serpent men

Player characters are never members of the Imperial Species. Instead, they belong to one of the PC Species.

Only about 1 in 60 PC species possess significant empires, and none of these are as powerful or widespread as those of the Imperial Species.

PC species live in the shadow of Imperial Species cities and fortresses, varyingly enslaved by them, at war with them, trading with them, serving them as auxiliaries, or in some cases living within them as provisional citizens. 

There are many cities and fortresses belonging to PC species, some with one species as hegemon, others with a riotous mix. The arc of fate, however, bends ever towards the Imperial star. 

PC Species

The artist.

Most animal men are 5'-8' tall.

In true OSR spirit they are in no way balanced from an ability perspective, nor in what they can eat. Carnivores are carnivores. Insectivores are insectivores, and insect men are thinking beings.

Contending for morality against strong instincts, just like us, with the complication of obligate carnivory in a world without non-thinking meat.

Aardvark man


The aardvark men do not present a unified polity, but are everywhere at war with the antmen, who pursue aardvarkian genocide when they have lulls in their internecine struggle

Aardvark men create roomy homes under the earth, prefer to emerge and socialize at night

They grow a single crop to supplement what they take in raids and ambushes against the antmen, the aardvark man cucumber; its exterior resembles a round, slightly malign-looking avocado. Even if their subterranean homes go unnoticed, the presences of these cucumbers or their remnants are a good sign of aardvark man activity, and antman long-range reconnaissance patrols are trained to identify them

Antmen teams who wipe out an aardvark man burrow may booby-trap it to catch returning friends and family

Some superstitious thieves and seducers wear portions of an aardvark man

Call one a snootpig and get bashed

Really strange teeth 

Have elephant man friends more often than chance would allow for poorly-understood reasons

Enmity (Antmen), Affinity (Elephant Men), Burrow 3'

Adder man

Painful, nauseating bites

Warning hisses

Warriors accept others' jokes that they're adding to the death toll

Common, often work as mercenaries or bounty hunters, not particularly distinguished, kind of like Rodians 

Bite damage inflicts ongoing Disadvantage

Albatross man

Huge wings

Thought to be the reincarnated souls of land animal men dead at sea, with weather and luck effects

Vagrants roam far and wide

Form colonial enterprises

Prefer the open ocean but will deign to overfly the coasts

Love to dance, meet partners this way. Divorce is rare

Regarded as harmless. On an individual basis, this may be as incorrect as regarding a mosquito woman as evil

+2 Str, Flying

Alligator man

Death roll

Big boys fly solo, smaller ones band together

Powerful bite, but you can hold his mouth closed bare-handed

Form bellowing choruses and hold spring dances

Benefit from the fearsomeness of saltwater crocodile men by association, though someone seeking to diminish an alligator man may make a comparison

Find it hard to jump when on land; can jump upwards from water pretty effectively

No cultural boundaries around cannibalism

Sometimes like to let people they've killed rot a bit to make them easier to eat

Forced the nutria men into extinction

Bite applies Grapple, can Death Roll a grappled foe for 3d6 damage next turn, cannot bite if grappled by opponent

Anaconda man

Can crush bones using its neck while grappling. This power generalizes; can strangle an elephant man

Can wait in the water with nothing but eyes and nostrils exposed 

Can eat prey larger than the size of its head, though very sluggish when digesting a sizeable animal man 

Have monthlong orgies with up to 12 dudes and a single female. Females may cannibalize a small male after giving birth; they are usually quite large but can lose up to half their weight postpartum. Females don’t technically need a male to get pregnant but produce much larger litters after mating

Normally carnivorous but known to be persuaded away from it by really good bakeries

+4 Str, Advantage to stealth in water, can Crush for 3d6 during grapple

Anole man

Neat dewlap, use it to subtly communicate

Changes color though not with the readiness of a chameleon man. Shadows that fall across the anole man can temporarily imprint themselves in its coloration 

Males are aggressive and obsessed with a convict’s conception of respect; known to swing on their own reflections in mirrors when their gaze lingers 

Anole men don’t care for their young and adult anole men may eat anole children they find; this contributes to the hardcase attitude

Speak Language (Anoledewlapi), Stealth Advantage while stationary with 2-round initialization

Armadillo man

Defensive curl

Can roll around

Historically employed to tank missile fire during assaults on insect man colonies. In turn, antmen call pink fairy armadillo men “walking nigiri” and tend to eat them immediately when captured, as they almost always mysteriously die anyway after a few days in captivity

Prefer to be called “turtle-rabbit men” because armadillo is kind of diminutive 

Prone to nonfatal leprosy. Armored creatures who feel reduced pain and have little to lose can be difficult to stop

+4 Natural AC, 60’ roll

Axolotl man

Amphibious

Seem innocent and trustworthy; adults are still neotenous in a biological sense

Can regenerate gills, limbs, and parts of their eyes and brains. Occasionally grow extras of whatever was maimed. Can accept transplants from other axolotl men with no problem

Natural camouflage, though it's most useful in water

Not strong, though can grow and grow and grow throughout their lifetime

Commonly die from bowel obstruction

The only people to have an affinity with olm men, and the only to be accepted as permanent residents

+3 Cha, -2 Str until age 30, Affinity (Olm Men), Advantage to Stealth in water, Recover from any physical stat damage between adventures 

Aye-aye man

Highly intrusive, dextrous fingers

Agreeable but very zany

Loves to explore tight, tubular spaces with a strange, super-dextrous finger that it has on each hand; usually have to learn that other people don't like this. Can situationally be used to pick locks 

Loves to eat insect man larvae but will also eat fruit 

Can chew through wood fortifications; uses this to break into insect man homes and devour their children. Some insect men hate and fear attracting them so much that they refuse to refer to aye-aye men directly, and instead of finding them weird and charming, despise them as freakish spider-handed psychopaths

Majorly pick their noses with that finger

Women have nipples in their groin

Crucified by the roads by insect man empires 

Echolocates

Thought to be bad luck by some empires, probably because of the fingers; executed and hung up as a ward 

+2 Cha (-2 with all insect men), Advantage to lockpicking, Burrow Wood 1’, Blindsense 30’

Badger man

Berserkers

Skilled spelunkers

Lustrous stripes

Build red castles, volcano fortresses, and vast burrows with up to 50 exits. Very particular about cleanliness in their domiciles

One of the few peoples able to forge steel, using the unique stones and magmatic conditions of their fortresses

Keep their domiciles clean, utilize outdoor latrines 

Narsty cream from around the butthole

Love to scratch a tree

Omnivorous

Like to eat motherfuckers by turning them inside out first

Extremely matrilineally hierarchical. Dominant sows suppress the breeding of subordinate sows and may kill their children. Males are generally monogamous; females somewhat less so

+3 Str, +1 Con, Berserk as Barbarian

Bark scorpion man

Six arms, two pincers

Immune to pain, stunning, fear and paralysis, never sleep, possess extravision, leading to a psychiatric state approaching cyberpsychosis 

Debilitating sting

Bioform incentivizes being the Predator more than interspecies cooperation

Six arms (up to six attacks with compounding penalties as normal main-gauche attacks), immune to pain, stunning, fear and paralysis, never fatigued, extravision 60’, sting attack inflicts ongoing disadvantage, Berserk as Barbarian

Barn owl man

Annihilates rodents

It can hear you 

Head on a swivel

Tears people apart and eats them piece by piece 

Solitary, prone to being bum rushed by crow men if not careful

Absolutely terrifying threat display when cornered, hunching up, swaying, emitting an earsplitting hiss

+2 Str, Flying, Blindsense 20’

Beaver man

Build dams and lodges; underwater access with a surface sanctuary inside. Also construct mighty canals to float material to their structures 

Sexually monogamous

Reputed for conscientiousness but they’re just doing what they love 

Assassinated for their furs, testicles, and delicious fatty tails

Can waterproof things with their castoreum

Visual part of brain is not that big

Burrow Wood 2’, Can't differentiate objects at 60'+

Beetle man

Devastating pincer attack

Can prise things pretty handily

"Jousting" culture; when they meet on bridges and narrow paths, they try to throw the other off. They'll accept challenges from other species too, but it's not required to win their respect. Some appreciate the gesture, most find it pretentious

Armored fliers

Natural pincer attack 2d6 damage and automatically applies grapple, Flying, +3 Natural AC

Black bear man

Really strong but more of a thief than the grizzly bear man. Fairly intelligent, more versatile than the grizzlies, but still mogged by them socially 

Sense of smell is 7x more sensitive than a dog

Loves mead and the udders of lactating females 

Promiscuous. Females get short-tempered after sex 

Develop a fecal plug during hibernation; expelling it upon awakening is the most satisfying shit anyone will ever take 

Raid the nut caches of squirrel men 

Black bear man bodyguard and bluejay man ward

+4 Str, +1 Int, +1 Con, Advantage to Stealth in liminal conditions, Darkvision with respect to organic beings from scent

Black mamba man

Deadly paralysis poison

Long-range strike

Aggressive instincts, almost a berserker

Your black mouth makes people cautious; many will know what you can do to them

Ssssuccessful Bite (2-square reach) inflicts Paralysis which will kill in 4d4 hours if left untreated

Bluejay man

Noisy, bold, intelligent, beautiful, and aggressive

Willing to fight predators, and not just bird men of prey

Can imitate hawk men

+1 Int, -1 Wis, +3 Cha, Flying

Bobcat man

Short tail; better able to hide mood

Solitary, territorial instincts, though guys are less standoffish towards one another than many cat man species

Can go longer without food than most carnivores

+1 Dex, -1 Cha

Brown recluse spider man

Webs

Six arms

Immune to pain and fear

Incapacitatingly-painful bite

Bioform incentivizes multiclassing to Assassin

Negative charisma

+1 Dex, -2 Cha, Six arms (up to six attacks with compounding penalties as normal main-gauche attacks), Spin Web (5’), Bite inflicts Paralysis, Immune to pain and fear

Bushmaster man

Asphyxiating poison, 90% fatality

Don’t handle stress very well, tend to have breakdowns (or lash out)

Sometimes kidnapped to be milked for their venom, but this doesn’t tend to last very long

Hard to spot in fallen leaves

Berserk as Barbarian, Victims of bite must save vs death DC20, Advantage to stealth on forest floor

Bushtit man

Talkative

Smol

An enemy of spider men

Make hanging nests that look like big wooly lungs

-1 Str, -1 Con, -1 Wis, +1 Cha, Flying, Animosity (All non-jumping spider men)

Buzzard man

AKA turkey vulture man

Instincts give banditry an allure

Defecates on own legs to cool down

Can projectile-vomit super foul rancid meat 

Generally unpleasant to eat

-3 Cha, Flying, Vomit ranged touch attack (10' reach) inflicts disadvantage for d4 rounds

Capuchin man

Smart and outgoing despite flat affect

Prone to thievery

Excellent with money despite short-term time-preference

Skilled riders, musicians, masseuses, and showmen

+3 Int, +2 Cha, +1 to Bardic performances, 10% Trade Bonus, Advantage to pickpocket

Capybara man

Very calm

Good swimmers

Large

Bask in hot springs

+1 Con, +2 Wis, +2 Cha

Cardinal man

Beautiful and striking

Don’t get too close when he’s chirpin

Divorce is common

Fecal sacs from nestlings are a valuable trade good in some empires

+2 Cha, Berserk as Barbarian

Cassowary man

Flightless

Big casque

Eviscerating claw and will kick you while you’re down

Wicked headbutt

Murderous instincts, lot of Mos Eisley cantina-type bullshit

2 natural attacks as club and dagger

Chameleon man

Changes color

Stereoscopic vision; can observe multiple objects simultaneously, full 360 degree vision

Males are highly ornamented

Ballistically-projected tongue; its material produces force in excess of what muscle can achieve, allowing them to take out eyes at close range

Prehensile tails useful for gripping, though not dexterous enough to swordfight with

+2 Cha, Advantage to Stealth, 360 degree vision negates most surprise unless sprung from within 15', can hang from objects using tail, Tongue attack can inflict disadvantage for d4 turns and permanent blindness on natural 20 to hit

Cheetah man

The fastest

Also stealthy

Uses its tail as a rudder to execute quick turns

Will literally sweep your feet and then choke you to death with its bite

Can eat dozens of pounds of food in a sitting

Very light

+1 Dex, -1 Con, 90’ movement, Advantage to stealth in tan grass environments, bite attack applies grapple and strangulation

Chinchilla man

Super luxuriant coat

Very agile jumpers

Can blast urine or detach fur as defense mechanisms

Neurotic, prone to convulsions

20’ jump, urine blast attack inflicts disadvantage for d4-1 turns 

The Stages of Life: A Chinchilla Man's Journey

Chipmunk man

Can store all kinds of things in its cheeks

Accomplished crooners (and strippers...)

Construct burrows

They’re rodents and people who are envious of their charm don’t let them forget this. The rodent man empire occasionally attempts to court chipmunk men as a kind of charismatic example of the set, but have limited success with anyone but the most bitter or mercenary chipmunk men

+2 Cha, +2 to Bardic performances

Coati man

Instinctually curious

And acquisitive

Can smell things underground

Males are about twice as large as females, but females operate an amazon system where they live in communities with the children and adult males are invited in periodically and conditionally for mating 

Can climb down surfaces head-first

Smart 

Good at fighting, slight natural armor in thick hide 

+1 Dex, +1 Int, -1 Wis, +1 to hit, +2 Natural AC, +4 to Pickpocket checks

Cockatiel man

Flying and nomadic

Majestic crest

Loving


Enjoy banging their beaks on things and flipping over objects

+3 Cha, Flying

Copperhead snake man

Nasty nausea poison. Bites you then falls back and waits for you to go down

Extremely effective camo in red clay or dead leaves

Moonshining and drug dealing are traditional, hereditary activities in isolated copperhead snake man communities

Bite attack inflicts Disadvantage for d6 Rounds and then Paralysis thereafter, Advantage to stealth in dry hills and dry woods

Cougar man

Instincts pressure towards ambush

Adaptable

Serious leaping ability (like 18’ straight up)

On the Carnivore Diet

No one hunts them, but they regularly beef with other predators

Willing to share kills with other cougar men

“Copulation is brief but frequent”

+2 Wis, 30’ jump (including upwards)

Coyote man

Sui generis howling

Instinct for aggression toward gentle creatures 

May eat carrion and some vegetation

Highly monogamous, not a lot of infidelity

Coyote man gangs tend to harass intruders and engage in light brawling as opposed to murdering them (“Ayyyy! Get the fuck outta heah! Eeeeeeyip!”)

