The Dwelyn are a fierce people of the Green Wilds and its surrounding jungles, tall and lanky warriors whose deep green skin lets them blend seamlessly with the verdant canopy. Black and white hair adorns their heads, often woven with beads that signify their influence within the tribe—the more beads, the greater their standing.
They fight with brutal efficiency and an unsettling, fluid grace, wielding curved scimitars and wearing armor of fur and bone. The Dwelyn are currently locked in conflict with the East Naruaghin Tribes, a war they once dominated easily. However, as their queen's dragon mount Surrey Mahaila has grown sick, so too has the nation's power waned. The queen herself is rumored to be the last true dragonrider, making her both revered and desperately protected by her people.
The making
The Dwelyn are flesh-kin to humans, close enough to cross with them and with orcs, though no human ever wore skin the color of wet leaves. That color, and everything else that sets a Dwelyn apart, was laid on a single settlement of ordinary people in a single afternoon. The Green Wilds hold their own Kethic the way a flooded river holds silt, and late in the Gaeaic Eon that charge slipped its banks. It did not kill the village it broke over. It rewrote them. The people who walked out were green to the bone, longer-lived than any parent who had borne them, and moving with the low fluid economy the jungle's own hunters use. The change held. It has bred true down every line since, which is why a Dwelyn child today is born already finished, carrying a making that happened once and never had to happen again.
The mark shows where a stranger can read it. The skin seals a Dwelyn into the canopy, so that one standing still at twenty paces is a trick of green light. The grace is a predator's body set into the gait, there whether the Dwelyn ever lifts a blade. And the years run long: a hundred and fifty is no great age for them, where a human is finished at a hundred, though they come nowhere near the slow centuries an elf keeps in the same jungle. None of it came from those elves, whatever the Caerene say about whose country the Green Wilds are. The Dwelyn are Gaea's, the same flesh as the humans they descend from with the forest written over the top.
Everything a Dwelyn takes pride in was chosen long after. The dragonriders and their queen, her sickening mount, the three daemons whose names ride over every warband's camp: all of it is covenant, struck ages past the making and bound by none of it. A people can be remade by the forest in an afternoon and spend the next age deciding what to make of it. The Dwelyn took to dragons and to their patrons. All of that came by choice, ages after the forest had already made them what they are.
The forest made us in an afternoon and has been trying to take us back ever since. Stand still long enough and it forgets you were ever anything but leaves. — a Dwelyn saying of the Green Wilds
Aspects
- Brutal but graceful
- Tribal warrior
Vitals
- Size: Medium
- Height: 6-7 ft
- Weight: 160-220 lbs
- Max Age: 150
Game mechanics
Savage Grace
Passive ability.
When you choose the might stance with a slashing weapon, you may sidestep 5 feet before or after your attack. When you choose the agility stance, add 1d4 to your attack roll.
War Trophies
Passive ability. Your beads are crafted from defeated enemies. When you kill a hostile creature, you may craft a bead from their remains. Each bead grants +1 to damage rolls against creatures of the same type (maximum +2 per creature type).