OTHER FACES (More Morning Stars races)

 The First and Last populated the world with many things, and set many people to rule them. The first were the bright-eyed djinn, born of fire, but God does not work with fire alone. The most populous are the humans, and perhaps the most beloved, but they have not filled every space and set foot in every land. There are more people than you could count, more types of people than you could count. Lost cities, brutal desert plains, sunken continents, phantom islands; they call these places, and many more, home.

Arragousets 

It's an old story, but not so old as you'd think. In isolated places of the western coast, they tell of the little men of the sea, cruel raiders with barbeled faces and needle teeth who come marching up from the waves with whalebone spears and shell-bladed clubs. They kill those who fight and make spouses of the survivors, and they stay for a generation before marching back into the sea when old age bids that they should die. Their children are human in all regards, save for some piscine aspects to their features: a cold slickness of the skin, large eyes, webbed fingers. When they have children of their own, they are more little folk of the sea: arragousets.

There is a second empire under the ocean, a shadow of the Sun and Moon. The Starry-Crowned King, Saint EMPEROR, brought no queen with him when he fled the nameless continent, because it was her and her god that he was fleeing. Queen Dahut rules the waves, and in that cold and hungry place, the arragousets are her subjects. They are the ones who stayed, whose now-dead god made gills from throats slit in the bloody rituals of their forefathers. The hierarchy is nigh-impenetrable, enforced brutally by her sworn soldiers. Those who go to the surface to raid are seeking the only advancement they will ever know. Is it any wonder that some would leave? You were probably either human-born or morally objected to the raiding and bride-taking. You'd be wise to move south or east; in the west, they know what to do with people like you. 

Arragouset names are Guernésiais and other Channel Island dialects of French.

+2 HRTS. 

Perk: You can breathe underwater, and swim effortlessly. 

Drawback: Your water ration is doubled, though only half of it has to be freshwater; the other half is for keeping your gills wet. On land, you have two fewer inventory slots.

You look like this. A Book of Creatures

You could also look like this. If you're a coward. Wikimedia Commons.

Changelings 

The fairies, maniacal and jealous things that they are, do not understand the world. They do not understand matter, nor energy. They especially don't understand people. Yet, still they try. Children are taken, the legend goes, then things take their place. Spies for the enemy of all things existent, marked with pointed ears and additional fingers, able to disguise their hideous skull-like faces of scar tissue with ingenious masks. If you find one, destroy it.

You were born, or maybe you weren't. You might be a human made more fairy-like, or a fairy made more human-like, but you found yourself in the care of people merciful enough not to smother or drown you for being something monstrous and inhuman. Having come into this world between the existent and the nonexistent, lacking a true identity for yourself, you learned to imitate. Look in the mirror and study your face. Every wrinkle, every blemish. The curves and angles. Who are you, and what are you?

Then take it off.

+2 SAVE 

Perk: When you wear a mask in the shape of a face, it cannot be distinguished from your actual face. This works even for very simple ones, though they'll make you look weird and almost certainly will draw suspicion. Fairies are more interested in talking to you than disassembling you like children playing with an insect.

Imagine a man with a face like this. Wikimedia Commons.

Drawback: You are completely face-blind, meaning you cannot distinguish people by their facial features. You are also marked by a deformity which your mask cannot hide: additional fingers, two pupils in one eye, double rows of teeth, or the like. You can pass them off as normal physical oddities, but someone who suspects you of being a changeling will recognize them, and if you are recognized as what you are, there will be torches and pitchforks.

For non-human changelings, use the stat bonus for that race instead. They don't tend to last long due to lacking the tell-tale perks and drawbacks of their people, but some still exist.

Sunmen

The desert is a place of contrasts. Burning days, and freezing nights. Barren land that is full of life. Danger and tranquility. It's no different for the people who live there.

Sunmen are fearsome raiders, yet they rarely stoop to the brutality of war and always show mercy to those stranded in the desert. They are hideous, but their weavers can make fine garments from even coarse hair. They are blunt and direct in speech, but they are lovers of poetry and storytelling. Their reputation was terrible regardless until, a century ago, a scholar of the church chanced upon their sun-worshipping rituals and realized that these spider-faced barbarians were, in fact, co-religionists of almighty PROVIDENCE. Not only that, but further research turned up the fact that the sunmen had been worshippers of PROVIDENCE even before the Presbyter's time. In an instant, a tribe of widely-hated nomads became some of the most holy people on earth. The missionaries were then disappointed by the practice of funerary cannibalism and the fact that, although they worshiped the same power, the sunmen had little interest in being imperial subjects.

The stalemate continues a century later. Some abandon the old way of living, and others betray it by fighting more viciously than their laws ever permitted. The social tensegrity structure which once kept the clans of the sunmen stable is strained to breaking; one more broken oath and perhaps it will snap once and for all, scattering the sunmen to the wind.

I removed šēdus and lamassus, as many protectors of the temple as there were. I ripped out the raging wild bulls that adorned gateways. I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts. As for their secret groves, into which no outsider has ever gazed or set foot within their borders, my battle troops entered inside them, saw their secrets, and burned them with fire.

Sunman names are Old Persian and their hellenized variants. Names are commonly reused, with epithets based on notable deeds used to differentiate. I'll be honest, just choose from the royalty of the Achaemenid Empire and you should be fine.

+2 INIT

Perk: You have a natural 1d6 bite attack, and your secondary arms effectively act as a third hand for purposes of holding weapons, shields, and light sources.

Drawback: As an obligate carnivore, your rations must consist of meat. Most armor will have to be altered to accommodate your additional arms, though the rest of you is humanoid enough to fit in anything besides specially-fitted plate armor.

Yakshas

There's a world going on underground. Countries with populations in the hundreds, where hungry people skim the bacterial film from boiling chemical springs to fertilize fungal gardens. The ambling men are the best-known residents of these places, ambassadors and traders between vast prosperity and constricting lack, but they are rarely the rulers of these underground kingdoms. That crown falls on the heads of the yakshas. They are bitter, dour people, cousins to the djinn, who drove them into depths of the earth in a catastrophic prehistoric war. The resemblance is close, both in body and in mind, but the yakshas are still much like the element they were formed from: their skin, rough or smooth, is hard like stone, and their bodies tend to be stout and blocky. 

They are nobles in exile, temporarily embarrassed; many willfully ignore the existence of the world above them. Many who do acknowledge it swear revenge against the hated usurper djinn; never mind the fact that most of the fire-born don't even know they exist, nor the fact that the djinn alone outnumber them by a hundred to one, the great retaking will come. They hoard, they wait, and most of all, they seethe for what they have lost.

Yaksha names are Sanskrit. Where djinn hoard titles and epithets, yakshas keep only the one of which they are most proud.

+2 SKLL

Perk: You have 2 points of DR against things that would cut or pierce you. Start with 1 ND and the spell Earth Glide.

• Earth Glide: For [sum] rounds, you and your carried equipment treat soil and unworked stone as if it were water. This does not grant you the ability to see through it, breathe it, or swim particularly well. Any parts of your body still in the earth when the spell ends are ejected. If you are completely immersed, you are either buried if you're in loose earth or immediately crushed to death if you're in solid stone. At least you'll leave an interesting fossil.

(Modified slightly from the original)

Drawback: You must SAVE to change your mind once your opinion on something has been established. Instances of new evidence allow another SAVE each time. You're about twice as heavy as someone your size would normally be, and when dealing with actual water, you have absolutely no buoyancy and will sink like a rock.

Robert Caney