Historically ally with badger men

Affinity (Badger men)

Crab man

Pincers

Detachable limbs

Deliciousness with melted butter

Some empires enslave them to repeatedly harvest their arms

Walk crabwise

With black pepper so shiok

Fight each other constantly and will snib you too

2d8 Natural Attack, +4 Natural AC

Crow man

Intelligent yet prone to mob mentality

Socially marred by scavenger instinct

Love carrion 

Tend to be pigeonholed (crowholed?) as skilled thieves and con artists

+1 Dex, +2 Int, -2 Wis, -2 Cha, Flying

Cuttlefish man

Can change color

W-shaped pupils, no blind spots

Produce damaging venom, contain deadly poison

Internal shell (cuttlebone)

Intelligent

Instant color changing

Communicate through skin coloration, texture, posture, and movement

+3 Int, 360 degree vision, Advantage to stealth in water, natural attacks deal d12 Venom damage, DR/5 Slashing, +2 Damage taken from piercing/bludgeoning attacks

Damselfly man

Love to soak in pools

Naturally get along with capybara men

Instincts invite towards predation

Males have two sets of genitalia, females sometimes eat males; caveat emptor

Flying, but not renowned for maneuverability

Flying 20’, Affinity (Capybara men)

Deer man

Males have big racks

Slitted pupils with superior motion detection

Roughly 1 in 10,000 females are horned freemartins

Favorite foods are generally found at the forest’s edge (“woody shoots, stems, and leaves of woody plants as well as grasses, cultivated crops, nuts, berries, and wildflowers”)

Can sprint at 40mph

Fast, great at leaping over things 

During the rut, guys run around fighting each other and pursuing females for sex until their physical condition degrades so much that they actually can’t go on

60’ Move for one turn, 45' thereafter, Advantage to Initiative roll

Desert tortoise man

Heavily armored

Often live like hermits in shelters on the high desert. Many almost never leave but may welcome harmless visitors

Individual desert tortoise men can have up to 25 separate burrows across a region, and may lease portions of their burrows to other creatures

Culture more permissive of bisexuality and homosexuality than other tortoise and turtle men

Can go a year or more without access to water

Eat some soil for calcium

Long lifespan (except for adventurers)

15’ Move, Burrow 3’, +6 Natural AC

Dingo man

Fast and hardy

Their culture tends to instill the belief that only really impressive people should breed, male and female. They have this in common with the wolf men, but there's no affinity. You can get to know a dingo man and have a normal relationship; this is usually not the case for wolf men

Highly dexterous for a canid

Known for vigilante actions against predators, and for their war with the kangaroo men, in which groups of dingo men chase lone kangaroo men into ambushes, and kangaroo men triangle-choke dingo men to death

In dingo man communities, generally only the dominant pair breed, and everybody else helps raise their children. Everyone else can breed if the community breaks up

+2 Dex, +2 Con, 35’ Move

Dragonfly man

Instinct leads one towards Assassin multiclassing

Expert fliers

Emerge from exumia

Project a feeder at ballistic speeds like an internecivus raptus

Have to dig out other guys’ nut while making love due to promiscuity and delayed fertilization 

See things in slow motion

+4 Dex, +4 AC to Ranged Defense, Flying, Grappling attack at +4 (deals d4 additional damage), Advantage to Initiative

Eagle man

Proud

Dive attack

Relatively large

Strong legs, big talons

Eyes are way bigger than human eyes, super-capable vision

+2 Str, +2 Cha, All movement detected up to 150’, Flying, Advantage to attack when diving at least 15’

Echidna man

Affinity for the mother of monsters

Spined

Snooted

Inveterate foes of the ant men 

Huge, spined, four-headed penis 

Very timid except when dispatching ant men or laying pipe

+2 Natural AC, +6 when attacked from behind, Animosity (Antmen)

Elephant man

Huge

Intelligent

Practically a one-man siege engine

Big tusks on males

Periodically go berserk, musth means testosterone spiking 60x-140x above baseline

+7 Str, +2 Con, +3 Int, +1 Cha, Racial Affinity (Aardvark Men), Berserk as Barbarian during musth

Elephant seal man

Big

Amphibious

Oleaginous

Carnivorous

Big ole proboscis on bulls

Capable of being earsplittingly loud

Females have super fatty milk

Alphas usually have a right-hand man who guards the alpha's admirers (and tries to bone them when the main man's busy)

Guys called "super weaners" get huge by suckling off multiple adult females by any means necessary as adolescents

+3 Str, -1 Dex,+3 Con

Elk man

Guys have giant racks

Just huge in general

Hoof strikes can break your bones through armor

Effective buglers

Bulls' instincts make them enjoy sparring and wallowing in their own piss, which cows love. Elk men call this "self-annointing"

Bulls' instincts tempt them towards extreme romantic possessiveness

+5 Str, Natural Attack as warhammer that reduces AC by 2

Emu man

Fast

Inquisitive

Super rugged

Can spill guts with a claw-kick

Like to eat charcoal, swallow stones as well as small, blunt metal objects

Testicles grow 2x in size during breeding season, males act like they're juicing

+4 Con, 50’ move, natural attack as short sword

Firefly man

Fly

Glow

Some female variants fly, glow, and then eat incoming males

Taste extremely nasty if you aren’t a firefly woman, due to a defensive steroid. Some firefly men who don’t have this function murder and cannibalize those who do to get it into their body

Glow is due to luciferase working of luciferin 

Prized as communicators 

Not all firefly men can glow, but firefly man PCs always have the option of being able to

Flying, Glowing

Fly man

Love to wank their snoots; generally have to be socialized out of this if adapting to other civilizations. Luckily, you will never be judged by a fly man for blasting snot and eating your boogers

Love to eat doo doo, though they also enjoy honey. Yak on food then slurp it up. Blow out big gray bubbles of digested food and suck them back in repeatedly

Not bad guys, their bioform is just a hindrance for socialization with most species. Great at dodging, perhaps as a consequence

^Tsetse fly men and blow fly men are the exception; the former will bite the fuck out of you and pass off disease (as Contagion), the latter will kidnap you and lay eggs in your body

-4 Cha, +4 natural AC

Flying squirrel man

Wingsuit gliders, can go 500m if gliding from a tree, higher if starting from a cliff or tall building. Can gain some lift 

Tail acts as an airfoil and air brake 

Charismatic

Weak

Can't fire or drop things from the air while flying

Omnivorous

-2 Str, -1 Wis, +2 Cha, Glide 40’, check Dex against DC to maintain altitude after 500m, checking and doubling DC for each additional 250m, dropping 30’ if failed

Fox man

Clever

Immune to traps

Can spring really far

Wiener bone feeds casanova myth

+1 Dex, +2 Wis, +2 Cha, Double Advantage to Detect Traps, 15’ jump

Gazelle man

Super fast sprinters

Dainty pallette

Eyes are regarded as having a certain appeal

+2 Cha, 60’ move

Giant tortoise man

Hard to Kill

Don't reproduce often and tend to just drum on their partners during sex

Can go a year without water

15’ move, +6 Natural AC

Gila monster man

Fearsome reputation

Venomous bite; not usually fatal, but extremely painful and makes the victim very ill

Sluggish

Has bumps all over skin which contain tiny spherical bones

Likes to eat people alive, headfirst

25’ Move, Bite inflicts ongoing Disadvantage, +2 Natural AC

Giraffe man

Whip their heads back and forth with their little stubby horns (which can Anton Chigurh your brain)

Can reach high things

Weirdly graceful

+1 Cha, 10' reach natural attack as morningstar

Grackle man

Extremely attentive

Good at wresting things away from other people, especially food

Know how to crack open hard objects

Tradition of alchemy passed down within the species, particularly using the liquids of insect men

Call is very loud and sounds like a power line

Can interpret magnetic and electromagnetic fields

+2 Wis, +2 Grappling (Advantage if grappling away food), Flying, Professional Skill: Appraise Magnetism (Wis)

Grasshopper man

Megajump

Megakick

Moults five times before adulthood, so grasshopper man settlements are like statue gardens with the subjects being the inhabitants during their youths

Beware: when grasshoppers form true cities, they change color and become locusts. For this reason, other species tend to band together to scatter grasshopper man settlements which get too large. As a corollary, many polities try to welcome grasshopper men so that revanchism doesn't become their guiding principle, and some cosmopolitan and highly-complex empires even employ acridologists

Decent natural camouflage

Can stun through wing-flash when jumping

More susceptible to horrific parasites than many species

All-round vision

Light natural armor

Decent natural musicians; many songs of lamentation for lost territories and ancient days of conquest

Jump 30’ (viewers check Wis vs DC5 or be blinded for d4 rounds), Natural Attack can send Medium creatures up to 20’, +1 to Stealth, +1 Natural AC, +1 to Bardic Performance

Gray langur man

Look kind of severe, but are actually friendly and talkative. Tend to be light-fingered

Expert brachiators

Some groups have a normal prestige hierarchy, but many are dominated by dictators

+2 Wis, +2 Cha, Brachiate 30’, +2 Pickpocket, +2 Lockpicking

Gray squirrel man

Expert climbers and leapers

Prolific but not particularly good close fighters; the few powerful squirrel man states tend to rely on bow-armed rangers

Tragic, intractable ethnic feud with red squirrel men, in which the red squirrel men have gotten a worsting

Intelligent, with great memory, but susceptible to traps due to irresistible curiosity

Gray squirrel man petty king and ranger

+1 Dex, +2 Int, -2 Wis, -1 to melee attacks, +2 to ranged attacks, double rate of Climbing, double fall height before taking damage

Great horned owl man

"The tiger of the air"

Tend to be murderous and imperious. Can be pleasant in the short term, but will generally resort to violence if they don't feel like they're getting what they want

Decent natural camouflage

Silent flight, can fly super slow

Not actually horned, just epic feathers

Huge eyes, has night vision

Not afraid of shit, will fight bear men

Will eliminate other predators in their zones

+3 Str, +2 Cha, +2 Stealth, Flying (minimum 5’ move), Immune to Fear/Terror

Green tree frog man

Ribbit

Jump and climb

The men like bigger women

Decent wrestlers but tend to have low morale

The men literally fuel their songs with testosterone. They are in demand as cabaret singers. Tom Jones-level promiscuous

+2 Grappling, +4 to Bardic Performances, 40’ jump

Grey parrot man

Highly intelligent 

Language experts

Very long-lived, giving them time to accumulate languages and experience

"Rather secretive personalities"

Monogamous

Often enslaved by empires for their abilities as linguists, become equivalent of protocol droids for various provincial conquerors 

Tend to be good dudes

+4 Int, Choose 4 additional languages (PC or Imperial), Flying

Grizzly bear man

Massively fast and strong

Can be very friendly, but a specter hangs over their reputation; small groups traveling with grizzly bear men have been known to be massacred by their giant guardians

Prone to strong-arm robbery; power and opportunity, the test of morality

Respect cougar men, who are generally willing to fight them, even if the cougar men will probably lose

Vulnerable to being dug out and murdered when hibernating

+6 Str, +3 Con, +2 Cha, 40’ Move, Berserk as Barbarian, Advantage to Intimidate checks

Groundhog man

Yes, good meteorologists

Excellent burrowers, make Viet Cong-style tunnel complexes

Notably promiscuous

Highly intelligent and social, make good work-crews after they've had a few fights to figure out the pecking order

Cultivate clover

Have a good bite

Love to whistle

+2 Int, +1 Cha, d6 Bite attack, Burrow 5’

Hamster man

Kind of awkward and nervous but endearing in their own way 

Hyperextensible cheek pouches

Bad eyesight

Love to eat peanut butter, even when it gets stuck in their cheeks

Love to eat their own fermented shit, but unlike e.g. fly men they tend to eat shit behind closed doors. Some only do it on holidays

Very solitary, very stressed out by other people. Will tolerate other species who don't try to bully them, but will invariably flip a switch and throw down with other hamster men if forced to spend time together

+1 Cha, can’t make out objects past 60’, Animosity (Hamster men)

Hare man

Very fast, very independent

Hare man polities build unique, impressive megalithic skystructures, but have a maligned reputation for collaborating with predators, sacrificing a few hares to the predators in exchange for elite predator shock troops. These polities are very often resisted by lone hare man heroes

Individually, the hare men produce some of the best fighters in the world due to their mobility and their ability to launch devastating running double-kick attacks, though most hare men warriors have not mastered this and are much more vulnerable; it is very dangerous to get this attack wrong

Also decent boxers, believe it or not. They are the only mammal with a jointed skull, helping them absorb blows

40’ move (running and/or jumping), DR/1, 2d6 damage running kick natural attack that sends medium creatures up to 30’ if the hare man has moved at least 25’ (natural 1 inflicts 2d6 damage on attacker) with critical damage if they're sent into a solid object

Harp seal man

Pretty big

Good vision

Gregarious and promiscuous, prefer to screw underwater

Rich families of other species love to adopt their pups, as they are regarded as charming, though the kids eat a lot and get big

Tend to vagrancy or just becoming ramblers

+2 Str, +2 Con, +1 Cha, Detect Motion to 60’

Hedgehog man

Prickly pears

Can defensive-curl and roll; some are faster than others

Difficult for scent-based predators to detect, as they rub counteracting scents on themselves; also, some put poison or shit on their spines for a nasty surprise

Limited immunity to some snakebites

Unreformed thug hedgehog men may try to kill male baby hedgehogs to lessen competition

Love shitty food and alcohol, prone to liver disease

-1 Con, +2 AC (+6 when being attacked from behind or rolling), 20’ roll (on average, the fastest can move up to 60'), snakebite has only 75% chance of affecting a hedgehog man

Hippo man

B I G

Cannot be predicted

Cannot jump

Look chonky but it's all muscle

Secrete a natural sunscreen

Take giant shits while whipping their tails around, spreading the muck. "Its function is not well understood"

Crush lion and crocodile men

Tolerate certain harmless species who will clean them of parasites

Very few engage in nonviolent professions

Some empires have dedicated Hippo Squads in their internal security forces, as in squads selected and equipped to bring down recalcitrant hippo men

+8 Str, -2 Dex, +4 Con, Berserk as Barbarian, Advantage to Intimidate checks

Hoary marmot man

Whistling loud and merry

Life is simple, young man; get fat and hibernate 

Bask when not hibernating

Establish far-flung colonies

Love to eat flowers

+2 Cha

Honey badger man

Fearless and tenacious

Berserker

Thick, super-loose skin

Face built to take lacerations

The smell of its anal pouch is "suffocating"

Have won fights with lion men

They do love honey

When they eat a creature they eat everything

Well-socialized honey badger men can be alright, but ones from the frontier will kill random people just to prove they don't give a fuck

Honey badger men with rabies approach the demonic

+3 Str, +2 Con, -2 Wis, DR/3 Slashing, Berserk as Barbarian

Hornbill man

Have great bills

Fused vertebrae just to carry the bills

Tend to have good relationships with other species but will bash you with the bill

Good parents

+2 Con, Natural attack as bill, Flying

Horseshoe crab man

Nice and armored

Not actually crabs. Almost arachnids

Forged mighty empires in prehistory but have no cultural memory of this, their fastnesses hurled down by the mimetaster men, who have themselves vanished

Blue-blooded

Profound nightvision

Hard to spot in sand

+4 Natural AC, Darkvision, Advantage to Stealth when stationary in sand

Hyena man

Females have most of the testosterone and a pseudo-penis, mate by docking

Jaw is so strong they can break your neck with a single bite without piercing the skin

Males have no baculum because the females would probably break it

Produce white cream from their ass, smells like boiling soap for marking territory


Deadbeat dads

Can survive rabies, have specific antibodies against herpes

Good at avoiding traps

Love fresh meat, will eat carrion

During ceremonial clan-greetings, individuals stand back-to-back, bend over forward and lick each others' ass and balls. If you get a boner it means you're the submissive one; that goes for males and females

Powerful clans like to request emissaries from Imperial civilizations, mostly to challenge their prowess at the clan greeting

Lion men rob them remorselessly, except when groups of hyena men can bum rush a lion man

Instincts make most hyena men into assholes, but they have a keen social intelligence nonetheless

Squads of mercenaries are in high demand; often work as grave robbers when unemployed

The guys are brutal to each other, but they like dominant women

Newborn cubs may attack and kill each other, and then try and eliminate rivals as they grow up

Beef between hyena men tends to manifest in attempts to murder each others' children

The least desirable possible neighbors due to the hooting and hollering whenever they eat

