It's been a while since I wrote one of these, since February 3rd; but I had a lot going on. Losing a loved one, and dealing with the stages of grief took a lot out of me. I slowly started to get back into doing my things thanks to doing the T3N streams on Sundays, starting to push for this game jam (which it has got so many people interested in such a short amount of time, I am stocked).  Then last night, I spent some time, thanks to some encouragement, talking about things about NovArchaic, and I realized I missed this. So, let me start this again!

I want to go back and talk about another playable species in NovArchaic like I was doing this week. This species is pretty unique, as they were not born from research, but wanted to test the bounds of role play. In NovArchaic I want species that can be all kinds of shapes and forms, so to put my money where my mouth is, I started to brainstorm. I was inspired by a post about the physiological nonsense that a normal centaur had, in the way its body worked. I mulled over how could I approach that general body shape, but for it to have fewer impractabilities (keeping that it would still be a fantastical species). 

My idea was a plant-based creature, like a falling tree, being held up by four of its lower branches. Thanks to a friend of mine, ironically called Leaf, we came up with a name for this creature "Entuari", which was a fusion of Ents and Centaur, with an added -i at the end. Doing more research, I have liked saying to people that the shape is also like a big tree version of a praying mantis. Being tree-like creatures, I also planned for these not to break just the basics when it came to shapes, but also in height. They average around 2.3 meters tall (though, because of their shape, they do take up a few extra spaces). They also, in my current draft of them, don't have any sex-based morphisms, they as a species don't have a gender; at least a normal sense. I will admit I have not spent much time thinking about that, but I like it for them.

Their stats show that their physical health is currently the highest (24) while their spiritual health is not as high (15). They are resistant to bashing, slashing, and piercing damage by 2 points, making them interesting for some form of a damage soaker, except they are fae, and as a tree person, they are also weak to Cold Iron and Fire by 3 each. They are slower to climb or swim, as their body is a little more clunky. They have an innate spell of detecting nature (picking up anything with the Nature tag).

I don't have much more written about them, except that they seem to have been created before the written word, being one of the older species, but only a few existed, to protect natural and powerful locations. They themselves don't know why they were created to do this, they just know that they find themselves feeling at home in certain locations, and wanting to protect them.

Later, so not in the version of the rules coming up, I will be dropping traits that only Entauri to take, that will continue to modify their body shape, like giving them extra limbs, or an even tougher flank. I want to also think of other opportunities for the species to be more unique by giving them future rituals or traits that they can share, but I am still in the planning phase.

So, what do you all think? Does being an Entauri sound interesting? Being something of such a different shape is something I like, though the "uniqueness" of that is shared now with the Fafnian Dragons. What sort of characters could you imagine for these plant-based life forms? 

-Technomancer Kyle