The Elnir were once druids who protected the wilds, but they have been corrupted by dark magic and a desire to control nature rather than serve it. Now, they are terrifying "mad scientists" of the natural world, splicing animals together and warping plants into rigid, unnatural shapes.
They view humanoids as mere biological clay to be molded. An Elnir might have the arm of a bear, the eyes of a hawk, or skin of bark, all grafted or grown through their twisted magic. They reside in deep forests where the trees grow in perfect, terrifying grids, and animals with too many legs or wrong numbers of eyes serve as their guardians.
No Elnir city exists — they are solitary, scattering individually across the great wildernesses of Alaria: the Filvrae Sylvyryn and Ishnit Jungles, the Green Wilds and Jungles of Titania, the Walking Forest and Everwood, Sorix Melar and Winterwood, the Plutachranes and Knulak, and the remote reaches of Fathre Morn, Pitte Ank, Lovre Ank, and Eyendra. The tell is always the same: a stretch of forest where the undergrowth has been rearranged into geometric rows, where the creatures are wrong in ways that take a moment to name.
The making
The Elnir were druids once, in the proper sense: shapers of living things who served the wild rather than ruled it. What unmade them was a working of their own. A circle of them grew certain that nature ran better under a firm hand than left to its own disorder, and they cut that conviction into their own flesh, a druid-craft binding meant to hand them mastery over every growing thing. It took. The binding rewrote the casters into what an Elnir is now, a flesh-shaper who can graft a bear's arm or a hawk's eye onto a body and feel no wrongness in the doing, and the change held in everyone the working had touched and everyone who came after them. What the Elnir were before all this, which people they sprang from and what their faces looked like, is gone past recovery, because the working overwrote that too. An Elnir cannot tell you what it used to be. Whatever records might once have answered the question are long gone, and no Elnir has ever gone looking for them.
Vitals
- Size: Medium
- Height: 5-7 feet
- Weight: 120-250 pounds
Aspects
- Nature must obey
- Flesh is clay to be shaped
Game mechanics
Corrupted Shapeshift
Major ability. Once per long rest, you can reshape your own body, growing natural weapons or adaptations. Choose one adaptation when you use this ability; it lasts until your next long rest:
- Claws: Your hands become vicious claws (light slashing weapons, 1d8 damage)
- Scales: Gain +2 to defense rolls against physical damage
- Gills: Gain the ability to breathe underwater and a swim speed equal to your movement
- Wings: Gain a glide speed of 40 feet (fall 10 feet per round while moving horizontally)
Biological Augmentation
Passive ability. You have permanently modified your body. Choose one augmentation at character creation:
- Venomous: Your bite or natural weapons deal an additional 1d4 poison damage
- Wall-Climber: You have a climb speed equal to your movement and can climb on walls and ceilings
- Armored Hide: You have +1 to all defense rolls
- Enhanced Senses: You have darkvision to 60 feet and A2 on perception checks