Nepotistic society

Nutty laughter

Basically drow crossed with derro

-2 Cha, Advantage to Detect Traps, successful Bite attack (2d6 damage) applies Grapple and Strangulation

Ibex man

Both genders have horns and beards, though the bucks' are the largest

Can wrestle using their horns

Great at navigating cliffs, can easily evade most terrestrial predators there

They smell the ass, there's piss, the lip curls up -> it's good

The horns of the guys from the mountains get truly ridiculous

2d6 ram attack if the Ibex man has moved at least 15’, +2 to Grappling

Iguana man

Dewlaps

Great coloration

Generally a popular species

Good long-range vision

Promiscuous. Women tend to be the landowners. For males, changing color is part of being sexy

+3 Cha, Advantage to Stealth while stationary

Impala man

Can jump like crazy for a mammal; great at jumping away from danger

Males can throw you with their horns

Excellent acrobats

Males tend to be very proud, though if his partner wants another guy to hit it after he's done, he's cool with that

+2 Dex, Advantage to Dex saving throws, +2 to Grappling, +4 to Acrobatics

Jackal man

Great overland rovers

Love to fight

Can crush your skull with their jaws

Monogamous, and male and female lovers will fight back-to-back

Cackle when cornered

+2 Con, +1 Cha, d12 Bite attack

Jaguar man

Big boys

They fears no one

Can bite through the shells of turtle men, but prefer to put a fang through your skull

Eat your heart and lungs first

Well-camo'd in the shadows

+2 Str, 2d8 Bite attack (ignores armor), Advantage to stealth underwater and in shadowy areas

Jumping spider man

Universally beloved

Great vision

Nimble jumpers

Make silk tents

Assail the antman empire

Defeat evil spiders and valiantly inhabit their webs

Enjoy nectar

Immune to pain

Cannot be stunned

Do a wonderful dance

…And They Shall Know No Fear

Jumping spider man hero

+4 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Con, +1 Int, +2 Wis, +8 Cha, 60’ jump, Can make an attack with up to 6 weapons per turn suffering -1 to hit per each previously executed attack, Ultravision, Web 10’ once per round, +6 to Bardic performances, immune to stun and pain, immune to fear and terror

Kakapo man

Cannot fly

Kind of fat and getting fatter on average every year

Need male role models but kakapo dads have checked out

Guys gather at conventions and show off in various ways; females who are interested in reproducing come by and pick out someone they find impressive. Alas, more and more kakapo women are choosing to mate with worldlier grey parrot men, cleverer kea men, or more fun lorikeet men

Kangaroo man

Leaps and bounds

Yoked

Can balance on their tail, punch and kick you simultaneously, then triangle-choke you to death

Foul-mouthed

Men don't produce sperm when the weather's too dry

Operate mobs in some cities

+1 Str, two natural d6 attacks, +3 to Grappling

Kea man

Excellent scientists and engineers, less so administrators

Can't leave traps alone due to curiosity but capable of dodging their effects

Very social and humorous, tend to be a naively trusting, don't do well alone

As a corollary to being trusting, they have an instinctually hazy view of property rights and will often walk off with things they really like

Love to eat pure fat

+4 Int, -2 Wis, +3 Cha, Advantage to physical Saving Throws, Flying

Kestrel man

The animal man attack helicopters; hover and dive

A lot of people like their coats

Discourse tends to be sort of ratchet

 

Flying (don't need traverse to remain airborne), +d6 Damage when diving at least 15’

King cobra man

Not to be fucked with

Can sniff you out

Swallows you whole

Won't come after you unless he's hunting, but keep your distance

Deadly neurotoxin

Kill and eat other snake men 

Blindsense 30’ from scent, Save vs Death when bitten (ongoing disadvantage if successful)

Kingsnake man

Sort of the flashier runner-up to the king cobra

Also eats other snake men

Nonvenomous, maybe brightly colored to make up for this

Twice the crushing power relative to body size over python men though

3d6 Damage per round to grappled foes

Kiwi man

Hairlike feathers

Bad vision, can get by even when blind

Monogamous, like to sing duets with their partner

Stronger than most bird men due to being flightless and thus not hollow-boned

Tend to be aggressive though not great fighters

Kind of endearing to decent people

+2 Cha, +1 to Bardic performances, Can’t distinguish objects at 60’

Koala man

Love eucalyptus

Sleep up to 20 hours a day

Asocial

Sort of inbred

Has one of the smallest brains in proportion to its body of any mammal, also smooth. Fills only 61% of its cranial cavity, the rest is cerebrospinal fluid

Needs routine, if its things are out of place it will take a long time to get its shit together and may give up

Carry young on their back; both will gaze at you expressionlessly like that dumbass bear 

Don't ask how mom feeds joey

Koala men on the frontier will eventually chew their teeth down and starve to death

Loud bellowing can still scare the shit out of predators 

-3 Int, -3 Wis, 20’ Movement, Advantage during surprise rounds from bellowing

Leech man

Well, what can you say about these guys? Tend to stick with their own; rejection is a bitch. Those cast out of their own civilizations often join bandits

If you're captured by a frontier community, prepare to be sucked to death (after a shave if you're e.g. a bear man)

Their horrific voices do not help

Secrete an anticoagulant

However, leech men who are partial to other civilizations have found work in the world's few standing hospitals, paid partly in blood, or as medical aides to nobles or merchant lords, often paid in less ethical ways

Don't really need to eat that often

“Leech man” is a colloquial descriptor as they're hermaphroditic; those who lack wieners hypodermically inject their semen

-3 Cha (except among other leech men)

Leopard gecko man

Thick, fatty tail. Can detach it if it needs to, but replacement tails will never be as impressive as the original

A popular, silent presence in imperial courts 

Get along with other species better than other leopard gecko men

+1 Cha (except with own species)

Leopard man

Decent wilderness camo

Solitary, though leopard men still typically visit their mothers throughout their lives

Stealthy and murderous

Hang eviscerated kills from trees

+2 Dex, +4 to Stealth checks in natural outdoor environments

Leopard seal man

Massive jaws

Powerful arms

Oppressors of the penguin men

+4 Str, +3 Con, 2d6 Bite attack

Lion man

Tend to hold lofty ambitions, though many are hurled down by sleep

Egalitarian within groups of lion men

Buff

Not quite as big as tiger men, but more worldly on average

Those who aren’t part of a pride tend to wander nomadically

Surprisingly fast

Relatively bisexual

Some live off lioness women like indolent quasi-pimps

Famed for infanticide

+4 Str, +3 Con, 45’ sprint (once per combat) 2d6 Bite attack

Lion tamarin man

Little guys, big manes

Great jumpers

Big climbing claws

Aggressive

Legalistic and hierarchical approach to reproduction; typically, in a group of them, only the highest-ranking male and female can breed

+2 Cha, 15’ Jump (including straight up)

Lizard man

Enemy to fly men, spider men, and insect men, being obligated to eat them

Less bound by thermodynamics than most reptiles

Able to incubate eggs inside and then give live birth, further cutting them off from the fellowship of so many reptillians forever

More prone to identity crises than most peoples

Loon man

Kind of clumsy, specialize in long-distance flying

Neat coloration

Prone to serial monogamy

Expert diver, can take the fight to submerged amphibians

Can stab your face with their face

A loon man is never unarmed

d8 Natural Stab Attack

Lorikeet man

Very colorful

Tend to be playful

Sometimes enslaved just for their aesthetics

Observers generally can't tell males from females 

+4 Cha, Flying

Louse man

Imagine if you encountered aliens who had an instinctive distaste for you because they were spawned in deep space but you were born on the surface of a Class M planet, and thus regard you as a kind of parasite by your very nature

That is how louse men feel about the way others view them

The trouble is that most louse men don't have any choice except to attach themselves to some flesh and succ

A few can subsist on hair, but not the majority

Certain philosophical louse men have joined monasteries and become living statues, wasting away voluntarily 

A few have attempted to work at hospitals, but most have been outcompeted by leech men and been forced to work hand-to-mouth as orderlies, receiving small amounts of blood as a result. There is no refrigeration, if people weren't medically bled on specious grounds then there would be no such food

One or two have renounced their former lives of hunt-parasitism and befriended benefactors who've provided them with brain-dead individuals to suck blood from

The vast majority have not subjected themselves to such crippling compromises and live as their ancestors did, capturing people and using them as blood slaves

Nature is cruel; wherever we lack relevant technology she forces cruel compromises on us, some more so than others

-4 Cha (except among louse men)

Lynx man

Extremely rare

Reputation as narcotraffickers

Ambushers; “traditional” wilderness lynx men might kill dozens and dozens of people per year- many will cannibalize fellow lynx men

Fight wolf men for raiding rights 

+2 Dex, Advantage to Stealth checks

Magpie man

It’s not that you have to be a thief, it’s that skill and interest have a compelling channelizing effect

You are profoundly intelligent, however intelligence is orthogonal to impulse. Impulse may win out against reason. Desire often wins out against reason

You can sing beautifully; that’s one way to gain coins (them being shiny is less important than reputed)

Or you can do what people will expect you to do

Pica pica

Their mate-attraction is done a little bit more suavemente than most bird men

-1 Str, +3 Int, -3 Wis, +3 Cha, +3 to Bardic performance, Advantage to Pickpocket, Advantage to Lockpicking, Professional Skill: Numismatist (Int)

Mandrill man

Tend to be memorable 

Travel in hordes

Big teeth, enjoy fruit but will eat insectoids and other meat 

Dominant male has the lushest colors and the fattest ass

+2 Cha (dominant male has +4)

Mantis man

Flying, ambushers; may be very skilled at blending into foliage

Bitin’ Off Hedz

Yes, females sometimes eat mantis men after sex; sometimes this happens in a frenzy, sometimes it’s premeditated murder, and it also occurs at some temples on the part of priestesses or hierodules. It has even happened to non-mantis men. For some mantis men, this is a holy terror; for others, it is the ultimate fetish

Part of this paradigm is that if they’re having sex and she bites off his head, his body will fucking jackhammer her

One of only a few species with fully restricted manual dexterity, further reducing the allure of nonviolent work (besides reaping, which some mantis men commit to in a stone cast against biological determinism)

Prone to bluffing but also fully capable of ripping people apart with those raptorial arms

Great eyesight

3 Natural 2d6 Attacks, Cannot hold objects except little things on the tip of the scythe, Flying 20’

Masked lovebird man

The love part of their name is relevant in the sense that they're less aggressive than many bird men and have intimate pair bonds both with their mates and with members of the same gender.

The "masked" part is metaphorically accurate in the sense that their pair bonds often dissolve as soon as they are no longer in the same location

-1 Str, +2 Cha, Flying

Mink man

Silky; some ruthless creatures kill mink men just to have their furs made into clothing

Carnivorous

Aggressive, particularly to other mink men. General bad attitude precludes +1 Cha

+1 Dex

Monarch butterfly man

Glorious

Possesses true color vision

Loves sugar

Loves to drink moisture off corpses

Many creatures who aren't specialized to eat monarch men will vomit upon swallowing their flesh. Eating monarch butterfly man caterpillars can stop the heart. In any case, monarch butterfly men taste absolutely foul

+4 Cha, Flying

Mongoose man

The Punisher for snake men

Has mutations to neutralize snake venom

Scorpion stings are similarly ineffective

Massively skillful dodger

+2 Dex, +2 Con, +3 Natural AC (Evasion), Advantage to Dex saving throws, 90% chance of negating venom (tested only once per type)

Monitor lizard man

Powerful

Eat people alive and often whole

When it’s eating you, it will ram you into a tree just to get you down its throat

Highly intelligent. Run cooperative confidence schemes whose invariable outcome is to devour the victim or its eggs/children

Bloody saliva due to naturally-gingival gums

Natural chainmail in the form of osteoderms

+3 Str, +3 Int, +2 Cha, Will start eating you if succeeding on a Bite attack (counts as Grappling + Strangulation), Natural AC begins at 16

Moon snail man

Actually pretty predatory; eats crab men by enveloping them and drilling their shells with its radula, which is an acidic, toothed, chitinous ribbon, then puts through a proboscis

Have developed specialized tactics for taking on crab man warbands, receding from and emerging from shells; know how to apply this to gradually infiltrate and outflank other enemy formations from within, as well

Slow

Armored from the rear

+1 Cha, 20’ movement, +10 Natural AC when attacked from behind or when curled up inside shell

Moose man

Gigantic

Deadly ram

Velvety antlers (can amplify sound around the ear)

^Drop off in the fall, regrowing over five months for the next mating season

Can eat up to almost 1/10th of its body weight every day

Having its schnoz bitten can immobilize it with pain

Like to throw their weight around; more violent though less murderous than bear men and wolf men

Females loudly protest when courted by small males, attracting the big dogs

+5 Str, +1 Con, 3d6 Ram attack if the moose man has moved at least 20’, Paralyzed by successful Bite attacks

Mosquito man

SUCC

Need only sense the tiniest change in air humidity to find you; sometimes hire themselves out as finders of hidden undesirables, such as aardvark men for the antmen

Spread horrific disease to people they don't kill; among other things, be careful grappling a mosquito woman, as she may give you malaria

Fairly susceptible to ambush; pitied by fly men

The males are amiable if unambitious sugar freaks

Not all of the females engage in unrestricted predation, and most can drink nectar, but we're dealing with a bioform and set of instincts that powerfully incentivizes predation. While females can drink nectar, sucking blood is a prelude to egg-laying; for some it is a necessity, for others it is an enhancement

Lay rafts of eggs in the water. Breed like mad

Mosquito saliva is an anticoagulant

The biggest mosquito men (elephant mosquito men) don't drink blood; their larvae can eat other mosquito larvae

-1 Str, -1 Dex, -2 Con, -1 Wis, -1 Cha, Flying, Disadvantage to Initiative, Ultravision for organic beings at 180’, 25% chance of Contagion from mosquito woman Bite attack 

Moth man

Mysterious and handsome

Some moth men, like the luna moth men, are extra mysterious because they do not have mouths. They live off what they consumed as caterpillar children

Bad romance with fire

Reputed to hunt malefactors

Help themselves to the agriculture of sedentary, self-focused people, justifiably aiding the moth men in their quests

Some moth men prefer to eat clothes

The moon to the butterfly's sun

Moth silkworms produce precious silk; so precious that the children are sometimes enslaved by ruthless empires. Cooked silkworms are regarded as a delicacy by some, and "killing the golden goose" for food is highly conspicuous consumption

Suddenly spreading their wings can scare the shit out of attackers if they're not expecting it, like you open a door and there's a giant pair of eyes looking at you

+4 Cha, Flying, Advantage to Initiative in dark or confined spaces

Mountain goat man

Horny

Extremely sure-footed

Ram speed

Both males and females have beards, like dwarves

Generally pretty aggressive

2d6 Ram attack if he’s moved at least 15’ with 4d5’ knockback against Medium creatures

Muskox man

Burly

Powerful scent during mating season

Valuable wool, which some will trade for salt licks

Need to get fat in order to conceive

Express interpersonal dominance by acting like they're coming on to you

Skilled defensive formation fighters

+3 Str, +4 Con, +1 Int

Narwhal man

The tusk is really long, like 1/3 of the body length or more

Lancing is one of the best ways to kill large monsters, assuming you're on-target

Very occasionally develops double tusks in an over-under pattern

Bulls will rub their tusks up against one anothers' as a way of ascertaining where they stand vis a vis one another; someone defecting on this paradigm is regarded as deeply pretentious, but this is sometimes necessary for less-developed males in order to get important things done 

