Vahaan, a playable race of tiny fey creatures.


Homebrew and House Rules


For your gaming enjoyment, I give you the vahaan.

They are a tiny race which was designed to be reasonably balanced, playable and flavorful. They are a race of living language, and by memorizing and meditating on liturgies, they can alter themselves and gain new abilities.

The vahaan come in 4 flavors: Earth, Sea, Sky and Aether. Each type gains its own language, spellcasting bonus and movement method, as well as access to unique racial feats which enhance their abilities.

Please note that this is an advanced race, which is inevitable for a tiny creature. Half of their traits have no race builder equivalents, so their rp value is enough of a judgment call that we might as well just look at the race as whole and decide how balanced it is without bringing in race points. The goal was simply to make something that was as playable as possible for a tiny race, and which would be able to fit in with a party of dwarves, drow, tieflings, etc.

As always, any feedback you have is greatly appreciated.


I would have the mechanics first. That allows for a GM to more quickly decide if he will allow them, or have no more than intro of a paragraph, then mechanics, and go into their history and other things.


wraithstrike wrote:
I would have the mechanics first. That allows for a GM to more quickly decide if he will allow them, or have no more than intro of a paragraph, then mechanics, and go into their history and other things.

You have a point, but at the same time, the standard for races has always been fluff, then crunch. I mean, if you are going to skip the fluff, is it really that hard to scroll down until you see ability scores? It only takes a few seconds.


OK, I skimmed the flavor text and read through the actual mechanics

The flavor text was interesting enough. I especially like the lowborn.

The -4 to str really hurts, but I guess that makes sense for a tiny race.

The "child of" traits are cool, and definitely give each type a nice flavor. However, I have trouble seeing anyone taking the water one outside of a very water heavy campaign. Even then, the levitating kind still works better if you don't have to go underwater.

I'm not sure whether an at will teleport is ever balanced, even with the restrictions. It doesn't seem horrible, but it just seems like there could be abuses I'm not thinking of.

Giving them reach weapons automatically should make them slightly more viable for melee, but only slightly.

Vulnerability hurts. A lot. It makes playing a melee character even harder, but I'd say it hurts wizards and sorcerers even more. I suppose toughness and your favored class bonus could overcome it, but still.

The litrugies. I had to look up most of them to understand. Most of them seem OK. The "exuviation" one is really cool and flavorful, if only ok mechanically. Evisceration would be overpowered, but these are a tiny race that is going to have trouble with melee, so I'll give it a pass. And having looked up micturition in the dictionary, it is now my favorite thing ever.

Overall, there's a ton of stuff here, so I don't know if I'm confident in saying that it is all balanced, but the base race and the alternate race traits seem reasonable, and they could be a lot of fun. About as balanced as a tiny race that can teleport could ever be.


Entil'Zha wrote:
The "child of" traits are cool, and definitely give each type a nice flavor. However, I have trouble seeing anyone taking the water one outside of a very water heavy campaign. Even then, the levitating kind still works better if you don't have to go underwater.

Yeah, aquatic characters do always suffer from aquaman syndrome. You don't want to make them overpowered, but their abilities are always going to be a bit too specialized to compete under ordinary circumstances. I figured it was better to just let them be balanced for what they are, and accept that they are mostly going to be relegated to being NPCs.

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I'm not sure whether an at will teleport is ever balanced, even with the restrictions. It doesn't seem horrible, but it just seems like there could be abuses I'm not thinking of.

I've tried long and hard to find a problem, and so far, nothing. Since they can't teleport through solid objects, there is nowhere they can get to that a flying character couldn't go, they just have the ability to not occupy the space between the two points. Good for avoiding traps, line of sight, environmental hazards and AoOs, but otherwise just something that's main advantage is being cool. And it helps them deal with being too short to interact with anything more than two feet off the ground.

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Giving them reach weapons automatically should make them slightly more viable for melee, but only slightly.

That's the idea. Being able to have a non-useless weapon is important, and at tiny size, that's a fairly small category.

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Vulnerability hurts. A lot. It makes playing a melee character even harder, but I'd say it hurts wizards and sorcerers even more. I suppose toughness and your favored class bonus could overcome it, but still.

It is painful, but it makes sense, and it is a necessary balancing factor. And you're right, it hurts the classes with lower hit dice more than the beefier classes. A barbarian will be able to get by just fine, but a wizard (who gains far more benefit from being tiny) is going to worry about it a lot more.

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The litrugies. I had to look up most of them to understand. Most of them seem OK. The "exuviation" one is really cool and flavorful, if only ok mechanically. Evisceration would be overpowered, but these are a tiny race that is going to have trouble with melee, so I'll give it a pass. And having looked up micturition in the dictionary, it is now my favorite thing ever.

I figured, what's the point of a language themed race if you can't put the dictionary to good use?

Evisceration is somewhat necessary. With a six point difference between dexterity and strength, you need to be able to get weapon finesse. And since the only viable weapons for most melee characters will be two handed, they needed to be able to apply it. It still doesn't give them dex to damage, but that's fine with me.

And yes, I am especially proud of the liturgy of micturition.

