The Centaurs of Siquestrya are a proud and volatile race, possessing the upper bodies of humanoids and the lower bodies of powerful horses. They are quick to anger and prone to violence, valuing strength and speed above all other virtues. Centaur society is nomadic and herd-based, roaming the vast plains and trampling anyone foolish enough to cross their path.
They view bipedal races with a mixture of pity and contempt, seeing them as slow and fragile. To a Centaur, the thundering of hooves is the heartbeat of the world, and a life spent inside walls is a life wasted. Their herds follow ancient migration routes, and the arrival of a centaur herd is an event that sends most settlements into a panic.
The making
Gaea made the centaur among her minor animal-children, named at the Birth of Man with all the beastfolk (see Beastman). She did not make them the way she made the rest. A minotaur or a koren is a whole person built on one animal's lines, a single body that reads as one thing. The centaur is two bodies that never closed into one: a horse that runs out at the shoulders into a person, a person rooted at the waist into a horse, joined along a seam the making never finished sealing. Where every other beastman is a completed shape, the centaur is a shape the world set down and walked away from before it was done.
They carry the unfinishedness as their temper. A centaur is at rest only in motion, because a thing that was never completed cannot settle into being any one thing. The herd moves and keeps moving along roads older than any living member of it, and a centaur penned behind a wall goes strange and violent inside a season. Their scorn for the bipedal races, the ones who root themselves behind stone and call it a life, is the outward face of the same wound. They look at a walled people and see beings the world troubled itself to finish, and they have never forgiven it.
A centaur herd on the move at dusk across the Siquestryan plain, a long ragged column dragging a wall of dust the color of the low sun. They do not make camp so much as slow, grazing as they go, the foals kept to the inside of the line. By full dark they are miles on. There is no destination that anyone outside the herd has ever been able to name, and the centaurs, when asked, do not understand the question.
Vitals
- Size: Large
- Height: 7-8 feet
- Weight: 1000-1500 pounds
Aspects
- Fury of the herd
- Trample the weak
Game mechanics
Thundering Charge
Major ability. When you move at least 30 feet in a straight line and make a melee attack, you deal an additional 1d8 damage and the target must make a Might saving throw against CN 12 or be knocked prone. If the target is smaller than you, they are also pushed 10 feet away from you.
Hoof Strike
Passive ability. Your hooves are deadly natural weapons that count as light bludgeoning weapons. You can make hoof attacks even when your hands are occupied. Once per round, as a reaction when a creature enters or leaves a space adjacent to you, you may make a single hoof attack against them.