+4 Str, +4 Con, 4d6 Ram attack requiring 20’ move 

Nautilus man

Expert sailors and navigators

Many long, extensible appendages in head, which can grasp so tightly they'll break off of the nautilus man before they come loose of an object

Beak for devouring crustacean men

Basically illithids without the mind powers, and not nearly as evil

Moves using jet propulsion while underwater

Does not suffer the bends

Brain structure is very different even than other cephalopods; good short term memory, poorer long-term memory (except for navigation, which they do more by instinct than anything)

Very long-lived

Sometimes murdered for the nacre

Females have two reproductive organs which have never been explained to anyone

-2 Int, +3 Wis, +4 Grappling, 3d6 Beak attack when successfully Grappling, 60’ movement underwater

Ocelot man

Stinky

Surly

Appealing coats but no touchie

They don't play social dominance games, they just fight

Unreconstructed ocelot men just creep around looking for people to murder

+1 Str, +1 Dex, -2 Cha

Octopus man

Highly intelligent… almost diabolical

Most men go into a coma and die after ejaculation; females do the same after laying eggs, as their cells die off and don't replace, but over a longer period of time

Gardeners

All are venomous. Blue-ringed octopus men are super venomous

Calling one a sucker can lead to knifing

Spews ink; also good for e.g. writing and tattooing

Change color chameleon-style

+6 Int, mild venomforms cause ongoing disadvantage on successful natural attack, major force save vs death with disadvantage on success, Inky Cloud once per day underwater, Advantage to Stealth underwater

One-humped camel man

Big

Dangerous kick

Have worked as desert porters for thousands of years

Inflates his palate and sticks it out of the side of his mouth to flirt

+4 Con, -1 Cha, d12 Kick attack

Opossum man

Unrepentant scavenger 

Regard everybody as super prissy about their food 

Moms can give birth to up to 20 kids at once, but they can only wean 13, so…

Ancient alliance with the wombat men sometimes informs the coalescence of criminal gangs

Automatic reaction of playing dead or sick when threatened; translates to being skilled at even administratively faking their own deaths. When playing dead they smell like absolute shit

Love steak and kidney pie; have been known to commit crimes to attain it 

Most are immune to several kinds of snake venom

Affinity (Wombat men), Advantage to Stealth when playing dead in contexts where one or more deaths are expected, 50% chance of being immune to snake venom (test once per type)

Orca man

Huge, murderous dolphins

Equal to elephant men size wise, and exceeded only by sperm whale men

Apex predators

Very stable, matriarchal groups 

Some of the longest-lived people on earth

+6 Str, +6 Con, 3d6 Bite attack

Oriole man

Great coloration and profile

Fond of grapes

Culturally value monogamy but are known for infidelity

Can turn on a dime, particularly proficient at bashing people into things

Can stab you with their beak and then open it

-1 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Cha, +2 Grappling, d10 Beak attack, Flying

Osprey man

Rapacious

The bane of aquatic peoples who like to surface

Basically function as an anti-submarine aircraft

Amazingly good grip

Go on military campaigns with other species to record clothes and flags as part of their culture. Serve vexillological and heraldric advisor function for supported commander

Can go in and out of the water without reducing aerodynamic qualities

Occasionally polyandrous

+1 Str, Negate opponents’ aquatic stealth Advantages, +4 Grappling, Flying

Ostrich man

  

 

The fastest bird-man on land

Deadly kick

Great eyesight

One of the only bird-men with external genitalia

Rule through madness

-4 Wis, 75’ Move, 2d6 Kick (+d6 after 20’ movement), Motion Detection to 120’

Otter man

Charismatic and fun-loving

Distinctive spraints

Some empires execute them for their skins and tails, facilitated by a memetic belief that certain otter men are self-interested shapeshifters

+4 Cha

Panda man

Thrive only in a few highly unusual forests where there are at least two varieties of bamboo

Eat bamboo shoots but have the digestive tract of a carnivore, making this super inefficient

Born with sterile intestines so they have to eat their mothers' shit to be able to digest vegetation

Shits up to 40 times a day

Eats a vast quantity of cyanide and has specific adaptations against it

Can eat meat just fine, but generally subsist on bamboo in their home forests

Use manure to warm themselves

Really narrow window every year where they're interested in sex

-2 Int, -2 Wis, +2 Cha (unless caked in manure)

Pangolin man

Heavily armored

Sometimes gild their scales

Super long tongues

Traffickers assassinate them to sell their scales to idiots who use them in folk medicine

+4 natural AC

Parakeet man

Locquacious but not regarded as being as handsome as many parrot men due to their ill-defined heads

Very social, regurgitate food into friends’ mouths even as adults

Females are stereotyped as disagreeable homebodies, males stereotyped as engaging in homosexual conduct while out on the range, these things are linked in jokes

-1 Str, +1 Cha, Flying

Peach-faced lovebird man

Reputed to be loving and/or skilled lovers, both of which disappoint people in cases where they're not true

They do sleep face-to-face

Definitely look like they're blushing

Eat a lot, bathe a lot, exercise a lot

-1 Str, +1 Con, +2 Cha, Flying

Penguin man

Great in the water

Great at sliding

Decent at hopping, relatively awful at walking

Many adaptations for deep diving

"Strangers come and go to our village, sir. If he is hiding here, you will surely find him if you look around."

+1 Cha, 20’ land movement

Peregrine falcon man

Top speed 240mph diving; aerodynamic adaptations so that the speed does not cause tissue damage 

Some experience a sympathetic transmission of the psychic radiance that corpses they devour have been steeped in, giving them a broader set of affects and interests than might be assumed for an apex predator

Chest muscles are 20% of their body weight

Falcon Punch: literally take out other bird men by diving at them and punching with a curled claw. They do this just for practice sometimes. This is a real thing

+3 Str, Natural attack as warhammer, Diving attacks (20’ drop or more) do double damage per 20’ dropped, can drop up to 80’ per turn, Flying

Platypus man

Equipped with advanced electrosensors

Males have spurs with extremely painful venom (females have spurs but lack venom)

Pronounced webbing on front feet. Knuckle-walks on land

Duck-billed, beaver-tailed

Carnivore and needs to eat 20% of its weight each day

20’ land movement, Blindsight 60’ underwater, male’s natural attacks cause ongoing disadvantage

Polar bear man

   

Hypercarnivore

Big unit

Solitary

Super sharp teeth

Aquiline nose

Fat reserves allow months without food

+6 Str, +5 Con, 2d10 Bite attack

Pond turtle man

Hard To Kill

Laid back but likes to eat insect man flesh, as well as aquatic men

Kill people to feed to their children, who become more omnivorous later in life

Delicious flesh and eggs, though their habitats are well-secreted

+5 natural AC, 20’ land movement

Porcupine man

He's hard to love he's hard to love, he don't make it easy

Good climber

Don't Tread On Him

Herbivore, can eat bark

Still eaten despite thornage; "delightful only to a lover of strong cheese"

Shivering, teeth clattering = keep your distance

Can stink and look like a skunk, but can't match the skunk in rancidness

Luckily, quills are lightly antibiotic

Strange affinity with capybara men and beaver men

Affinity (Capybara men), Affinity (Beaver Men), +2 Natural AC, +6 natural AC from behind

Puffin man

Like to take over burrow-space from rabbit men

A hunted people on the continents, yet vastly prolific on certain remote islands; even there, sometimes raided by other bird men

If you're lost at sea, these guys are your salvation

Spend most of their days preening; have a specific gland for this that oils them up

Countershaded color scheme, hard to see them from above or below

Can attack watery people in one-minute dives

Excellent burrowing engineers

Loves the herb

+1 Int, -2 Wis, +2 Cha, Flying, 1' Burrow

Python man

Sadly nonvenomous

They do have black teeth that help fix prey in place

Huge

Sssssssuffocate you or stop your heart through pure pressure

Eat everyone

Killed to make gaudy clothes

Some polities believe that the blood of python men can propitiate witches

Commonly believed that python fat has analgesic qualities; snake oil is traded

+2 Str, +4 Grappling, Grappling automatically applies Suffocation

Raccoon man

Highly intelligent; excellent memories

"In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down."

Yes, many engage in thievery, though also excel in most other professions involving small mechanisms, such as clockmaking. Others have reclaimed the thief identity and behave proudly about it, even though raccoon men are not without a conscience

Those who do steal are sneak-thieves or armed robbers, not social thieves; there is too little trust for the latter

The males form little rival gangs, meeting at their latrines; females shack up together, and the gangs compete for their affections (often culminating in orgies)

Prefer their food be soaking wet

Friends with skunks

Sometimes arbitrarily confined by polities and imperial species; often end up disappeared and made into fur coats and hats, their baculums made amulets

Can be very charming when they want to be

Do not like to be told what to do; generally only capable of being employed in imperial civil services if made eunuchs while young

Excellent night vision

+4 Int, +1 Cha, Advantage to Lockpicking, +4 to Stealth, Darkvision, Affinity (Skunk men)

Rat man

Populous; if there’s a die-off through war or starvation, they’ll just increase their breeding rate til they’re back at previous levels

Extremely long tails

Can give warnings through ultrasonic emissions

Those who don’t live as scavengers actually have very nice fur

Males can have multiple orgasms like females of other species. Females prefer men they don’t know, and “Females also prefer to mate with males who have not experienced social stress during adolescence, and can determine which males were stressed even without any observed difference in sexual performance of males experiencing stress during adolescence and not”

Very friendly and playful, and take care of the old, though they otherwise don’t generally make other sacrifices for other rat men

Somewhat impressionable; sometimes turn to crime and piracy when associating with unscrupulous weasel and stoat men

Often confused with rodent men by unsophisticated people; the rodent men are far more organized

Some polities keep horrific hidden chambers at their cores where foreign species are subjected to plague-treated louse man woodwoses carrying various strains to test their effects; several rat man polities have been turned into skeleton-filled ghost towns as a result of mishaps in these chambers, louse men dispersing to find new feeding grounds. Some say that this began as a tragic response to some foreign empires capturing rat men and using them in sick experiments- a practice which continues to this day

+1 Cha, Speak Language (Ratsonic)

Rattlesnake man

Has an organ that can sense radiation at short range; thus they can maneuver on you based on your thermal radiation when it’s dark as hell

Tend toward heavily-armed libertarianism 

Sometimes used as pit fighters when held captive by empires, or milked for venom. This venom literally destroys flesh. Some varieties are neurotoxic

Heads can reflexively bite you even an hour after being cut off

Great sense of smell

Make for charismatic performers

Love to sink their fangs into soft, furry flesh. Give their children stuffed animal men resembling mink men etc

Eats you headfirst; can digest bone

Baby rattlesnake men are considered an utmost delicacy by many peoples, though even newborns can kill with their bites

+2 Cha, Ultravision 30’, Bite attack deals 2d6 damage ongoing for 2d6 rounds

Raven man

This grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

ebony bird beguiling from the Night’s Plutonian shore

Smart if somewhat distant

Good fighters

Tend towards monogamy, though infidelity happens

Extremely long-lived when they don’t live too rough

Traditionally used by some empires as the bearers of bad news

Enjoy numismatics

+2 Dex, +2 Int, Flying

Red panda man

More like a raccoon man or weasel man than a (giant) panda man; however, still loves bamboo

Anal glands make them smell like pepper

Like the giant panda, it has the intestinal tract of a carnivore, but nevertheless eats vast amounts of bamboo and defecates relentlessly, but the digestion process of a red panda man is twice as effective as a giant panda man so they’re less pathetic

+1 Str, +1 Con

Red squirrel man

Losing the ghastly, deleterious race war with the gray squirrel men despite being more charismatic. They are also superior archers but are being out-resourced, out-bred, and logistically out-done in the long term, and certain gray squirrel man pathogens don’t affect the grays but kill the reds, further contaminating the possibility of cohabitation

Gallant but unfocused

Murdered for its pelt

Tolerant and non-territorial towards non-gray squirrel men, sometimes to their detriment

Great climber, naturally

+2 Dex, -2 Con, -2 Wis, +3 Cha, +2 to ranged attacks, double rate of Climbing, double fall height before taking damage

Red-winged blackbird man

Have Germanic epaulets though the above image omits them

Highly security-oriented; willing to go out and attack predators in their nests

Have their centers of power in fortified marshes, but practice extensive agriculture in the open

War against insect men, devouring their carcasses

Extremely promiscuous, very populous. Within the society, a guy will try to safeguard up to ten women, but they will freely mate with others if they get the chance 

Their polities are rich with stored wealth and often violently targeted by raccoon man robbery squads

-1 Str, Flying

Rhesus macaque man

Aristocratic age-inverse matrilineage

Females outnumber males 4-to-1 in polities; males who remain tend to become despotic, using the few younger males they tolerate as flunkies and gofers, yet the females still prefer outsiders to the local dominant male. Beware: “Top-ranking female rhesus monkeys are known to sexually coerce unreceptive males and also physically injure them, biting off digits and damaging their genitals.”

“An archaic name for the rhesus macaque, in use in the 19th century, is "bruh".”

Found in all kinds of biomes

Certain thieves and mountebanks have given them an outsized reputation for mischief, harming their integration into certain imperial polities

Intelligent and emotionally intelligent; doesn’t mean they’re always kind

Make for good physicians

Sometimes have an extremely dangerous herpes variant that doesn’t affect them but will affect other species

Like to groom deer men. Not that kind of groom

+2 Dex, +2 Int, +2 Cha

Rhinoceros man

Coming Through

Big boys, small brains

Armored

Potentially dangerous but not nearly as congenitally-short fused as hippo men

Killed for their horns on behalf of nitwits who grind them up to try to achieve erection

Don’t have teeth at the front of their mouths, sound like Mike Tyson

+7 Str, +4 Con, -3 Int, +4 Natural AC, 3d6 Charge attack after 20’

Roach man

Always universally despised simply for squatting absolutely everywhere and eating absolutely anything, the roach men have had enough and are now forging an empire at the edge of the sword

Can settle almost anywhere, from the arctic to the tropics, setting up vanguard polities devilishly well-hidden inside of or at the hem of other polities

Despite being individually laid-back, with distinctive individual personalities, they are highly capable of collective action and form societies with complex divisions of labor. It can be disturbing to see your roach man friend suddenly and uncritically go along with the roach man group's decision

Extremely kind and communicative to one another; very opaque to outsiders, which compounds their unwelcomeness

Not as known for atrocity as the primary imperial species; if you can accept their suzerainty and constant presence, you may live within their empire, even if you once fought them 

Not great fighters and easily blinded by sudden increases in light, but extremely willful in the long run

Love rotting wood and leaves; will import fresh material to home-rot

Roach man imperial soldiers and administrators

+1 Con, -2 Cha (other species)

Saltwater crocodile man

Huge, prolific, generally-unreconstructed ambush predators

Easily retreat into the water after attacking coastal villages or ranging slightly inland to catch someone unawares, unless they have swallowed prey whole in a fit of gluttony; many who are killed are found in this state

Lethargic; majorly constrain all but the most organized civilizations along warm sea coasts, but don’t actively destroy them

Fortify mangrove swamps into shantytowns of death; however, these are assemblies of convenience, and saltwater crocodile men almost never cooperate on any level beyond basic barter and simply not fighting

Even those who integrate with other societies tend to leverage their intimidation

Can death roll after a successful bite attack. They have the strongest bite of any living species. Their jaw muscle is nearly as hard as bone. However, their jaws can be held shut