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Overall, there's a ton of stuff here, so I don't know if I'm confident in saying that it is all balanced, but the base race and the alternate race traits seem reasonable, and they could be a lot of fun. About as balanced as a tiny race that can teleport could ever be.

Glad you like them.


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Vulnerability hurts. A lot. It makes playing a melee character even harder, but I'd say it hurts wizards and sorcerers even more. I suppose toughness and your favored class bonus could overcome it, but still.
It is painful, but it makes sense, and it is a necessary balancing factor. And you're right, it hurts the classes with lower hit dice more than the beefier classes. A barbarian will be able to get by just fine, but a...

It hurts enough that I feel most people would not use the race, assuming the campaign involves regular life-threatening combat.


Is it really that bad? You get one less hit point per level than an elf, without all the other downsides of a low constitution. Take toughness and you're back up to elf health. If that's not enough, you can use your favored class bonus and you're back to normal. And that's without putting any extra points in con, as you probably could.

It's probably not a race you'd bring to a meat grinder of a campaign, but for a more average one it should be simple enough to make a character with sufficient survivability.


So, I was bored and decided to give the flavor text a closer examination.

I really liked their origins. The idea of them existing in this other realm carved out by the primal force of their creation, that they are the incarnations of some eternal force which has ripped the fabric of reality is really cool.

The singularity at the heart of the civilization was especially interesting. That said, it really bugs me that I can't picture how it can have eight temples around it connected by twelve rings without the whole thing being horribly asymmetrical.

I also like the diversity of the race. There's four elements, plus highborn and lowborn, plus aristocrats, expatriates and nearly any walk of life you can think of. That's a lot of possible combinations, and all of it feels very well fleshed out.

The bit about families didn't interest me as much. It's no bad, but it was just not great. I especially didn't care for the life story concept, and even true names in general.

I think that covers just about everything worth mentioning.


Entil'Zha wrote:

I really liked their origins. The idea of them existing in this other realm carved out by the primal force of their creation, that they are the incarnations of some eternal force which has ripped the fabric of reality is really cool.

The singularity at the heart of the civilization was especially interesting.

I tried to give them an origin befitting a race that was the living embodiment of a concept. I too am happy with the way it turned out.

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That said, it really bugs me that I can't picture how it can have eight temples around it connected by twelve rings without the whole thing being horribly asymmetrical.

This is actually pretty simple. The eight shrines are positioned around the core at equal distances, forming the corners of a cube. Each ring connects four of the shrines, with six of them essentially forming the sides of the cube, and six others wrapping around it, causing each face of the cube to have an intersection of two rings over the center.

OK, maybe it would be simple if I could draw it competently. But in the absence of a diagram, just look at a d6, and picture one ring making up each face, and two more crossing each face diagonally. That's twelve, since each diagonal ring will cross two faces.

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I also like the diversity of the race. There's four elements, plus highborn and lowborn, plus aristocrats, expatriates and nearly any walk of life you can think of. That's a lot of possible combinations, and all of it feels very well fleshed out.

Yeah, I wanted to make them varied as a race. It's always a risk with races, particularly new ones, that they will become a one dimensional race which has only one flavor and can only be played one way. I prefer to give them several flavors and see what people can come up with.

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The bit about families didn't interest me as much. It's no bad, but it was just not great. I especially didn't care for the life story concept, and even true names in general.

I think that covers just about everything worth mentioning.

Well, can't win them all. True names seemed like the logical choice for a language based race, and then I felt I had to flesh out how true names come to be. That was the best I could come up with. Not my favorite part of the fluff, but passable in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback.


Alright, major update.

I've made some tiny cosmetic tweaks to the lore, and a few important changes to the mechanics. I also added notes covering the use of true names, tiny reach weapons, and liturgies.

The vulnerability trait has been toned down. Instead of directly lowering HP, it now reduces hit die size. The net effect is that you lose 2 hp at level 1, and an average of 1 hp every level thereafter. Take toughness and you are back to normal more or less.

The liturgy of elucidation has been slightly improved so as to be more equal to the traits you can trade it for. It now allows you to, once per day, roll a will save twice and take the better result. This is balanced out slightly by the fact that a lot of the nastiest will saves are made in secret, and represent things the character wouldn't know to actively resist.

Liturgy feats now have their own separate category, if only for better readability.

Finally, I've added three traits and a bunch of favored class bonuses.


Based on feedback I've received, I've made a few changes.

First, the liturgy race traits have all been switched over to being liturgy feats, and in their place is a liturgical training race trait, which gives one of those liturgies as a bonus feat. Aside from making the liturgies a consistent thing, the only real affect this has is that it is possible to get combinations of those three, though the prerequisites are a bit high because I didn't want it to be easy to negate the choice.

Related to the previous changed, I've also given the lowborn the ability to choose the liturgy of mastication as their bonus feat if they want.

Finally, I've overhauled greater child of the earth to make something more fun and useful like the other lineages get. You can now get a larger pool for the ability, and can use it to make longer and larger tunnels, and tunnels have a duration in minutes rather than rounds. Alternatively, you can now use the same resource pool to make walls as though using wall of stone.

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