Fighting them is a major source of pay for amphibious and aquatic mercenaries

Hatchlings fight each other to the death; 1% survive to adulthood, which usually creates a complex in survivors 

Their skin is a trade good

+4 Str, 4d6 Bite attack, Bite counts as grapple check, can Death Roll a grappled foe for 4d6 damage, cannot bite if grappled, Advantage to Intimidate checks

Skink man

Small, short-legged; not being distinguished by your bioform, you will have to distinguish yourself by your deeds

You have no venom, no poison, and you are retiring by nature. Yet most skinks are carnivores. You are an enemy to all insect empires. You have many predators. Your only defense is that skinks are natural subsurface engineers

Life will be a war. Your people stand alone

+1 Int

Skunk man

PSSSSSSSSSS

Will blast you

Commonly hired as petty mercenaries for acts of social revenge

Charismatic to people who don't realize they're dealing with a skunk man

Dads are deadbeat. Moms are trigger happy

All kinds of administrative applications. The Bat Men have a prison where political prisoners and enemies of the state are blasted from a porthole in the tops of their cells on a daily basis

+2 Cha if not identified as skunk man, Blast attack (15’ cone) causes ongoing disadvantage for 1d4 rounds and reduces target Charisma to -6 until long rest

Sloth bear man

Lately at war among the antman

Specialized to reave against insect men, but traditional specimens are willing and able to tear up anyone; generally if they get you, they won’t kill you outright, but just suck and chew on your mangled body til you expire

Also enjoy fruit and sugarcane 

Rough-looking

Not stealthy, but fast

Regurgitate masses of half-digested fruit and honeycomb when feeding young; these conglomerations are considered a valuable delicacy by other species

Predisposed to aggression, but kind and playful with their children

+1 Str, -2 Cha, 35’ movement, Animosity (Antmen)

Sloth man

Charismatic, when not entrusted with responsibility

Generally only go on adventures when forced; descending from the trees roughly once a week to take a shit is adventure enough for most sloth men

They don’t need marijuana; but they like it

10-20% less muscle mass than other mammals by body weight; “almost helpless” on the ground

Can move up to 15 feet per minute if endangered by a predator

Motionless 90% of the time

The only mammal men that don’t have seven cervical vertebrae; if manatee men existed, they wouldn’t either, but there’s no such thing

Ambition challenges sloth men, and those who carry out grand schemes in the world successfully have absolutely steely personalities. Many begin journeys and are simply defeated by their restfulness

Most host symbiotic algae, which camouflages them. Moth men can fertilize this algae, which is an odd sight

If you kill one with an arrow, he’ll probably just keep hanging there

+1 Cha, 5’ movement, Advantage to stealth when stationary in the trees

Slug man

Rulers of a distant city-state

Love opium and literature

Excellent merchants

Served by renegade roach man mercenaries and crab man slaves, both of whom are occasionally devoured for failure

+2 Int, +2 Wis, Cha sort of balances out to +0, 20% trade advantage

Snail man

Practical, some sell old shells as art for imperial pagodas and such. However, certain polities seize them by force, serving the snail men’s flesh in parsleyed delicacies, their flavor like a wet, mossy forest wrapped up in buttery fire

Can seal themselves in their shells and wait for better conditions

Have radulae to rip up prey like a bandsaw, albeit very slowly. Some snail men will kill and eat other snail men

Can't absorb pigments while eating, so their shit is multicolored

Enslaved and murdered for meat, mucous (for topical application), dye (in some cases)

Massage aficionados

Don't assume their gender

Interspecies romances are complicated by snail man suspicion of foot fetishists

20’ movement, +10 Natural AC when attacked from behind or when curled up inside shell

Snapping turtle man

Notorious for castrating foes

Surprisingly mobile neck, very accurate bite, which gets more powerful with age

Sharp claws, though mostly good for digging, climbing, and holding objects

Prone to fighting when on land, underwater they feel they have less to prove

Snapping turtle women can use sperm for multiple seasons after receiving it

Hibernate under ice and mud, can take in oxygen through membranes in their mouth and throat; if this doesn't work they can burn sugar and fats without oxygen, though this is not good for them

Sort of lionized by other turtle men, who tend to justify snapping turtle mens' misdeeds 

Alligator snapping turtle men have ridges of gothic armor projections down their backs

20’ land movement, 3d4 Bite attack with +3 to hit, +5 Natural AC, 3’ burrow

Snowy owl man

Charismatic; other species like them more than horned owl men, for example, but snowy owl men are not so highly regarded by other owl men, as their flight is not perfectly silent, and they have a rough barking speech rather than a mellifluous hoot

Prefer to be nocturnal

Love polygons

Very good actors

Breed in far northerly climes but fare considerably south

Extremely stealthy in the snow

Fully immune to cold short of being immersed in arctic water or hard vacuum

Like to hang out in built-up environments, such as penguin man basking fanes and depopulated crow man towerscapes

Big brained

Nasty tendency to fly into field hospitals in wartime and hermitage hospitals in peacetime to carry off injured patients for eating

Some serve as high-prestige Imperial couriers, observers, and manhunters, as they can spot small movement up to a mile away; others sweep down from the arctic tundra to murder by night. Tend to scatter torn-apart victims in dramatic fashion

+1 Str, +2 Int, +4 Cha (+0 among other owl men), +3 to Bardic performances, Advantage to stealth in snowscapes, Flying

Sparrow man

Love to take dust baths, most middle-class sparrow man homes will have these

Popular singers, have professional choirs

Buy seeds wholesale, also like to eat insect men

Thought of as being massive horndogs, this is an exaggeration

Several famous examples as court favorites in Imperial Species monarchies and dictatorships

+2 Cha, +2 to Bardic performances, Flying

Sperm whale man

Everyone would have jokes except these guys are huge, like the hugest

Break the normal 5'-8' formula for animal man size

Capable of busting down the undersea temples of the amphibian men, which makes them their inveterate enemy

Deep deep dives still stress the sperm whale man's body, and ascending too quickly can cause potentially-fatal decompression sickness

Ethnic beef with orca whale men, who try to get at their children. Sperm whale women train to fight in formation around the young 

Capable of eating pretty much anyone alive in a single bite. If you are swallowed, you will first enter a tough, muscular, blade-resistant stomach that will crush you, and then you will go into a second stomach that will digest you (and may be filled with weapons and squid man beaks)

Its echolocation is the loudest sound made by any animal

Built for ramming, but also capable of tearing you apart with his arms

Some sperm whale men are heartless pirates, sinking ships, devouring sailors and passengers in the water, and collecting choice cargo in huge nets for resale. Some serve as privateers, being more selective with targets for ethical, ideological, or mercenary reasons. Either way, they are capable of attacking and sinking even ships that are much bigger and heavier than them

Attacked even by non-amphibian men for their spermaceti and ambergris (the latter produced by the irritation of squid man beaks stuck inside the gut). They will trade ambergris, but not spermaceti

Some of them kind of own being hunted men, behaving like sexy outlaws, imagining the blaze of glory when their enemies finally close in

Dead sperm whale men who wash up on land sometimes massively detonate after a period of decomposition

Sperm whale women live together, the men live apart in a koyros where the older guys shape the younger, wilder ones. The bulls get less and less social as they age

+10 Str, +3 Con, triple damage ram attack if moved 30’, triple all damage to structures and ships, Bite attack inflicts Swallow Whole (as +10Str grapple, 2d4 damage per round, 20AC interior), Animosity (Orca men), Animosity (Amphibian men)

Spider monkey man

Extremely handy with their tails, great for climbing, can perform most tasks (including swordfighting) with reduced dexterity

The brown spider monkey men are dying out and have a haunting blue-eyed gaze

Love fruit and flowers, will eat leaves and insect men

Very intelligent and socially adept

A spider monkey man who genuinely likes you (as a friend) will probably get face to face with you, wrap his arm around you, and juggle your balls while speaking to you. Those who wander abroad know not to do this but generally feel that foreigners are quite cold

Very accurate jumpers

"Female spider monkeys have pendulous and erectile clitorises long enough to be mistaken for a penis"

Spider monkey men lack wiener bones and are clowned on as weak-sauce motherfuckers by mandrill men et al, who are way stupider but do have the baculum

+2 Dex, +3 Int, +2 Cha, can attack with a weapon held in tail as offhand

Sponge man

Have a kind of complex where they see all other creatures as latecoming and somewhat redundant developments in life, as slightly charming if tragic creatures flailing about for an elusive perfection

Build residential reefs underwater

Their basic cells can transform into whatever kind of cells are needed

Most are not symmetrical

Like to stay rooted later in life

Don't need much, don't want much

Other species call them sponge men but they're hermaphroditic; one will blast sperm into the water and another will catch it in the eggs. These two may play switch depending on the time of year. The resulting little sponge babies float off to grow up somewhere else

Rarely preyed upon; sometimes subjugated by amphibian men

If a sponge man has a piece knocked away, it may settle down and gradually grow into a new sponge man with a fraction of the old one's personality as its starting point; the personality is likely to diverge from there 

Most sponge men suck in water to draw off nutrients (sounds like "WHRHERRRRRRRRRRRRRREHREREGGRLGLBBBLLGLLLBLLLHHHHHH" if you are nearby) but there are also carnivorous sponge men

Much of their biomass either consists of microbial symbionts (up to 50% of the sponge man's mass) or nonliving jelly called mesohyl between cell layers

Coralline spongemen are basically covered in silica that's as hard as rock, though somewhat brittle. They usually have the same attitude as other non-carnivorous sponge men, though, just a bit more confident

Despised by the octopus men, though the sponge men don’t realize this

+1 Natural AC, DR/5 Bashing, Affinity (Squid men)

Squid man

Can blast ink

Excellent grapplers, can stab you with their beak (and then chew you and radula you and toxic saliva you, depending on the subspecies of squid man)

Jet propulsion with their face 

Highly intelligent and cooperative (with each other)

Active camo; color change can also be used at a distance for silent communication

Their legends tell that someday, giant beasts partially resembling squid men will rise from the deep to devour the sperm whale men and drive the amphibian man empire from the seas

Some deep sea squid men have eyes in two different shapes, a big one to look up and a small one to look down

"deep-water squid have the greatest known penis length relative to body size of all mobile animals"

+3 Int, Ink Cloud while underwater, d8 Beak attack, 40’ move underwater, Advantage to stealth while underwater, Animosity (Sperm whale men), Animosity (Sponge men), Animosity (Amphibian men)

Stoat man

Changes coat in summer and winter, granting excellent year-round camouflage

Hunted for fur by empires and merchants; this drives them further into the outlaw lifestyle

Notorious for stabbing people in the back, though this is a cultural stereotype; stoat men are more than capable of throwing down with much larger and heavier opponents due to their ability to dodge

Many become capable assassins simply by dint of murdering people for food in the wilderness

Outstanding climbers and sneak thieves

Being overweight is considered the height of personal vice and moral failure in stoat man culture

Do a striking war dance, just like weasel men, which means they're sometimes featured in mixed auxiliary units for use on the imperial parade ground

Promiscuous, and fathers don't raise their young; they are renowned for their coital endurance, however

Have serious wakes when somebody dies

+2 Dex, +2 Natural AC (Evasiveness), Advantage to Stealth in natural environments

Swan man

Terrific wandering knights; swan men go about doing chivalrous deeds for ladies of every species, even hyena women. They prefer not to reveal their names, as it's considered very crass and as screwing up the game for others for one to seek individual recognition for one's deeds; most swan knights will accept the favors of an admiring lady, however...

Meanwhile, swan woman maidens sometimes meet men of other species while bathing and have relationships with them, until the swan woman must mysteriously depart

One of the most culturally cohesive and deterministic societies, at least for those who wish to participate in the prime masquerade; there are swan man shopkeepers and aquaculturists, but most tend to romanticize the life of the tales

Swan knights and swan maidens who grow out of their venturesome riverine promiscuity settle down with one another, thereafter remaining monogamous in almost all cases

Swan men are huge and powerful for bird men, though they still cannot compete for sheer power with e.g. bear men

Though swan men have a reputation for chivalry and gentility, they can be as dangerous as any murderous bandit to those who stumble upon their wilderness homes, should there be cygnets about

They like oilseed rape

Enemies of corvid men, who go after their eggs and young

Some empires seek swan men as high-status meat; both for the deliciousness and for the symbolism of defeating them

While most bird men cannot shut the fuck up, the swan men can be appealingly reticent or laconic

+3 Str, +4 Cha, Flying, Animosity (Crow men, Raven men, Magpie men, Bluejay men)

Tapir man

Heavily probosc'd

Eat vegetables, chill in rivers, wallow in mud pits

Enjoy berries

Not socially aggressive but capable of ripping your arm off in their teeth

Pretty damage-resistant, surprisingly fast

Despite the snout, most tapir men live lives that almost any species would recognize as being close to the civilizational "norm" or average, cultivating crops around a city or among villages, enjoying the countryside, and occasionally forming militias or serving in an overlord's armies as medium infantry

"males have long penises relative to their body size.[20][21][22][23][24]"

+1 Dex, 35’ Movement, +1 Natural AC, Bite 2d6

Thrips man

Like to get up in your face to examine you

Feathery wings, don't fly very well

Like to eat mushrooms and other fungi

Rarely join other societies, just don't enjoy it

Considered kind of adorable by some

Not all that aggressive on a polity/geopolitics level, though their communities sometimes have professional soldiers and may occasionally raid crops

May bite each others' throats out in mating disputes (this takes them a minute)

When they eat a mushroom it sounds like someone drinking through a straw from an almost-empty glass 

+1 Cha (-2 when becoming nosy), 20’ flight

Tick man

Another rough hand to be dealt; most tick men seem extremely alien to other species

They do not make noise, either vocalizations or bodily instrumentation a la crickets. They are intelligent but communicate with one another through contextual movements. Their faces are considered horrific by other species, and so they are rarely socially-integrated, except as a method of execution in some empires, kept in pits and fed on disfavored subjects

Tick men are how they are, and most of them choose to play the hand they've been dealt, kidnapping people and drinking their blood. Take it how you want it

Some tick men and women like to fuck while simultaneously draining your blood

Megastretches as it drinks a shitload of blood

Imposes an anticoagulant

Really don't have to eat that often but may drink from you for ten days

Go questing for blood, arms raised and outstretched like a heliotropic chevalier

Can give you shitty and obscure diseases even if you escape. Lyme disease majorly screwing up your body in a variety of ways, deadly fevers and bleeding into your skin, paralysis, allergy to red meat which is bad news if you're a carnivore, though you can still eat reptile and bird men

The hematophage is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version

-4 Cha (among other species), Speak Language (Ixodaesia), 25% chance of Contagion from Bite (flat 10% chance of alpha-gal syndrome which is not as based as it sounds for predator bioforms)

Tiger man

Enormously big and strong; they can be extremely fun and gregarious when they're well-fed and in a good mood, but are, of course, one of the most dangerous weapons platforms on the planet when this is not the case

Unreconstructed tiger men are some of the most effective highway killers: extremely fast, strong, and cunning, though they will only ambush or sprint to get you; if you can get some good distance on them, they'll tend to relent rather than trying to run you down overland

One of the most common inspirations for the representation of demons in other species’ mythology

Polygamous, though tiger people lovers rarely cohabit in any meaningful sense

Certain empires like to have tiger men in prominent positions (that do not threaten the regime), like lieutenant generals or as royal bodyguards

Has the death-bite neck clamp, though his right cross alone can break your skull

Can eat a fifth of their body weight in a sitting

Males and females get along well, but males and males or females and females don't, though fights are rarer than one might think. They get testier when competing for a mate's attraction, but may still be willing to share food and space with one another as long as there's a clear pecking order

Dads don't do much for their kids besides visitation unless the mom dies, in which case he may step in. They have the big cat man "kill other people's kids" instinct, though this is suppressed by civilized tiger men, sometimes manifesting instead as extreme psychological cruelty towards children

Can be heard roaring a couple miles away

Skins are very valuable to imperial and warlord-types

+5 Str, +1 Con, +3 Wis, +2 Cha, 60’ one-round sprint, 3 natural attacks (longsword/longsword/3d6 bite), Advantage to stealth when among undergrowth

Toad man

Tend to be charmingly selfish

Adroit politicians in empires that allow them

Less-polished toad men tend to simply serve in imperial bureaucracies. Generally fed on chopped-up prisoners

Great variety of physical manifestations

Their conspicuous overconfidence belies the fact that they are very good at positioning themselves to avoid danger, both physically and in a planning sense. Some are quite capable of actual bravery, however

Sheds its skin in tatters, eats it as it comes

Prefers the land but can swim along deep waterbeds at surprising depths for lengthy periods

Prefer to hibernate, but those working for empires can't always do this

A common, brutal attack by bird men involves piercing a toad man's skin and eating his liver, which may eventually cause him to burst

Prone to developing intense (and intensely temporary) hobbyist interests

Have nasty orgies in a big rolling ball. When mating one-on-one, the smaller male gets up on the bigger female's back, which most other species find hilarious

Some have poisonous skin, further cementing their position as friends-not-food; others produce psychedelics, which most are more than happy to sell, and isolated toad man shamans may take imperial late bloomers on guided meditation retreats for pay. Making up mythological stories and spiritual progression matrices for paying customers is a kind of competitive art form among rural psychedelic toad men, whose clients often regard them as possessing an unlimited, uncorruptible spiritual insight 

-1 Str, -2 Dex, +2 Con, +3 Int, +3 Wis, +3 Cha

Two-humped camel man

Spit in your face (and it's partially barf)

Serve as porters in remote climes

Huge and extremely strong from a carrying perspective; all-told, the best overland transporters in the world

Can deal with extreme cold and heat

Big, fat, pert, "plump and erect" humps when well-fed, deflated and sag to the side when hard up

Great sense of smell

Some empires inhabiting rough regions have dedicated corps of two-humped camel men for logistics or state trading programs

Will eat pretty much anything when there's no food, including bark and camping equipment

Two-humped camel men get nasty attitudes during mating season. They like to finish fights by sitting on each other

+2 Str, +6 Con, -2 Cha, Spit (ranged touch attack, disadvantage for d4 rounds), d12 Kick attack

Vulture man

Haunt battlefields, both for meat and for equipment to sell secondhand

Sometimes work as grave robbers, also contributing to their scavenged resale businesses

Piss on themselves, which kills microbes gathered by wading through dead bodies

Some empires, and some people in general, think that since vulture men are so resistant to foul conditions, they must have superior vital force or some such in their flesh. These people kill and eat vulture men for these effects, which is not always a good idea. However, sometimes vulture men sell disfavored comrades to such people

Generally don't raid people who are doing well, but may assault wounded stragglers or starving communities

They eat until they can barely sit up straight and then just lay there in a food coma until they're ready to move

Can safely eat decaying carcasses full of botox, hog cholera, and anthrax

+3 Con, -3 Cha, 90% chance of negating Contagion, Flying

Walrus man

Extraordinarily dense and heavy for their height, make for dangerous bouncers and other guards of static positions

Super ugly but have the biggest baculum-dicks on the planet; most are raised to take jokes about this good-naturedly, and a few work as exotic dancers in decadent imperial polities

If you kill one of these guys you can eat for a long time, which means most have acquainted themselves with the arts of war. The cave swallow man empire once used a number of walrus man captives as blubber torches for a religious festival; given the walrus men's cold northern environ, this has become a dark legend in their community

When dealing with a group of walrus man, 99% of the time you can tell who's the top dog based off the tusk size, which all members of the group will think is natural

Can extrude its eyes to see in front and behind it, though vision is relatively short-range

Their whiskers have blood and nerves

Get together to sing and recite poetry; the women choose who they want to sleep with based on this (though guys can be chased away from the circle, but too much of this is considered bad form). Only give birth every couple years

Can be very sleepy; their legends often have to do with a walrus man falling asleep on an iceberg and drifting to distant lands, subsequently using their great strength and size during adventures

+4 Str, -1 Dex, +4 Con, +1 Cha, 20’ movement, +1 to Bardic performances

Warthog man

The tusks can be literally razor sharp

Surprisingly, they do not have any subcutaneous fat. They wallow in mud when it's hot and get close together when cold

Natural sprinters, very dangerous over short distances. However, they generally actually prefer to run away, unless it's mating season

Sometimes form friendships with mongoose men and various monkey men, who help them groom themselves

Can be violent, but notable for taking care of orphans

+1 Str, +1 Con, 45’ sprint (one round per combat), 2d6 tusk attack 

Weasel man

Commonly live as pirates

Calling one the traditional imperial species appellation of 'least weasel' will almost always lead to violence unless the weasel man is heavily cultured and/or outnumbered

Imperial species tend to have superstitions around weasel men; some shun them for causing various forms of bad luck, others dictate their simultaneous social shunning and protection from violence

Prefer to jump literally everywhere but can suppress this when trying to interact with foreigners

Look very appealing but truly reek; their undesirability as neighbors has increased their standoffishness, on average

Tend to squat in empty houses, dragging their asses all over everything to mark it. They like to line their sleeping areas in the skins of people they've killed

Do the epic war dance shared with stoat men

If he's not that hungry he will at least eat your brain

Thought to be effective at slaying large beasts like minotaurs, either by being hard to hit or by slithering halfway up their assholes and cutting everything to shreds

+2 Dex, +2 Natural AC (Evasiveness), -1 Cha (among other species) from scent

White stork man

The white stork men were once employed by the olm man empire to transport babies between cavern complexes; this reputation has stuck. White stork men are, however, carnivorous, and when getting lost or unable to find thermal updrafts to soar on, there were too many incidents of cargocarnivory and the olm man empire finally cancelled the contract

White stork men once had a reputation for returning lost children to their homes; this has actually gotten more true over time, as white stork men mostly just killed and ate children they found in the past, but now many will try to live up to the legend, given how their reputation has declined in other ways

White stork man parents are known for exposing children they find inadequate, further cementing the natal black legend

Tend to travel long, long distances every year, so still commonly employed as couriers and long-distance deliverymen

Like to hang out in big open areas; major picnickers

Like to shit on their own legs to cool them down and give them the nice pearly white aspect

If you befriend one he'll preen you

White stork men are regarded as practicing extremely strong filial piety, to a degree that other species can find shaming or intimidating, but this is overstated

Some empires will let white stork men establish homes for seasonal use in or around their polities; seen as a useful conduit for information and small items. Some of these have an integral trade post that anyone friendly to the host empire can visit 

White stork men, being sometimes-couriers, are sometimes also shot in transit; those who survive may retain the arrow as a keepsake, or sell it as a good-luck talisman and curiosity in a far-off land

Their long-distance travel and broad observation mean that some groups of white stork men engage in piracy of vulnerable ships, descending upon them, selling their cargo at a steep discount, and continuing on their journey

Tend to pair bond and raise children monogamously in the long term, though high amounts of long-distance migration means that infidelity can be depressingly common

+2 Con, +1 Cha (+3 among people who know nothing of white stork men), Flying

Wild boar man

Love a wallow

Most bands engage in constant border warfare around their prize acorn woods. Some empires have attempted to enslave them for meat; more common are imperial hunting raids, which often result in the deaths of imperial notables

They are spreading

Matriarchal, groups of mothers are led by an ancient matriarch. The guys tend to live away from these groups, chilling with each other or being solitary. The guys' nuts double in size during the breeding season and they get much more involved. Guys will fight each other and try to bite each others' dicks off; a dude may die of wounds after breeding season, but if successful will have gotten down with up to a dozen ladies

Dangerous charging gore attack

Berserkers

Great at digging and rooting using the face

Love a fruit and a scavenge

Adorable piglets, blinking among the spring flowers. Unfortunately a wild boar man's upbringing is very deterministic; those who drink more milk and eat more get bigger and hardier, and then tend to win mating contests and prestige as warriors

Males have a big sexy mohawk-mane, as well as a wiener bulb that catches some urine and stinks

Low-intensity warfare against boar men is a common proofing activity for aristocratic warriors of other species; individual boar men can be very dangerous, but often forgo cooperation

Extreme variance in size; most are average size for animal men, but the biggest bruisers can reach 600lbs or larger; these guys are some of the strongest, most dangerous fighters there are, but this takes a *lot* of size, food, and wellbeing to attain, and is more common for boar men living as mountain men than for professional warriors

Many cultures have the killing of a wild boar man as a traditional attribute of a hero

Amazing sense of smell, great hearing, very poor eyesight

Hate the wolf man

Dramas no one will ever know of; boar man communities on the edge of the world being preyed upon by a tiger man, taking them out one by one over the course of the weeks, lore and practices developing organically around the foe

Captured by certain empires, held in prison complexes that are connected to the polity's sewers and outhouses to provide sustenance to the wild boar men, who are periodically shot down and reeled up for meat

+1 Str, +1 Con at age 10. Additional +1 Str and +1 Con per 7 years of life. 2d8 attack on 15’ charge, Berserk as Barbarian, 3’ Burrow, Animosity (Wolf men)

Wolf man

Highly effective pack hunters, launch complex staged ambushes of travelers

Have a notoriously difficult time socializing with non-wolf men. Their social interactions with outsiders tend to be framed explicitly in terms of dominance and submission, and they are highly, dramatically demonstrative, which people tend to find hard to take for long

Will eat anyone, anytime, anywhere; will also eat fruit

The wolf men would be extremely dangerous if they ever formed a large army, but they feud constantly against one another, and most wolf men who die by violence are killed by another wolf man

Utterly brutal, Social Darwinist group dynamics; weak or injured members may be murdered and cannibalized. Naturally, they have completely merciless attitudes towards outsiders

Wolf man packs are highly prized as mercenaries, particularly for hunting enemy ground reconnaissance and skirmish elements, though are extremely disagreeable and prone to switching sides if disrespected or used thoughtlessly

Packs are often oriented around a breeding pair, who get the lion's share of food and plunder

Not superior fighters alone relative to many predator species, just highly effective in groups

Sometimes use teams of coyote men for long-range reconnaissance. Only the most effective and nigh-psychopathic warriors of other species ever actually join wolf man packs

Highly intelligent but congenitally fierce and disagreeable outside of established pack dynamics. An especially agreeable wolf man might get sick of the dynamics in his pack and go attempt to be a scribe in an imperial polity or something; people like this are often sadly defeated by their explosive tempers and simmering contempt for most creatures' seeming frivolity and lack of focus 

Tend to massacre whole communities of farmers and pastoralists

Literally biting someone's face off (usually takes multiple tries) is a calling card of wolf men who don't have time to fully eat a victim

Howl brutal poetry at night to warn off interlopers, but go silent and use physical signals during operations

Deadly grapplers as they're adept at clamping your throat, rendering you unconscious in moments. Their bite will break bones

Large packs like to assault outposts belonging to other polities and use them as bases of operations

Wolf men who cannot be bought off or otherwise corralled by Imperial Species are hated and feared, hunted by large forces of infantry with flying auxiliaries to attempt to track them; these counterinsurgency campaigns are usually successful in the long term, but sometimes result in large military forces being totally destroyed in ambushes by multiple coordinated wolf man packs

Wolf women sometimes get the urge to suckle very young members of other species; such individuals go on to found warlike polities more often than random chance would allow

Their pelts are prized as cloaks by Imperial Species leaders and as headdresses by professional skirmishers

Rabid wolf men are figures of folklore

+1 Str, +1 Dex, +2 Int, +1 Wis, +3 to Grappling, Bite attack applies Grappling/Suffocation

Wolverine man

Big, powerful flesheater; they like to go after targets that are bigger than them, and bringing down someone like an elephant man or elephant seal man is highly prestigious among them; not among their society, as there isn't much social organizing, but within the chain of rumors passed along by campfire talk. Unresconstructed wolverine men are utterly unscrupulous, however, and will burglarize homes to devour children, or travelers suffering frostbite (they have a special horizontal tooth deep in their mouths to help them rip off frozen meat)

Extremely powerful bite

Regarded as extraordinarily gluttonous, but this is only sometimes true; however, they do tend to eat with fearsome intentionality

Targeted for their fur, which is extremely good against frost

Ultra gnarly anal scent used to mark territory

Successful guys have relationships with several women, while other guys are left as incels; fathers have strong bonds with their kids, though

+2 Str, +2 Dex, +2 Con, -1 Int, -1 Wis, +1 Cha, Bite applies Grapple, Berserk as Barbarian

Wombat man

Once controlled a much larger empire, aided by opossum man tax collectors, but the wombat men are said to have been cursed early in their history, and the empire fell apart from their selfishness. The cultural memory of this has traumatized many wombat man, who treat armed robbery as their ancestral right

Wombat man imperial ruins still contain many ferreted (opossum'd) treasures

Dig homes and facilities with their teeth and claws 

Shit cubes which they arrange to attract mates. “It is believed that the cubic shape makes them more stackable and less likely to roll, which gives this shape a biological advantage”

Aggressive but herbivorous 

Tough ass made of cartilage; can be difficult to backstab 

Small eyes, very fat

+1 Dex, +1 Con, Burrow 2’, +3 AC from behind, Affinity (Opossum men)

Worm man

Prefer to eat dead leaves and topsoil; will also eat insect man corpses and shit. Rarely when you are about to defecate a worm man may pop his head up amicably

They are cosmopolitan and are willing to interact with pretty much every civilization, except that they tend to avoid bird men

They are almost impossible for Imperial Species to account for and police, and so are mostly left alone (or attacked where seen but not hunted for), save a few historical grand gestures involving engineered flooding

Adept burrower, sometimes used to scout besieged fortresses

Loves the rain

Has a hydrostatic skeleton 

Construct vertical houses beneath the earth, accessible only by burrowing. They are more common than they seem, preferring to visit the surface during wet weather

Get lazy when it’s warm and dry

Create fungal middens

Burrow 5’, DR/3 Bludgeoning, Animosity (All bird men)

Wren man

Songs appeal to dilettantes 

Attracted to the caves of the Bat Men and the Cave Swallow men; often serve them as heralds, troubadours, and auxiliaries. Despite enjoying insect man flesh, wren men often serve with antman armies, as well 

Small-bird Napolewren complex 

-1 Str, +2 Cha, +2 to Bardic performance

The Imperial Species

The Amphibian Men

  

The amphibian men chisel out exotic undersea temples and come to nearest surface communities to establish divine suzerainty. Little is known of them beyond this. They communicate in cryptic, malevolent poetry and compel from their subjects auxiliary military service and an annual sacrifice of individuals to be brought under the sea.

The amphibian men establish new temples in territories that they overtake, to new interpretations of existing gods. These temples are built from exotic seastone. Local doctrine is always modified to suit the centrality of the amphibian men. A lion god made into a molten sea lion icon, mutagenic sputum transforming his rivals’ children into servile jellyfish nimbuses. Crab men reduced to harvester peonage, dredging algae and seaweed from the littoral main for the amphibian men, their crab gods extended to impossible widths, given strange spines like chitinous thorn trees, doctrines warped to favor the ostentation of unclicking idols rather than warmcolored crabshell as the old culture decreed.

Their weapons, forged underwater, are strange, wavy, and impractical-seeming. Amphibian men are not the most effective fighters on the surface, but have a basically unlimited strategic resilience.

The true extent of their empire or its unity is unknown. Different amphibian man suzerains have been observed going to war with one another, hurling their surfacer subjects against each other as well.

Surfacers integrated into their armies or puppet governments may never approach their underwater temples, except as annual sacrifices. 

-1 Dex, -1 Cha, Animosity (Sperm whale men)

The Antmen

There is no single antman empire despite the wide distribution of the cities and fortresses.

Every antman polity has the destruction of everg other antman polity as its aim.

An antman fortress might demand tributes of raw material from surfacer communities, or occupy them directly to take what is needed, but the objective of an antman fortress is never omnidirectional conquest. It is always the destruction of the nearest antman polities. 

Between campaigns, the antmen raid each other for infants and adult antmen to use as slaves. They sometimes slave raid other species as well, but have little regard for them as slaves and enslave them more often out of punishment than as reliable laborers. Occasionally there are massive rebellions by the slaves.

The antmen are the most open of Imperial civilizations to non-antman foreigners. One may participate in antman civilization if one is willing to contribute to the monomaniacal goal, as a second-class citizen. 

Outsiders can rise to high positions in antman strongholds only on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, general residents of foreign extraction are prevented from attaining too much influence despite the value of their labor, as they never share the antmen's focus on internecine warfare to a sufficient degree.

However, as a comparison of foreigner-permissive empires, the roach men tend to be warmer to outsiders but the antmen actually allow them to hold high-level positions. The roach men do not.

Antman religious festival procession

Antman fortresses can actually be a welcome sight, assuming their struggles are going well. One may find trade posts open to outsiders, even lodging. If a fortress is losing, however, one may be enslaved for the war effort, or killed as probable spies by the fortress’s paranoid leadership. Best to ascertain their dispositions.

The antmen are one of the most common employers of mercenaries and auxiliaries of other species. Experienced warriors think twice before committing to a gleaming antman contract; the scale of their battles means that small mercenary bands are decimated more often than in the brushfire wars and skirmishes of smaller-scale polities.

Antmen fortresses absolutely do make war on other imperial species, and on the “savage species”; however, they always prefer to assail other antmen first. All other species can wait; all other species will be an afterthought once one antman culture stands triumphant.

Besides other antmen, the antmen are most principally concerned about the aardvark men, who are more of a feared apparition to them than anything. The aardvark men do not present anything like an existential threat to the antmen. Aardvark men have only totally destroyed an antman colony twice.

Antmen mass-produce weapons, but these are intended to leverage their great strength and four upper extremities, and are prized mostly for melting down by other species. Antman leaders and blademasters sometimes wield four short swords or daggers, and these can be highly well-made and ornate.

Their high average strength makes antmen armies particularly dangerous; the larger the engagement, the greater a chance for a small, consistent advantage to tip the scales, and there will never be an e.g. grizzly bear man force capable of matching an antman army in numbers.

If the antman polities ever unified they could probably take over the world, this will never happen. They regard the idea as anathema, with the different colonies so obviously having different interests.

In a bit of lexical obscura 'antman' is always a single word.

+3 Str, +2 Con, -1 Wis, Burrow 1’, Animosity (Aardvark men), Animosity (Aye-aye men), Animosity (Echidna men)

The Bat Men

Vampire bat men have come to dominate the bat man empire. Struggles within the empire are mostly between the non-vampiric bat man followers of rival vampire bat man potentates, though the bat man polities themselves are largely united against foreign powers. Internecine struggles occur within the confines of their cavern-cities rather than in the spaces between.

The bat man empire launches brutal raids on insect man polities, carrying off as many unprepared victims as possible before taking refuge in their elevated caves, ready to fend off any reprisal attacks; they do the same against mammals, but at greater intervals, as these are only necessary to feed the ruling class.

The vampire bat men tend to dwell in the deepest recesses of their cavern-cities, sitting with maps and styluses, muttering, working through calculations of wind and rain and elevation in their ravishingly-geometric minds, stopping only to drink from the blood of bound captives placed at intervals around them. The ultimate raid-sages, they depart their darkened desks to lead their people in the attack. 

Some bat man polities maintain orchards in the lowlands near their caves. One should beware if stumbling upon a rich, high-walled orchard that has been heavily fertilized but is seemingly unguarded.

There are fruit bat man villages in the hills around some bat man cavern-cities. They are regarded from the metropole as lovable, dopey layabouts, and the fruit bat men are indeed amiable to outsiders. Nevertheless, the imperial bat men will viciously defend their country cousins, who will dutifully in turn pass on information about travelers to the mother cavern. The vampire bats there will make a cold assessment whether to trade with the passersby, ignore them, or kidnap them as food. 

Foreigners are generally allowed to enter bat man polities for trade, but must leave well before the community's sleep period, as they are far too noisy. They will find huge stalactites carved into upside-down skyscrapers pointing into chasms filled with huddled insect men, mammal men, or fruit.

There are a few insectivore-dominant bat man polities on the imperial periphery. These are very friendly towards non-flying, non-insect, non-troglodytic foreigners, seeing their presence in the region as pure upside. They will be gradually co-opted by the vampire bats.

Vampire Bat Man: +4 Int, +3 Wis, -3 Cha, Flying, Ultravision 120’

Insectivore Bat Man: -1 Str, +1 Dex, Flying, Ultravision 120’, Animosity (Cave swallow men)

Fruit Bat Man: -1 Int, -1 Wis, +1 Cha, Flying

The Cave Fish Men

Cave fish men are careful not to antagonize other aquatic polities. Instead, they sponsor predation on surface ones, as they're extremely difficult for surfacers to permanently remove. The olm men are ancestral enemies of cave fish men and tend to champion the surfacers' cause in this.

This predation takes the form of highly defensible (and highly aquatically-trapped) wharf-fortresses with berths and services offered to privateers. These privateers bring the cave fish men food (i.e. prisoners and foodstuffs captured from cargo holds), which the cave fish men trade for valuable ores mined from beneath their caverns. This arrangement allows the cave fish men to dedicate most of their population to mining, which helps prepare them for the stress and coordination of standing off aquatic invasions 

Cave fish men offer other incentives to privateers. They will copper-body your galley, which is an almost unheard of service elsewhere but very reliable from the cave fish men. They will conduct highly-efficient repairs at the waterline (and tend to have drydock facilities for more extensive work; they will use pulleys to haul your ship out of the water from their positions beneath it) and often keep huge quantities of plundered trade goods and ship components warehoused in their caverns, to trade at further profit to privateers in need and unscrupulous merchants.

In addition to cave fish man wharf complexes, they also inhabit some isolated fissures. These are extremely difficult for foreigners to detect, and are used as listening posts to spy on water traffic and collect intelligence from paid-off surfacers in the area. Cave fish men tend to secretly hate all other species, so these are sometimes used as residences and vacation homes for those tired of dealing with privateers and informants. Crystalline vugs are particularly prized for this purpose.

Cave fish men sometimes share space with the bat men, as they don't require one another's terrain and the cave fish men have great use for guano.

-1 Str, +2 Int

The Cave Swallow Men

The cave swallow men operate vast sanctuaries designed to strip as much lucre off of members of other species as possible, each resplendent with gambling halls, brothels, drug sanctuaries, donation-oriented temples, boarding houses, taverns, masseuseries, and a plethora of other services aggressively marketed towards temporary and permanent foreign residents.

The cave swallow men ruthlessly enforce order in these places, and in times of invasion and siege, brutally conscript and marshal all outsiders in their fortresses, using their flight and knowledge of their fastnesses to massacre everyone who will not comply with their draft order. Draftees are not expected to engage in complex maneuvers, but to hold static fortifications while the cave swallow men relentlessly skirmish the attackers.

The bat man empire is the inveterate foe of the cave swallow men, competing for desirable caverns and cliff face shelters; their attacks are also much harder for the cave swallow men to resist than ground invasions, which they are extensively prepared for.

Cave swallow man vice sanctuaries have levels for all wealth categories; the bottoms, where guano tends to accumulate, are ramshackle affairs offering degrading entertainment and bargain basement hovels, and unsafe (but palatable and abundant) food in buffets and open-plan barbecue pits. Slaves are bet upon in fighting pits, with cave swallow man bookies only too happy to let piss-proud foreigners step into the ring for a bet.

The highest reaches of a vice sanctuary are places of ravishing beauty, perfectly tailored (sometimes tailored per species) for their guests, with amenities seen elsewhere only in imperial metropoles for the exclusive use of the core race’s rulers. The top layers of a cave swallow man vice sanctuary are also the only places where one might be waited upon by actual cave swallow men; in lower levels, including the middle-class areas, the staff are debt slaves and foreign professionals.

The cave swallow men are very judicious in selecting elements of charm for the upper quarters. If the roach men decided to host entertainments for their non-roach man subjects, they might carelessly retain poetasters and windbags. The cave swallow men do not make such mistakes.

The cave swallow men want to attract visitors and so their use of violence within their vice sanctuaries is very situationally deployed. They will intervene to prevent violence between guests, quickly on the middle and upper layers, more haphazardly below, though they don't want foreign robbers to operate anywhere in their caverns (they pay off informants and foreign swordsmen to act on their behalf in the lower quarters, in addition to posting their own security personnel).

They promptly force those who default on immediate payment for bets and services into debt slavery, which provides most of their labor force. They try not to use conspicuous force against their debt slaves, but a debt slave who refuses to perform in his or her role will be taken behind closed doors, slaughtered, and served to guests in the lower or upper quarters depending on the prestige of the meat.

While the conditions of debt slavery massively favor the cave swallow men from a labor-profit perspective, it is structured so that most defaulters will not fight to the death rather than be taken, though many don't factor in the chance of being forced into the brothels when they decide to surrender. Those who are not killed or forced into the cave swallow men's worst forms of slavery can expect 10 years of servitude with three square meals a day, the chance to rise to service in the middle class quarters, and only occasional torture for underperformance.

If running out of meat, cave swallow men will occasionally raid isolated communities (or rival imperial species), but they try hard to avoid too much of this. They will, however, kidnap or kill and butcher people whose body parts they associate with healing and virility. Traders and kidnappers know that if they can get their hands on beaver man testicles or rhino man horns, bringing them to cave swallow vice fortresses will net them a handsome profit. 

The cave swallow men are highly hypochondriac and believe deeply that eating the flesh or byproducts of a variety of other species can cure vague ailments or add to their libido and sexual prowess; of course, in many cases, the exact opposite is true. When outsiders have laid hands on beaver man testicles or pangolin scales, they will chart a course for the nearest cave swallow man polity. The types of people who kill innocents for this purpose tend to go with the vice fortress's pleasures in mind, and usually leave with empty pockets to hunt again, fuelling their hedonism with the blood of the unsuspecting.

The cave swallow men employ professional gamblers to skin high rollers (and luckless common gamblers) at competitive games. These men are trained in swordsmanship behind the scenes if they are not already skilled, and are expected to defend what they win from irate guests in the lower levels, while passing much of their winnings to the cave swallow men. They are also given financial incentives to find and eliminate foreign robbers seeking to prey on guests, and foreign criminal networks and gamblers' rings attempting to parasitize the system.

The more polished of these gamblers are occasionally brought to the upper levels to skin moneyed whales (not literally), but are never armed during this service; if needed, the cave swallow men will step in.

There are cave swallow man fortresses and garrisons which do not serve as vice sanctuaries; these tend to be quarried into cliff faces, totally inaccessible to most ground-walkers. However, the polities with large cave swallow man populations are always vice sanctuaries.

Cave swallow men fill their uppermost chambers with a faint, melodious warbling glissando.

-1 Str, +1 Int, +1 Cha, Flying, Animosity (Bat men)

The Olm Men

The remotest and most alien Imperial Species, and the least aggressive towards surfacers. They take and hold the caves that they want, and if you don't occupy or sit on top of one, then you are not likely to become an object of their aggression. They will think of you as a source of odd trade goods, at best.

They war with the cave fish men, the cave swallow men, and the amphibian men, but have ancient non-aggression pacts with the other Imperial Species that no one has ever seen a reason to violate.

The Olm Men are the most united Imperial Species, possessing complete isopolity across cavern complexes and a shared foreign policy, though they rarely send large armies to embattled complexes, content to reclaim them once the enemy's paradigm has changed; isolated cave complexes possess no intrinsic threat to each other once occupied, save the reduction in transmissible resources, yet they rarely have reason for the transmission.

Olm man portalguards

They are the least interested of all the imperial species in integrating surfacer subjects. Surfacers never play a role in olm man governance and are not allowed to establish permanent trade posts or embassies in olm man territory. However, foreigners will also never experience unprovoked hostility from olm men, who do not hunt randomly (they can go ten years without food).

While the olm men will butcher defeated groups of insect men, and will seize stockpiles of cave fish man eggs, for basic sustenance the olm men maintain ruthless breeding programs for crab men and snail men, rearing them in purpose-built sub-aquatic dugouts intended to replicate idyllic prelapsarian crab man and snail man environments.

Teams of olm man abductors go into the crab man synthetic hamlets to harvest them using armor-piercing harpoons, and in the captive snail man communities, baroque cultic synthetic traditions are imposed and cultivated, with periodic culls of snail men seen by the victims as necessary divine honors. These captive communities are never accessible to outsiders except by traveling through the entire olm man cave complex and breaking in.

The olm man empire maintains a few synthetic-culture blacksites for members of other species, as well, though they are not used as food. Rather, subjects are studied and queried in times of geopolitical confrontation in an attempt to understand the underpinnings of foreign species psychology. 

Foreigners (including visiting crab men and snail men) are well-treated in olm man polities, and can expect to receive free treatment of wounds and enough food to see them to the surface, but they are not accommodated by the society in the long term. If they make themselves a nuisance they will be exiled at best, tied up and left for angry crab men at worst.

+1 Dex, -1 Con, +1 Int

The Reptile Men

The reptile men are amoral artists of ostentation, as if the crab men were able to direct their violence outward. They bedeck themselves in glittering armor of exotic extraction, forge or seize magnificent or bizarre weapons, and test themselves in fatal bouts against unwilling and unready surfacers.

Every engagement is a big game hunt to the reptile men, a colonial reaving against foes who may be armed but are unprepared for their sudden onrush. When beneath the earth, the cold-blooded reptile men dwell around warm magma flues beneath the earth and arise through freezing tunnels where their veins constrict and send them into strange visions, fugues, melancholies, and manias. 

They arrive on the surface and their new vision-personas blossom in the sun, seeds sown by the freezing dark booming to full-on psychological possession, and in these personas, with these visions and intimations, bands of reptile men make their cruel war. They feel they are kings, prophets, reborn antediluvians, religious figures lost to time and space, and they exercise their natural right upon the surface. Bands of murderous neurotic megalomaniacs and brutal argonauts in a cosmos of psychic warpfire, red-eyed reavers living the fantasies of their sun-fired egos. 

Reptile man warriors

Reptile man polities on the surface are always built around these personalities; alliances of kings with their prophet-advisors and hero retainers, their all-knowing sages and brilliant blacksmiths. Normally these associations rule over a handful of confused and degraded surfacers, but the largest have snowballed to rule thousands and thousands of subjects. The reptile men are bad masters if baited or defied, but “the robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated” and clever and/or unscrupulous surfacers are able to scrape a living within their domains, though are sometimes corvéed for labor, expropriated, or drafted as audiences for decadent plays.

The reptile man metropoles abide beneath the earth, forging grand, odd weapons and armor for their expeditionary exiles. The reptile men there are more reasonable if more alien, and someday may fasten a handle upon their weirdling colonies.

+1 Str, -1 Wis

The Rodent Men

The rodent man empire has a strange cultic prestige system. Rodent men are rated by how much food they bring to the empire, but only through theft from other beings, which creates a kind of constant low-level warfare.

Rodent men are glad to raid caravans or to bring back loads of carcasses after successful battles, but the greatest prestige event of all (regarded as the highest level of sophistication) is for an individual to steal high-quality, high-value delicacies. The individual lays these on the altars to the rodent man gods, returning after a day or two to devour them.

The rodent men admire thieves of other civilizations; they sometimes pay a commission for famous thieves to reside in rodent man polities and bring them delicacies from abroad, or to regale dinner clubs with their stories. This has resulted in a few mass poisonings.

The rodent men sometimes attempt to bring less-generalist forms of rodent men into the fold of their civilization, but have been mostly unsuccessful so far.

The rodent men are glad to allow surfacers into their polities if they are willing to behave themselves, unless they are expecting an attack and wish to keep out spies. Rodent men do not expect politeness, but they do expect consideration for their statues and temples.

Rodent man commanders delight in stealing the harvests of foreign polities, engaging in brutal chevauchees where they strip the countryside of everything their enemies could eat, bypassing fortified population centers, glad to let them gradually starve.

The massive surplus of food in the rodent man civilization has allowed them to maintain a huge population, of which a great many can be called up for the defense of warrens. They are not practiced warriors, but have numbers and ferocity enough.

-1 Str, +1 Dex, Advantage to Stealth while underground 

Serpent Men

The serpent man empire is oriented towards establishing the complete interpersonal dominance of serpent men over every other species. Serpent men are to be revered and obeyed in all things; not brainlessly, but slavishly.

Important serpent men may have dozens of surfacers as part of their retinue and staff, and this is part of their prestige among lower-level serpent men, but any surfacer servant who treats their lord with insufficient respect can expect to be stripped naked (likely by their peers) and swallowed whole by their lord.

Serpent man soldiers are competent, though tend to focus on lightning-fast weapon strikes more than coordinated strategy. Serpent man warriors and aristocrats compete to see how many members of other species they can swallow whole in a season.

Much of the serpent man empire's economy is dedicated to creating ornate, bejeweled statues of the serpentmen in their underground redoubts, and similar edifices of glory. By and large their economy is fed by tribute from subjugated foreigners. A party who enters a surfacer community and finds statues of serpentmen is likely in mortal danger of being seized and driven before the serpent men, some taken as servants, others devoured alive.

Foreign emissaries are allowed to reside in the serpent man empire, but will risk death or comprehensive maiming if they behave imperiously; this has been the germ of many serpent man wars.

99% of serpent men would rather die than surrender, but are certainly capable of running away to save their own scales.

+1 Dex, -1 Int

Appendices

Appendix: Trade Goods

    Staple

Dried insect man corpse shake

Preserved animal man meat

    Semi-precious

Aardvark man portions (for amulets etc; the antmen also might pay one a bounty)

Alligator man skin

Badger man pelt

Badger man steel

Bat man guano

Beaver man tail

Beaver man castoreum

Beaver man testicles

Bushmaster man venom

Cardinal man nestling fecal sacs

Chinchilla man pelt

Cheetah man pelt

Leopard gecko man tail

Mink man coat

Moth man silk

Moth man silkworms (economic engine or delicacy)

Muskox man wool

Nautilus man nacre (it is always blood nacre)

Treated ocelot man coat

Otter man pelt

Otter man tail

Ostrich man feathers

Pangolin man scales

Platypus man tail

Polar bear man pelt

Pond turtle man eggs

Python man blood

Python man oil

Raccoon man pelt

Raccoon man baculum

Rattlesnake man venom

Baby rattlesnake men

Red squirrel man pelt

Red squirrel man tail

Rhinoceros man horn

Saltwater crocodile man skin

Snail man shell

Snail man mucous

Snail man dye

Sperm whale man ambergris

Sperm whale man spermaceti

Stoat man summer fur

Stoat man winter fur

Tiger man hide

Psychedelic toad man ichor

Walrus man tusks

Wolf man pelt

Wolverine man pelt

Ruthless polities may also buy the following captives:

Aardvark men (insect men only, antmen especially)

Aye-aye men (sold to insect men)

Chinchilla men

Firefly men (as signalers)

Grey parrot men (as linguists)

Leopard gecko men

Lorikeet men

Mink men

Mantis men (for species that harvest grain)

Moth men (villains)

Monarch butterfly men

Muskox men

Oriole men

Pond turtle men (for eating)

Porcupine men (odd delicacy/prestige dish)

Python men (for special skin harvesting)

Raccoon men (co-opted for dirty dozen missions)

Rattlesnake men (for venom or their children as a delicacy)

Slug men (prized as advisors)

Skunk men

Snowy owl men

Two-humped camel men

One-humped camel men

Toad men (prized as administrative slaves, tend to rapidly become influential freedmen)

Swan men (make the centerpiece of some morbid feasts)

Wild boar men (imperial waste disposal)

    Fallen Civilization/Precursor ruin site treasures

Grasshopper men: Endless statue-mummy complexes; the mummies are often wrapped in valuable silks and jewels and filled with treasures and tools to go to the shedder when he or she gets to the afterlife.

Crow men: Tall, crumbling, narrow stone towers with treasures secreted at their tops. Often have hidden spikes and deadly traps against avians attempting to enter from the air.

Horseshoe crab men: Extremely alien undersea thermal fanes, have weapons and armor forged of ore formed naturally from aquavolcanic runoff meeting seams of ore broken up from deep beneath the earth by tectonic activity. These items have unusual characteristics like being unbelievably light or channeling ambient electricity.

Hare man skytoucher megaliths: Require epic feats of jumping to surmount, have shrines to warrior hares that carry badger steel weaponry sometimes gifted to hare man heroes.

Wombat men: Loads of ancient coinage in tax fortresses and state treasury vaults.

Appendix: Encountering a Polity

You can roll on the following tables when the PCs encounter a settlement, or a group of people associated with a settlement.

Polity Dominance Status

d4

1: Freehold: There is no dominant species here per se, the populace is a mélange of species. The nature of power here may or may not still have species-associated factors

2: Imperial Species

3-4: PC Species

Note: Roll or select on the following tables based on your judgement about the underlying species. For example, if you rolled a hamster man polity, it's probably just a hamlet or a trade post involving a single family who take steps not to get on each other's nerves. Roll instead if the interpretation should be more open-ended.

Scale

d6

1: Hamlet

2: Outstation (trade post/wilderness "factory", or observation post depending on species proclivity)

3: Village

4: Town

5: Fortress

6: City

If Imperial, characterize the polity's Disposition and Rule per the relevant Imperial species entry. Otherwise:

Disposition

d4

1: Insular

2: Mercantile

3: Expansionist

4: Crisis: The polity is currently undergoing an existential crisis which will depopulate it if not resolved. The players may find the place is in a state of chaos and carnage, or it may be dead silent as the people gather at the central hall to figure out what to do and assign food reserves and responsibilities

Rule

d4

1: Distributed: Informal control of state resources based on affiliation and negotiation e.g. aristocratic oligarchies, peasant republics, voluntaryist tribal confederations 

2: Centralized: Formalized state apparatus governs based on precedent and officeholder perception of state interests

3: Despotic: Absolutist personal rule, 50% chance of de jure, 50% chance of de facto 

4: Totalitarian: 50% chance of an established tyrant, 50% chance of rule by faction

Appendix: Travelers

Wilderness travel is dangerous not only for its natural hazards but also:

-Solitary predators seeking to ambush you, sometimes assisted by complex traps and/or gustatorily-disinterested hirelings (an easygoing fruitarian may be in the employ of predators in a nearby gulch).

-Bandits seeking to rob you, kidnap you for ransom, or kill you; if they do the latter, they'll butcher you and sell your meat to carnivores (or insectivores as the case may be).

-Tribes who raid by tradition or have ongoing dietary uses for you, such as mosquito men or leech men.

-Imperial Species military sections raiding for slaves, sacrifices, forage, or plunder.

-Unemployed mercenaries or deserters who may rob you for everything you're worth, burning you over a fire if they think you’ve got something hidden away, or will attempt to dragoon you into their formation.

Any given polity may also have the following example traveler types out and about to be encountered by the players, though these are more commonly seen from PC species polities than Imperial Species ones:

d10

1. Caravan

2. Migrants

3. Delegation

4. Prospectors

5. Pilgrims

6. Surveyors

7. Sightseers

8. Explorers

9. Missionaries

10. Roving adventurers

The only PC species with significant empires are the roach men, the crab men, the red winged blackbird men, and the crow men, though the latter have arguably already fallen.

The roach man empire is the only one rapidly expanding. The red winged blackbird men are holding their own, but the crab man empire is sinking in a storm of internal violence, jewel-encrusted crablords with their gilded, fur-wearing retainers maiming each other in Cancer's glittering halls.

The crow man empire has receded vastly through administrative decay, a few rumps surrounded by towerscapes devoid of the crow men's influence save the traps they left behind.

    Nonpolity Locales 

You may run into inhabited sites that are not polities. Here are some examples. Roll a d4 and then roll on the respective table.

    1

d10

Antman tunnel fortress nexus

Cave swallow man industrial wharves

Bluejay man beauty annex

Alligator man corruption pit

Dragonfly man assassination chambers

Octopus man breedstock factory

Vulture man corpse warehouse

Badger man mountaincore millstone

Amphibian man imprisoned islands

Serpent man experimental hell

    2

d10

Magpie man brilliance chamber

Lorikeet man eros grove

Mongoose man snakehead hall

Hyena man hyperfertilized corpsefield

Aardvark man grand insect man grinder

Lynx man frontier furrier

Grizzly bear man hall of smoking corpses

Hare man stone slab skypalace

Wren man temple of power mantras 

Squid man cachalot carcass

    3

d10

Reptile man delirium chamber

Bat man guano furnace

Grasshopper man lamentory scriptorium

Snowy owl man playhouse

Raccoon man mechanist academy

Beaver man water clocktower

Snapping turtle man testicle trophy hall

Moth man plotter's redoubt

Giraffe man canopial drumscape 

Capuchin man capitulator's abbey

    4

d10

Aye-aye man spyhole

Tapir man debtor's sanctum

Wombat man flue gas forge

Leech man death oracle

Porcupine man boozehaven

Walrus man engraving clinic

Ocelot man scalpery

Beetle man balustrade labyrinth

Rodent man criminarium

Cardinal man well of songs

Appendix: The Supernatural

Whether anything supernatural exists in the world is left to the GM. Certainly minotaurs and tiger demons feature in many of these cultures' folklores. Personally I would include minotaurs, Dwarf Fortress's foul blendecs as a very rare liminal terror, and probably nothing else at first.

Appendix: Imperial Species Numerical Index

 

RNG 1-9:

1. Amphibian man

2. Antman 

3. Bat man 

4. Cave fish man 

5. Cave swallow man 

6. Olm man 

7. Reptile man 

8. Rodent man

9. Serpent man 

Appendix: PC Species Numerical Index

RNG 1-181: 

1. Aardvark man 

2. Adder man 

3. Albatross man

4. Alligator man 

5. Anaconda man 

6. Anole man 

7. Armadillo man 

8. Axolotl man 

9. Aye aye man 

10. Badger man 

11. Bark scorpion man 

12. Barn owl man

13. Beaver man

14. Beetle man

15. Black bear man

16. Black mamba man

17. Bluejay man

18. Bobcat man 

19. Brown recluse spider man

20. Bushmaster man 

21. Bushtit man 

22. Buzzard man 

23. Capuchin man 

24. Capybara man 

25. Cardinal man

26. Cassowary man

27. Chameleon man 

28. Cheetah man 

29. Chinchilla man

30. Chipmunk man 

31. Coati man 

32. Cockatiel man

33. Copperhead snake man 

34. Cougar man 

35. Coyote man 

36. Crab man 

37. Crow man 

38. Cuttlefish man

39. Damselfly man 

40. Deer man 

41. Desert tortoise man

42. Dingo man

43. Dragonfly man

44. Eagle man 

45. Echidna man 

46. Elephant man

47. Elephant seal man

48. Elk man

49. Emu man

50. Firefly man 

51. Fly man 

52. Flying squirrel man 

53. Fox man 

54. Gazelle man 

55. Giant tortoise man 

56. Gila monster man 

57. Giraffe man

58. Grackle man 

59. Grasshopper man 

60. Gray langur man 

61. Gray squirrel man

62. Great horned owl man

63. Green tree frog man 

64. Grey parrot man

65. Grizzly bear man

66. Groundhog man

67. Hamster man

68. Hare man 

69. Harp seal man

70. Hedgehog man 

71. Hippo man 

72. Hoary marmot man

73. Honey badger man 

74. Hornbill man 

75. Horseshoe crab man 

76. Hyena man 

77. Ibex man 

78. Iguana man

79. Impala man 

80. Jackal man

81. Jaguar man 

82. Jumping spider man

83. Kakapo man 

84. Kangaroo man

85. Kea man 

86. Kestrel man 

87. King cobra man

88. Kingsnake man

89. Kiwi man 

90. Koala man 

91. Leech man 

92. Leopard gecko man 

93. Leopard man 

94. Leopard seal man 

95. Lion man 

96. Lion tamarin man 

97. Lizard man

98. Loon man 

99. Lorikeet man 

100. Louse man

101. Lynx man 

102. Magpie man 

103. Mandrill man

104. Mantis man 

105. Masked lovebird man

106. Mink man 

107. Monarch butterfly man

108. Mongoose man 

109. Monitor lizard man 

110. Moon snail man 

111. Moose man 

112. Mosquito man 

113. Moth man 

114. Mountain goat man 

115. Muskox man

116. Narwhal man 

117. Nautilus man 

118. Ocelot man

119. Octopus man 

120. One humped camel man

121. Opossum man 

122. Orca man 

123. Oriole man 

124. Osprey man 

125. Ostrich man 

126. Otter man 

127. Panda man 

128. Pangolin man 

129. Parakeet man 

130. Peach faced lovebird man 

131. Penguin man 

132. Peregrine falcon man

133. Platypus man

134. Polar bear man

135. Pond turtle man 

136. Porcupine man

137. Puffin man 

138. Python man 

139. Raccoon man 

140. Rat man 

141. Rattlesnake man

142. Raven man 

143. Red panda man

144. Red squirrel man

145. Red winged blackbird man 

146. Rhesus macaque man

147. Rhinoceros man

148. Roach man 

149. Saltwater crocodile man 

150. Skink man 

151. Skunk man 

152. Sloth bear man

153. Sloth man

154. Slug man 

155. Snail man

156. Snapping turtle man 

157. Snowy owl man 

158. Sparrow man 

159. Sperm whale man 

160. Spider monkey man

161. Sponge man

162. Squid man 

163. Stoat man 

164. Swan man 

165. Tapir man

166. Thrips man 

167. Tick man

168. Tiger man 

169. Toad man

170. Two humped camel man

171. Vulture man

172. Walrus man 

173. Warthog man 

174. Weasel man 

175. White stork man

176. Wild boar man 

177. Wolf man 

178. Wolverine man 

179. Wombat man

180. Worm man

181. Wren man 

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